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Semantic search engine startup Hakia has retooled its Web site, adding tabs for news, images and "credible" site searches as a way to differentiate between its search approach and what it calls the "10 blue links" approach search incumbents Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have used in the first era of search engines. Hakia employs semantic search technologies, leveraging natural language processing to derive broader meaning from search queries.

Hakia began hawking "credible" Web sites, vetted by librarians and informational professionals, in April for health and medical searches drawing from sites examined by the Medical Library Association. These sites have a peer review process or strict editorial controls to ensure the accuracy of the information and zero commercial bias. The idea is to clearly define sites users can trust in an age when do-it-yourself chronicling via Wikipedia and other sites that enable crowdsourcing activities has led to some questionable results.

HTML 5 demos from September 2008

The demos and segments of this talk are: <video> (00:35) postMessage() (05:40) localStorage (15:20) sessionStorage (21:00) Drag and Drop API (29:05) onhashchange (37:30) Form Controls (40:50) <canvas> (56:55) Validation (1:07:20) Questions and Answers (1:09:35)

ZoooS LLC today previewed ZoooS Office, a web-based office suite that puts OpenOffice.org 3.0 in a browser, targeting enterprise, SMB, and individual users alike with a blend of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and desktop advantages.

Other key ZoooS Office implementations will include Mozilla XULRunner; Firefox, Opera, Safari as well as the new Google Chrome web browser; social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Second Life; and Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation. Regardless of implementation, ZoooS applications run entirely on the client machine, performing all file operations locally to reduce network traffic, improve application performance, and support offline access.

Public availability of ZoooS Office is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2008. Initially, ZoooS will deliver the Mozilla XULRunner version, a Firefox plug-in, an Opera widget, and an intranet server. ZoooS will follow up with a Vista gadget and Internet Explorer support in the first half of 2009. For more information on ZoooS, please visit www.zooos.com.

The new technology, dubbed TraceMonkey, promises to speed up Firefox's ability to deliver complex applications. The move heightens the threat posed by a nascent group of online alternatives to Microsoft's most profitable software: PC applications, like Microsoft Office, that allow Microsoft to burn hundreds of millions of dollars on efforts to seize control of the online world. Microsoft's Business Division, which gets 90% of its revenues from sales of Microsoft Office, spat out $12.4 billion in operating income for the fiscal year ending June 30. Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), however, is playing a parallel game, using profits from its online advertising business to fund alternatives to Microsoft's desktop offerings. Google already says it has "millions" of users for its free, Web-based alternative to desktop staples, including Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint software. The next version of Firefox, which could debut by the end of this year, promises to speed up such applications, thanks to a new technology built into the developer's version of the software last week. Right now, rich Web applications such as Google Gmail rely on a technology known as Javascript to turn them from lifeless Web pages into applications that respond as users mouse about a Web page. TraceMonkey aims to turn the most frequently used chunks of Javascript code embedded into Web pages into binary form--allowing computers to hustle through the most used bits of code--without waiting around to render all of the code into binary form.

Maybe if we focused on what we are trying to accomplish (deliver business results more efficiently) vs the gee whiz of all the tools we would be in better shape.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has obtained a broad patent for a data center in a container, which might put a kink in product plans for companies like Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA), Rackable Systems, and IBM (NYSE: IBM). The patent, granted Tuesday, covers "modular data centers with modular components that can implemented in numerous ways, including as a process, an apparatus, a system, a device, or a method."

The U.S. Patent Trademark Office site reveals patent number 7,278,273 as describing modules in intermodal shipping containers, or those that can be shipped by multiple carriers and systems. It also covers computing systems mounted within temperature-controlled containers, configured so they can ship easily, be factory built and deployed at data center sites.

If this sounds familiar, it might just be. Google's patent description resembles Sun Microsystems' data center in a box, called Project Blackbox. During its debut last year, Sun installed a Blackbox -- essentially a cargo container for 18-wheelers -- outside of Grand Central Station in New York City to show how easily one of their data centers could be installed. Google's patent description also has similarities to Rackable Systems' ICE Cube as well as IBM's Scalable Modular Data Center.

The Time to Pounce Has Come I agree with DonnieBoy. Microsoft will try to leverage their MSOffice monopoly to dominate the newly emerging marketplace of Web-Stack and Cloud Computing solutions. I also believe that for Microsoft, the final pieces of this puzzle fell into place on March 29th, 2008 with ISO approval of the MSOffice-OOXML document format. For most businesses, Microsoft is the "client" in "client/server". The great transition from client/server to client/ Web-Stack /server has been slow because Microsoft was uncertain as to how they could control this transition. Some light was shed on the nature of this "uncertainty" when the Combs vs. Microsoft antitrust case brought forth a 1998 eMail from Chairman Bill to the MSOffice development team. The issue for the good Chairman was that of controlling the formats and protocols used to connect MSOffice to a Web centric world. MSOffice support for Open Web formats and protocols like (X)HTML, CSS, and WebDAV were out of the question. Microsoft needed to figure out how pull off this transition with proprietary formats and protocols. And avoid the wrath of antitrust in the process!