personalization

Video: CommuniGate’s Pronto! demo shows what a real-time communications dashboard can do

This video, uploaded by CommuniGate, demonstrates Pronto!, their take on a unified communications dashboard.

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.

Netvibes is a good start

Netvibes.com is a terrific, highly customizable start page . It comes with some defaults but you can change just about anything on the page to get whatever you want to see first when you log in.

Dion Hinchcliffe named netvibes the best start page in his Best Web 2.0 Software of 2006:

Increasing in popularity in particular are what some people call Ajax desktops, or personalized start pages. Well exemplified by Microsoft’s Live.com, but also by the likes of the popular Protopage and Netvibes, the interest in these online desktops is being driven by a confluence of factors.

One major factor is that we are struggling with attention scarcity; finding enough time to digest the proliferating sources of information we need to track on a daily basis. I don’t need to tell you that the sheer variety can be daunting and now usually includes e-mail, calendars, contacts, to do lists, news, weather, school closings, blogs and work documents like spreadsheets, presentations, and more…

This is making the simplicity and elegance of online desktops ever more attractive.

Video: Web 2.0 Explained

If you’re looking for buzzwords, you’d be hard pressed to find one more over-used than “Web 2.0.” The hype and marketing, unfortunately, obscure the rapid growth of social media and the associated technologies. Fortunately, a brilliant little video popped up online last week and was immediately hailed as a much-need breath of sanity and clarity by BoingBoing, Kottke and many others.
We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did. Watch the “Web2.0 Explained” video here.

Pandora: An online music discovery platform from the Music Genome Project

Pandora is a music discovery service designed to help users find and enjoy music. It’s powered by the Music Genome Project, one of the most comprehensive analyses of music ever undertaken.

According to Tom Westergren, the founder of the project, the analytical engine that drives the service was created by “assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It’s not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it’s about what each individual song sounds like.”

After you’ve clicked over to the Web site, all you have to do is enter a few of your favorite songs or artists and Pandora launches “a streaming station to explore that part of the music universe.” The more you listen, the more accurate Pandora becomes in predicting which other artists and tracks will be within your boundaries of taste, much as speech recognition software becomes more accurate with greater use.