It not only increases government transparency, but as Rosling says, it will encourage software and social service innovators.
It wants to encourage software developers to build Web sites that are more app-like, such as responding to finger gestures, said Ryan Gavin, general manager for Internet Explorer.
By adding speed and new functions to the inner workings of the browser, Chrome will encourage software makers to create increasingly sophisticated programs that can run on the Web, Mr. Brin said.
Microsoft has also put US Department of Agriculture data sets online via its Azure Marketplace, and is partnering with the agency to encourage software developers to create new tools for using them.
This means Microsoft, which launches the newest version of its Windows operating system this month, could lose out unless, that is, the software giant can encourage software developers and users to migrate to its new suite of cloud-based services.
Given the tiny amount of money being spent, however, one can really only consider it to be seed money that might help encourage software developers and technologists who care about free speech around the world to focus their work in certain ways, or to collaborate with some of the grantees.
This person said the applications would not be sold in an app store, as with the Apple iTunes model, but Microsoft will encourage software partners to host the applications on their own Web sites, which will then be highlighted in a search interface on the slate computers.
While we have yet to see how Google's book scanning will play out, a machine-centric vision of the project might encourage software that treats books as grist for the mill, decontextualized snippets in one big database, rather than separate expressions from individual writers.
It is attending CES to encourage software developers to start work on related apps.
The automatic production of performance models of software products can encourage software designers to include performance validation in their best practices.
