Microsoft chairman and soon-to-retire chief visionary Bill Gates has been touting alternative forms of computer-human interaction for years, such as tablet computing and voice recognition.
On Wednesday, the company said it will deliver on that promise by the end of the year with a device that presents information using an intuitive touch-screen interface based on a display embedded in a table top. The announcement, made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, came at The Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital” conference being held this week in Carlsbad, Calif.
Dubbed Microsoft Surface, the computer and its interface is the result of six years of collaboration between the company’s hardware and Microsoft Research (MSR) divisions. But far from being a research project never meant to see the light of day, the company announced four launch customers for the product.
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The Surface.
Source: Microsoft |
That doesn’t mean you can look for them at your neighborhood computer store any time soon. Right now, at least, the devices are too expensive for the average household. While Microsoft would not reveal the actual cost to customers, they will likely range from about $5,000 to $10,000 each, a Microsoft spokesperson told internetnews.com.
Instead, Microsoft intends to sell the first versions to commercial enterprises. Indeed, Microsoft executives see markets for Surface in hundreds of thousands of restaurants, hotels and retail locations.
Ballmer announced that Surface’s launch customers are Harrah’s Entertainment, which is looking to initially install them as virtual concierge kiosks in its seven Las Vegas casinos. Similarly, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide will launch Surface at Sheraton hotels and resorts in its lobbies, including the ability to browse for music and download books with the use of a credit card.
International Game Technology will create gaming devices and systems via a development and distribution agreement with Microsoft – video poker on steroids anyone?
Finally, T-Mobile USA, owned by Deutsche Telekom AG, announced it is looking to use Surface devices as in-store kiosks where customers could compare phones and wireless plans simply by placing them side-by-side on the table top.
“Surface is one example of how we’re turning our stores into a playground where customers can comfortably explore exciting new products in their own personal way,” Bonita Inza, vice president of retail at T-Mobile USA, said in a Microsoft statement.
No Mouse, No Keyboard
First begun as a joint project between MSR researchers and Microsoft’s hardware group in 2001, it has evolved into a commercial product that some analysts say is viable – even innovative.
Surface features a 30-inch diagonal square display built into a table configuration. It consists of a computer running a customized version of Windows Vista, a rear projection screen and five cameras that look through the screen to recognize and read items placed on the surface, as well as to track hand gestures and touch. It has wired 10/100Mbit Ethernet and wireless 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth 2.0 support built in.
It supports multiple touch points – Microsoft says “dozens and dozens” — as well as multiple users simultaneously, so more than one person could be using it at once, or one person could be doing multiple tasks.
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‘Digital’ interaction digitally.
Source: Microsoft |
The term “surface” describes how it’s used. There is no keyboard or mouse. All interactions with the computer are done via touching the surface of the computer’s screen with hands or brushes, or via wireless interaction with devices such as smartphones, digital cameras or Microsoft’s Zune music player. Because of the cameras, the device can also recognize physical objects; for instance credit cards or hotel “loyalty” cards.
This ability to actually deal with physical objects is one of Surface’s unique capabilities. The idea, said Microsoft, is to bridge the physical and virtual worlds.
“It’s very intuitive to use [and] it’s not like anything else out there,” Matt Rosoff, analyst for consumer strategy and corporate affairs at industry newsletter Directions on Microsoft, told internetnews.com. “It’s a new category [and] I think it’s very innovative.”
Want to move digital pictures around on the tabletop? Use your finger to push them around so you can see them better. Need to resize a favorite shot? Grab two opposite corners with your fingers and drag them apart to enlarge it.
For instance, a user could set a digital camera down on the tabletop and wirelessly transfer pictures into folders on Surface’s hard drive. Or setting a music player down would let a user drag songs from his or her home music collection directly into the player, or between two players, using a finger – or transfer mapping information for the location of a restaurant where you just made reservations through a Surface tabletop over to a smartphone just before you walk out the door.
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Plan a day out.
Source: Microsoft |
And whereas Microsoft usually doesn’t build hardware to sell – like tablet PCs or mobile phones – this time the company smells money.
“We see this as a multi billion dollar category, and we envision a time when surface computing technologies will be pervasive, from tabletops and counters to the hallway mirror,” Microsoft CEO Ballmer said in a statement.
When will all this transpire? Surface will begin surfacing at its four partners’ locations by the end of the year, Microsoft says.
Microsoft executives also see broader applications for surface computing, including in schools, businesses and homes and in several form factors, such as built into refrigerators, walls, or counter tops.
And make no mistake, Microsoft intends to sell a lot of Surface devices into consumer householders a few years down the line – hopefully, in three to five years, the spokesperson said.
“It’s what Windows Media Center [Edition] probably should have been,” Rob Enderle, principal analyst at research firm Enderle Group told internetnews.com. “Even though it’s not initially slated for your living room, it would fit well there once the price comes down.”
Gates and Apple CEO Steve Jobs were scheduled to share the stage Wednesday evening for an “unrehearsed, unscripted, onstage conversation” with Journal writers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, according to the event’s producers.
Source: www.internetnews.com
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Google has posted a Release Candidate of Google Web Toolkit (GWT) 1.4, the latest version of its developer tool for building AJAX-based Web applications and sites. Bruce Johnson, technical lead on the project, announced the release candidate on a Googleblog.
GWT 1.4 RC is the first release of the toolkit to make heavy use of contributions from open source developers. Johnson wrote that “Many of the biggest improvements in GWT 1.4 RC came from ideas and patches contributed by the community,” and offered his thanks to the developers.
Johnson said that ImageBundle is the single biggest “have-to-see-it-to-believe-it feature of GWT 1.4 RC.” This feature makes it simple to combine dozens of images into a single “image strip,” like a slide show, so instead of an HTTP request for each image, only one HTTP request is needed for the entire collection.
Version 1.4 features optimized code that is 15 to 20 percent smaller, which should translate into faster load times. Optimizations to the startup sequence should reduce the size of startup script by 80 percent, and elimination of HTTP round-trips could reduce the load time for modules by 33 percent.
Also with this version the RPC is no longer tied exclusively to Java servlets. Developers can connect to their choice of Java back-ends. Cross-site script inclusion is now supported as well.
The library and widget collection have been significantly expanded and enhanced to add new functionality to applications, plus there’s a benchmark for comparing code performance.
Steven Yaskin, chief technology officer of Queplix, said his company has been using GWT to assist in building its services for migrating legacy CRM applications to a Web 2.0 world. After assessing a number of tools, he said he saw a clear advantage in GWT.
“What made us go with GWT was Google showed tremendous commitment to the open source community in general. Since then I think that was one of the greatest decisions we ever made, not just from being endorsed by Google but from a technology point of view as well,” he told internetnews.com.
With the new release, Yaskin has noticed the improvements in performance. “Some preliminary figures show a twenty percent decrease in load time, bringing it closer to or even superseding the desktop experience. The system definitely allowed our product to behave like an installed desktop app while running inside a browser. So we were able to leverage all of the AJAX technologies,” he said.
Google will demonstrate GWT on Thursday at its Google Developer Day conference. It has not set a release date for the final version of GWT.
Source:www.internetnews.com
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SAN JOSE, Calif. — With the passing of each fiscal quarter, it’s increasingly clear Google’s got a good thing going connecting the world to the fruits of Web developer labor. And it’s not about to let up.
Today at its Google Developer Day event here, Google vice president Jeff Huber emphasized the search giant’s plans to help developers “integrate, reach and build.” In his keynote address, Huber brought out a series of company engineers to talk about the latest tools, Google Mashup Editor, Mapplets and Gears.
Starting with “integrate,” Google product manager Paul McDonald took the stage to help Huber explain Google Mashup Editor. McDonald said the tool is designed to help developers build mashups –the small Web applications that tap into Google’s various APIs–by providing server, hosting, data bases, and authentication and other Web services, all brought together in a single AJAX interface and coupled with an editing screen and easy access to Google-supported sandbox testing.
Turning to how Google can help developers with “reach,” Huber touted the over 500 million unique visits to Google’s site each month.
“The good news is we like to share,” Huber said. He pointed to the room Google makes for third party Gadgets all over its network. For an example of the kind of impact this sharing can have, Huber pointed to a pair of small, seemingly simple applications–a PacMan gadget and To-Do list gadget–and drew an audible reaction from the audience after telling them those application developers combined to draw over 11 million unique visitors last week alone.
The idea behind Google Mapplets is that it will make these sorts of gadgets easier for developers to combine with Google Maps, thus making them even more appealing to the millions of visitors to Google’s network. Examples Product manager Tai Tran demonstrated WalkJogRun.com, which makes a gadget available for those who want to use a Google Map in planning their exercise routes.
The last product manager to join Huber on stage was Othman Laraki, who detailed the new Google Gears, a Web browser plug-in that allows Web developers to add offline access to Web applications such as Google’s own Gmail.. Google announced it’s already used Gears to adapt its Google Reader application for use offline.
Huber stressed that Google hopes Gears will become an industry standard. Adobe chief software architect Kevin Lynch, joined Huber on stage and gave Gears a strong endorsement.
Source: www.internetnews.com
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SAN FRANCISCO: Google announced Friday that it bought FeedBurner, a firm specializing in delivering podcasts, weblogs, news and advertising to Internet browsers.
Chicago-based FeedBurner is a “web feed” firm that lets online publishers constantly send updated news, commentary and other content directly to readers with tools such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS).
“We are thrilled with this acquisition,” Google vice president of product management Susan Wojcicki said during a conference call with reporters.
“We believe the two companies are very complementary and it will enable Google to bring hundreds of thousands of new sites into AdSense network.”
Buying FeedBurner lets Google expand its online advertising empire deep into the fast-growing world of direct feeds.
FeedBurner simplified the process by which users create drop-down boxes in browser windows to receive continuous updates from preferred publishers of news, blogs or other web content.
More than 763,000 “live feeds” run through FeedBurner daily delivering content from approximately 430,000 publishers including major news organizations, said co-founder and “new Google executive” Dick Costolo.
“The number of feed publishers continues to explode and the number of people subscribing has exploded,” Costolo said during the conference call.
“The spiraling complexity we are seeing in the world of media distribution is not over. FeedBurner’s focus is providing the right media to the right end-point.”
Along with news companies instantly updating Internet users merchants are increasingly using the technique to spread word of special offers, such as travel companies sending alerts about seasonal deals, Costolo said.
FeedBurner also excels at tracking what people are reading or watching and which ads are hitting their marks, according to Wojcicki. Google has a proven mastery of targeting ads to online search results.
“The opportunity it fills for Google is we have not been as active in providing a monetization option for feeds and that is what FeedBurner does,” Wojcicki said.
“We want AdWords advertisers to have access to the feeds and publishers on FeedBurner to have access to other Google services. We think this will be a win with users, publishers and advertisers.”
Financial terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed. According to some reports Google was to pay 100 million dollars for FeedBurner, which raised 10 million dollars in venture capital since its launch in 2004.
Costolo and Wojciki said the companies were intent on quickly integrating FeedBurner into Google.
FeedBurner’s headquarters will remain in Chicago but its workers will spend a lot of time in Google offices worldwide to weave its technology into the Mountain View, California-company’s global operations, Costolo said.
“The overlap with the depth and breadth of services that Google provides is almost too perfect,” Costolo said. “The reason we are both excited by this relationship is the ability to make one plus one equal three.”
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It’s the end of an era at VeriSign - Stratton Sclavos, the company’s CEO, has resigned. “[T]he leading provider of digital infrastructure for the networked world” will now be managed by William A. Roper, Jr.
Why Sclavos stepped down remains unclear, however; an official statement from VeriSign mentions a potential reason - “the review of the company’s historical stock option grant practices by an ad hoc group of independent members of VeriSign’s Board of Directors is substantially completed” - but then goes on to point out that “[t]he review did not find intentional wrongdoing by any current member of senior management, including Sclavos.”
In the end, we may never know. Sclavos is, in any event, staying positive, and has stated, “I want to thank the people of VeriSign for their support and contributions over the past 12 years. I am proud of my role in building VeriSign into the great company it has become, and wish all of my associates the very best in the coming years.”
Sounds like a nice fella, right? No word on any “golden parachutes,” but it seems reasonable to assume that any CEO who’s wisely managed his (or her) money has nothing to worry about.
VeriSign’s stockholders also appear to be in the clear - after an initial dive in value, the company’s shares are now trading near a 52-week high. Yet, from our eBusiness angle, it’ll be interesting to see if Sclavos’s resignation has an effect on domain name prices and his (former) company’s scuffles with ICANN.
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It’s a well-known fact that Google frequently lets its employees do their own thing on company time. Many of those employees then come up with brilliant ideas, but the search engine giant - wealthy as it is - doesn’t have money to pursue them all. In the long term, do those employees go on to get rich, or get screwed?
Robert Cringely votes for “rich.” After considering several aspects of the company’s operations, he writes, “[W]e’ll shortly see a dribble, then a river, then a flood of former Google employees with time, money, and experience, and some of them will have the drive to realize the dreams of those thousands of ideas that were rejected by their former company.”
That sounds like a pretty sweet deal - work for a famously “fun” company, then go do whatever you like best. But Google Watch’s Steve Bryant found a flaw with the plan, and it relates to a clause in Google’s standard employee agreement form; Googlers appear to forfeit the rights to just about everything they think of while working for the company.
“In other words, everything you do here, stays here,” writes Bryant. “So that fabled 20% free time at Google is really just 20% more time for Google. . . . Google knows what it’s doing. And while I have no doubt that the current Google employees will go on to make wondrous companies, Google is ensuring they snatch up most of the good ideas first. In that light, working for Google could be the worst decision an entrepreneur ever makes.”
Yikes. I don’t know if free food balances that out.
Source: www.webpronews.com
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Once upon a time, if you typed “she invents,” Google tried to tell you it was “he invents.” This applied to a lot of other queries, as well, and a number of people grew unhappy with these apparent examples of sexism. Now Google’s programmers seem to have gone in and tweaked the engine, and “she” is allowed to invent things.
After all, being accused of sexism isn’t good for a company’s reputation, regardless of whether the charges are true. (As Valleywag’s Nick Denton interpreted an official Google statement, “It’s the world that’s sexist; we just index it.”)
And so, though it remains unclear what had to be done or undone, Google fine-tuned this aspect of its search engine. “It might be Google engineers manually corrected this using a blacklist, or they advanced their algorithm to return more relevant spellcheckings for cases like these,” writes Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped.
Problem solved? Not quite. Lingering cases of insulting “did you mean” suggestions may still be out there, as Seth Finkelstein discovered. His search for “she invent” returned a “did you mean” of “he inventt.” But as Finkelstein asked, “Why is this significant?”
“Because ‘she’ is a common English word, ‘inveent’ is not a common English word, and the naive correction of ‘inveent’ to ‘invent’ should yield a suggestion of ‘she invent,’” he answered. “But it seems to be doing some sort of statistical best-match for the phrase as a whole. . . . [I]t shows it’s harder than it might appear to remove all aspects of structural bias (which is not to trivialize addressing an obvious case).”
Well, Google’s sexist “did you mean”s may not be entirely gone, but at least they’re on the way out.
Source: www.webpronews.com
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Submitted by David A. Utter on Fri, 05/25/2007 - 17:25.
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The early results of a click fraud study by Fair Isaac found advertisers being charged for illicit clicks, at a far higher rate than search engines like Google claim takes place.
The 10 to 15 percent rate of pathological traffic hitting Fair Isaac’s small sample of advertisers, less than a dozen sites, far exceeds the 0.02 percent rate touted by Google.
It’s news that has grabbed the attention of the search industry. Even though Fair Isaac has been careful to note it only discussed early results of its study at InterACT 2007, the figures they have found for advertisers being charged for illicit clicks corroborates some third party research into the matter.
We talked with Dr. Joseph Milana, who worked on the Fair Isaac click fraud study. He stressed the expertise Fair Isaac possesses after years of fraud detection in other industries, and that it could be applied to illicit clicks.
A follow-up message we received from Google bears out Dr. Milana’s point. Google and Fair Isaac both use statistical anomaly detection as part of their click fraud detection process. Here’s Google’s response:
• We have post-click data from thousands of advertisers through our conversion tracking tool. They are claiming post-click data from a “handful” of advertisers.
• It sounds like FI is doing the same kind of analysis we’re doing - statistical anomaly detection - only with considerable less data. That is, if you assume an advertiser has a 1% CTR, that means they are receiving 100 ad impressions (no one but Google gets ad impression data) for every one click. As a result, Google has 101 pieces of data to analyze vs. their 1.
• Most clicks don’t result in conversions, and in fact many/most (depending on the site) clicks don’t result in much “advertiser side data”. Imagine legitimate users who click an ad and then immediately leave if they don’t like their site. That’s obviously not click fraud.
One point Dr. Milana made at InterACT will be of interest to the statisticians among our readership. He said Google’s automated effectiveness claims at detecting click fraud would be roughly equal to a Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test score of 95.
He called that figure “not believable.” Without some more openness from Google into their fraud detection methods, which they guard closely for the protection of their advertisers, or more results from the Fair Isaac test, it’s hard to tell who to believe right now.
Google, Fair Isaac, Click Fraud
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Source: www.webpronews.com
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