Two clever bits of technology that aren't Mac

I don't usually get worked up about non-Mac related technologies, but the two that have been announced this week are pretty cool.

The first is the Firefox plugin called Ubiquity. Its basically a command line interface for doing all sorts of cool things. I like this a lot and wish that it was available for Safari... :)

Here's the link to the announcement and a cool video showing how it can work.

Ubiquity

And the second thing, shock of all shocks, comes out of Microsoft...

Its called Photosynth. It is a technology that builds 3d models from 2D pictures by tracking points. We use the same technology at our company for video processing, but the UI for this on the microsoft site is tremendous.
You'll need to download a plug in player to view the results, but its pretty cool. Again, this won't work on a Mac, but at least Microsoft admits that they aren't cool enough with their message

The link is
Photosynth

They talked about it at TED a couple of years ago, so here's the talk so that you can enjoy it without downloading. It is based on a technology called Seadragon.. That name rules.... The newspaper piece is wonderful