Techfest: Ready To Use

At Microsoft Research's Techfest (Radar post) a number of goodies were presented that are available to use right now. Among them included:

Assira - Cats and dogs. Humans can tell the difference, but programs (and thus spambots) can't. Inspired by the Hot Or Not CAPTCHA (Radar post), this is a more politically correct CAPTCHA. It has a couple of other advantages over its inspiration. As Tim noted in his Radar post, the Hot or Not CAPTCHA is subjective; this is not as a picture is either of a cat or of a dog. Also, it is pulling from over 2 million images (with 10K added per day); this is more images than Hot or Not. Finally, it benefits Pet Finder who is trying to get all of these animals adopted.
You can install this on your site to stay spam-free.

Backstory - Backstory is an app that allows you to do searches across multiple sources (Amazon, Wikipedia, Live Search, your PC). It then enables you to combine, tag, and rate your results. You can also subscribe to your searches. (Update: I made a mistake this is not available for download)

HDView - How do you view 4 Gigapixel photos over the web? Normally, not very effectively in my experience. An MSR group has created an ActiveX control to let us do just that (they're a research group). Those with IE can get the control and view the images here.
Even the process for making the photos was quite impressive. Just read the camera description:

The capture platform is a Meade LX200 telescope mount. The telescope was removed to accommodate a Canon 1DS Mark II with a 100-400mm zoom lens. Custom software was developed to control the system. The ASCOM SDK was used to control the Meade mount, the Canon SDK was used to control the camera. The camera was typically set to ISO 50, Aperture Priority - f11, and RAW capture. Multiple SanDisk 4GB CF cards were used per shoot.

Personal Skyserver - Zoom around 3D space with your own copy of SkyServer. This was demoed during the opening talk at Techfest. The data comes from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.