New Gadgets and Gizmos

In a move that should send “cold chills down the necks of broadcast network executives,” Google will unveil this fall an Internet-only animation show from Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane.

The new program, to be released in September, is called Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, and it will appear exclusively on the Internet. But it won’t be exclusive to Google. Rather, the search giant will exploit its AdSense advertising network to distribute MacFarlane’s work across thousands of Web sites that attract the kinds of audiences likely to be interested in the show — in a word, young audiences.

“The Internet is on track to become the dominant way video will eventually be distributed, and with it will come the ability for content creators like Mr. MacFarlane to take his shows directly to the customer and reap the benefits directly, without sharing any of his profits with traditional broadcasters,” said Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with Creative Strategies, in an e-mail.

Cutting Hollywood Out

Unlike previous Internet efforts to enter the entertainment business — notably former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel’s many agreements with Hollywood studios — Google’s deal cuts out the movie studios and television networks that have to date controlled top-quality content.

By going directly to a creative leader with an established reputation and a built-in audience comfortable with computers, Google is defining a future of entertainment that doesn’t include the age-old “suits,” producers and moneymen. Entertainment Hollywood-style could be replaced by Silicon Valley project managers.

The New York Times reports that the MacFarlane program will run as 50 two-minute episodes (possibly the optimum viewing time for the Internet), supported by a range of advertising formats, including “preroll” ads that run before the program, banner ads and text messages. MacFarlane describes the episodes as “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see…

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates “retired” at 52 Friday from the company he cofounded to spend more time with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest.

He is known in the PC industry as the person who pushed it to a thriving industry with a goal of a PC in every home. But in 33 years of building Microsoft, Gates has also been reviled as a merciless competitor and a monopolist, and accused of appropriating other people’s ideas.

An Empire from MS-DOS

Starting in 1980, Gates turned an obscure operating system called QDOS into MS-DOS, which some techies have derided as the “retarded little brother” of open-source UNIX, since it basically consisted of flopped slash marks and similar commands with slightly different names.

IBM paid for the development but didn’t retain the rights to MS-DOS because it was certain its bread-and-butter big mainframe computers would always be dominant and PCs were just a passing fad. Big mistake. Gates supplied MS-DOS and later Windows to thousands of entrepreneurs who assembled PCs with off-the-shelf parts and sold them for much less than IBM.

Along the way, Gates added other software, sometimes buying out competitors or adding their features as Microsoft Office and other software programs grew to dominate the industry. Some claimed the Windows code was manipulated to cripple competitors, and that became an issue in the company’s antitrust battles along with Microsoft taking over the Internet browser market by making Internet Explorer free.

The European Union has also objected to Microsoft’s tactics, leading to some changes in the company’s behavior toward competitors.

A Tearful Farewell

Add that behavior to Microsoft products that often didn’t work well on the first release, notably Windows Vista, and the critics have been hard on Gates and Microsoft. Some in the industry accused the company of releasing “betaware.” On the other hand,…

As Bill Gates enjoyed his last day as a Microsoft employee Friday, rumors swirled that CEO Steve Ballmer was ready to make a powerful move to improve search capability. An unconfirmed report in VentureBeat said Microsoft will acquire semantic-search start-up PowerSet for $100 million.

At the same time, Gates told NBC’s Tom Brokaw that it’s unlikely Microsoft would cut a deal with Yahoo. Microsoft sought to acquire Yahoo, the No. 2 search and advertising company behind Google, for $47.5 billion. Ballmer walked away from the deal after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang refused a sweetened offer and cut a deal with Google to share search revenues.

Powerset, founded in 2005 by artificial-intelligence technologist Barney Pell, focuses on natural-language searches. On its Web site, the company says its strategy is to “improve the way we find information by unlocking the meaning encoded in ordinary human language.”

A Different Approach

The first implementation of Powerset’s technology is a Wikipedia search engine, which it says “gives more accurate results, often answering questions directly, and aggregates information from across multiple articles.”

The approach is fundamentally different than Google’s, which delivers what most users consider excellent results by analyzing the frequency of words typed into the query box and ranks results in part on the number of inbound links to a given page. Microsoft’s rumored acquisition of Powerset is intriguing, then, because it would not only raise in-house search technology but do so in a fundamentally different way than Google.

If Powerset’s technology can be made to work across the Web, as opposed to the rather limited and well-structured Wikipedia, it has the potential to make a Microsoft search more useful than a Google search.

Uncertain Technology

But the technology has risks, Venture Beat’s Matt Marshall noted. Getting computers to understand language in any meaningful way has long been an elusive goal of…