Joost: Bringing the TV to your Internet

While Apple TV and other new media devices have pushed to find ways to bring video content to your television Joost is attempting to bring the TV to your internet.

WHAT IS JOOST?

Joost describes itself on their website as being FREE TV with complete control and exciting extras. They currently are streaming TV shows as user demands over the internet and to the Joost Client.

At first I was skeptic of the whole idea given that the most important item or any TV service would be content. Fortunately for all of us, Joost has been working deals for a while with a number of different providers. Their channel lineup includes MTV, Comedy Central, BET, National Geographic, and many many others. While most of these Joost Channels only include one to two shows, the potential of additional content seems endless.

The application is still in Beta but I must admit that I'm very impressed with my initial experience with the application. The current version of the software is 0.9.2 for windows but also has a similar release available for Mac OSX.

After receiving an invite to the Beta testing I quickly downloaded the software and registered an account. The application loaded quickly and within seconds started streaming video content to my computer. While the user interface is a bit flashy for me, it provides all the userful options for navigating a TV internet application including channels, shows, and even personal options that allow you to chat about the episodes you're watching with other users currently watching the same show. It was nice to be able to quickly pick from one show to another and start watching in full screen a decent quality video for free.

Currently Joost is only available by Invite only. Post a comment if you'd like an invitation and I'll share any that come my way.

Google: Docs and Spreadsheets To Get a New Friend

Presentations will soon join up with Google Docs and Spreadsheets to offer more office based applications to end users. Like their other web based applications, Google plans to add collaboration capabilities to the new Presentation software. Google expects to have this out to end users by sometime this summer.

This addition will bring it even closer to the home user versions of Microsoft Office. With the online capabilities of the software and its expanding software package it will be interesting to see if Microsoft next versions of Office include more web based tools and collaboration abilities.

NEW ADDITION TO GOOGLE

Google also made the announcement today that they've purchased Tonic Systems:

"Tonic Systems is a San Francisco-based company that provides Java presentation automation products and solutions for document management - Tonic Systems Builder, Tonic Systems Filter, Tonic Systems Transformer, Tonic Systems Viewer, and JarJar Links. Features of their products included text extraction for indexing documents, presentation creation capabilities and document conversion tools."

It looks like Google is hoping that some of the software and ideas from Tonic Systems can help them with Presentations and all the Google Office features.

Adobe's New Media Player

Adobe announced today that they'll be entering the Media Player market to compete with Microsoft Media Player, Real Media Player, and Apple's Quicktime.

With proven track record of providing online video options through their flash based software Adobe instantly stands on stable grounds in the increasingly important online video market.

Some of the features that their new media player will offer include the ability for users to save copies of video they access on the web to their hard drives and personal media devices and even mobile phones. In accordance with the web 2.0 movement, the Adobe media player will also support RSS feeds.

One of the most interesting technological aspects of their new video system is its increased ability to provide relevant advertisements to end consumers. A future partnership with Google may be a very interesting possibility.

Find a Hike with Google Earth

If you're an outdoor type person and always looking for new places to explore, things just got a little bit easier for you.

Google announced a partnership with Trimble Outdoors to provide Google Earth users information about hiking trails and opportunities. Through the user of GPS technology the two companies will provide users with detailed information about hiking locations and the trails you'll set out on.

Trimble Outdoors website explains how easy it is to add the layer to your own Google Earth:

• Start Google Earth
• Go to "Layers" in the Sidebar on the left
• Expand the "Featured Content" folder under "Primary Database"
• Click the "Trimble Outdoors Trips" checkbox
• In the main window, pan and zoom into the area of interest to you until you see red lines and dots indicating Trimble Outdoors trips
• Continue to zoom in until you see little "Green Hikers":
  
  Depending on the zoom level and context, clicking a Green Hiker will open a popup window with detailed information about a trip or its element, for example a photo as shown above.

Based on the screenshots from their announcement... it looks like people in California have a lot of exploring options...

Google Calendar: Features

Lifehacker.com has posted an interested article with some additional insights on how to get the most out of Google's free Calendar application.

While I listed and talked about some of these Google Calendar features in the past, the article is well written and explains how simple adding tasks can be with a simple push of a button (q).

Check out the article and the links to read more about how you can optimize Google Calendar to help you stay organized and productive.