Google Gears rocks! (+ lots of other tech news)

Now this was meant to be big. Steve and Bill on the same stage.
Well at the end of the day it didn't really keep up with (my) expectations: they just chatted and laughed a lot (I wanted a riot).
Anyway here's the video (if you're a I-can-read-quicker-than-that guy, here's Engadget's liveblogging)

By the way: why is everybody talking of Microsoft's Surface computer? Not much in there except for the cool "Minority Report" style demo.

Indeed, out there there's A LOT OF NEW STUFF that's going to change our lives:

First and most important: Google Gears (for a full coverage see Lifehacker's post). This is finally enabling us to access Google Reader offline. It's something I always wanted and something that should have people at Redmond kind of nervous (seems like Read/Write Web agrees). How long before we can get Gmail and GDocs without being connected to the web?

Then: Apple has finally launched its new DRM-free iTunes Plus. While this is huge but expected, the news is the 160Gb AppleTV. Now that's a digital hub! Also, it's going to play YouTube videos (though is a somewhat tricky way).

Finally, Scoble has a nice video on a speech to text recongnition technology.

Oh, and Google enabled sightseeing on their GMaps. The results? A lot of funny pictures!

Last update: lots of acquisitions going on. CBS acquired my favourite Last.fm, eBay took StumbleUpon and Fox got Photobucket and Flektor.