Rest In Peace, Microsoft Encarta. This year saw the demise of the once very popular digital encyclopedia which first launched as a CD-ROM in 1993 but couldn’t keep up with the (free) real-time capabilities of Wikipedia and other web-based search tools. Encarta joins Circuit City, Saturn, Kodachrome and four more brands on CNNMoney.com’s list of familiar names you won’t see in the future.

Meanwhile, Microsoft researchers are busy experimenting with a new wiki-like search application that can generate summaries of web entities from billions of crawled pages. In Microsoft-speak, this new application, dubbed EntityCube, “is a research prototype for exploring object-level search technologies, which automatically summarizes the Web for entities (such as people, locations and organizations) with a modest web presence.”

And finally, announcing the 2010 Color of the Year. Pantone, the color chip provider to designers, has declared PANTONE 15-5519 Turquoise as its next big hue: “Combining the serene qualities of blue and the invigorating aspects of green, Turquoise inspires thoughts of soothing, tropical waters and a comforting escape from the everyday troubles of the world, while at the same time restoring our sense of wellbeing.”

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Monday Miscellany: Gadget of the Year, RIP Encarta, and Wiki’s for Everyone. is a post from: Codero dedicated hosting blog