Microsoft’s launch yesterday of the multi-touch interface toting $10,000 Surface Computer is awesome. It features multiple cameras which identify the things you put on the table top, which is a beautiful screen, recognizing wi-fi devices and syncing or at least accessing on the fly. As you see in the video, you can arrange photos, videos, text etc in a very ‘natural paper-like’ fashion and then dump them into your pda or camera by dragging them towards it.

This is a consumer pipe dream and definitely a new paradigm in personal computing. Available only for retail or business customers ranging from $5,000 to $10,000 by the end of this year, the rest of us will have to wait. I do wonder how many of these does His Highness BG have in his tech paradise of a home.

Yuvi Panda, a 16 year old 12th grader in Chennai, India just did some fantastic site stats anaylsis for one of my favorite sites - Engadget.

Some really interesting stuff stood out:

25 comments in the first 3 months

2,900 = most # of  comments on one post which was not a giveaway

16,000 = most # of comments on one post for a giveaway

615,212 = total comments

24 posts a day on average

~ 28,000 total posts

You can get Yuvi to analyse your site traffic data and growth statistics for some really low $$$. He just got dugg, so I am sure he needs the extra bandwith from a new, more reliable host. Email him at yuvipanda@gmail.com.

Techcrunch just reported that CBS has acquired the awesome music community/social network - Last.fm for $280 million cash. That’s great but why CBS? They picked up Wallstreet and now this. Evidently, online media communities is a priority to this once-lumbering giant, but I wonder if they give a crap about communities. I am glad that at least they are leaving the team behind Last.fm in place to keep the good times rolling.

There’s a big community that popped up around AppleTV even before the product came out. Then came the hacks almost instantaneously. Even I found myself checking the somethingawful.com forums 5 times a day. People have ported apps, games, rss readers and what not onto the little device that could. People can open it up and install a new hard disk, but the last time I checked AppleTVHacks.net nobody has been able to mod it without cracking it open yet. Why did Apple not make it better? Sure, they are coming around to it by making ‘enhancements available for download’ sometime in the future. Who cares?

XBMC or Xbox Media Centre is the best out there. I have an original XBOX in my living room with the latest version of XBMC running smoothly. I can play every single media file known to man, stream it from the network or the internet, use plugins to interface with almost every well-known website and much more. Why has this software not been ported for mainstream use yet? Why have smaller hardware makers not embraced it for use on their proprietary machines? I recently heard about the Team XBMC hiring Linux developers for the same purpose. Wonder what can we expect to come out of this? Only good, I bet.

Google Maps launched a new feature for their already great map utility - 360 Views of streets in Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and San Francisco. How come they don’t buy higher resolution satellite photos of India? Or, have street level photos of cities like Delhi, Bangalore or Mumbai for this type of service? I get it, not enough reported broadband users!

But don’t the mobile users count? They could create a better Mobile Google Maps application and let the nearly 150 million subscribers download and benefit from these value-added services.

Wake up Google!