I could have compiled the source from scratch, but a quick search gave this page from Gdgt providing a VMWare image of a complete install of Chrome OS. So I created a new virtual machine in VMWare Fusion on my MacBook, selected “Other Linux 2.6.x kernel” as OS type and poited it to the .vmdk disk image. See Figure 1 for how that looks.

Figure 1: VMWare Fusion with Chrome OS VM

After powering on the VM, it virtually took only 8 seconds for it to boot into the login screen. Here you fill in a valid Google login, e.g. a GMail address:

Then wait another 9 seconds for the Chrome browser to show up, already logged in to your GMail account. Nice. Everything in Chrome OS are web apps, and the Chrome browser shows App tabs differently than normal web page tabs. This is a nice and clean idea. Signing in to an OS with a web-based user name and password feels strange, but hey, it just works! And if you’re without internet connection, you can still sign in with an account that you’ve used before!

From here, browsing works like normal. You can create tabs, windows, switch between windows with Alt-TAB etc. In the upper righthand corner are some icons which provides you with some menus for battery status, WiFi and network connection and a general menu with access to options etc.

I was unable to test WiFi since my VMWare only provides ethernet to the local OS. I also tried to start the leftmost tab which is supposed to be a quick-launch for Web Apps, but it requires a <user>@google.com account which I don’t have, so I don’t know how to do that:

Glitches

This being an early pre-release of the OS one year before the launch of the first public version, no wonder there are some way to go still. Here are some of the minor issues I found

1. Not possible to change locale in login screen. U.S. keyboard layout is default., which means Norwegians need to search for the @ key and others.
2. Loggin in to a “Google Apps for Domains” account, auto-login to mail and calendar gets lost.
3. The quick-launch tab to the left does not let me login with a GMail account…
4. The whole thing just freezes sometimes Could be due to VMWare?

Read more

Here are a few articles I found useful

• GDGT: Download Google Chrome OS
• Live Blog: The Google Chrome OS Press Event
• PCWorld: Google Chrome OS: Visual Tour

So why leave Apple’s iTunes out in the cold? This is of course part of a battle of online digital music. Although some were guessing that Google were planning its own music service, partnering up with and helping the most innovative services out there may be a just as efficient move, if they manage to get people used to search for music in Google instead of through iTunes. Yes, some of these services let you purchase music as well as listen online.

I could not find any info on when this service is expected to Norway, if ever. I guess that would be with other partners since Rhapsody for one is U.S. only But we surely welcome all competition in this space, as the industry gets used to better models and cheaper music for us consumers.

That would come as no surpise to us who have followed Lucene for some time. And perhaps for intelligence in particular, they do not want to be too heavily dependent upon closed source code. In their press release, In-Q-Tel they say that they want to secure advanced access to Lucene/Solr technology, and state that Lucene/Solr is one of the fastest growing search solutions over the last three years.

This is good news for all users of Lucene/Solr search, also in Norway where Cominvent is Lucid Imagination’s partner. It gives even more credibility to open source search, and makes this platform grow even faster. Time for Norwegian intelligence to follow?

Yesterday the new iPhone 3G S was presented by Apple. Neither Telenor nor NetCom reveals on their home pages when it will be available in Norway, but Apple’s pages say it is already available.

We already knew that these software improvements would come in iPhone OS 3.0

• Cut & Paste
• MMS
• Wireless communication with other iPhones
• Spotlight search throughout the phone
• Payment API within apps
• Built-in MS Exchange server support
• ++

All of this is available both for old iPhone 3G’s and also for the new 3G s. Here are the hardware improvements:

• 3Mp camera with auto focus
• Video recording with direct post to YouTube
• Built-in compass (makes car navigation more reliable)
• Voice commands both for calling, changing playlists and more
• 32Gb model
• Improved battry life
• Super 3G with up to 7mbps
• +many minor improvements

So let’s line up for this goodie – this time also available from Telenor in Norway…

Let’s compare:

From a decision engine I’d expect to get an overview of possible travel options, such as Air, Bus, Train. This however is just the normal bla-bla. Let’s try the same on Google:

At least the top two results on Google are about flights between the two cities, which is better.

Let’s try to get decision help in purchasing an iPhone. From some more searching, it seems as if it is unfair to do the comparison on the Norwegian version of Bing, as it does not contain ads or related searches, so let’s go for the English. Search is “buy iPhone”:

That’s a bit better:

Here, both Bing and Google at least show both relevant ads and iPhone links. But decision engine????

The shopping support does not show up until I try to find it, searching for “casio exilim” – the first link is “Shop for Casio Exilim”, and clicking that takes me to a nice result set with photos of the models, reviews and price. Not very impressive, as Google has had this with Froogle for many years.

Bing seems not to be the revolusion Microsoft promised, so time will show if it becomes a hit or not.

The old kvasir was one of the most used web searches in Norway, but they never really managed to beat Google in popularity, so far. So what’s new in the new version of their search, and has this anything to do with “search 3.0″?

The first page is changed to a fancy logo and single search box, as is mandatory these days. The ide about the result page is that it is segmented into displaying results from different sources:

• Companies (kind of yellow-page results with not only name but keyword hits as well)
• Ordinary web results (From Google)
• Images
• Topics
• Encyclopedia (Store Norske)
• News
• Twitter
• Sponsored links (ads)

A quick test show that this is nowhere near the revolutionary “search 3.0″ as they claim. A search for my own company “Cominvent” shows no results other than web results. Not very 3.0-ish… The same search at Finn.no shows contact information as well as a map to my company.

How about a search for “microsoft fast”? This brings up a totally unrelated company on top, then web hits and some images. But where are the news stories about the Microsoft/FAST merger last year? I had to click “news search” tab to get to those results, why?

Finally, let’s try a search for “kakkerlakker” (cokroaches in Norwegian). It brings be a lot of company hits for insect fighting companies, but no encyclopedia hit. But they have a “did you mean kakerlakker” – ah, I mis-spelled it. Clicking the spell correction, brings up a better result, and that is good.

All in all, searching multiple sources is good, but it is neither new not “search 3.0″. Sesam/finn has been doing this for years, and they just gave up competing on the web search arena. Sorry, Kvasir. It takes more to call something “search 3.0″.

Office 14

The main news is that ESP will be included in Office 14, to serve as the advanced/extended search server of Sharepoint. It has long been a problem that the Sharepoint Search Server can only handle about 50 million documents, and by offering the FAST-based extension, this will be extended to almost infinite number of docs, as well as enabling some features which Sharepoint did not have as well (faceted navigation being one of them). The product will be more limited than the full-fledged ESP in that you cannot tune as many parameters. Much of the middleware and administrative components of ESP are stipped out and replaced with Windows/Sharepoint/MSSQL components, for a tighter integration.

But Office14 will not ship before 2010, so as a gap-filler Microsoft will sell ESP for Sharepoint for as little as USD 25.000 per server, which is a fraction of the typical license cost for such a system. This product is basically the same as today’s ESP, but if you intend to upgrade to Office 14 Extended Search, you better not use all the features of ESP, but stick to the recommended customization options which are compatible with the coming Office 14 search.

FAST Search for Internet Business

The second product announced is “FAST Search for Internet Business”, intended to fill the needs of the typical existing FAST customer within site search or e-commerce. Even the Linux versions of this product will be developed and maintained alongside the Windows versions.

A good question is how MS/FAST is going to maintain all these code bases going forward. I’d expect a consolidation sooner or later, and perhaps also an end-of-life announcement for the Linux platform support within the next 5 years. But that will only be speculations anyway

Attivio

Boston based Attivio (www.attivio.com) is founded by ex-FAST key people with Ali Riaz in the driver’s seat, and promises to bridge the gap between traditional Enterprise Search and traditional Databases/Information Warehouses.

Being less than two years old, the new company is already making headlines, and time (and customers) will reveal how much is pure product strenght and how much is the usual marketing blabla.

Many with DB background miss the ability to do real JOINs with traditional enterprise search engines, where typically DB tables need to be de-normalized and flattened before being indexed. For most use-cases that doesn’t cause a big problem, but for some applications the amount of redundancy in the engine just grows too big, and/or the flexibility of doing varied queries along other axis than the index was designed for, gets complicated or impossible.

The problem has been that a runtime JOIN is very costly – where RDBMS’s can spend minutes or hours computing a huge JOIN query, you expect from an Enterprise Search Engine that the result be ready in milliseconds. So if Oracle have not succeeded in combining unstructured search with large structured queries in an efficient way, how can a small startup do it? Or can they?

We’ll follow-up once the product, called Active Intelligence Engine^TM (AIE) has been prooven a bit more in the market.

And IF Attivio’s claims are correct, then both Oracle and Microsoft/FAST really have something to fear, because this is something the information retrieval world have been waiting for a loong time!

In a recnt post on Shahzad Rana’s (Microsoft’s most profiled OOXML promoter in Norway) blog, he comments on Håkon Wium Lie’s (Opera Software’s tech director and profiled standards promoter) wording in a comment to VG TV. Here, Lie introduces the term “Microsoft tax” to explain what happens when ordinary people feel forced to purchase MS-Office to read documents from the government or their kid’s scool. Lie says that the consequence of widespread use of Microsoft Office’s new document format OOXML, could be many more years of vendor lock-in since OOXML allows arbitrary non-standardized, non-open extensions. An example is if a parent recives a document from her kid’s teacher, which contains an Equation binary object, which is not part of the OOXML specification, and thus cannot possibly be implemented by other office packages wanting to support OOXML.

Futher, Rana asks Lie to produce some evidence of an OOXML document from a teacher to a student or parent that is only readable on Windows and MS Office, whereby Lie refers to an OOXML document that Rana himself had sent by email. A funny thing here is that Rana had to rename the .docx file as .doc to be able to upload it to WordPress. This caused a lot of trouble for the users, thus examplifying even stronger what kind of trouble the new format would cause for ordinary people. Rana should of course have zipped the file, or better, modified WordPress to accept .docx files for upload. But a MS supporter is probably not used to the idea of freely being able to modify ones own GPL software