Camfrog Video Chat represents a still struggling attempt by a site to catch a ride on the "online video community" phenomenon. Basically, this industry is composed of sites that gather huge numbers users by allowing them to interface in a wide variety of ways, and whose owners later hope to later sell out for big sums to even bigger sites. Camfrog Video Chat is designed so users log on to chat rooms where they can hear, see, and chat with many people at the same time using streaming video.

It is video conferencing gone popular. It is video conferencing for the masses. It is video conferencing with strangers. Well, actually I exaggerate. You can chose chat rooms by topic, and you can create private ones for select friends. The site currently lists about 4,600 chat topics. But this number is not representative. Many are one user chat rooms started, but failing to attract anyone else.

In other words the site, which started in 2003, is still in the land in between becoming really big and falling behind. There were 96,352 users online last night when I visited. Respectable so far. The question is how many more sites like this can people handle? Facebook has created a generation of sleepless zombies.

However, Camfrog's sign language chat rooms for the deaf really demonstrates how something like a multi-user video conferencing site can be of use. It could also be a way, I guess, for businesses to hold impromptu video conferencing sessions online, in private chat rooms. Some X-rated chat rooms exist. So watch out if you think the site is only for long distance family discussions. The software and the site are free. If you pay a one time fee of $50, you get the "Pro" edition to view up to 100 video windows at the same time. How is that for shouting in a crowd? Offering a prize for landing a robotic rover on the moon is a blatant bid for publicity, as if Google needs any more than it already has. Google has put up $30 million in prizes for the first two teams to land a robotic rover on the moon and send images and other data back home. Ten teams from five countries have announced their participation, mostly universities, open-source engineers and aerospace start-ups. Sounds like many will be out of pocket, even if they manage to pick up a prize. Unless they figure out a way to do it cheap.

Perhaps I would prefer instead to invest $200,000 for a five minute trip into space with Virgin. Yes, Richard Branson has started Virgin Galactic, with an aim to turn a profit in five years from its commercial start in 2010. He has collected $31 million in deposits of $20,000 each for tickets so far, with about interest from about 80,000 people worldwide.

Virgin is investing $250 million in the venture.

Virgin's SpaceShipTwo is due to be tested later this year. The craft is designed to to carry eight passengers into suborbital space during a two-hour flight beyond Earth's atmosphere that will culminate in five minutes in space. Sign up at www.virgingalactic.com

Is Microsoft changing its tactics in a market that is distrustful of a near monolith? Last week the company announced it would give its main IT developers' programmes free to all registered students. At the same time the company announced it would open the code for many of its applications in a bid to promote more interoperability with other applications.

This is important as the company had only made its key codes available to a select few companies, keeping other developers out of entering the market with innovate new software. Without access to the main code for say Windows, makes it difficult to create software that will not crash the system, or work very poorly, or be less sophisticated than it could have been.

The company has already released about 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols.

You can expect a who raft of new software to follow, or less buggy versions of existing programs.

Still the European Commission remained sceptical of the move, noting that Microsoft had made similar promises in the past. The Commission has taken Microsoft to court for shutting out competitors from its dominant Windows operating system. The announcement does not relate to the question of whether or not Microsoft has been complying with EU antitrust rules in this area in the past, the Commission said.

"Nonetheless, the Commission notes that today's announcement follows at least four similar statements by Microsoft in the past on the importance of interoperability," the EU administrator said in a statement. In January 2008, the Commission started two formal antitrust investigations against Microsoft - one relating to interoperability, the other to the company's penchant for tying separate software products to each other, namely Internet Explorer with Windows. One of the Commission's previous investigations focuses on whether Microsoft had disclosed as required sufficient interoperability information across a broad range of products, including Office suite, some server products, and the .NET framework.

Is this a case of an attack on one site of the Atlantic reverberating on the company's actions on the other? Those pesky Europeans!

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