Stories about: Prism

Microsoft on Monday offered a software development kit for its tabletop computer to about 1,000 people at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, opening the door to a variety of new applications for the table.

I'm continually amazed at how the premier Web properties are willing to share what they are doing. We get to peek behind the curtain routinely. Google and Yahoo both have good lab pages, but there's some seriously experimental stuff on the Mozilla labs page. Here's what they're up to.

Whether you're building an application for the 3G iPhone in the United States or trying to figure out how to deliver health information via SMS (Short Message Service) to a rural community in Botswana, the mobile space is diverse and exciting in equal measure. It touches on more fields than you could throw a phone at: anthropology, appropriate technology, electronics, programming, telecommunications, geography, literacy, gender and poverty to name a few. It's this diversity that makes it so exciting. Yet, at the same time, it's this same diversity that presents us with many of our greatest challenges. In many ways, the mobile world -- particularly in the ICT4D (ICT for Development) field -- is fragmented and often misunderstood.

Yahoo Wednesday became the latest company to provide developers with the opportunity to build rich Internet applications with some desktop functions with its unveiling of a preview version of a new offering called BrowserPlus.

Since its inception, the Web has been synonymous with the browser. Pundits hailed NCSA Mosaic as "the killer app of the Internet" in 1993, and today's browsers share an unbroken lineage from that humble beginning.

Offline access to Web applications is becoming an important trend, with Adobe and Google looking to make the most of this new direction.

Curl next week plans to unveil a beta version of a runtime tool that it said will help large organizations extend Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to run on the desktop.