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Lip Reading, 3D Desktops, And NUI: Microsoft Plans To Reinvent User Interaction

admin2 — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:25:45 +0000

Deep in the skunk works of its Research and Labs divisions, secreted around the Seattle area, Microsoft is working on totally reinventing the way people interact with their computers. Very little is out in the open or in more than a prototype form, but the work is unquestionably being done. Last week it transpired that Microsoft is working on building Kinect into the bezels of laptops , and after that, presumably, tablets and eventually mobile phones. But it’s not just about building out the install base for Dance Central 3. It’s enabling the next generation of awareness in our electronics. The iPhone ushered in an era where our devices know when we touch them. Microsoft is working on the next one, in which our devices will simply know us. How do you, as a person, experience the world around you? You mostly see and hear, and to a lesser extent you touch, taste, smell. Our devices, however, are largely restricted to an extremely limited sense of touch. Why shouldn’t they be more like us? There’s a good reason, actually: computers don’t need to be like people because computers aren’t people. For years this has held true: the computer’s primary purpose for decades was to sit still and perform calculations humans couldn’t do. Interaction with a computer was strictly input, output. You didn’t interact so much as instruct, and wait for the result. But mobile phones and touchscreens and laptops began changing the idea of a computer into something more personal, more interactive, more two-way. And technology exists to let our devices become more human. Why not let them? Microsoft wants to. Despite their reputation among tech enthusiasts as a sort of stodgy blue-chip still coasting on the PC explosion of the late 90s and early 2000s, their R&D sections are world-class and put out actually innovative ideas and devices all the time. The trouble, briefly stated, is that implementing these ideas as products that fit into the Microsoft ecosystem isn’t easy, and even if it were, Microsoft has no talent for it . But this work on “Natural User Interaction,” or NUI, is more promising. People have embraced the idea in gaming: the Wii led the way and the Kinect brought the future into your living room, though the future is a little laggy and the voice controls spotty. People are simply interested in new ways of interacting with their content and devices. For years the promise of a different kind of interaction has been dangling, in the form of sci-fi shows and movies usually, and people have always been intrigued by it. So people want it — and Microsoft wants to make it — and they have the technology. Purchasing the IP behind the Kinect was an extremely smart move, maybe smarter than they know. What started out as a way to cash in on the market the Wii had created has snowballed into an entirely new form of interacting with computers, and a way for Microsoft to differentiate itself meaningfully for years to come. It was reported to me that one of the things the new Kinect/depth/IR sensors will do is read lips. At first it sounds silly. Why? Maybe so it can better interpret your words from across the room, or in a loud environment. You won’t have to turn the music down to search and navigate the web on your TV or tablet. And then it becomes clear that it’s just part of a larger suite of “senses” the device would have. The new devices are to have face recognition and voice recognition, so your password will be you saying your password in your own voice, not someone else, and not a print-out of you. They’ll be able to pick you out of a crowd, say a small party, and will be able to tell when you’re giving it a command — because you make eye contact and move your lips . Again, it sounds perfectly ridiculous until it starts sounding perfectly natural. Another feature described was a sort of 3D desktop on which you could actually grab files and place them here and there. This has been tried before, of course, and Windows 8 is looking decided two-dimensional, so it’s probably more of a research project than anything. But it’s still interesting. Think of the basic gestures you might be able to make. One was described as pulling out a drawer. In the surprisingly resilient desktop metaphor of files and folders, what could be more natural? Or perhaps raising your hand palm up to show the task bar or dock? Trace your finger in a counter-clockwise circle to undo, clockwise to redo? User experience reflects both the needs of the user and the capabilities of the device. For a few years now we’ve been satisfied with running our fingers along a slab of glass, producing an electrical signal interpreted as a point or blob — mainly because capacitive screens got good and cheap, and nobody wants to plug a mouse into their phone. But there are many other ways of interacting with our new mobile objects and information. Soon the glass touchscreen will seem as quaint as the command-line interface. And yet, some are no doubt thinking, we still have some command-line interfaces in use. Sure. And mice and keyboards are still better for productivity, and a pen and paper is better for sketching out ideas, and headphones are better for listening to music in public. There are countless use cases and potential applications of technology, but it’s good to recognize when one should give way or simply isn’t applicable. Microsoft is working hard at this, and you’d better believe that Apple is too, though they aren’t nearly as open about their research. And for once, they seem to actually be missing a piece of the technology pie: Microsoft has a head start on them in the world of NUI, having purchased and developed depth and personal sensors for at least two years now. Apple can always throw money at the problem, but it’s pretty clear that Microsoft has perceived this rare advantage and will be using it as a wedge wherever possible. This shouldn’t be taken as an indication that Windows 8 is going to be anything other than advertised, but I think it will be a test bed for some major changes coming down the line. Microsoft wants to change the way people interact with computers because it sees, hopefully not too late, that the old way, the PC way, treating a computer like a box that computes things, is on its way out in a hurry. So if computers are going to be a part of the real world, they need to be able to live in that world. Eyes, ears, and who knows what else. It’s only creepy until you can’t live without it. [images: Matthew Fisher/Stanford , Wolfgang Herfuntner ]

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Lip Reading, 3D Desktops, And NUI: Microsoft Plans To Reinvent User Interaction

Backplane To Hold Music Hackathon At SXSW, With Top Industry Managers As Judges

A D M I N — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:13:44 +0000

A few weeks ago we wrote about Backplane — a platform for creating interactive, highly visual communities — that counts Lady Gaga as one of its backers, along with plenty of the Valley’s most well-known investors. Now the company is harnessing its star power to hold a unique (and potentially awesome) event at SXSW: the SXSW Managers Hack — a hackathon that will be judged by some of the most accomplished managers in the music industry, including: Scooter Braun, best known for facilitating Justin Bieber’s rise to fame; Jay Brown, President of Jay-Z’s Roc Nation; and Troy Carter, manager of Lady Gaga (Carter is also one of Backplane’s cofounders). Developers are being asked to hack together “apps, platforms, and technologies designed to advance the future of digital music distribution” — where they’ll be judged by the people who actually decide which apps and platforms their artists will use. In order to attend the event, you’ll need to apply for an invitation, which you can do right here . The event will take place on March 11 2012, from 2 PM til 10 PM, and will also be live streamed by R to Z Studios, Randi Zuckerberg’s new social media firm (she’ll be hosting the stream as well). Note that while the event will revolve around music, it’s being held during the ‘Interactive’ portion of SXSW (SXSW Music begins on the 13th). Music-themed hackathons have been held before (check out Music Hack Day if you’d like to find one that’s coming up in your area), but the presence of top industry managers at this one will likely help make it especially interesting. It’s also another sign that the industry recognizes the potential that startups and hackers can bring to the table — which is a lot better than the innovation-squelching lawsuits that the record companies have slung around before. The event also fits in line with Backplane’s stated goal of attracting the best developers around (they’ve previously discussed their aim to foster an engineering-focused culture). Oh, and Backplane fittingly promises that ”live music and DJs will jam throughout” the hackathon.

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Backplane To Hold Music Hackathon At SXSW, With Top Industry Managers As Judges

When Will The Post-PC Era Arrive? It Just Did.

Administrator — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:49:06 +0000

There has been much debate about what the post-PC era is, when it will arrive, or whether it’s already here. But key pieces of new data, emerging last week, are making the case that we crossed the imaginary line from the “PC” era to the “post-PC” era at the end of 2011. According to analysts at Canalys, two major computing milestones were achieved at the end of this year: smartphone shipments outpaced PCs for the first time ever, and Apple became the world’s largest PC maker, if you count iPads as PCs (as well you should). Combined, what these numbers tell us is that the post-PC era is happening now. Right now. And maybe we need to think about how we define “PC.” In Q4 2011, vendors shipped 158.5 million smartphones, up 57% on the 101.2 million units shipped in Q4 2010. For the year, there were 487.7 million units shipped, up 63% on the 299.7 million units shipped in 2010. Meanwhile, the global PC market grew just 15% in 2011 to 414.6 million units. The smartphones have won. The funny thing about that PC shipments number is that, on its own, it doesn’t paint the most accurate picture of today’s PC landscape. There weren’t 414.6 million desktop, notebook and netbook computers shipped in 2011 – those were at 112.4 million, 209.6 million and 29.4 million, respectively. The 414.6 million number includes 63.2 million in “pad” shipments, Canalys’s preferred term for tablets. That means 15% of the “PC” shipments in 2011 were tablets, largely Apple’s iPad. In Q4, tablets were 22% of the total PC shipments. And the tablet segment of the market grew 274.2% year-over-year. Also in Q4 2011, Apple became the leading worldwide “PC” vendor (if you count the iPad as a PC) with 15 million iPads and 5 million Macs shipped, representing 17% of the total 120 million client PCs shipped in Q4. It overtook HP (now #2), Acer, Dell and Lenovo in the process. Overall, the PC market grew 16% year-over-year, Canalys noted last month. Without tablets, it declined 0.4%. Of course, there’s still the question of whether or not tablets should be broken out into their own computing category, positioned against the traditional “PCs” when tracking device shipments. For what’s it worth, I think it’s fine to count tablets as PCs – after all, PC means “personal computer,” not “machine running Windows.” The fact that we still equate the word with a desktop, monitor, keyboard and mouse combo is a testament to the empire Microsoft built, and is now losing. Case in point: netbook shipments dropped 25.3% from 2010 to 2011. Desktops grew a paltry 2.3% and notebooks grew just 7.5%. This is end of the “PC” era in action. While the 209.6 million notebook shipments still make that the largest category of “PCs,” the growth trends here, if sustained, dictate that’s its only a matter of time before the shift to tablets becomes even more pronounced. Think about it: what’s the first “PC” you’re going to buy for your kid, as a new member to the post-PC computing generation? If you respond “ notebook ,” I’d say you’re lying. That kid is getting an iPad, even if they end up stealing yours. If not an iPad, then they’re getting a phone. And smartphones are PCs, too. The most affordable ones. This past quarter, smartphone shipments overtook PCs, a hugely important milestone that speaks volumes about the state of modern-day computing. The computer-in-your-pocket has moved from being “a niche product segment at the high-end of the mobile phone market to becoming a truly mass-market proposition,” explains Canalys of the change. In Q4, Apple broke records by shipping 37 million iPhones – the most ever shipped by a single vendor in a quarter. Previously, Nokia held the record with 28.3 million phones shipped in Q4 2010. What a difference a year makes. But Canalys cautioned that it expects to see smartphone market growth slow in 2012, as vendors exercise “greater cost control and discipline” to focus on profitability. This is the only discordant note to the report. Smartphone growth slowing? No offense to the analysts, but I’ll believe that one when I see it. Just watching Apple’s sales alone, it’s clear you can’t underestimate its power to deliver record-breaking numbers. In addition, just because vendors like HTC and Motorola are going to launch fewer smartphone models in 2012, that doesn’t (necessarily) mean they’ll sell fewer overall phones. If anything, the companies are hoping that their increased focus on “hero” devices will help them increase sales. One thing is clear, however: that post-PC era everyone’s been talking about since the day the phrase slipped off Steve Jobs’ lips has arrived. We’re living it. Anyone who wastes their time debating its existence (tablets are PCs! phones are PCs!) is arguing semantics. The shift itself, whatever you want to call it, is happening. So perhaps “post-PC” isn’t the best terminology. If everything’s a PC, then maybe what we’ve achieved is something more akin to “PCs Everywhere.” Not as catchy, though. Photo credit top: Lokesh Dhakar , flickr; bottom: agirregabiria , flickr

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When Will The Post-PC Era Arrive? It Just Did.

Amazon Incarnate: Bezos The Book Giant Is Planning A Store In Seattle

vertical8 — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:46:13 +0000

According to GoodEReader , Amazon is planning to open a retail store in Seattle this year where they will sell Amazon-exclusive books and, more importantly, Kindles of all kinds. While this looks to be more of a pop-up retail presence than a fully-fledged store, if I were in publishing I’d be circling the wagons right now. To be fair, Amazon’s own publishing offerings are pretty wonky so far. There haven’t been many runaway successes coming out of the house although Seth Godin and Tim Ferris will soon be bringing their own brand of publishing success and there are some interesting cross-cultural titles coming out. But that’s not why publishing has to worry. The Kindle was Amazon incarnate, a way for Amazon to bring its online presence into the real world. A physical Kindle store – one that exists in a mall or popular area, even for a short period – is like the third coming. It’s basically a chance for Amazon to grab every else they have missed during the initial run up in Kindle popularity. We’re talking older folks, luddites, grumps, and folks who claim that “reading it in paper” is better. To have them walk up to a display of working Kindles, newly minted and displaying the latest Stephen King book, is the only way Amazon will convince them that going digital is the only way to go. This will also encourage the movement from the agent-publisher-distributor model of book publishing into a direct to consumer model that Amazon will spearhead. By showing potential authors that they can get their books bound in handsome Kindle editions, they’ll be more likely to go that route instead of pounding fruitlessly against the gates of big publishing. It’s obviously a no-brainer to many of us, but old paradigms die hard. As I said before, the Fire is Amazon’s Trojan Horse . However, rather than the wary hold-outs bringing in Amazon’s market by buying the fire, Amazon will bring the Trojans to their own branded stores. The store will appear in Settle in the next few months and presumably be the first of a nation-wide roll-out. I suspect it will be a bit of a loss for Amazon but hopefully it will convert the last hold-outs to the benefits of ereading.

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Windows Phone 8 Apollo Features Leak

bestcbstore — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:34:37 +0000

A video detailing the new features of Windows Phone 8 Apollo — originally intended for Microsoft’s smartphone partners — has leaked into the hands of PocketNow editors. Yay! In my opinion, Windows Phone Mango is a solid platform that’s quicker and smoother than anything I’ve seen on Android. Still, when looking at devices from Microsoft, Apple, and Google side-by-side, the Windows Phone always seems to lose in the spec department. That said, WinPho boss Joe Belfiore has plenty in store for us come Q4 2012 (the rumored release date of Apollo). As far as hardware is concerned, Microsoft is ready to take it to the next level, adding support for multiple cores, NFC, and full microSD card storage. Apollo will also support four different screen resolutions, though Belfiore apparently wasn’t very forthcoming with specifics on those. Developers are going to love this next part. According to PocketNow , developers will be able to use most of the same code when porting a Windows 8 app over to the Windows Phone platform. Of course, both platforms will share the same Metro-style interface, and that NFC radio will allow for tap-to-share capabilities between various Windows 8 devices. Microsoft used to tout its Tango video chat app , but it would seem as thought that Skype acquisition isn’t going to waste. Windows Phone 8 will have Skype baked right in, taking video chat and VoIP calls to a much higher level of audio/visual quality. Redmond expects at least 100,000 apps in the Marketplace by the time Apollo launches, at which point developers will have native code support and the ability to implement app-to-app communication. Now that most of our data plans are no longer unlimited, keeping track of data consumption is more important than ever. That said, Apollo will offer up a live tile for data usage called DataSmart. According to PocketNow, the feature will give precedence to WiFi connections. IE10 will include built-in server-side compression, which should reduce data usage, and the Local Scout tile will eventually hook you up with real-time locations of nearby hotspots. Windows has always been a powerhouse in the enterprise, and it’s about time the same was true for Windows Phone. That said, Apollo will bring with it BitLocker encryption support for full-disk encryption, along with the option to deploy company-specific apps behind enterprise firewalls. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Windows Phone is on its way people, and with such a hearty update on the way, I’m only that more confident in my prediction. I’m in good company , too.

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Windows Phone 8 Apollo Features Leak

comScore: As U.S. Smartphone Usage Grows, Android Nears 50 Percent Market Share

A D M I N — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:24:38 +0000

comScore just released its monthly mobile numbers, which charts smartphone usage from U.S. consumers for the three month period ending in December 2011. For the period, 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices, which is in line with the previous period’s usage. With respect to smartphone usage, 97.9 million (up from 91.4 million people in the previous period) people in the U.S. used smartphones during the three months ending in December, representing 40 percent of all mobile subscribers. Google Android continued to be the most popular smartphone platform with 47.3 percent market share, up 2.5 percentage points from September. Apple took the second position, growing 2.2 percentage points to grab 29.6 percent of the smartphone market. RIM ranked third with 16 percent share, followed by Microsoft (4.7 percent) and Symbian (1.4 percent). Samsung ranked as the top OEM with 25.3 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers (no change from September), followed by LG with 20 percent share and Motorola with 13.3 percent share. Apple has 12.4 percent share of total mobile subscribers (up 2.2 percentage points), while RIM following with 6.7 percent share. As mobile phone usage increases and smartphone adoption grows, more and more consumers are actually using their mobile for functions other than phone calls. In December, 74.3 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers used text messaging on their mobile device; ownloaded applications were used by 47.6 percent of subscribers (up 5.1 percentage points), while browsers were used by 47.5 percent (up 4.6 percentage points). Accessing of social networking sites or blogs increased 3.8 percentage points to 35.3 percent of mobile subscribers. Game-playing was done by 31.4 percent of the mobile audience (up 2.6 percentage points), while 23.8 percent listened to music on their phones (up 2.9 percentage points). Google just revealed in its fourth quarter earnings, Android has been activated on over 250 million devices, up 50 million since November of last year. But iOS is growing as well. Nielsen reported recently new smartphone buyers are more interested in the iPhone (particularly the 4S) vs. Android phones.

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Why It’s Good News HealthIT is So Bad

user — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:06:11 +0000

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase , the CEO of Avado.com , a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist . Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft’s Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave . Image is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I know of no industry where technology is as despised as it is in healthcare. It’s telling that it took government money to incentivize healthcare providers to finally do what virtually every other industry has done — apply information technology to streamline processes. “Established technology is being given a federally funded new lease on life,” athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush said. “Traditional health software now is on Medicare, being kept alive like grandma.” Bush dubs this program as the “cash for clunkers” program for health IT leaving no doubt what his opinion is regarding the legacy vendors’ solutions. While one might dismiss this coming from a company with a dog in the fight, the feeling is nearly universal amongst doctors who are the most important users (besides patients who are almost completely ignored). Perhaps the best evidence of how abysmal legacy healthIT is, is that even the market leader is having trouble getting medical practices to adopt their software despite huge subsidies from large health systems. In the course of discussions with large health systems, they often proudly shared the deployment of a mega EMR and how they were offering subsidies to affiliated physicians to adopt the same system. When pressed about how broadly it was being adopted by non-employee physicians (i.e., MDs who have a choice), the penetration was staggeringly low — 2/10 of one percent was the average of those who shared figures. This was despite the fact that they were subsidizing 85% of the cost (the maximum allowed by Stark Law ). When I’ve spoken with physicians who have rejected the entreaties from their affiliated health systems, it’s more than the expense (even after a massive subsidy, it’s still several thousand dollars plus monthly costs). Rather, the complexity and lack of user friendliness is the bigger driver. HealthIT Vendors Reflect Flawed Reimbursement Model All of this begs the question, “why is HealthIT so bad that massive government and health system subsidies are required to drive adoption?” And how can this possibly be good news? Let me address the issues and then I’ll conclude with the good news. While it may seem easy to bash legacy HealthIT vendors, my experience has been that vendors reflect their customers. I would take this a step further. In the case of healthcare, customers reflect the reimbursement model. It’s a reimbursement model that is so broken Americans pay nearly twice as much as other countries to get inferior outcomes. The “do more, bill more” reimbursement model in the U.S. has been at the root of healthcare’s hyperinflation (fun fact: while what we spend on all other goods and services has increased 8x since the 60′s, healthcare costs have skyrocketed 274x). The byproduct is a focus on activity rather than value/outcome, the primary IT focus has been how you can get more bills out faster. Despite the fact that most physicians call the patient the most important member of the care team, in reality, the “patient” as architected into most HealthIT has been little more than a vessel to attach billing codes to. More recently, there’s been a drive to add so-called Patient Portals to involve the patient. However, these have been more driven by marketing objectives than truly rethinking the care delivery model. Making the patients central in a system designed for optimizing billing is even less likely than Yahoo or Microsoft surpassing Facebook in social networking. Both require a different architecture from the ground up. As I wrote earlier, EMR portals are like driving a 747 to the grocery store — it can get you there but it’s going to be far more expensive and complex than necessary. Convoluted Decisions Processes Have Killed Great Products When I’m asked why I didn’t get back in to healthcare sooner, I share with them a story from my past. I was at a well recognized hospital implementing their patient accounting system and we needed to decide the unique patient identifier scheme. It’s an important decision, but they were in year seven of debating what the new scheme should be! It may seem like an absurd example, but it’s indicative of how interminable and almost crazy the decision processes can be in a health system. It virtually guarantees that the only companies that can survive those processes are incumbent vendors — breakthrough young companies die on the vine waiting those processes out. If you wonder why MUMPS is still widely used in healthcare, it’s because old vendors, and old technology persists in healthcare. Separation of Consumptive User and Economic Buyer The role of Chief Medical Informatics Officer (CMIO) is relatively new and long overdue. The idea is a senior level physician plays an integral role in IT decision processes. However, there are still many scenarios where the people who will actually use software are a great distance from those who pay for the software. In other industries, the rise of SaaS software has closed or eliminated this gap where you see individuals and departments not waiting around for IT to pick something that they don’t want to use. Rather, they can directly contract with the technology company. This has only just begun in healthcare. There was a parallel scenario 10-15 years ago when multi-million dollar CRM implementations from companies like Siebel weren’t embraced the way Salesforce.com has been embraced today. A key driver of this is the user of Salesforce.com is often only a step removed from the purchaser. One Item For Which HealthIT Vendors are Fully Responsible Most of the items above put the root cause at the provider level. However, there persists one insidious practice. There are various ways to ensure customers stick around as long as possible — lock-in or loyalty. Successful SaaS businesses are built on the loyalty model. Rather than holding data hostage or locking customers into long agreements, they believe that the more freedom you give customers, the more loyal they become (assuming you deliver the goods). In contrast, there’s still the old model of lock-in used in many HealthIT vendors. For example, they make it expensive and/or difficult to get access to data in a system to keep any in-house or 3rd party built system from being integrated. These vendors pull it over on naive customers by telling them that it’s a ton of work when it’s only a ton of work if that vendor is incompetent. Like escaping an abusive relationship, healthcare providers must take action or else they reward that behavior. The Good News Tectonic shifts are underway. Smart healthcare providers are trying to avoid making the same mistakes newspaper companies made in the late 90′s. For those of us used to the convoluted, interminable decision processes of the past, it is breathtaking to see the decision processes of today. As I detailed in the Rise of Nimble Medicine , not only are entrepreneurial ventures popping up like weeds, healthcare providers are getting far more aggressive about trying new models without doing the equivalent of organizing the Roman Legions. Naturally, when a project is hugely expensive and will take months to implement, it’s going to lead to a longer decision process. However, the principles we see in agile software development , are spreading to healthcare delivery. I’ve seen scenarios, such as in telehealth, where the time from initially seeing technology to moving into implementation takes less than a week. The startups that are adept at finding the nimble organizations will have great success. The reward for healthcare providers in rationalizing their decision processes is they will no longer have to settle for rigid software that is difficult to implement. The best news for healthtech startups is that, by definition, legacy HealthIT is optimized around the flawed reimbursement model of the past. The disruptive innovators instinctually know that they will either have to build their own software (if there isn’t off-the-shelf software) or they can work with software companies that allow them to be nimble. There is universal agreement that anything less than a fundamental redesign of healthcare will fall short in solving the most important problem the U.S. and the world faces — spiraling healthcare costs. Related story: Money Ball for Medicine – Business Models for Healthcare

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Why It’s Good News HealthIT is So Bad

Showyou Rolls Out All-New iPad App With Improved Video Discovery, Better Social Tools

ACMAir — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:00:40 +0000

Social video browsing app Showyou just launched version 3.0 of its iPad application, a major update with a ton of new features. Competing in a hot space with competitors like Fanhattan , Shelby.tv , Squrl , Vodio and others, Showyou offers a grid-like view for browsing the videos your friends are sharing on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and Vimeo. Once connected, you can watch any of the over 30 million videos indexed by the Showyou search engine. With version 3.0, four months in the making, the focus is offering users a better way to find content and new ways to drill down deeper into their favorite videos and topics. The Showyou application now pulls in over 5,000,000 videos retrieved from users’ Facebook and Twitter feeds per day, and includes nearly 700,000,000 “social signals” (data from tweets, other metadata) in its search index. According to founder Mark Hall, Showyou is now handling a video volume of 150 videos per second and 5 million videos per day – numbers which represent the incredible amount of videos being socially shared across various networks. With the new version of the iPad app, the aim was to use this massive archive of data to improve Showyou’s social discovery mechanisms. In Showyou 3.0, users can tap on friends’ user icons within the app which will then launch a grid of the videos they’ve shared. Another update involves a new category grid feature that lets you see the top videos within a given topical area. You can also now browse the videos by social network (e.g. those shared on Facebook, Twitter, etc.), toggle between popular and recent videos, and browse through videos associated with Twitter hashtags, among other things. There are actually dozens of features in this new update, some of which involve user interface improvements which, like the above, are easier to see and use than they are to explain. Hall tries to simplify things, saying “we’ve gone from this 2D grid to being able to drill down into more specific grids for users… and that interaction is going to really fun.” (Well, yes it is.) But given the increasingly crowded social video discovery space, the question is not necessarily why is Showyou fun, but why is it the one to beat? Hall says that one of the app’s distinguishing features is its “immersive, engaging UI – it’s really unique.” The other thing is that the app is “really data-driven,” he says. “Doing that at scale, I don’t think anyone’s close to us,” he says, “And using that data in really intelligent ways to make the grid more responsive and intelligent is another area where we are excelling and will continue to excel. It’s not just a pretty interface, it’s a pretty interface powered by incredibly sophisticated data.” The updated version of Showyou is live now in the iTunes App Store here .

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Showyou Rolls Out All-New iPad App With Improved Video Discovery, Better Social Tools

Facebook’s S-1 And The Largest Shareholders: Who Owns What?

Administrator — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 03:08:32 +0000

Facebook’s S-1 is finally out and we can now see how much stock Zuck, investors, employees and others own in the company. Facebook has raised a total of $2.4 billion in funding and seeks to raise as much as $5 billion in a public offering. Mark Zuckerberg is the largest shareholder with 28.2 percent of the company. He’s followed by Accel (invested in 2005) and Accel Partner Jim Breyer who owns 11.4 percent of the company. Co-founder Dustin Moskovitz owns 7.6 percent of the company, followed by DST with 5.4 percent. Peter Thiel, Facebook’s first investor, owns 2.5 percent. COO Sheryl Sandberg has 1,899,986 shares. Zuck will be selling shares in the offering, according to the filing. Assuming a $100 billion valuation, Zuckerberg is worth a whopping $28 billion. Accel’s share is worth $11.4 billion. Peter Thiel’s share is worth $2.5 billion. VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer owns 2,101,870 shares, CFO David Ebersman owns 2,174,999 shares, and General counsel Theodore Ullyot owns 1,863,656 shares (all own less than 1 percent of the company). Investor and board member Marc Andreessen owns 3,571,431 shares. Other investors in Facebook include Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Marc Pincus, Elevation Partners, La-Ka Shing, Elevation Partners, Founders Fund, Goldman Sachs, And Meritech, but these investors are not listed as 5 percent or more shareholders. Employees not listed in the chart but who also own large portions of stock include Sean Parker, and co-founder Eduardo Saverin.

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Microsoft Updates Kinect Hardware For Official Windows Release

blogger — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:10:12 +0000

We’ve known for some time that Microsoft would be bringing official Kinect support to Windows this week, but one thing they kept quiet was the fact that they’d be debuting a new version of the hardware as well. It’s not tiny, as some hoped, or built into the bezel of a laptop, as we know it will be eventually , but it does improve on the original in a few ways. The most visible improvement for most people will be a slight improvement of the minimum distance required for the device to operate. The Xbox 360 Kinect required you to be around 50cm away at least, and the Kinect for Windows will go down to 40cm — about 16 inches. That means it can sit on a monitor on a user’s desk and capture movements without the user having to scoot back at all. Other improvements are of the softer variety. Microsoft has improved the tracking software, providing an improved raw sensor stream, better color/depth synchronization, and more accurate skeletal tracking. On the downside, the new version costs quite a bit more: the new Kinect for Windows is going for $250 , while the 360 version is selling for just $100 at the Microsoft Store right now. The justification for the price seems to be that the new version has been updated to support multiple systems and situations, rather than the standard 360 hardware it’s been running on for the last year. And I’m guessing they’re not subsidizing this price quite as heavily. The official SDK won’t work with the 360 version, it seems, though you can still download the beta SDK, which works fine but officially can’t be used for commercial applications. Microsoft says they’ve been working with hundreds of companies and seeing lots of unique applications and ideas, so hopefully we’ll see some of those hit soon. In the mean time our Kinect tag has lots of projects that demonstrate the versatility of the device.

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Microsoft Updates Kinect Hardware For Official Windows Release