Augmented Identity

A new app makes it possible to identify people and learn about them just by pointing your phone.

By Erika Jonietz

An application that lets users point a smart phone at a stranger and immediately learn about them premiered last Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Developed by The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), a Swedish mobile software and design firm, the prototype software combines computer vision, cloud computing, facial recognition, social networking, and augmented reality.

"It's taking social networking to the next level," says Dan Gärdenfors, head of user experience research at TAT. "We thought the idea of bridging the way people used to meet, in the real world, and the new Internet-based ways of congregating would be really interesting."

TAT built the augmented ID demo, called Recognizr, to work on a phone that has a five-megapixel camera and runs the Android operating system. A user opens the application and points the phone's camera at someone nearby. Software created by Swedish computer-vision firm Polar Rose then detects the subject's face and creates a unique signature by combining measurements of facial features and building a 3-D model. This signature is sent to a server where it's compared to others stored in a database. Providing the subject has opted in to the service and uploaded a photo and profile of themselves, the server then sends back that person's name along with links to her profile on several social networking sites, including Twitter or Facebook. The Polar Rose software also tracks the position of the subject's head--TAT uses this information to display the subject's name and icons for the Web links on the phone's screen without obscuring her face.

"It's a very robust approach" to facial recognition, says Andrew Till, vice president of marketing solutions at Teleca, a mobile software consulting company in the United Kingdom. "It's much, much better than what I've previously seen."

Till says that applying image and face recognition to the trend of posting photos on social networking sites opens up interesting new possibilities. "You start to move into very creative ways of pulling together lots of services in a very beneficial way for personal uses, business uses, and you start to get into things that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do," he says.

Polar Rose's algorithms can run on the iPhone and on newer Android phones, says the company's chief technical officer and founder, Jan Erik Solem. The augmented ID application uses a cloud server to do the facial recognition primarily because many subjects will be unknown to the user (so there won't be a matching photo on the phone), but also to speed up the process on devices with less processing power.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/24639/?nlid=2766&a=f

Twitter Hits 50 Million Tweets Per Day

by Erick Schonfeld on Feb 22, 2010
Twitter is now processing 50 million Tweets a day, which comes to about 1.5 billion Tweets a month. Royal Pingdom recently reported that Twitter passed one billion Tweets a month last December and measured about 1.2 billion in January. On a daily basis, Royal Pindom was measuring 27 million Tweets a day back in November, 2009. But the latest data comes from Twitter itself (after attempting to strip out spam Tweets).

In January, comScore estimated that Twitter.com attracted almost 75 million unique visitors worldwide. But the number of messages going across Twitter is perhaps a more useful metric because it cuts across all third-party Twitter clients as well. At its most fundamental level, Twitter is a communications service, and 50 million messages a day is certainly a healthy number. What Twitter doesn’t say is how many of its users are responsible for those 50 million Tweets, or on average how many Tweets a day comes from each user. I’d love to see the distribution of Tweets across heavy, medium, and light users.

How many of those 50 million Tweets come from the top 10 percent of users? It seems to me that even though I follow more than 300 people on Twitter, I hear from the same 20 to 30 blabbermouths every day.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/22/twitter-50-million-tweets-day/

Yahoo! and Twitter enter content-sharing partnership

24.02.2010
Internet portal Yahoo! has entered into a partnership with Twitter to integrate the popular microblogging service into its own offferings through search and beyond.

With Yahoo!'s search engine, users will now be able to find tweets in real-time search results but Twitter will also be integrated into Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports and its homepage, allowing users to share its content straight onto Twitter - in other words the ability to tweet from within all of Yahoo's services.

Using its Firehose service, Twitter says Yahoo! will have a similar service to other companies it has created partnerships with, including "a full feed of public tweets sent to Twitter and our partners every second of every day from all around the world".

"From our perspective, this partnership represents a big opportunity," said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

"Tweets may be short, but they have proven over and over again to contain valuable information. As the Twitter information network grows and expands, it becomes more valuable for everyone who participates. Our open approach helps us get closer to providing universal connectivity to a global network of immediate information."

Bryan Lamkin, senior vice-president of the consumer products group for Yahoo! said this move was part of the company's aim to simplify the user's world by bringing together their social worlds.

"Let me try to capture the enormity of this integration in 140 characters or less: We're turning the key to the online social universe - you will find the most personally relevant experiences through Yahoo!," he added.

By Marie Boran

Photo: Yahoo! users will be able to find tweets in real-time search results as a result of a content-sharing partnership between Yahoo! and microblogging site Twitter
http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/article/15360/

reality BYTES

21 February 2010 By Adrian Weckler If any Ryan Tubridy, Terry Prone or John Waters is reading this, they should stop now. The following column might irritate. That’s because it’s about technology. And the internet. And forms of communicating that don’t involve hundreds of hours of poise, middlemen and ‘understandings’. In Ireland, there is a strong tradition of pulling the plug on disruptive technology. E-voting was the best example: an entirely fixable system that was vilified, mainly by establishment cliques (politicians, journalists and other parties who would have lost electionweek influence).P-pars was another example (of sorts). Mobhaile is the latest casualty. It was a decent, cheap community portal system that local councils decided to sniff at, as it wasn’t their idea. So the entire concept got rubbished, with no one, except the developers, taking flak for it. There is a similar pretentious, protectionist culture around the adoption of Twitter in Ireland. While news agencies in other modern countries have adopted it as a significant way of spreading and debating news issues, Irish media establishment flunkies sit back and sneer. Sporting leather briefcases and allowing suspiciously well-worn literary classics (or Moleskine notebooks) to protrude from their coat pockets (but only in public), these worthies effect disdain for gee-whiz cyber services. Depending on their particular spot in the limelight, Twitter is a) frivolous and exhibitionist b) an affront to decency or c) devilish because it bypasses the ‘normal way of doing things’. Thankfully, the influence of people spouting this pretentious nonsense is on the wane. So it was that, last week, the chairman of the Green Party, Dan Boyle, chose Twitter as his forum for expressing his lack of confidence in Willie O’Dea. The remarks exacerbated an already tense situation and must have greatly added to the political discomfiture of the government. Boyle’s remarks were dissected and debated by Twitter users for hours, just as Senator Déirdre de Búrca’s resignation blog-post had been, a week before. Moleskine media consumers learned of Boyle’s remarks much later, effectively becoming the second tier of ‘those in the know’. A similar phenomenon had occurred ten days before, when George Lee resigned. While some traditional media sources had the Lee resignation at about the same time as blogs and Twitter, most only got the story an hour or two later. And mainly through blogs or Twitter. Whether the Moleskineers and book-club radio presenters like it or not, Twitter has become a must have service for those seeking the latest news. Twitter is not always first with the dissemination of a story. And it never actually produces a story. (But then how often does Morning Ireland, the Nine O’Clock news, or any other news bulletin?) What Twitter does is to curate and publish news stories that are unknown to the general public. So to all those who smirk and shrug at the mention of Twitter, know this: you are now a second-tier news consumer. You’re outside the loop. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Being behind on the latest story is entirely a personal choice. Not knowing what up to 50,000 other people are buzzing about isn’t the end of the world. Nor is being late in finding out about a senior politician’s resignation. So carry on. We’ll let you know when anything important happens. http://www.thepost.ie/technology/reality-bytes-47466.html

Virtual Revolution: The Cost of Free

As the web becomes a bigger part of our everyday lives, are we giving away too much of our private information?

Tomorrow night's episode of The Virtual Revolution, The Cost of Free, looks at the dark corporate underbelly of the web, and how it's transforming our notions of privacy and culture in the 21st century. It's also the one that excites me the most.

I am a dystopian from way back, and I'm both thrilled and terrified to see how we have been complicit in our own 1984. What does Google have on us? How is Amazon's recommendation system contradicting the most powerful opportunity for new inforamtion that the web offers – serendipity – and manipulating us into homogenous proles for its own benefit?

As assistant producer, Jo Wade, explains in an article for the BBC:

Every day in Britain millions of searches are carried out on Google for free. Every month we spend millions of hours on Facebook for free and read millions of articles from free newspapers. But now look at it the other way round.

Every day Google gathers millions of search terms that help them refine their search system and give them a direct marketing bonanza that they keep for months.

Every week Facebook receives millions of highly personal status updates that are kept forever and are forming the basis of direct advertising revenue.

Every month free newspapers plant and track a cookie tracking device on your computer that tells them what your range of interests are and allows them to shape their adverts and in the future, even content around you. So you're not just being watched, you're being traded. The currency has changed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/feb/12/virtual-revolution-bbc-aleks-krotoski

Google embarks on a ‘Mobile First’ strategy, Schmidt says

17.02.2010
MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS 2010, BARCELONA - Everything that Google will create going forward will be done so through a ‘Mobile First’ lens, the company’s CEO Eric Schmidt told the largest gathering of the world’s mobile industry at the GSMA Congress in Barcelona.

Schmidt told the Mobile World Congress in his keynote yesterday that the cloud-computing revolution has resulted in a fundamental transformation in terms of how data is managed. He said that once it was about where the data was stored and where data was copied and stored in a particular place. “The right terminology is to replicate, not to copy from here to here.

“Applications are coming that are sharing intensive. The generation of app developer before cloud computing thought about making local copies on servers. Now it is all about sharing and replication. This means we are building powerful, interlinked systems. Over time each of these waves – computing, telecoms and the need for servers – intersect at a particular point. It was the mainframe, then the PC. I’m pleased to say that everything will be in the context of powerful mobile phones.

“The mobile phone is the meeting point. An app that does not leverage the power of the cloud is not going to wow anybody and will be too narrow.”

Now is the time of Mobile, Google CEO says

Schmidt told some of the most senior executives in the mobile industry that the time of mobile is upon us. “It’s like magic. All of a sudden you can do things that it never occurred to you was possible. The implication that has not been expressed here or in the industry now is Mobile First – the principal of everything being developed for mobile first.

“Our programmers are working on products from a ‘Mobile First’ perspective. That is in fact a major change. Every recent product announcement we have made – and of course we have a desktop version – is being made from the point of view of it being used on a high-performance mobile phone on all the browsers that are available. Now the programmers want to work on those apps for mobile that you can’t get on a desktop – applications that are personal and location-aware.

Schmidt said that Google is focused on new applications that include speech recognition and make use of devices’ camera power for augmented reality. “The new applications use sets of databases that sit on servers and if the networks are fast enough all of a sudden voice recognition works remarkably well. Processed by hundreds of thousands of computers in parallel it can be remarkably accurate.

“Look at voice recognition and Google Translate – why can’t I talk to someone on a phone who doesn’t speak my language – it’s not quite there yet but its coming. Mobile has resulted in the development of algorithms that were only ideas on whiteboards.

“There are applications that can tell me how well I am if I cough into my phone. Google Goggles should tell me if a museum is open if I look at the building through my camera phone. There are other implications of this that are interesting and worrisome. We have applications today that know where we are but what if they can predict where we’re going?

“The important thing to remember is that when we have all of this data, we can use modern computer science to do phenomenal things,” Schmidt said.

^{Google Voice search}

Searching using voice

During the keynote, Google demonstrated voice-based search in English and German over a Nexus One device showing how to locate a Berlin nightclub by the power of voice and how by taking a photograph of the Sacrada Familia church in Barcelona it automatically spawned a Google search based on the image alone. The company also demonstrated how Google Goggles on a mobile device can do character recognition and generate a search – not only that but the words would be automatically translated from a menu in German to English.

The company also demonstrated how Flash video can now be incorporated inside newspaper pages fully rendered on mobile devices like the Android-powered Nexus One. Another example given by Google was the high-end graphics capabilities on the latest smart-phone devices for showing movies and how up-to-date Google Earth is in terms of the latest images. Senior product engineer Eric Tseng showed images of the latest Google Earth photography of Haiti’s capital city Port-au-Prince in the days following the earthquake there, including the massive tent city that has grown up outside the presidential palace.

“Let me suggest right now at Mobile World Congress that we understand the new rule is ‘Mobile First’ in everything – apps, the way people use things. We have a role now to inform and educate through all these devices. The important thing is to develop the apps that people want.”

Bandwidth needs to be available

To see this vision take shape, Schmidt said that it is vital the global mobile industry has the software and the networks to come together to make optimal use of bandwidth available and not have capacity wasted in the signalling. “We need to move from the 1pc of people who use 70pc of the mobile bandwidth to make it useful for 100pc of users.

“Culturally, it is time to say yes to emerging services and ideas – literally by millions of companies and programming shops – they are all coming and they are coming now.

“We need advanced, sophisticated networks that can deal with security and lad balancing. The future of mobile is not about dumb fat data pipes. Google will not be investing in broad scale infrastructure, we will have the operators to it.

“We have been testing 1Gbps networks on an open net neutral basis. We actually believe it is important for operators to be able to deal with too much capacity because right now wireless networks have too many constraints.

“We want to make sure that operators can offer video on the same basis.”

^{A view from Google Earth}

Schmidt said that the future of mobile is also the future of banking and finance. “It is our strategy to encourage the banking community to embrace mobile, it will help bring banking to the millions of unbanked people in developing countries. The work is currently being done by mobile operators – the correct credit card should be your mobile phone. There is so much information and it is much more useful. If you had a mobile banking app that is authenticated and tied to the banking system, for example.

“Operators around the world have done trials. The banking system is under a lot of attacks for other reasons. I would suggest a strong lobbying campaign for this because it strikes me as a perfect example of the marriage of technology. Mobile operators have the best billing relations and are the most efficient billing systems – we would be happy to help them.”

By John Kennedy

Main photo: Google CEO Eric Schmidt

http://siliconrepublic.com/news/article/15300/comms/google-embarks-on-a-mobile-first-strategy-schmidt-says/

Gmail, Too, Seeks to Rival Facebook

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

• FEBRUARY 8, 2010

Google Inc. is taking a swipe at Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. with a new feature that makes it easier for users of Gmail to view media and status updates shared online by their friends.

Google could announce the new Gmail feature as soon as this week, said people familiar with the matter. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.

The change adds a module to the Gmail screen that will display a stream of updates from individuals a user chooses to connect with, said one of these people. It is a format popularized by Facebook and Twitter.

Yahoo Inc. added a similar feature to Yahoo Mail last year, allowing users to see whether friends have uploaded a photo to a site like Flickr, for example.

Google, too, is trying to get users to turn to Gmail as a place they can go to see what's up with their friends. But whether users will want to blend sending email with browsing friends' content is unclear.

Google has been trying to fashion Gmail into more than an email service for years. It currently lets users set an "away message"—which can be a link to a Web site—that their friends see when they message them.

The new stream will eventually include content that a user's connections share through Google's YouTube video site and Picasa photo service, according to one person familiar with the matter. But whether those features will be announced in the coming days remains unclear.

Google's move comes after Facebook last week rolled out a new design with a newmessage inbox that more closely resembles an email inbox like Gmail's. The social-networking company said it had roughly 400 million users. Gmail had 176 million unique visitors in December, according to comScore Inc.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703630404575053480962942848.html?mod=dist_smartbrief

Microsoft partners with LinkedIn, Facebook for social inbox

17.02.2010
Microsoft is making its Outlook email client more social by adding a new service called Outlook Social Connector (OSC), which will link in users’ Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace accounts to their inbox.

The new service is expected to launch in beta today and the LinkedIn plug-in will be on the professional networking site also while the Facebook and MySpace plug-ins will not be ready until June when Office 2010 goes on sale.

What Outlook Social Connector does is add a new pane to the contact information for one of your connections, so that when you receive mail from them, clicking on this will not only bring up their email address but also the latest status updates from their social-networking sites.

Specifically, the LinkedIn team has built a provider for the OSC using Microsoft’s public SDK to provide the user with both pictures and activity from colleagues directly from their network.

Clicking on a message from a co-worker will display their new LinkedIn activity, as well as link to their profile page.

The new tool will also bring a social view to Outlook in general: when you click on a contact you will receive a timeline of recent emails and files exchanged: a bit like the Xobni third part add-on.

OSC will work with both the beta and final release version of Office 2010 as well, as Office 2003 and 2007.

By Marie Boran

Photo: Outlook Social Connector

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/article/15292/

Facebook to launch stripped-down version: Facebook Zero

16.02.2010
Social-networking site Facebook is rolling out a stripped-down version of its site, called Facebook Zero, for people viewing Facebook on their mobile phones.

Facebook Zero, a low-bandwidth site that omits "data intensive applications like photos", is set to launch in the coming weeks.

"We are discussing it," said a Facebook spokesperson. "As an option to make Facebook on the mobile web available to everyone, anywhere and allow operators to encourage more mobile internet usage."

CCS Insight analysts have said the pared-down site could help mobile operators free up critical bandwidth on their networks.

Facebook recently said more than 100 million people now access the site from their phones.

Facebook already offers Facebook Lite, which is also a scaled-back version of the full site. Facebook Lite is for people with slow or poor internet connections. It is targeted at users in the developing world.

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/article/15287/

Internet veterans gather for Dublin Web Summit 2.0

05.02.2010
Last night saw Trinity College Dublin host the Dublin Web Summit 2.0, an event that gathered together some of the best minds from both the Irish and the global internet scene, with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg talking about everything from the beauty of coding to embracing failure.

The first of the two panels assembled for the night saw Irish entrepreneurs give their thoughts on starting out, establishing a successful technology company and what Ireland needs to be doing now to attract business.

Dylan Collins of Jolt Online, Fred Karlsson of Donedeal.ie, Ciaran Bollard of MUZU TV, Colm Lyon of Realex Payments and Chris Horn, co-founder of Iona and a member of the Innovation Task Force, shared their thoughts on technology entrepreneurism and the difficulties involved in a sustainable business model.

“Controlling scale and matching revenue to scale is key," said Bollard of MUZU TV, who attributes some of his business success to great support from grassroots bands.

Adding that MUZU TV is about to expand in Europe he name-checked rock band Kasabian as a good example of a band that has embraced the online music model by gathering content into one channel and allowing fans to contribute.

He explained that while bands are getting income from ads being served on MUZU TV, the service is free to the user. MUZU TV is currently the largest online music-video resource on the web.

What was talked about at the Dublin Web Summit 2.0

Both Collins and Lyon talked about making their first sale, operating on a shoestring budget and with minimal staff, while Horn described his first sale as one of the most thrilling moments of his life.

Eschewing ‘knowledge economy’ rhetoric as moderator Mark Little put it, the panel didn’t use inspirational quotes and theories on how better to encourage innovation here in Ireland but gave real insight into the realities of getting a start-up off the ground.

The biggest message of the night came from Horn, who said that Ireland needed to change its bankruptcy laws to allow people who fail to start again while adding that "restoring competitiveness in the economy" is just a race to the bottom.

Mullenweg, Newmark and Wired UK’s editor-at-large Ben Hammersley also had something to say about attracting high-tech business in a global economy.

Newmark said: “We need a business culture that doesn't stigmatise failure,” adding that success involves good customer service and not only listening to your customers, but then following through.

“Customer service, even imperfect, is a competitive advantage,” he added.

One of the most powerful observations was Mullenweg, whose advice for those wishing to succeed in the online space was: “Learn to code. Scripting is the new literacy.”

Hammersley, who spoke at length about information overload, online content and the future of the media, simply said: “Make it beautiful."

On these terms we can compete, he said, explaining that all the usual advice to countries looking to attract business, eg, tax breaks, usually fizzles out whereas getting the business culture right and “being a wonderful place” that attracts the right people is more important.

By Marie Boran

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/article/15148/new-media/internet-veterans-gather-for-dublin-web-summit-2-0

Dublin mobile player locates stg£2.7 million R&D operation in Belfast

02.02.2010
A Dublin mobile technology company has set up a stg£2.7-million R&D centre in Belfast with the backing of Invest NI. The company’s technology allows mobile operators to allow users to capture and share high-definition video.

Award-winning Movidius, which is located at ECIT (Electronics, Communications and Information Technology Institute) in Titanic Quarter, will provide nine high-quality jobs for research engineers in the highly advanced area of silicon-chip technology over the next 18 months.

Movidius is applying revolutionary technology to enable manufacturers of mobile phones and other hand-held devices to offer customers the ability to capture, view and edit high-resolution video, directly on their handset, for sharing with family, friends and others on social-networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and You Tube.

Alastair Hamilton, Invest NI chief executive, said: “This project is focused on highly innovative technology which will position Northern Ireland at the forefront of next generation mobile communications.

“This is industry-shaping technology with immense potential in the global marketplace. It represents a quantum leap in the multimedia functionality of mobile devices using silicon technology that also increases the appeal of such devices to customers through significant savings in costs and power consumption.

“The investment is another substantial boost for our strategic focus on attracting projects from globally focused and entrepreneurial businesses with innovative technology.

Movidius will provide high-value jobs and strengthen our technology base particularly in the dynamic and fast-moving mobile communications industry,” he added.

Sean Mitchell, Movidius’ CEO, said the company’s strategic focus is on the design and development of original technologies, such as its multi-core Myriad platform, which allow mobile-phone manufacturers to provide their users with superb mobile video and photo experiences.

“The new Belfast centre, which we selected because of the availability of engineering professionals, particularly those with experience in embedded software and System on Chip (SoC) design and development, will develop sophisticated imaging software and semiconductor technology to expand our Myriad-based product offerings for a rapidly growing market.

“ECIT is an ideal location for our leading-edge work in micro-processing technology because of its proven track record of success, its world class expertise in technologies, including SoC systems, for a wide range of industries and partnerships with global IT businesses,” Mitchell said.

By John Kennedy

Photo: Movidius is located at Queen's University's ECIT building in Belfast

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/article/15102/