Months of work on "chromoting" have reached fruition with Google's release on Friday of a new Chrome extension to let a person on one computer remotely control another across the network. The Chrome Remote Desktop beta version, which arrived Friday, is a browser-based equivalent of remote desktop software for conventional operating systems. Such software is handy for IT administrators managing employees' machines, people taking care of their relatives' computers, or individuals getting access to their own machines from afar.

The Linux Foundation and the LiMo Foundation issued a joint statement on Wednesday morning to announce the launch of Tizen, a new Linux-based open source mobile operating system. The platform's application stack and third-party developer frameworks will be built around standards-based Web technologies. The new Tizen website says that Intel and Samsung are jointly backing the effort. The new platform effort will displace the unsuccessful MeeGo project, an open source mobile operating system that was launched last year when Intel and Nokia sought to unify their respective mobile Linux platforms with the help of the Linux Foundation. MeeGo began to unravel when Nokia abandoned Linux in favor of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating system.

Content management systems today continue to be based on the types of structured database systems about one or two steps more evolved than dBASE. We've known they would be insufficient for the task, but we've put off the problem of composing a new architecture. It's already too late for major IT companies to start that new architecture from square one; if a company has any hope of addressing this colossal, underappreciated problem, it will need to acquire the architectural project in progress. This is what Hewlett-Packard announced yesterday that it intends to do: acquire a software firm whose core product aims to supplant everything we know about databases, both the SQL kind and the Google kind. In its place would come a clustered approach whose goal is no less than to be the central repository for meaning in the world.

As CEO Apotheker told analysts yesterday, HP intends to exploit the prospects for using Autonomy's technology as a foundation for a content management system. For now, that CMS would be a project for what, on the surface, seems an unlikely department: the Imaging and Printing Group (IPG). Autonomy describes this technology - which it calls Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) - as nothing less than a replacement for, a complete substitute for, a revolutionary disruption of, Google.

Elsewhere in Autonomy's literature is a monkey wrench it hurls directly at Google, with hopes of messing up its gears. Here, the company attacks the value of Google's page ranking technology in the enterprise: "in many cases, the most popular information is also the most relevant. The importance or popularity of a Web page is approximated by counting the number of other pages that are linked to it, and by how frequently those pages are viewed by other users. This works quite well on the Internet but in the enterprise it is doomed to failure. Firstly, there are no native links between information in the enterprise. Secondly, if a user happens to be an expert, perhaps in the field of gallium arsenide laser diodes, there may be no one else interested in the subject, but it is still imperative that they find relevant information." This is what HP is buying: an opportunity to disrupt Google. If IDOL is every bit the next stage of database evolution that Autonomy makes it out to be, then HP (at least in its executives' own minds) is not surrendering to Google at all, as some consumer publications this morning are suggesting. As HP perceives it, rather than cutting off Google's left arm, it's targeting the gut.

The IEEE announced today that it had finalized the 802.22TM white space wireless standards for Wireless Regional Area Networks (WRAN). White space wireless, sometimes called "super Wi-Fi" because of its long range capability and faster throughput, broadcasts data on unused, unlicensed frequencies that were designated for VHF and UHF television broadcast. The new standard will be capable of providing broadband wireless access over a large area, with a range of more than 60 miles from the transmitter. White space wireless can deliver up to 22 Mbps per channel.The white space standard was sought by Microsoft and other companies to make broadband access available in areas where extending wired internet service is impractical. Consumers will also benefit from extended range wireless hubs. A test network was established at Rice University in Houston in April.

Shortly after releasing software for audio and video chat as an open-source project called WebRTC as open-source software, Google is beginning to build it into its Chrome browser. The real-time chat software originated from Google's 2010 acquisition of Global IP Solutions (GIPS), a company specializing in Internet telephony and videoconferencing.

If Google and allies succeed in establishing the technology and building support into multiple browsers, that would mean anybody building a Web site or Web application could draw upon the communications technology. In other words, anyone could build a rival to services, such as Skype, with just a Web application.

AT&T's controversial $39 billion bid for T-Mobile officially got under way Thursday, crystallizing a big risk and possibly a big opportunity for President Barack Obama.The risk: allowing a deal that could, in time, leave Americans with just two choices for cellphone providers. The potential opportunity: extending high-speed wireless to virtually the entire country, which AT&T has promised if the deal goes through.

The political implications don't end there: Blocking the acquisition would mean alienating a stalwart member of the business community. Approving it, critics warn, could lead to steep layoffs as the two phone companies merge overlapping operations.

Maqetta is an open source technology initiative at Dojo Foundation that provides WYSIWYG tooling in the cloud for HTML5 (desktop and mobile). Maqetta allows User Experience Designers (UXD) to perform drag/drop assembly of live UI mockups. One of Maqetta's key design goals is to create developer-ready UI mockups that promote efficient hand-off from designers to developers. The user interfaces created by Maqetta are real-life web applications that can be handed off to developers, who can then transform the application incrementally from UI mockup into final shipping application. While we expect the Maqetta-created mockups often will go through major code changes, Maqetta is designed to promote preservation of visual assets, particularly the CSS style sheets, across the development life cycle. As a result, the careful pixel-level styling efforts by the UI team will carry through into the final shipping application. To help with the designer/developer hand-off, Maqetta includes a "download into ZIP" feature to create a ZIP image that can be imported into a developer tool workspace (e.g., Eclipse IDE). For team development, Maqetta includes a web-based review&commenting features with forum-style comments and on-canvas annotations.

Maqetta includes: a WYSIWYG visual page editor for drawing out user interfaces drag/drop mobile UI authoring within an exact-dimension device silhouette, such as the silhouette of an iPhone simultaneous editing in either design or source views deep support for CSS styling (the application includes a full CSS parser/modeler) a mechanism for organizing a UI prototype into a series of "application states" (aka "screens" or "panels") which allows a UI designer to define interactivity without programming a web-based review and commenting feature where the author can submit a live UI mockup for review by his team members a "wireframing" feature that allows UI designers to create UI proposals that have a hand-drawn look a theme editor for customizing the visual styling of a collection of widgets export options that allow for smooth hand-off of the UI mockups into leading developer tools such as Eclipse Maqetta's code base has a toolkit-independent architecture that allows for plugging in arbitrary widget libraries and CSS themes.

IBM announced Maqetta, an HTML5 authoring tool for building desktop and mobile user interfaces, and also announced the contribution of the open-source technology to the Dojo Foundation.

28 March 2011 -- The Web and television convergence story was the focus of W3C's Second Web and TV Workshop, which took place in Berlin in February. Today, W3C publishes a report that summarizes the discussion among the 77 organizations that participated, including broadcasters, telecom companies, cable operators, OTT (over the top) companies, content providers, device vendors, software vendors, Web application providers, researchers, governments, and standardization organizations active in the TV space. Convergence priorities identified in the report include: Adaptive streaming over HTTP Home networking and second-screen scenarios The role of metadata and relation to Semantic Web technology Ensuring that convergent solutions are accessible. Profiling and testing Possible extensions to HTML5 for Television

Google's (GOOG)  newest browser, Chrome 11 Beta, has the ability to understand the spoken word.  This isn't just a Java Plugin or Flash tool either.  This is all done in HTML5 with something called the HTML5 speech input API.