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New Underwater Scooter Technology

Check out the Scoobadoo -- a new underwater scooter that lets anyone scuba dive, without wearing a mask, tank or weights... Cool.

New Touch Sensitive Display Detects Multiple Fingers

Check out the photo and video of this cool new display right out of Minority Report. It detects multiple fingers at once, enabling a wide range of new gestural interactions.

New 3D Display -- Shows Images in Mid-Air -- See Pics

An innovative new 3D display technology uses lasers to create plasma dots in mid-air. Can you say, "Help me, Obi-Wan," anybody? Check the link to see the kewl pics!

Open IRIS - Semantic Desktop PIM Released!

Yesterday, the first public open-source release of Open IRIS was annnounced. IRIS is a Java-based desktop semantic personal information manager developed by SRI (with help from my own company, Radar Networks -- we provided a some of our early semantic object libraries and a native triplestore, and some work on UI; note that our own upcoming products, and our semantic applications platform, are quite different from IRIS and focused on different needs, however), as part of the DARPA CALO program. IRIS provides a rich semantic web based environment for desktop personal knowledge management across activities, applications and types of information. This release is primarily for semantic web and AI researchers for now -- in other words, it's still early-stage software (not intended for end-user consumers...yet) -- but for researchers IRIS provides what may be the most comprehensive, robust development  platform  for building next-generation learning applications that help people work with their desktop information more productively. If you're interested in a practical example of how the semantic web looks and feels on the desktop, see the information on the Open IRIS site, or if you're a bit more of a geek, download it and try it yourself. Congratulations to the IRIS team at SRI on this release!

Email Postage Stamps Coming ... Now

This is a good idea...

Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers.

America Online and Yahoo, two of the world's largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a controversial system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.

  The Internet companies say that this will help them identify legitimate mail and cut down on junk e-mail, identity-theft scams and other scourges that plague users of their services. The two companies also stand to earn millions of dollars a year from the system if it is widely adopted.