Another (Early) Wave

With that rant out of the way, I do like the idea behind the revamped Windows Live start page. It's highly customizable, loads faster and is full of dynamic little pop-up windows that give previews from other sites without having to visit then.

The fancy Live.com page that Microsoft execs showed here packed a lot of information into a small space. It also offered software "gadgets" that display dynamic data, such as clocks for various cities and a dictionary that shows a new word every day.

But when I tried to personalize my version, the results weren't half as good. Not only was the page slow to load, it was short on help files and repeatedly crashed my browser.

Live.com is still in beta testing, of course, and I imagine Microsoft will shake out the bugs fairly quickly. Then it might be worth taking for a spin.

Touch the Future

Wednesday, March 8, 3:55 p.m. ET: One gadget drawing oohs and aaahs here was a touchscreen tilt-top table that lets people manipulate images appearing on its electronic surface with both hands and multiple fingers.

Dubbed a "multi-touch sensor system," it was 36 inches wide. New York University professor Jeff Han showed how to manipulate data displayed on the screen by using his fingers to move images and video around -- drawing on the screen as if his digits were paintbrushes, or pulling images to make them bigger.

"The future of interfaces is multi-touch," Han told the crowd. "This stuff is really ... coming out of the lab just now."

NYU professor Jeff Han showing his "multi-touch" computer interface, designed as a tilt-top table. (Leslie Walker - The Post)

Han acknowledged that his "infinite desktop" prototype (Quicktime video here) is not new, but said the NYU team had taken a design approach that reduced its cost and boosted its resolution.

The high point of his demo came when he projected more than 180 video channels from Time Warner cable on his illuminated table all at once, creating a stunning patchwork of moving images that he could zoom in and out of at will.

Fixing the Attention Deficit

Wednesday, March 8, 2:15 p.m. ET: Former Microsoft vice president Linda Stone delivered a diatribe against the "always on, anywhere, anytime" high-tech lifestyle that puts people in a state of "continuous partial attention" and leaves them feeling "overwhelmed, overstimulated, and unfulfilled."

"Improving quality of life" should be the new mantra of technology, Stone said, because the biggest opportunity for new businesses will lie in helping people see information in ways that lead to understanding, wisdom and a better life.

"It seems to me that the new opportunity is to move from being 'knowledge workers' to being 'understanding and wisdom workers,'" Stone said.