gwsnetwork.com

A partnership between the BBC, ITV, BT, Five, Channel 4 and TalkTalk has been given a provisional thumbs up by the BBC Trust to develop an internet television standard. The project known as Canvas, would develop set-top boxes to access services such as BBC iPlayer and ITV player.
The boxes could be available by the end of next year and will sell for around £200. In addition to these services, users will be able to access internet services such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. The news of this free service has not pleased everyone however. Pay TV providers such as Virgin and BSkyB are critical of the scheme.

Speculation  today that Google will develop its own phone. This is not news I hear your say and you would be partly correct. The operating system developed for telephones and mobile devices has been around for some time. However, this has been made to run on telephones that have been produced and sold under the manufacturer HTC.

Now the Google telephone is going to be made for Google, with Google branding. The research phones have been issued to some employees at Google to test the facilities.  Unfortunately, that is where the story ends as further news is not forthcoming.  I would expect that it will probably have something to do with augmented reality as applications for this seem to fit well with Google’s information retrieval model.  Don’t you get the feeling they are trying to market this for all it is worth?

Bing is making great efforts to differentiate itself from its arch nemesis, Google. One of the ways it is doing this is with a new visual search. ( This creates sets of data and allows the images to organised in ways that show relationships between them. One example is the Priministers of the UK, and the images can be sorted and arranged in many ways.
As well as the usual alphabetical order, the prime ministers can be ordered in terms of their age, how long they spent in office, which political party they belonged. Hovering over an image produces lots more information.

Other data sets include the periodic table, oscar winners. At the moment this is in beta and there are limited data sets.
However, an interesting dataset is the shopping dataset which allows products to be arrange in terms of price, brand, number of reviews and who they are suitable for. This can be ordered and arranged to suit your particular queries. People find it easier to look at images than read text and the way in which queries can be answered by sliders is an interesting and tactile way of interacting with the information.
If it can be adapted to larger dataset from search queries it could prove to be a winning search tool that bests Google.