Bump your desktop with 3d icons!

Recently in the TED conference, I came across a peculiar innovation. Bumptop, as the creator Anand Agarwala calls it, is a desktop which closely resembles the conventional physical desktops we have at home. It has icons which behave more like tangible objects on our desktop, which can be stretched tossed, pinned on the wall, stacked, arranged, shuffled, and even crumbled and thrown over the corner. The idea looks interesting, but I am not sure, if it will find its way into practical computing.
The young Anand starts by calling Windows desktop as flat and rigid, and though he says, you can sex it up, with more lickable Mac, he calls Mac the same old crap we had for last 30 years. The arrogance soon fades out with his demo of Bumptop. It basically looks like a physical desktop and each icons have physical attributes of real world objects. It basically uses pie menus and lasso selections to quickly select icons from the desktop and apply transformations on it. The physics looks really good, with heavier (bigger) icons actually looking heavier when pushed and tossed, etc.
But, the question is why would you want such a messy, 3D desktop, when you have the flat and rigid, by usable, and tidy desktop. It may be the fact that you feel more at home, and relaxed working with a real physical desktop. Or the subtelity and the clarity that it provides may be another reason. Anand maybe able to give more reasons. Anyway I havent yet got the copy of the software which is in private beta, so I cannot comment on its system resource comsuption and speed. I will post updates when I get one.
Bumptop Home
Bumptop Twitter

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Google on for a makeover?

Recently, Google announced officially that they are no more getting any profits from Youtube, along with a few other ventures like Google Checkout, Print Ads etc. To stress on the severity of the situation, Google even went on to say that Youtube might well prove to be a significant risk for the search ads giant. That is understandable, considering the amount of bandwidth and storage Youtube eats up every hour. But, what would Google do now? Since the incubation about 10 years ago, Google has been on a upward run, acquiring anything interesting and adding the Google brand to it. This included the likes of Blogspot, Picasa, Feedburner and ofcourse Youtube, which was bought for a whopping 1.65$ Billion. But, has the Google's downslide started? Is history repeating, as it happened the software giant Microsoft a few years ago?
For instance, I agree there were trivial improvements to youtube in the past few months, but has there been any major innovation? What happened to the iGoogle? Though it was a big hit overnight, soon Yahoo! and Live where able to kick butt, at least to some extent. What about orkut? Facebook is now in news everyday, but we seldom hear about orkut. Has the buying spree of Google cost them dearly?
Two weeks back, Google acquired Omnisio, a video annotation company for reviving Youtube. But still, for the first time, Google seems desperate and upset over Youtube, as this statement from Google proves,"[The] anticipated benefit of may of our acquisitions may not materialize. For example, we have yet to realize significant revenue benefits from our acquisitions of dMarc Broadcasting (Audio Ads) and YouTube."
Google is the undisputed king of internet, at least as on date. But, how many days more? I believe they have already entered the red zone, and you might well get to see some real makeovers to keep them in game. Rather than taking over anything that comes their way, Google might try to make the existing businesses profitable.
Recently an ad by Google on newspaper read,
"We are very much like a startup company, and think in the same way. So if you are innovative..." it goes on. I think, Google has to pull up their socks, if they don't want to end up like a startup company.
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