Jaron Lanier is a Silicon Valley visionnary who created back in the 80s VPL Research, the first Virtual Reality company who pioneered the VR product industry (and made the amazing Nintendo Powerglove !!).

In his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse.

When at WaveStorm we built the Spykee spy robot  we wanted to build Skype support inside the beast since the hardware had everything it needs to support proper VoIP. unfortuantely at that time Skype was very un-cool with 3rd-part hardware makers and would not release the necessary libraries so we ended up doing an integration with the desktop app through the official APIs.

Things finally changed with Skype announcing the SkypeKit beta SDK. SkypeKit is a collection of software and APIs that allows Internet-connected devices or applications to offer Skype voice and video calls. SkypeKit is designed to work with a wide variety of chip sets, operating systems, and audio/video devices.

Can’t wait to see a Skype-ready TV enabling a telepresence-like HD experience at a decent cost (Cisco’s is 100k+) .

HTML5 has been around for some time, but I think it’s often misunderstood and people usually understand HTML5 as web videos without flash. HTML5 is far more than that. HTML4 has been our tool for building the web and was published in 1997 – that’s over a decade ago ! A lot changed since that time with the boradband, the high-performance machines, the GPUs… CSS, Javascript and Flash came in as “patches” enabling richer interaction, but it only lead to clumsy unstable browsing experience and headache for developers in order to support the various browsers in the market. HTML 5 is a game-changer in Web application development, making obsolete such plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies. While still in its infancy, through its ability to handle media, 3d (WebGL) and proper rich interactions it’s already able to achieve unbelievable performance like the one showcased in the video below with a port of Quake2 in HTML5.

With all the fuss about Hadopi and controling illicit usage of the broadband connection, this was bound to happen, where there is a new regulation, companies build tools to enforce it. So did Detica with their CView deep packet inspection appliances to measure the level of illegal file-sharing on the network.

The solution yet does not enable tracking of a specific user’s usage an only give metrics on a network-wide level, yet I don’t see why this could not be applied to a specific user.

Virgin Media in UK is the first tester of the solution allegedly to get a measure rather than to act on illegal file-sharing.