Monday, June 25, 2007
Xerox Enters Search Market
FactSpotter is text mining software that combines a linguistic engine that allows users to make queries in everyday language. FactSpotter looks for the keywords contained in a query along with the context those words have.
According to Xerox, FactSpotter is capable of combing through almost any document regardless of the language, location, format or type; take advantage of the way humans think, speak and ask questions; and discriminate the results highlighting just a handful of relevant answers instead of returning thousands of unrelated responses.
Frédérique Segond, manager of parsing and semantics research at XRCE said that the tool is more accurate because it delves into documents, extracting the concepts and the relationships among them. “By understanding the context, it returns the right information to the searcher, and it even highlights the exact location of the answer within the document”.
Whilst it sounds appealing, FactSpotter will not be coming to a browser near anyone, anytime shortly. Xerox plans to launch FactSpotter next year as part of the paid Xerox Litigation Service platform and has no plans for a wider or public release. Here’s betting that a Steve Jobs character comes along and steals the concept and turns into the next Google; history often does repeat itself.
Instant Messaging: Google Talk adds Group Chat
Previously mentioned Google Talk Gadget has integrated a new Group Chat feature for your Google Talk contacts.
To use Group Chat, just start a conversation with a contact, then click the drop-down on the right of the chat window and select Group Chat. From there you can add as many contacts as you want. Granted, the idea of Group Chat is far from innovative (a lot of GTalk users have wanted this for sometime), but it's nice to finally see it rolling out. Group chat is currently only available with the Google Talk Gadget. Thanks Mike!
Google Apps: Add live Google data to Google Spreadsheets
The Webware weblog highlights 5 things you didn't know about Google Docs and Spreadsheets, most notably that you can insert live lookups in Google Spreadsheets via Google search and Google Finance.
Using two special formulas, users can create cells that will update constantly with data or information gleaned from Web searches or Google's finance service. This works for things such as stock symbols, sports statistics, or any other piece of information you want to source and keep up to date automatically
For example, you can insert the current price of Google stock in a spreadsheet by entering =GoogleFinance("GOOG"; "price"), or check out the number of internet users in Paraguay with =GoogleLookup("Paraguay"; "internet users"). Very cool.
Broadband Subscribers, 300 million strong
At the end of first quarter 2007, the total number of broadband subscribers was close to 300 million, and according to folks at Point Topic, we are way past that number by now. Thanks to strong growth in Eastern Europe and China, the broadband subscriber base is growing at much faster clip that most imagined.
Making Real Money from Virtual Goods
While the term evokes gold coins and magic items bought and sold in MMORPGs, conference attendance by social networks like Dogster and Hot or Not suggests how pervasive the concept has become. Virtual goods can also be gifts you send to friends on your network (as in Facebook), and it's an already growing income stream. Consider some highlights from the conference:
Three Rings' CEO Daniel James on Puzzle Pirates, a casual MMO: "We do about $350,000 a month in revenue, of which $250,000 is virtual currency sales."
Craig Sherman of teen hangout Gaia Online : "Virtual economy, we have about 50,000 completed auctions every day. Plus 12 virtual stores that are like an Amazon space, 6,000 items sold."
Dan Kelly from virtual currency exchange site Sparter, on the total value of the industry: "It's easily a billion dollar [secondary] market. Consumers have told us these things have value, the industry now is trying to reconcile that with their business model."
The question is why they have value, and Robert Scoble began the moderating of one Virtual Goods panel by noting a real Swiss watch that sells for $20,000—roughly $19,500 more than meaningful functionality and quality would ever require. With Hot or Not, users can buy each other virtual flowers, and according to CEO James Hong, intention drives the willingness to pay more: "We sell more expensive flowers to people that have a relationship."
Kudos to Mark Wallace and the staff of Virtual World News for taking such copious notes to the conference's many panels—read more here, here, here, and here. Be sure to also read the conference presentation– first in the West, I believe– on the phenomenal success of QQ , China's largest IM/games/social network, where you can buy virtual penguins as pets (54 million sold so far), with a virtual currency that's so popular, the Chinese government is worried it'll destabilize the official one.
Nokia N95 + RC plane = unlimited DIY aerial photography
now, this is what I call community involvement! and viral!
If you've found yourself tempted by other interesting DIY aerial photography rigs, but spent all your dough on the Nokia N95 instead, you may still be able to make a lifelong (or momentary) dream come true. A pioneering lad over at the N95 Blog has suggested that nearly unlimited high-resolution aerial photography can be yours if you're willing to strap your precious handset to an RC plane and get savvy with Pict'Earth software. The application allows users to create a theoretical Google Earth of their own if the existing imagery isn't up to snuff with their personal standards. Still, we'd have to mull this one over mighty hard before attaching such a valuable communicator to a potential death bed, but feel free to let us know how things go if you can muster the courage.[Via AllAboutSymbian]
Read
ZAP announces mysterious high-performance electric car
New details about the iPhone
- The keyboard was simply described as "disappointing". Keyboarding with two thumbs often registers multiple key presses (two or three at a time) resulting in a lot of mistakes. The best way to type is with a single finger (as shown in most of Apple's demos), but two thumbs is supposedly very difficult. After trying it for a number of days our source gave up using their thumbs.
- The text auto-correction only works well for simple words, but doesn't work for proper names. We can only assume this bit will get better with time as Apple fills out its predictive text dictionary.
- "It won't replace a BlackBerry. It's not good for text input. It's just not a business product."
- The touchscreen was said to, in general, require somewhat hard presses to register input, and needs some getting used to.
- In addition to its dock, the iPhone comes packaged with a polishing cloth (the thing's supposedly a fingerprint magnet, no surprise) and the usual smallish power adapter.
- The Bluetooth headset will debut in the $120 range, and will come with its own dock for charging both the phone and the headset. The headset will feature a miniature magnetic charging interface á la MagSafe.
Continue reading New details about the iPhone
Fiber optic tablecloth: the new candlelit dinner
Vision Robotics' harvesting machines edge closer to the farm
Write a Text Blog with Pen, Paper and a Digital Camera
Dislike typing on the computer keyboard or the tiny cell phone ? You can still write a beautiful text blog - just get a piece of paper and a pen or pencil to jot down your blog posts.
These are called handwritten blogs - the paper note with your text is scanned using a digital camera or a scanner and posted on the web as a regular photograph. Even PostSecret is an handwritten blog.
There an entire Flickr group devoted to the community of handwritten bloggers. It would help if you have a good handwriting style but sorry, no Google Juice for you as search engine bots can't read your handwritten blog posts. Very creative.
More examples at flickr.com/handwrittenblogs/ and mivox.com/.
Incoming Links on YouTube Expose Hundreds of FTP Passwords
As these screenshots show, some incoming links on YouTube videos are found to contain username/passwords of FTP servers that could allow anyone to login into these servers.
If Google doesn't fix this immediately, it could possibly become a big security issue for FTP sites whose credentials are now available in Google cache.
Earlier these YouTube links had revealed clicks on Adsense Gadgets ads. The latest issue was discovered by Rohan Pinto of konkan.tv/.
To ensure that your FTP servers are not in the YouTube database, run the following query:
site:youtube.com "clicks from ftp" your_server_name
Run Windows Vista, Office 2007 Together Without Installation
Too lazy to install the new Office 2007 or Windows Vista on your machine ? Worried that the new software might break existing stuff on your computer or may not work at all ? Here's something for you - Windows Vista cum Office 2007 inside Windows XP.
Microsoft today released a free combo VHD edition of Windows Vista and Office 2007 Professional which includes Publisher, Excel, Outlook, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, and Word.
You can download this all-in-one package from Microsoft Download Center and run it on your Windows XP computer without making any modifications by using the free Microsoft Virtual PC software.
Start the Virtual PC software and just open the Windows Vista cum Office 2007 image - the software will run independent of your existing XP SP2 setup and will not alter or install anything on the computer.
Excited ? There's a small catch - though the Office 2007 / Vista image file is free, it is a bit bulky (~2 GB to be exact) and requires addition 10 GB of free hard drive space for running smoothly inside the Virtual PC software.
If you think your Broadband connection can take the load, get the Office 2007 cum Vista installer from microsoft.com/downloads/ (file available in VHD image format).
The Facebook Problem
Brad Feld has a post up where he talks about The Facebook Problem. Brad sees an emerging problem for those who are developing apps for Facebook and says:
It seems like Facebook could easily turn on CPM based ads on all of the Facebook apps pages and do a revenue share with the application developer. Suddenly, the application developer would get paid for the massive new page views they are getting (as would Facebook), and Facebook would create a real incentive for the publishers to stay with their apps and grow them.
In the absence of this, Facebook is going to need to address the “value to the apps developer” quickly, before some of the larger apps vaporize due to the developer saying “I’m not willing to keep paying for servers and bandwidth.” I can think of a couple of other approaches here, including Facebook building an in-the-cloud infrastructure for their developers that they make available to one’s that reach a certain level of popularity. But - the straight “we’ll make more money and share it with you” seems the most logical approach to me.
I see a different Facebook problem. Invite overload and application noise. I cannot keep track of all the invites I am getting, both the standard invites and the application invites. And what's worse, I can't keep track of all the applications that all of my friends are using.
We all know I am not the Facebook generation. So maybe I am just not capable of dealing with this level of social networking. But I bet that many of the members of the Facebook generation are secretly wishing for the old Facebook where it was more about them and their friends and less about being a social operating system.
The comments to Brad's post have a few such examples. Since there are a bunch of members of the Facebook generation who read this blog, please tell me what you think.
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