With Google Wave launching this year, digital communication will evolve to greater heights. This new baby that Google intends to launch is a realtime communication platform that combines email, IM, Social Networks, Wiki etc all under one neat platform. The layout might look something like below.

Google Wave The Future Of Digital Communication

This product has created so much buzz and is one of the most talked about and I personaly can’t wait for it to launch

To learn more about Google Wave watch this video

You can also read the Google Wave Guide.

The Pope launched the Youtube channel last year and now he is getting on to Facebook, with the launch of his own application “Pope2You”. The idea is to go beyond just a facebook application as there is a website too called pope2you.net which is trying to connect the Youtube channel, facebook app & the iPhone app. I’m sure it won’t be long before we see the Pope on Twitter.

The Vatican describes this as follows:

“Pope2You for Facebook lets you receive the messages of Pope Benedict XVI through the most important social network of the world. So you can meet the Pope on Facebook, listen to his words, see his pictures, receive his messages of congratulations through “virtual postcards”. The postcards can be sent to your “friends” on Facebook and the application can be shared with anyone.”

Pope Benedict's Page On Facebook

While it might be in the best interest of the Vatican to use Internet as a broadcast medium alone, I am not sure if this is going to be a great success. A large part of any success on the interactive medium lies on interactivity the medium provides. To genuinely build that connect people need to  communicate, express their opinions & be heard.

Anyway, it would be interesting to see how this goes, but again a short interesting story on the impact of social media on the world of communications.

Coldplay has actually decided to move their distribution online. One of the most popular. This band from UK has actually released a new album online leftrightleftrightleftThis is a collection of some of their live performances. Way to go Coldplay a nice way to build a really strong fan base  

Leftrightleftrightleft Coldplay

The other interesting aggregator which seems to be the mother of it all is Popurls. If you have not signed up for this yet you should. It manages to pick the latest on the web through news, bookmarks, images, videos etc… It’s really a good resource to gather the information you want and share it.

Popurl.com The news aggregator

Apart from this Popurl also has a network where you can explore a lot of interesting stuff like buzz monitoring through popurl search, the top viewed urls through popurl.tv and take it to your mobile, iPhone and BlackBerry through Popurl.mobi. Check it out and let me know if we really need newspapers anymore

Similarly, for any start-up getting the right mix of tools to support their business and office becomes very critical. Google Aps might be an answer to some of it, but Zoho seems to be growing a lot faster because of the various services they now offer. From CRM, email hosting, wiki to documents such as sheet, writer etc… they have answers to almost anything a start-up or a small business would need. I personally have not used all tools that ZOHO offers but I hear from a few that some of the services provided by zoho have a better advantage than what google can offer.

ZOHO

A user has added a layer to Google Maps that lets you track cases of swine flu as they are reported

Swine Flue

This is interesting cause it outlines what people can now do with Mash-ups like this. 

To read more about Swine Flu on Google Maps Click Here

One Laptop Per Child

If you have not heard about OLPC, the One Laptop Per Child Program, then you can get more details about it from www.laptop.org. This non profit organisation was founded by Nicholas Negroponte who left MIT, where he was the co-founder and director of MIT media laboritory. This organisation was formed to provide educational opportunity to the world’s poorest children through ownership of a connected, rugged, low-cost laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, creative, joyful and self-empowered learning. To this end, OLPC designed and built the XO laptop.

The new designed laptop scheduled to launch in 2010 will soon have the option of running on Microsoft Windows; previously, the machines only ran on the GNU/Linux operating system, plus a custom interface called Sugar that emphasizes collaboration among children. With the addition of Windows, OLPC hopes to boost sales to countries, such as Egypt, that already use Windows software in schools.

 Now for the interesting part. This PC will cost only USD 75$ !!! One can only imagine how this will change the world. Now every child in developing countries like India, China, Brazil etc.. can afford to have a PC. This will change the education system to a large extent and we will definitely have a more tech savy generation in the next few years to come. So essentially what we have here is an awesome project for an awesome cause. Let’s support this in anyway we can.

This video explains how this works

This was created by Ryo Katsuma by using Google Street View. Users download the software from the site and connect their Wiimote to Google Map’s Street View and this guides people along the streets of Tokyo. Hopefully in a few years I hope to wake up every day (wherever I may be) and go for a Jog in Mapusa where i was born