See here and video below:

BMW has hosted a video on how they are implementing Microsoft Surface for product configuration. BMW is the first car manufacturer worldwide to use this product commercially. By interacting with this multi-touch surface that runs on special hardware and software provided by Microsoft, customers can configure their BMW and instantly see their results.

The Microsoft Surface is a multi-touch interface that allows a user or multiple users to manipulate digital content by using hand movements instead of a mouse or keyboard. BMW will take the customer experience to another level with this technology, basically each customer can configure their future car by simply placing some small tiles on the touch-screen and the car’s color will change instantly. This also applies to different trims or wheel.

This looks interesting!

As anticipated last month, Google’s experiment that lets you reorder and annotate search results is now live. Google SearchWiki should be available automatically if you are logged in to a Google account and it can be recognized by the visual clutter added to the search results. [link]

Google SearchWiki

(via The Fire Wire, Nobody Likes Bush)

also:

• World Leaders Won’t Shake Bush’s Hand
• No One Shakes Bush’s Hand At G20 Summit

Cheers to Google for embarking on this ambitious film with Vermilion Films to show the way many parts of the world are still struggling to fight polio; something all but eradicated in our country.  I think this is a great idea and congratulations to Google for supporting such a worthy cause.  It is important that the rest of the world be constantly remind of the suffering across the globe.  The only problem I have is that it is being released on HBO.  This should have a much more public release than that.  After all Google is behind it, you would think they could post this to the internet for all to see.  Here’s a snippet of the article on The Official Google Blog followed by the video.

We’re proud to announce The Final Inch, a 38-minute film about the historic global effort to eradicate polio. Here, the story told is as much about the messengers as the message. You’ll meet Munzareen Fatima, one of the thousands of community “foot soldiers” across India working to sway reluctant families to vaccinate their children, and Dr. Ashfaq Bhat, who travels into the backwaters of India’s Ganges Basin by boat and foot to detect emerging cases of polio. Martha Mason and Mikail Davenport bring us into their lives and describe the paralyzing challenges of childhood polio, reminding us how endemic polio once was in the United States. [link]

***Update:  The App has been released. You can download it here.***

On Friday the New York Times announced that there would be a new iPhone app by Google.

Pushing ahead in the decades-long effort to get computers to understand human speech, Google researchers have added sophisticated voice recognition technology to the company’s search software for the Apple iPhone.

Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like “Where’s the nearest Starbucks?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?” The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.

But as of today the app still is not available.  Now Techcrunch is reporting that the availability was delayed because of Apple’s approval process.

Google was under the impression that the application would be live on the App Store on Friday (obviously, since they pushed all significant press attention to it). Sometime Friday they found out Apple wouldn’t be pushing it, despite the fact that Google submitted it for review earlier in the week and got a thumbs up for Friday. One source says they’ve had little direct contact with Apple during the review, instead getting their updates via the standard iPhone developer tool, which has said “in review” for the last few days.

It seems to me that Apple’s iPhone App approval process has been broken from the beginning.  They really need to find a way to honor the hard work of all the iPhone developers out there.  At this time a developer creating an iPhone app can have no confidence that there App will be approved.  Some of the best apps out there may not be developed because developers are scared Apple may not approve their app.

Here’s a Youtube video of the new app.  It looks awesome!

President-Elect Barack Obama has decided to use YouTube as an important communication medium.  He recently released his first address as the new President-Elect and plans to release the weekly presidential radio address as a Youtube video as well when he is in office. I think this is a great way for the new president-elect to use technology in a helpful way. There are great hopes that the new administration will be more tech savvy.