But the same technological advances that have empowered the rise of Big Brother have created another wrinkle in the story.

We might call it the emergence of Little Brother: the ordinary citizen who by chance finds himself in a position to record events of great public import, and to share the results with the rest of us.

This has become immeasurably easier and more likely with the near-ubiquitous proliferation of high-quality recording devices.

You know Big Brother, now meet Little Brother.

Craig Venter and team make a historic announcement: they’ve created the first fully functioning, reproducing cell controlled by synthetic DNA. He explains how they did it and why the achievement marks the beginning of a new era for science.

It’s the ultimate science experiment, really — taking a handful of chemicals, mixing them in just the right combination and presto — life!

And after nearly 15 years of such toiling in his labs in Rockville, Md., J. Craig Venter, co-mapper of the human genome, has done just that. Reporting in the journal Science, he describes a remarkable experiment in which he and the team at his eponymous institute have pieced together the entire genome of a bacterium and then inserted those genetic instructions into another bacterium. The cell booted up, and life — by nearly any definition — was created.

“We’re basically getting new life out of the computer,” Venter says. “We started with a genetic code in the computer, wrote the ‘software,’ put it into the cell and transformed it biologically into a new species. We’re still stunned by it as a concept.”

With Venter’s breakthrough it’s now possible to splice and snap together genetic material to create a Legoland’s worth of new genetic combinations. Ideally, some of these would have robust industrial purposes, such as manufacturing bacteria that can churn out valuable vaccine components to shorten production times during an epidemic, or co-opting organisms such as algae to pump out new sources of biofuel-based energy.

Introducing Google TV [Video]

via youtube.com

Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.

TV meets web. Web meets TV. Learn more at www.google.com/tv

Read the official Google blog update here: http://bit.ly/aQo8p9

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Google Apps to get unified search capability in the not-too-distant future #win

Today during a press discussion at Google I/O, Matthew Glotzbach, Google’s Director of Product, Enterprise, strongly hinted that Google Apps would soon be getting a key new feature: unified search across all of a user’s Google Apps. In other words, there’s a good chance that we’ll soon be able to enter a search query into, say, Gmail, and see not just matches from Gmail, but also results in Google Calendar, Docs, and Wave as well.

Look how far we’ve come - Chandler Bing’s new computer [Video]

via youtube.com

Was watching old re-runs of Friends when I came across this clip where Chandler describes his state of the art brand new computer. That bad-boy even has built in spreadsheet capabilities! #90’sWin

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A SneakPeak at TweetDeck’s HTML5 browser App at Google I/O [Video]

via youtube.com

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Apple: The Microsoft of Mobile?

Apple could soon be the target of an antitrust investigation by either the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice, according to numerous press reports, with the feds focusing on its new iPhone developer policy requiring developers to write iPhone OS apps using only Apple-approved programming languages.

The rule would effectively prohibit developers from using third-party code to create iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch apps that can easily be converted into apps for competing platforms including Android, Windows Mobile and Palm’s Web OS. Apple’s new policy also prohibits third-party analytics tools from being inserted into apps, which could make it impossible for competing ad networks to serve advertisements on the iPhone OS. Incidentally, Apple just introduced its own in-app ad platform iAd.

Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists

“It’s funny in a way”, says Bill Gates, relaxing in an armchair in his office. “When I was young, I didn’t know any old people. When we did the microprocessor revolution, there was nobody old, nobody. It’s weird how old this industry has become.” The Microsoft cofounder and I, a couple of fiftysomething codgers, are following up on an interview I had with a tousle-headed Gates more than a quarter century ago. I was trying to capture what I thought was the red-hot core of the then-burgeoning computer revolution — the scarily obsessive, absurdly brainy, and endlessly inventive people known as hackers. Back then, Gates had just pulled off a deal to supply his DOS operating system to IBM. His name was not yet a household word; even Word was not yet a household word. I would interview Gates many times over the years, but that first conversation was special. I saw his passion for computers as a matter of historic import. Gates himself saw my reverence as an intriguing novelty. But by then I was convinced that I was documenting a movement that would affect everybody.

(Read More)

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Geek Power: Steven Levy Revisits Tech Titans, Hackers, Idealists

“It’s funny in a way”, says Bill Gates, relaxing in an armchair in his office. “When I was young, I didn’t know any old people. When we did the microprocessor revolution, there was nobody old, nobody. It’s weird how old this industry has become.” The Microsoft cofounder and I, a couple of fiftysomething codgers, are following up on an interview I had with a tousle-headed Gates more than a quarter century ago. I was trying to capture what I thought was the red-hot core of the then-burgeoning computer revolution — the scarily obsessive, absurdly brainy, and endlessly inventive people known as hackers. Back then, Gates had just pulled off a deal to supply his DOS operating system to IBM. His name was not yet a household word; even Word was not yet a household word. I would interview Gates many times over the years, but that first conversation was special. I saw his passion for computers as a matter of historic import. Gates himself saw my reverence as an intriguing novelty. But by then I was convinced that I was documenting a movement that would affect everybody.

(Read More)

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Ballmer previews Microsoft’s next Messenger

The new version of Windows Live Messenger, being tested within Microsoft right now, allows for tabbed browsing, deeper integration with social networks, and sharing of more content types, such as Web pages and search results.

(Credit: Microsoft)

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Untitled

Ballmer previews Microsoft’s next Messenger

The new version of Windows Live Messenger, being tested within Microsoft right now, allows for tabbed browsing, deeper integration with social networks, and sharing of more content types, such as Web pages and search results.

(Credit: Microsoft)