.

Presentations or Zoho, Cassette or Vinyl, One Laptop May Be The Answer.

Let me get it started with my weekly Google fix out of the way before I get to the meat of this post. To the tune of $30 millions US, Google is “Platinum” sponsor of the next X-Prize. This time, the X-Fund will go to the first private team to the moon and back, with some payload activities in between. For more info, visit the X-Prize site. Right now to me, $30 millions seem too little to really attract serious participants. I mean, it’s not like we don’t know of the millions and millions that NASA has to spend every year just to keep the shuttle program going. So in terms of scale, in today’s market, that prize seems puny in comparison to the requirements. Plus, the timing is a little off to me. In 2008, we should hopefully see the first tests of the sub orbital planes like those from Branson with his Galatic enterprises. If any hope or success came out of these efforts, an announcement date around that time would have definitely invigorated the race.

That said, my interest is piqued with the announcement of the Google Presentations. Google continues to generate traction with the somewhat complete integration of all their parts that make me get deeper and deeper into their universe. It started with Gmail. To save documents and access easily, Docs came next. Then Analytics, Reader then iGoogle. I long had installed Picassa on my desktop, then lately, i found it easily to store my pics on Picassaweb and use them on my blog. See, I’m getting deeper. However, I gotta admit, I have been looking at Zoho. Seems like same kind of integration direction, however better looking.

These two upcoming items directly tickle my musician, DJ, record producer and vinyl collector in me. First, the USB cassette deck, for those tons of good old home made mixed tapes that still stack my apartment. Yeah, I still hold on to some of them, plus believe it or not, there are some gems on there. Several solutions can be found around.

Music is music, 20 years ago, as it is today and gems take shape at any time. With a USB deck, I can digitize hours of entertainment and probably get rid of the tapes (not too sure. I’m not too safe and convinced of the digital-only format of my treasures).

The ITT USB Turntable from ION serves the same above described purpose, but this comes handy because as a club dj for more then 12 years, the majority of my tools of the trade are in vinyl format. Even tough CD’s have been around for a while and many DJ’s started the conversion not too long after, it took clubs a long time to upgrade to CD’s and then the digital world.

Whereas in the days, you could count on finding solid decent Technics 1200 decks at most clubs and reliably depend on their sturdiness to take you through your sets, when the transition started, it was a hard road of low quality CD decks that would skip your tracks, various modes of unsuccessful vinyl emulations, tentative attempts at the MP3 format and plenty horrified moments in the middle of your live set. Nowadays, formats have taken shape and with laptops, digital players and Flash drives, the once scary threat of the digital revolution to the DJ purist is now opening countless new ways to express, play and keep the crowds growing. What those cross format appliances reveal is that variety is the spice of life and the markings of a generation. We grew up with tapes and records, why can’t we enjoy and pass them on for more interesting recombinations? (DRM-free obviously.)

Since it was first announced, I have kept an eye on the One-Laptop-Per-Child movement and was keenly interested in their developments. Apparently, there are a few bumps on the road, with a recent price hike and delay with manufacturers, to realizing its full potential. Having seen both here in New York and back in the Caribbean what a computer can do in improving the lives of the receiver, from family members here and abroad, to friends in the neighbourhood without the means to afford a machine, anything from a cheap bare bone to a second-hand computer inevitably increases productivity, outlets, ways to communicate and so much more. It’s a connected world after all.

Among all my techy friends and acquaintances, I always collect second hand or discarded hardware. These days, you put a few parts together, slap Ubuntu Linux on the machine, get a wireless card and you’ve got a tool and a whole new set of possibilities. Right now, I am writing this article on a rescued Dell Latitude CPx with Feisty.

With the prize of going to close to $200 US, it looks like half the children will get their computers after all; or they’ll all get them, but later. I understand first product blues and the likes. I have no doubt that with the first few ones out there in the wild, people will get to thinker with them and come up with brilliant ideas to improve. It’s the open-source community model after all. Wouldn’t be over the top if the solutions actually came from the same third-world countries where those laptops would be distributed?

Short interesting news: Winamp, the venerable media player celebrated it’s 10th year anniversary with the release of an edition that would challenge iTunes. Yeah, right! I mean, I had forgotten about winamp because for a while, they lost their mojo, their innovative ways in their corporate parents corridors. Ask me again later because these days, I am still going through my evaluations of which media player I’ll be moving to next, so I have downloaded their latest release, but not installed not tested it yet. I’m still giving recently downloaded Media Monkey a try for now (my gripe for now is that it refuses to read my mapped network drives.)

More interesting bits I collected or heard over the recent week:
Salesforce.com: It’s all about the UI

AOL comes to manhattan with ads in tow

Lotus Symphony relaunches as open source

IBM’s Office Rival