SFist Tech Roundup: sunday Sunday SUNDAY!
ComBots are coming to Fort Mason next weekend, so you can all knock yourselves out watching robots with sawblades and blowtorches cutting each other up and setting each other on fire. We've already made our opinion clear on the topic of forcing robots to do battle against each other, but what the hell. The kids dig it, and it's easier than waiting for a Survival Research Labs show or the next Burning Man. Besides, who wouldn't want to see (quoting the promotional e-mail) "Biohazard, Sewer Snake, Megabyte, and other famous bots... spin hundred-pound weapons faster than Bruce Lee on meth"?
While you're waiting for that action to start, there's a few more preliminary battles going on in tech news, after the jump. Your Web browser bought you the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge!
Image from the Combots promotional e-mail
Our defending champ should come as absolutely no surprise. Do you smell what the Google's cooking? If you've been following tech news for any length of time, you can, because it's the story that refuses to die: the Web-based office suite. They've been playing the crowd, building up the anticipation, denying there's anything in the works except for the Google Toolbar while hiring people to work on OpenOffice on the down-low. This does make it look like they're planning a bigger stake in an office suite than they appeared to at first, but they still don't need to announce anything, while they're at the top of their game and...
Oh my God did you just see that? Out of nowhere, it's Gorgeous Bill Gates with a direct hit to the solar plexus with "Windows Live" and "Office Live," two new Web-based products that are a completely new paradigm for software and a new era for personal computing. Not, we repeat, not just a new name slapped onto MSN in an attempt to steal Google's thunder.
And who's that coming out of the crowd with a folding chair? Holy cow, it's Amazon and Random House delivering a crushing blow to the Google Library project, which still hasn't begun scanning copyrighted material as planned. While Google is still working through "operational" issues and all the various lawsuits, Amazon and Random House are saying screw this whole "free access to information" business and working on how to develop a business plan for it. Meanwhile, Yahoo! and MSN are waiting outside the ring ready to do a tag-team smackdown on Google with their own version of a book digitization project.
And in an exhibition match, we have the Wall Street Journal in a no-holds-barred grudge match against their long-time rival, the concept of being topical. They've just discovered AJAX, or Asynchronous Javascript and XML, the web programming technology that's already gone through its first two cycles of buzz and backlash, and is in fact such old news that even we've talked about it in this column. In any case, get used to hearing the buzzword, because that's the concept that's going to drive all the Web-based office and productivity software you're going to be seeing in this Brave New World.