OStatic

Microsoft is changing the way it does business and is opening up, according to a long elaborate press release the company issued this morning. I am reading through it and will try and make sense of it all.

Amazon (AMZN), I have often pointed out, is a harbinger of technology trends that eventually gain mainstream acceptance. Contextual matching of information and community-powered feedback and ratings systems are two such examples.

Dimdim, a Burlington, MA.-based web meeting services startup, wants to take on Cisco Systems' (CSCO) WebEx and Microsoft's (MSFT) Placeware by emphasizing simplicity and ease of use. The company, which is backed by investors including Draper Richards, Index Ventures and Nexus Capital India, launches its service today at DEMOfall 2007.

Call it Second Life on the web, call it an MMO markup language, call it the most powerful open-standards, web-driven game platform ever made public - however you end up describing it, we finally have the main details to go on. After a year of rumors? around Raph Koster's newstartup, Areae, his stealth Internet project is finally public.

Adobe announced the public alpha of its Apollo development framework that allows developers to build cross-platform hybrid web/desktop applications using Flash and Ajax. The tech blogosphere responded mostly positively, looking forward to the era of so-called rich Internet applications...