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As I've written about previously, we're starting to move beyond the familiar keyboard  and mouse/touchpad, and two-handed game controller as ways of interacting with our computer systems. In the gaming world, the motion-sensing Nintendo Wii remote is the most obvious innovation. Elsewhere, multi-touch screens, either on the large scale (Microsoft Surface) or small scale (Apple iPhone) have been garnering a lot of attention.

Another interesting category is the six-degrees-of-freedom (6DOF) controller. These aren't particularly new but, until recently, they've been targeted primarily at 3D CAD professionals and have been priced in line with relatively … Read more

On the road to the elusive Web 3.0 (something to do with semantics, meaning, and context rather than just data, links, and AJAX), core infrastructure is beginning to move from the edge to a center inhabited by companies such as Amazon, Salesforce.com, Joyent, and now Google with its new App Engine.

Call it Web 2.5, where the platform-as-a-service providers allow developers to create Web applications via the cloud and for users to consume them on any Web-connected device, anytime and anywhere. It eliminates what Amazon's Jeff Bezos describes as the "muck," the undifferentiated heavy … Read more

Google plans to launch a service called App Engine Monday evening that the company hopes will attract programmers and eventually companies needing an expandable foundation for online applications.

App Engine, free to the first 10,000 people who sign up, offers a combination of several online Google services for those who want a place to host software, said Pete Koomen, a product manager on the Google developer team. Those include the BigTable service for data storage and processing--as expected--along with authentication to let people sign on to services and e-mail to let the system handle communications, he said.

At … Read more

TechCrunch is reporting that Salesforce.com will announce on Monday a deal to resell Google online applications such as Google Docs to its customers.

It's unverified at this point, but TechCrunch points to a Google Operating System blog post that details several bits of evidence that could point to some integration.

Salesforce.com and Google share a vision of transforming computing tasks that today happen on corporate PCs or servers onto services available across the Internet.

Salesforce.com declined to comment on the report. Update 9:09 p.m.: So did Google.

On the eve of the RSA security conference, there's a showdown in the offing between "Old Europe" and U.S. search operators. Earlier Monday word leaked about a European regulatory plan to press search engine providers to dump personal search data after six months.

Barring the unforeseen, it's likely the European Commission will look kindly upon the plan. This would be quite a big deal, setting the stage for a continent-wide challenge to the way big search engine companies set procedures handling log deletion and browser cookies.

Until now, privacy advocates haven't gotten very far … Read more

In a move that seems destined to invite tension with major American search engines, a European Commission advisory body has suggested that those companies delete data collected about their users after six months--a far cry from what most companies currently do.

The recommendation arrived in a 29-page "opinion" (PDF) published Friday by a European Commission body known as the Article 29 Working Party. Backed by privacy groups, it has been pressuring Internet companies on the search data front for months. The report focused on advertising-supported search engines, as opposed to search functions embedded in Web sites.

The Working … Read more

Google has added a new layer to its Google Earth software that shows New York Times news linked to the region a person is viewing with the geographic software.

New York Times "placemarks" will appear on maps where there's relevant news, and showing the New York Times layer in the software will show a window with a month's worth of headlines, Google's LatLong blog said.

Google spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz said the company is open to partnerships with other media outlets and that extending such a feature to Google Maps--a much more widely used service than … Read more

Google Talk users have yet another way to chat with their Gtalk buddies. The new "labs edition" which was quietly released on Friday brings to your desktop several features that previously could only be found in the Web version. Most importantly, the group chat feature which made its way into the Web version of Google Talk last year, yet was oddly missing from the desktop application until now. Also new to the desktop version are emoticons and notifications from Gmail and Google Calendar, as well as Google's hot-in-Brazil social network Orkut.

Oddly enough, with these extra features … Read more

Microsoft can give Google a better fight in online ads than Google can compete against Redmond in enterprise software, a Gartner analyst concludes in a new research report.

In one corner is Microsoft, the leader in enterprise software and PC-centric applications. Microsoft's eye is on the prize--a bigger slice of the $75 billion in online ad revenue that is forecast by 2011.

Microsoft is looking for growth after failing to see big payoffs from investments in areas like mobile, games, and online services, says David Mitchell Smith, Gartner research vice president and fellow, who authored the "Google vs. … Read more