I just wanted to note down something Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, recently said at the Edinburgh International Television Festival.

"Trust me - if you gave people at Google free rein to produce TV you'd end up with a lot of bad sci-fi,"

I lol'ed a bit at the amount of truth in that statement.

My invitation to beta test Google Wave has finally arrived in my inbox and I am pretty excited about this. As I may have mentioned before, I believe Google Wave is going to be the Next Big Thing in the web in coming years and it gives me great pleasure to be able to test it out and try and develop some cool applications for it.

For those of you who are in the Google Wave beta program, you should be able to see my first attempt at embedding a Wave within this blog post. Lets hope it works!

Unfortunately you'll need a Google Wave account to view the Wave. So if you are not in the beta test program, I'm sorry for all you will see is a blank space.

Until today, I never realized that for the past 2 years, I have been dilligently reading daily news updates from 22 different sites. These sites include major news networks such as BBC, Reuters, Channel News Asia for local news and for technology news, I follow Slashdot and Digg. I also follow news related to Apple, just because it is usually interesting and fun to read. For that, I read from MacRumors, AppleInsider as well as news released by Apple itself. Besides all of these, I also follow a few blogs, these are usually related to machine learning or natural language processing.

So how have I been able to read from so many disparate sites on a daily basis? To be honest, it is not an easy process. Just about every news website as well as blogs have an RSS news feed these days. I used Yahoo Pipes! to combine and sort all of these news feeds into a smaller number of news feeds, each focusing on a specific topic such as "Tech News", "Singapore News" and "Apple News". Finally, I use a FireFox extension called Sage that presents the piped news in a nice format on my web browser. So yes this is how I have been reading news everyday for the past 2+ years, and yes I know I am geeky.

Well this is no longer the case! Today, I stumbled upon a new Google product called Google Reader that handles everything for me so I don't have to jump through all the hoops ever again.


All I need to do is read the news. :)