Skunkworks has developed a new website and brand called LawStartBC on behalf of our client Courthouse Libraries BC. LawStartBC provides an easy-to-remember gateway to the many services Courthouse Libraries BC provides to the general public and stakeholder community organizations.
Courthouse Libraries BC has developed several important initiatives over the last two years focused on the needs of the general public. These include:
ClickLaw (a web portal drawing from 24 different BC organizations who provide legal information and help);
LawMatters (a program that places key legal texts and information in public libraries); and
HelpMap (a unique tool integrated with google maps to help users locate legal resources near them).
For the public, however, knowing where to tap into the different resources available to them could initially be confusing. Now LawStartBC serves as a unified a starting point. CLBC’s Community Outreach Team officially launched the new brand during LawWeek events as shown here.
When it comes to Google’s pioneer ideas and solutions, you can never have enough. Every couple weeks you hear of a new speculation or a beta version of a new service they are preparing to launch. Well, the most recent promise I have come across is Google Wave, a new service that combines e-mail, instant messaging, blogging, document sharing, wikis, and multimedia content to provide a seamless communications platform.
As of yet, only 100,000 people were invited to play with the new toy, but Macworld lists 5 reasons why we should be looking forward to this new creation:
Single point of access
Next-generation communication
Real-time sharing and collaboration
A life of its own
It’s in the cloud
Do you think this is going to change how people communicate, or this is just another parallel universe which only a few of the tech-savvy people will be actually using?
Personally, I will give it a try for sure, but I wonder if this will become the default internet messaging tool of the majority in the long-term future.
Are Google the next Microsoft? It’s certainly looking more and more likely as they make monthly inroads on our computers and phones with fast/free apps which take advantage of the Internet’s abilities. We have Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Video, Google Chrome, Google Android, Google Docs, Gmail and of course, how could we forget their market leading search abilities. I don’t know one person who doesn’t use Google for some aspect or another.
Well, we may all be getting a LOT more familiar with Google as they have just announced the first foray into building an entire OS for your home computer/notebook. The reason Microsoft should be a little scared? Google have a very good reputation for providing free/useful/productive software which will most likely translate into a solid OS which garners very high trust from the general public. Lots of people would gladly try out a competing OS to Windows or OSX if it’s free and intuitive, even our resident Apple-flavoured Bulgarian.
Apparently the new Google OS (entitled ‘Google Chrome OS’) will be hitting the public later in 2010 on small netbooks. It’ll be heavily web-based and light, meaning it’ll be extremely fast; reducing start-up times and increasing overall performance.
This should get very interesting. Straight from Google’s PR ‘”It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.” Game on.
Google’s SearchWiki is a new feature that allows for users to organize search results and make comments. The reorganized results only show up for the user that made the changes, but the comments are made public.
