Wired @ Home

When I heard about ths site I was game for it and went to sign up. I am a huge Halo fan, although I'll admit I'm not totally informed so I was intrigued as to what this site would offer. Maybe I could learn a thing or two about my favourite game. This is my chance to dive into the exciting world of Halo. I just started playing Guitar Hero yesterday, yes just yesterday and I was amazed as to how addicting it was. My friends had told me that it was really good and wondered why I didn't want to try it. Another friend, like me, didn't know what all the hype was and didn't care whether or not she played it but then she played it and was hooked. Today I played Rock Band with 5 other friends and I can say it's an amazing game and I've gone from easy to medium in one day. A huge feat for someone like me.

Now back to the storey. Basically WeGame is a YouTube for gamers where they allow you to watch videos, upload, or record your own. There are many new video sites now opening for different topics like cooking, How-To, high quality videos, and many, many others. This is no exception and coupled with a short and sweet name with great site design, it is sure to be a hit.

The quality is pretty decent with 600kbps, double that of YouTube but the videos seem to be at a minimum. That's all about to change.
WeGame offers a desktop client to help minimize the pain that comes along with uploading gameplay content to sites. The desktop client works with DirectX to capture screencasts from the game without slowing it down and outputs it to AVI files that are small and can be uploaded quickly to the web. I tested the client to give you readers a low down on exactly how it works.

WeGame steps in by providing a free desktop client that works tightly with DirectX to capture screencasts from within games without slowing them down significantly. It also outputs those screencasts to AVI files that are small enough for quick uploading to the web, a process that occurs from within the client itself. To record a screencast, just hit a special key while in-game to start and then stop recording. Once you���ve exited the game, you can click the ���Upload to WeGame��� button, choose a title and description, and the client will convert the AVI file to Flash and publish to the WeGame site directly. Check out a screenshot of the client to the left to see what the interface for this looks like.

Search engines have been a hot topic lately and many new search engine sites have opened up. I've already reviewed 2, Spacetime and Hakia, but now Microsoft has released its own, Tafiti. At the time I wrote Beta Update, Spacetime was in its Beta 1 with many issues to fix, but now its very close to releasing Beta 2 with many improved features. I highly encourage you to visit SpaceTime to learn more and see more. They have a video up on the new features and the overall free product. Hakia however is in the midst of fully implementing its flagship feature, Semantic-Rank algorithm which is designed to extract meaning from your search phrases and questions. This is a massive step in bringing better search and more credible results to you. Another company that is using this type of technology is Vlingo. They offer a voice-recognition system for on the go Sprint users. It uses the Hieracrhical Language Model to recognize every single word you say and make educated predictions on what word you are going to say next based on the previous word uttered. On top of this, it will adapt, learn, and improve itself to understand new words, speech patterns and more.

The big news though is Microsofts new search engine called Tafiti. If you don't already have Silverlight*, the website will instruct you to download it. Once started, Tafiti loads surprisingly quickly and will position a search box in front of you. Once you've entered a phrase or keyword and pressed Go, the search box will slide to the left and below it, an orbit of the world, RSS, News, Images, and Halo icons will swirl around. These are just like the Google tabs of Web, Images, News, Groups, etc. After you've gone to the tab you want, you can click the result which has a larger description, or you can save that website by dragging it over to the corner which contains 5 empty slots. You can label those slots, email, or blog it (Windows Live Spaces). This is only possible if you have a Hotmail, MSN, or Live account. Not only does it display the results in such a cool way, they give you a second option to display it in a tree view which isn't the best but definitly looks cool.

Silverlight is basically another version of Adobe Flash but much better. This is why Tafiti can support such great graphics, video and animation. Sun Microsystems has already released a competitor for Silverlight days after its release called JavaFX. Currently, Silverlight is supported by the most popular broswers on Windows 2000 and up except Opera. The Mac versions are in the making and should represent a fair amount of the downloads. I won't get into the technical details of Silverlight but the jist is: it's more useable, superior graphics, animation, and video, more searchable, and doesn't need Windows Media Player, WMP Active X, or Windows Media plug-ins to be played. You can view some demos of the type of quality Silverlight provides on Fox. To learn more on Silverlight and other Beta products go to Beta Updates.

2010 is a year Microsoft is looking forward to as it is the proposed release date of its new OS. With Vista failing expectations, Microsoft needs to put all its effort into creating an amazingly great OS that has great security, speed, and performance and from the word go. Already leaks have been sited on the new OS but none to specific. One feature is it will not include if any groud breaking software and features like Vista did, but improve on Vista's flaws and make them superior. For example, the difficult to use, Bitlocker for all those technical readers out there. Even though the userface has gone a modern look, Microsoft is hinting the new OS wil undergo a major revamp called a really thin OS that manages virtual machines. Finally, a touch screen interface will maybe makes it way into the next-gen OS, many people are waiting for, and analysts putting heavy weight on.