captsolo weblog

“Semantic Web: How Can We Make Semantic Web Usable?” is the title of today’s SDForum Semantic Web SIG event taking place in Palo Alto, CA.

That’s an interesting topic and it gets even more intriguing if you look at the list of speakers and moderators of the event:

• Nova Spivack - CEO of Radar Networks
• Holger Knublauch - VP of Product Development in TopQuadrant
• AJ Chen (moderator) - Senior Search Engineer, Healthline.com
• Jeffrey Pollock (moderator) - Senior Director, Oracle Fusion Middleware

It would be interesting to find out more about what happened at the event. If you participated or just know more about it please add some comments.

Apple’s special event - new iPod Touch, iPhone price drop, …

Today (September 5, 2007) Steve Jobs announced many news in the iPhone and iPod range of products [engadget.com].

The most exciting product of these is probably iPod Touch which has most of the features of the iPhone apart from the mobile phone functionality. A full size screen, Multi-Touch interface, WiFi, Safari and it’s 8mm thin. Pricing - $299 for 8Gb, $399 for 16 Gb.

Other things announced:

• iPhone 8Gb price cut - down to $399 !
• refreshed iPod classic line - 80 Gb and … “a slightly thicker one as well… and it’s going to have 160GB.”
• new, smaller iPod nano
• partnership b/w iTunes WiFi music store and Starbucks hotspots (now that both iPod touch and iPhone have WiFi)
• … (perhaps more) …

Looking forward to find a video of this event online. These events (eg, iPhone launch) are always a good show. For now take a look at the

Personal view:

Multi-touch interface is sexy and I’d like to get one of these devices to listen to music and enjoy their style. But regardless of Apple’s announcements I would not call it a device for normal web browsing. Their screen resolution is just too small.

Unless even old 800x600 px desktop displays have too high resolution for your browsing and video watching needs.