Google announced today that Google News is out of beta and is now an official service. SearchEngineWatch has a good story on Google News. Congratulations to Krishna Bharat. I worked with Krishna 10 years ago at the DEC Research Labs in Palo Alto, known as SRC. Krishna first developed a web newspaper back in 1995 at the DEC labs. Here is a link to his paper "An Interactive Personalized Newspaper on the WWW (1995)". It was a remarkable achievement then, and a successful service now.
Krishna has many other inventions and discoveries to his credit, in collaboration with Monika Henzinger, Marc Brown, Raymie Stata, and many others from the DEC research labs. The labs were managed by Roy Levin who now manages Microsoft's research lab in Silicon Valley. Jim Gray also manages a Microsoft research lab in San Francisco. An amazing group of people!
Inventions take a long time to refine and bring to market. Research by definition is way ahead of the curve. It takes a while for the marketplace to catch up. Google News really started more than 10 years ago in the DEC labs. The Tablet PC is another example. Chuck Thacker produced the first tablet PC while working at Xerox PARC in the early Nineties. Chuck was also a co-inventor of Ethernet while at PARC.
In 1995 he did it again with Mark Hayter, David Chaiken, Jay Kistler, and Dave Redell at the DEC labs. It was known as the Lectrice. I had the pleasure of demoing the Lectrice at Networld/Interop in Las Vegas in 1996. It was phenomenal...but ahead of its time. DEC and Compaq didn't have the vision to manufacture it.
Chuck Thacker moved to Microsoft Research several years ago and made a third run at building a Tablet PC. This time Bill Gates was committed to making it happen...and it did. It took three tries and over 10 years to finally bring a Tablet PC to market. Congratulations to Chuck Thacker and his collaborators.
The perseverance of Krishna Bharat, Chuck Thacker, Roy Levin, Jim Gray, and all their research colleagues is an inspiration to all of us. Congratulations!
UPDATE: I exchanged email with Roy Levin today. He reminded me of two other innovations that were developed in the research labs many years before others companies brought a similar product to market. There are probably lots of other examples but everyone can identify with these two.
Back in 1997 at DEC's research lab a team developed the PJB (Portable Juke Box) which was precursor to today's iPod. Compaq wouldn't commit to developing it, although the technology was licensed to a Korean manufacturer. A huge missed opportunity for DEC/Compaq.
Jim Gray developed the TerraServer in Microsoft's research labs many years before Google Maps, or any other map service.
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