Yahoo is testing a new way to display search engine results to the users, something completely different then the usual "10 blue links" way. Instead of just displaying the top 10 search results for a search, that's the usual way today, Yahoo will try to find out the "intent" of the users search, and then present various types of information within the results that relate to what they are looking for, such as restaurant reviews, movie times, flight schedules and so on.

If for example a user search for the name of a restaurant Yahoo will show a map showing the location followed by photos, reviews and directions since that is most likely what  the user is looking for with that type of search.

Yahoo is saying that they want to move searching from "web of pages" to "web of objects" instead.

The goal is to organize results in a way that reflects how those objects relate to each other in real life. Searching for "Paris," for example, should reveal related "objects" such as travel guides, cheap airplane tickets, and images of the city — in short, all the related content users might want to see.

All the other big search engines are trying something similar too, so we should soon start seeing the results of their work

Twitter will also start with new searching, or at least improve their search content by indexing the pages people twitter about. So next time you twitter about a web page Twitter may actually include the complete page in their search engine.

Sometime ago Psion announced that they own the right to the trademark "netbook" since 1996 and they demanded all manufacturers of the increasingly popular mini-notebooks to stop marketing their mini-notebooks as "netbooks". The background to all this is that Psion had a product several years ago called Netbook and they even registered the term "netbook" as a trademark. The Psion Netbook hasn't been produced since 2003 but they still sell spare parts to them.

If you do a search in Yahoo you get 149 million hits, and the first hit you get is a link to Wikipedia describing netbooks as a generic product:

Netbooks are light, compact, highly portable, inexpensive, and energy efficient[1] laptops.

Since so many manufacturers, like Asus, Intel, Acer and many more, use the term netbook as a generic term to describe their products (not as a name/trademark) I think Psion wont have much luck at all in stopping. I think we'll have another Xerox-incident where Xerox is same thing as a photo-copy of something and not just the Xerox copy-machines.

Google has however announced that they will help Psion by not allowing ads any more on the term "netbook" so when you search in Google.com for netbook you only get the search results (and no Adwords ads at all):

So what's the lesson learned from all this? Get your trademarks popular, but make sure people don't start using them to describe what their doing because you may lose the right to your trademark . Most of us will never have to care about this, but some of will create a popular product/service sometime…..

Something telling me that Gizmodo.com isn't going to stop using the term netbook .

Or what do you think?

When Steve Ballmer spoke at CES he mentioned Windows in three types of devices: computers, TV and mobile devices. We've seen the first one since the 80's so that's no surprise and the other two are just a natural step.

We've already seen services offering movies on your computer (like Swedish HomeTV.se), so why not give your TV Internet access so you can view whatever you like in your comfortable sofa no matter if it's from the
Internet or from cable TV. You as the user shouldn't be bound by the type of device needed you should instead be able to see whatever you like whenever and where ever you like.

Samsung (together with Yahoo) are also working on Internet in your TV and they are planning several devices you can connect to Internet via cable or wifi so you can browse services like YouTube and Flickr directly from your
TV. Since you can also connect your TV via wifi you can of course see TV wherever you have Internet access, and the development we've seen on Internet connections is that more and more can use connections via 3G or
wifi. So soon you should be able to watch whatever you like where ever you like

Lets just hope that all companies work for an open solution which works on any device with any service so the users can be free to choose anything they like. So far we've seen limited services on the movie on demand area
where HomeTV.se are operating. Their service works only on Windows with Internet Explorer and Media Player. That's not freedom to choose at all. They should have selected a solution that works on Linux and Mac too, with
Firefox as web browser since "tech geeks" usually use another browser then IE (and they are also more interested in movie on demand over Internet then other consumer groups). For example HomeTV.se wont work on my Popcorn Hour with projector

The future is freedom to connect to Internet with any device wherever you are and watch whatever you like on any screen you prefer.