• Focuses your attention on a tangible reinforcement "score" that provides immediate feedback about your actions.
• Provides an intuitive visual display of your progress over time to provide positive reinforcement.
• Let's you to configure tasks and their associated value, and share these configurations with others.
• Let's you set up rewards you can "purchase" with your earned points, to provide additional motivation.

What excites me is that these represent only the first, or in some cases the second, step for web-based applications.  Any of these apps will help you be more productive, but imagine them integrated and refined 5 years from now — using Jott to call Sandy to schedule a payment in Mint and placing a todo in Todoist telling you to call in three days to make sure the payment is received. Maybe it won’t be these apps or these companies, but if not, the ones that follow will have the creators of the apps above to thank for blazing the trail.

The most current build of IE8 running in standards mode now correctly renders the Acid2 browser test.

Acid2 is a test that determines how well a browser works with several different web standards.  Successfully rendering Acid2 is an important landmark for IE8, as it highlights the interoperability, standards compliance and backwards compatibility that we're committed to for this release.  We are also announcing that IE8 Beta 1 will be released in the first half of 2008.  This is the first significant disclosure of IE8 features and standards support and we expect broad interest.  A Channel 9 video interview will provide further detail on this announcement.

As per usual, we will continue to collect designer and developer feedback to determine additional milestone timelines further down the line.
New information for developers:  One of the goals of IE8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementation and without breaking the existing web.  Last week, IE8 reached a core milestone:  IE8 in standard mode now correctly renders the “Acid2 Browser Test”.  Acid2 is a test that determines how well a browser works with several different web standards.