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This video from Skype demonstrates using the service for business: 

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FrugalTech discusses more ways to save money using Skype for business:

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Kid Guru explains how to record calls for podcasting and other purposes:

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Brad Feld appreciates this relationship between science fiction and fact as few others do. As he writes in ‘Science Fact‘ on Oblong’s web blog, the future of human-computer interaction is looking breathtaking. And, while the genetically-engineering precognitive humans Philip K. Dick imagined in “Minority Report” in 1956 haven’t arrived yet, g-speak certainly has.

g-speak is a spatial operating environment from Oblong Industries that combines a gestural interface, DLP projectors and ‘recombinant networking.” It’s modeled upon the virtual OS operated by Precrime Agent John Anderton in Minority Report, the film adaptation of Dick’s short story.

That connection is no accident. The science adviser that Spielberg consulted for the film, John Underkoffler, has been quietly busy since the film’s premiere in 2002. A few stories have popped up over the years, to be sure, but since Oblong Industries was founded in the research in 2006 he and other technologists have advanced the technology considerably, as you’ll see in the video below.

Once you’ve watched it, read g-speak in slices and about the origins of Oblong in the MIT Media Lab to learn about the potential for this human-to-machine interface and the long road to bringing it into reality..

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g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

[Hat tip to Engadget's Josh Topolsky and Jamie.]

Embedded below is a 2007 report on g-speak featuring an interview with Underkoffler.

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CBS took a similar approach to “March Madness” this spring, streaming all 64 games of the NCAA mens’ basketball tournament.  Network administrators have similar challenges now in deciding where and whether to block users from accessing NBC.com, capping bandwidth use or engaging in a little proactive traffic shaping.

Personally, I like the suggestion made in Shamus’s story by Eileen Haggerty, director of product marketing with NetScout:

“An IT organization could set up a PC with a large-screen monitor in the office cafeteria that would run streaming video of the games. Instead of having 15 people sitting at their desks sucking up bandwidth individually, a savvy network administrator could bring all those people together to watch the Olympics during their break.”

Let’s assume for a moment, however, that you aren’t a bandwidth-conscious CTO and would like to be able to keep current on the standings in your favorite events or athletes. (Or that you believe setting up a few televisions is a handy low-tech hack.)

Thanks to Gina’s post on Lifehacker,Watch the Olympics Online, I found Wired’s excellent How-To Wiki for Watching the Olympics Online. (As you might expect, this link has been climbing the charts on the most popular page at delicious).

As the wiki notes, you can catch up to four different livestreams and more than 3,000 hours of on-demand at NBCOlympics.com.

World-wide, there also many other websites streaming Games footage:  CCTVOlympics.com in mainland China, BBC Sports in the U.K., Yahoo7 in Australia or CBC Olympics in Canada.

There’s a catch, however, to the livestreaming, on-demand video goodness: In most cases, users in the United States will be blocked from viewing the footage on any site but NBC.

If you’re savvy enough to follow the advice at Metafilter by setting up a proxy server or using Anonymizer, you should be able to get around location restrictions.

It’s a cinch that the millions of broadcast viewers will be recording and uploading events to YouTube on their own, of course.  NBC has tried to get out in front of the inevitable wave by partnering with Google, with plans to provide 3 hours of highlights and wrap-ups to a dedicated channel onYouTube.

As the authors of the Wired wiki note (nice work, applian, apardoe, mosesofmason and snackfight!), BitTorrent is also an option for watching events after the fact, though P2P files sharing on your corporate network may land you in more hot water than simply streaming the video, given the various serious security risks involved.

What the wiki doesn’t note is what is lying under the hood over at NBCOlympics.com. NBC has partnered with MSN to stream the Olympics using Silverlight, in what will be far and away the biggest test for Microsoft’s alternative to Flash to date.

Anyone that wants to watch the Olympics will have to download and install the Silverlight plug-in, a process that certain to test out exactly how ready for “prime time” the technology is for streaming rich media online. Of special note is the fact that Silverlight encrypts a videostream, which will make recording the events considerably harder (if not impossible).

As a result, tech pundits, geeks and network executives will no doubt be watching the race to crack the streams and distribute unauthorized video nearly as closely as the games themselves.

Enjoy the Olympics!

It’s 2008. Do you know where your avatar is?

Only three years to get your avatar unless you want to be lumped in with the bottom 20% — by 2011, Gartner says that the vast majority of Internet users will have avatars to represent them online in various gaming and non-game virtual environments. Which, I guess, are expected to proliferate. The clock’s ticking — Gartner predicted that last year at their Symposium/ITxpo 2007 Emerging Trends.

And they aren’t talking about the 2D image that pops up beside your posts in forums. I mean, even I have one of those. And she’s cute, if a little on the flat side. But she’s no Lara Croft — her ass-kicking ability is extremely limited. And I can’t see the world from her perspective, in a 3-D immersive world.

I have friends in virtual worlds, have had invitations extended — but so far, I haven’t wandered into one. I completely understand the appeal. Wow — talk about a rich fantasy life! My stock response, though, is that I don’t have time for my first life, let alone a second one.

I guess I’m going to have to make time. According to Gartner and near-futurists such as Gerri Sinclair, more and more of our online activities will move to virtual environments and our interactions will be conducted by 3D representatives with all the capabilities we and others possess in the real world — and then some. Sinclair is executive director of the master’s degree program for digital media at the Great Northern Way Campus in Vancouver and her students are creating a parallel virtual university.

Here’s an interview on MSDN’s Channel 10.

Apparently, the future of online interaction is going to be pretty much conducted by avatars, in 3-D surround everything. I was thinking about that — my worklife avatar would be plunked in front of a computer looking at a computer screen and my online leisure time avatar would best represent me by sitting around chatting in book store cafes. But then, I guess, “I” could wander over to the shelves and find something to read or go get some sprinkles on my latte…

Maybe it’s just a failure of imagination on my part. In a 3-D immersive world I can be and do — virtually — anything… Hmmm… Well, it looks like I’m going to get sprinkles on my latte. Then… on the way to the counter I feel inspired to… do a triple backflip. Hey! Perfectly executed — and not a drop spilled! Now I’m going to drink my coffee. For real.

~ Ivy Wigmore

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Learn how to add codecs automatically, play video embedded in a browser and how to install a Flash Player plugin or the Miro video platform.

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The application pulls multiple forms of rich media and communication streams into a single dashboard. 

The desktops of many office workers these days often contains all of these communications forms already; they’re just not combined into a single, slick interface or administrated by centralized controls.  Given the risk that any organization, much less enterprise, takes in  allowing employees to install multiple third party applications for IM, VoIP, email, RSS, videoconferencing and web-based widgets for anything and everything else, it’s perhaps not surprising that vendors are stepping in to offer some control to sysadmins.

HowStuffWorks has posted a helpful explanation for how OLEDs work.

While the above video shows Sony’s prototype, the technology is actually licensed from Kodak. The Eastman Kodak Company, in fact, has been busy signing licensing deals with a number of electronics manufacturers, including an agreement with LG this past week.

GE’s announcement of a successful demonstration of the world’s first roll-to-roll manufactured OLEDs lighting devices (press release) spurred the normal engaging commentary on a Slashdot thread.

Kyoto Prize winner Hiroo Inokuchi, whose organic chemistry work led to the development of OLEDs, is bullish on the techology. In this interview with Wired, he forsees applications in photovoltaics and improved energy conversion.

Will these thin, cheap and green color displays be embedded in surfaces around us within the next ten years? Maybe. Toshiba engineers are reporting problems with high OLED power requirements. In other words, cereal box cartoons may take a bit longer than that to play at a breakfast table near you.

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My immediate thought upon seeing Steve Forstall’s demo is that there could be a lot of flying iPhones, similar to the stories we’ve heard about the Wiimote. Remember those videos of plasma screens when the Wii debuted?

Now just imagine it’s a device that costs more than $500 direct from Apple in the U.S. and often much more than that in Europe.

That being said, I’m excited to see how software designers take advantage of that new Apple iPhone SDK.

That and Spore. Given more than two weeks to work on this game, I think this could be a killer gaming app for the device.

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“OpenID is a decentralized single sign-on authentication system for the Internet. The goal of the OpenID initiative is to allow users to log in at websites around the Internet with one ID instead of having to create multiple unique accounts. OpenID was developed using the open source software model to be an interoperable protocol independent from any single organization. (Continued…)”

Activating and using an OpenID is quite easy — I was able to sign up for TravelWiki, for instance, using one from Yahoo!. Activation and setup took about a minute. I’ve embedded three videos below that explain more about how OpenID works and how to use it. Enjoy!

The video below explains more about how to use an OpenID to login, in this case to votay.com:

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Here’s another one that explains how to use OpenID with WordPress:

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Dave provides a short, clear explanation of OpenID using a whiteboard here:

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And finally, in a Google TechTalk, Simon Willison  (co-creator of the Django Web framework) discusses the implications of OpenID and explores the best practices required to take advantage of the new technology while avoiding the potential security pitfalls. This one’s a bit long but excellent. 

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The two-person team that make up CommonCraft (Sachi and Lee LeFever) put it simply: they solve explanation problems.

I love that tagline. It’s rather similar sort of thing we try to do here at WhatIs.com. To that point, I’ve embedded three of CommonCraft’s previously released videos on our site, each of which explore and explain a different social media technology:

• RSS in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English
• Social Networking in Plain English

The newest addition to the mix is a video explaining what Twitter is and how it works.

As you may know, Twitter is a popular microblogging service that launched almost exactly one year ago at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. While we’ve blogged about it right afterwards. Due in no small part to the high percentage of geeks and “digerati” at the festival who had the opportunity to try it out and start networking with each other, Twitter really took off. Twitter is now a leader in the “social messaging” category that includes Pownce and Jaiku, spanning the gap between our online and offline worlds. Each allows users to update a microblogging service using SMS messages, a Web interface or a desktop application. (Twitter relies on third party apps for the last based upon its APIs. Try Snitter if you have Adobe Air installed.)

CommonCraft’s video sheds worthwhile additional insight. Watch it below:

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There’s plenty of interesting activity going on out there, too. Just check out this mashup of Twitter, Google Maps and live election results for intriguing insights into the 2008 presidential primary season.

And if you’d like to find/follow me on Twitter, head over to http://twitter.com/digiphile.