Monday Morning Muffins

Posted by Hyder on April 16th, 2007

Stop the presses! Get online instead!

The world of startups and announcements just goes crazy Monday morning, well some acquisitions happen over the weekend too.

Microsoft Silverlight - Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. From their FAQ’s you will find out that this is the product that was formerly code named “WPF/E”. This is more or less a direct competitor to Adobe’s Flash. Silverlight media capabilities include fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality audio and video to all major browsers including Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Windows Internet Explorer running on the Macintosh or on Microsoft Windows.

Right now you can download it as a pre-release meant for developers to use for evaluation. The logo looks kinda smoky to me and not so “light”.

I don’t know how far and wide the adoption of it would go. As it is clearly meant to offer richer experiences so users with less than optimal systems will probably not get to experience what it has to offer. Unless of course they upgrade.

Egnyte - Share yourself seamlessly by continuous synchronization on the web with Egnyte. This is a competitor for Microsoft Groove which also does the same thing. Currently working across projects with multiple partners across the globe can be quite a hassle with all kinds of technicalities.

So let’s say a project manager has everyone on his team at different locales on the globe, now each member can continue to keep & modify project information on their computers. A Shared View in Egnyte allows virtual consolidation of project information from project team members – one area where all files, folders, emails about the project are available.

Egnyte senses when you are offline and does the synchronization when you get back online. Any changes you make to files are posted on the web, including saving different file versions. You can search the files by keyword, tag, document or person and location.

They are currently showing at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Fotowoosh - Fotowoosh is a service that will turn any 2D picture you feed it into a 3D image. Some may even say its a competitor to Microsofts photosynth but I think it’s in a class all of its own. With Photosynth you need multiple images to make a 3D atmosphere, but the drawback is that you can only see one picture at a time.

Fotowoosh has one-upped photosynth and takes only one picture to make a truly 3D looking picture. You will be needing a VRML { Virtual Reality Modeling Language } reader to see it. You can view some examples on techcrunch.

You can read more about it here.

Technorati Tags: silverlight, fotowoosh, egnyte, microsoft, web 2.0 expo