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Remember TouchWall, the experimental Microsoft touch interface operating system we wrote about in May (here’s me playing with it)?

We’ve been trying to get Microsoft to send us a copy of the operating system so that we could build a touch interface computer the size of a wall, but they have yet to agree. Today they say the technology is still years off in terms of development. But the overall idea has inspired a new product which is being released today by Microsoft Office Labs - pptPlex.

Despite the horrible product name, some people will find this very useful. it turns PowerPoint into a more dynamic presentation tool that breaks away from the slide mentality to allow the presenter to zoom in and out of areas. No more worrying about whether or not a bit of text will be large enough to read when projected on a wall. You can simply zoom in on it.

A video overview is below:

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: Michael Arrington

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Filed under: Cellphones

T-Mobile may have once been able to bank on J.D. Power’s customer care survey to bolster its bag of bragging rights, but it looks like that’s no longer the case, as Verizon has now finally edged it out, following a similar shift in J.D. Power’s retail sales satisfaction survey last year. Not only that, T-Mobile actually fell to third place, behind Verizon’s merger-mate Alltel. There isn’t much of a spread between the top-ranked companies, however, with Verizon snagging a score of 103, Alltel scoring 102, and T-Mobile garnering a respectable 100. Only Sprint Nextel, which got a lowly 79, scored below the industry average. Among the other tidbits to be found in the survey, which included more than 11,000 respondents, is the fact that customers spent an average of 4.4 minutes on hold with customer service, a jump of 34% from the previous survey, while 49% of all wireless customers said they called in for help at least once, a minor uptick from the 47% reported last time around. That, J.D. Power says, is at least partly due to the “increasingly complex” wireless phones and services available nowadays.

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Source: Donald Melanson

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AP - Three college students who discovered a way to hack into the Boston subway system’s payment cards and add hundreds of dollars in value to them were ordered again Thursday to keep details of their findings secret.

Source: AP

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NewsFactor - Commercial software developers, listen up: If you think open source is a free toolkit from which you can borrow at will, take a good look at Wednesday’s legal ruling. A U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in New York City, where many intellectual-property cases are heard, overturned a Northern California court decision in Jacobsen v. Katzer, a pivotal case in open-source and Creative Commons law.

Source: NewsFactor

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Office Snapshots has posted a picture of the clever sign hanging on the door of Twitter’s old office. The sign was posted by the office’s current inhabitants, customer service startup Get Satisfaction.

Twitter switched offices in early July, and the move seems to have done them well. Since then the service has been unusually stable, with relatively few periods of downtime - though this may be on account of the functionality that seems to be slowly disappearing.

Update: Get Satisfaction’s Thor Muller comments that in celebration of Twitter’s increased reliability, the sign has been updated:

Credit: monstro

Thanks to Jason Moser for the tip.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: Jason Kincaid

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The ethical quandaries of the free ride were spotlighted by the disclosure of a computer glitch that allowed hundreds of people to get free rail tickets and MetroCards.

Source: By WILLIAM NEUMAN

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The twenty one startups from Y Combinator’s summer session are presenting their ideas and creations to investors in Boston this afternoon. Below are descriptions of the nine startups we haven’t covered and who don’t wish to remain in stealth mode any longer. See our prior coverage of Posterous, Anyvite, ididwork, Popcuts, and Slinkset - all of which are part of this batch and have launched already.

TicketStumbler

TicketStumbler can be described as Kayak for sports tickets. It aggregates tickets from sites like StubHub and RazorGator, making them searchable by keyword and allowing for the filtering of results by maximum price, quantity available, provider, etc. The site is live, fast, and gets extra points for not spelling “stumbler” without the “e”.

People and Pages

While yet to launch, the founders of People and Pages describe their service as “a better Google Groups”, although the screenshots show that it’s part WYSIWYG website creation tool as well, making it competitive with Google Sites, Weebly (also a Y Combinator startup), and others. Group organizers can use People and Pages to manage email lists and publish to the web in one place.

MeetCast

MeetCast is a WebEx and GoToMeeting competitor (yes, another one) that is marketing itself on ease of use (no downloads) and playback (all conferences are saved and indexed for later viewing). The founders draw comparisons to Tokbox for its simplicity.

CO2Stats

For a flat monthly fee, CO2Stats will measure the overall electricity usage of websites and then automatically buy renewable energy certificates for them to offset their effective emissions. Founded by academics from Harvard and Yale, CO2Stats has already turned a profit by signing up 2,500+ sites in over 25 countries. See our review from earlier today.

Youlicit

Youlicit is a service prepping for relaunch that will generate Mahalo-like search guides by scouring the web for user generated content and compiling it into topics algorithmically instead of relying on human editors. These search guides themselves are intended to show up highly in the results of more traditional search engines like Google.

Job Alchemist

Job Alchemist is the parent company of two online services: Startuply, a job site for tech startups that we covered last month, and a new job affiliate network called JobSyndicate that launches today. Publishers can place JobSyndicate’s widgets on their sites and earn half the bounty set by employers when visitors click through and get hired.

Frogmetrics

Frogmetrics isn’t a pure web venture: the company wants to place touch screens in restaurants, stores, and other brick and mortar establishments that can be used to collect customer feedback on the spot. The devices ask customers a few questions at the point of sale about their experience and can collect contact information about customers to generate leads. The information gathered across physical locations is aggregated and analyzed for trends and other statistics.

Snipd

Snipd appears to be another web annotation service, one that allows users to “snip” page content such as images, videos, and text to share them with others and save for later. These snips are also used to generate so-called heat maps of pages that help users find the best content on a page. The service has yet to launch.

BackType

BackType is a search engine for comments that crawls the internet for blogs and indexes their user generated content regardless of the platform (WordPress, Moveable Type, etc). These comments are not only keyword searchable but can be followed by author, allowing you to keep track of what your friends are saying online.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: Mark Hendrickson

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In a letter to a congressional committee, AT&T defends the practice of monitoring Internet customers in order to target advertising. (It doesn’t do that yet, but it is considering doing so.)

Source: By SAUL HANSELL

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