Software

Image recognition is an effective way to generate metadata and revolutionize image search. A new start-up, Milabra, which launched and announced $1.4 million in funding on Monday, has some of the most interesting technology we’ve heard about in this space.

Cloud computing is certainly one of the big buzz words in the technology space — but what does it mean and where does Microsoft fit into this movement?  Last week in New York at the Microsoft offices, I interviewed Dan'l Lewin, Corporate Vice President for Strategy and Emerging Business Development at Microsoft.

When Microsoft Office releases its web applications into beta this year, it has a good shot of surpassing Google Docs right off the bat: The mainstream reliance on Microsoft Office makes Microsoft web apps a natural extension.

Thomson Reuters' metadata generation service Calais will now allow users to automatically integrate their content with Linked Data assets like Wikipedia, the company announced today on their blog. "With 9,000 of you processing 1+ million documents a day, it was time to take Calais to the next level," Krista Thomas writes.

Video SEO EveryZing will power search and discovery for Revision3, the digital web studio created by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, the company announced today. Andy interviewed CEO Tom Wilde in the Beet offices last month about the company's speech-to-text technology, which creates rich, searchable metadata for videos. 

One of the big software developments of the year was Adobe’s introduction of AIR, a desktop computing environment which marries rich, local applications with the live interactivity of the Web.  Today, the company announced that it has brought its version for Linux out of beta.  It already has AIR for Windows and the Mac. Linux […]

Google web browser Chrome is leaving beta, Marissa Mayer told Michael Arrington today at the Le Web conference in Paris. I republished my interview with Marissa at TechCrunch50 this summer about Chrome. You can check out TechCrunch’s story here. —Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

Social entertainment center Boxee has been one of Beet’s favorite start-ups since its alpha launch this summer. It’s been improving steadily since then, and today it announced that Netflix subscribers can now stream movies through the site’s Watch Instantly feature and that is has expanded its television content to include thewb.com shows like Buffy The […]

Stephen Shankland has done a little research on adoption of Chrome, the recently introduced Web browser from Google. He finds that 3.6 percent of visitors to CNET used Chrome in October, up from just one percent in September. While CNET users are earlier adopters, the general population uses Chrome less one percent, he finds. In […]

Move Networks, the small Utah-based company which has created an impressive high quality, low bandwidth solution to streaming video for ABC, FOX, the and others, will now provide its technology to much smaller publishers through an association with Boston-based PermissionTV. Move’s streaming technology is not Flash or Microsoft based, it is a technology it calls […]

Adobe has landed a two-year agreement with MLB.com to stream its 2,500-plus spring training, regular season and post-season games live to MLB.com’s 1.5 million subscribers.  Games were previously streamed on Microsoft Silverlight, an arrangement announced in August of 2007.  In the rich media platform game, Adobe has a home run here.  Details were released a […]

At the big Adobe developers conference in San Francisco today, Adobe will unveil the introduction of Flash video on mobile phones, just on Windows Mobile.  Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch has the story. In September on the MIT campus, I spoke with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch about the future of Flash and the prospects for Flash […]

To identify illegal video uploads, YouTube has implemented a software technology to "catch" content which infringes on the rights of copyrights holders.  NBC Universal’s general counsel Rick Cotton tells ZDNet’s Tom Steinert-Threlkeld that the software is identifying 75-80 percent of illegal uploads.  For Viacom, which is locked in a legal battle with Google over illegal […]

While Google, Yahoo! and AOL are focused on advertising-based business models around online video, Microsoft is advancing into the area it knows the best; software and services. Seeking a big piece of the emerging field for video streaming and the demand for HD video, Microsoft is expanding the ecosystem for Silverlight, the new rich-media Web […]

Microsoft and Akamai Technologies will release a beta version of a high-definition video solution for PCs in early 2009, the companies announced today. Both companies are introducing new streaming technologies to make the new service possible.  More details will be discussed later this morning when Microsoft Director of Media and Advertising Evangelism Eric Schmidt speaks […]

Adobe Flash Player 10 is now available for free download, the company announced today. Andy interviewed Jim Guerard, VP of Adobe Dynamic Media, in Palo Alto this summer about the second beta version of the player; I republished the interview above.

Personal finance web application Mint, last year’s TechCrunch40 winner, leaves beta today with a slew of new features under its belt, including investment tracking and flexible budget sheets, Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch reports. He writes that Mint registrations have gone up 100 percent over the last few weeks due to the financial crisis.

The authoring tools for Microsoft’s Silverlight, the new rich-media Web plug-in,  will soon be available for those working on Macs and on open source programs.  The software giant hopes to accelerate the use of Silverlight on different operating systems through the funding of a project to be undertaken by Soyatec, a France-based IT solutions provider […]

Zoho Mail came out of private beta today with some impressive features already lined up: The service has an iPhone app and an offline mode. Gmail still doesn’t have offline support, prompting Read Write Web’s Richard MacManus to write: "Innovative web office start-up Zoho has beaten Google to the punch again."

Competition is growing in the enterprise Twitter market: Austin-based start-up QikCom, which announced its closed beta launch today, adds some fresh ideas to the concept that won competitor Yammer the top prize at TechCrunch50.