Computed·Blg

By Sebastian Anthony

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The Apple “Let’s Talk iPhone” event has concluded. Tim Cook and a slew of Apple execs have taken it in turns to tell us about the latest and greatest Apple goodies, and rather underwhelmingly there’s no iPhone 5 and just significant takeaways: a cheaper and faster iPhone 4S, and an interesting software package called Siri. You can read all about the iPhone 4S on our sister sites Geek and PC Mag — here we’re going to talk about Siri.

If we look past the rather Indian (and feminine) name, Siri is a portable (and pocketable) virtual personal assistant. She has a speech-recognition module which works out what you’re saying, and then a natural language parser combs through your words to work out what you’re trying to do. Finally, an artificial intelligence gathers the possible responses and works out which one is most likely to be accurate, given the context, your geographical location, iOS’s current state, and so on.

Siri is, in essence, a computer that you can interrogate for answers, kind of like a search engine that runs locally on your phone. If you’ve seen IBM’s Watson play Jeopardy, Siri is basically a cut-down version. She isn’t intelligent per se, but if she has access to enough data, she can certainly appear intelligent. Siri’s data sources are open APIs, like Wikipedia or Wolfram Alpha, and in theory there’s no limit to the number of sources that can be added (though it does require significant developer time to add a new data set). For now you can ask Siri about the weather or the definition of a word, but in the future, if Apple links Siri up to United Airlines, you’ll be able to book a plane ticket, just by talking. Because Siri runs locally, she can also send SMSes or set reminders, or anything else that Apple (or app developers) allow her to do.

Artificial intelligence isn’t cheap in terms of processing power, though: Siri is expected to only run on the iPhone 4S, which sports a new and significantly faster processor than its predecessors, the A5. Siri probably makes extensive use of Apple’s new cloud computer cluster, too, much in the same way that Amazon Silk splits web browsing between the cloud and the local device.

Noise

That’s enough about what Siri is and how it works. Let’s talk about whether anyone will actually use Siri, which is fundamentally a glorified voice control search engine. Voice commands have existed in some semblance since at least as far back as the Nokia 3310, which was released in 2000. Almost every phone since then has had the ability to voice dial, or in the case of modern smartphones, voice activate apps and features.

When was the last time you saw someone talk to their phone? Driving and other hands-otherwise-occupied activities don’t count. When was the last time you walked down the street and heard someone loudly dictate “call mom” into their phone? Can you really see yourself saying “Siri, I want a kebab” in public?

It might lose its social stigma if everyone talks to their phone, but isn’t it already annoying enough that people swan down streets with hands-free headsets, blabbing away? It’s not like voice recognition is at the stage where you can whisper or mumble a command into your phone, either: you’re going to have to say, nice and clearly, “how do I get to the bank?” in public. Now imagine that you’ve just walked past the guy who’s talking to Siri — is he asking you for directions, or Siri? Now imagine what it would be like if everyone around you is having a one-sided phone conversation or talking to Siri.

Finally, there’re practical implications to consider, which Apple usually ignores in its press events. For example, will Siri only recognize my voice? What if I leave my phone in the living room and my girlfriend shouts out “honey, we should go to that Italian restaurant” — will Siri then make a reservation? On a more nefarious note, will my wife be able to say “Siri, show me my husband’s hidden email.” When walking down a street, will Siri overhear other conversations and react accordingly?

Siri will be fantastic in the car, that’s for certain. She will also be very accommodating when you’re on your own — imagine shouting across the room “Siri, do I need to wear a jacket today?” or “Siri, download the latest episode of Glee.” Siri will be unusable in public, though, while on the move — and that’s the one time where you really don’t want to be looking down at that darn on-screen keyboard.

The technicians at SecureAlert’s monitoring center in Salt Lake City sit in front of computer screens filled with multicolored dots. Each dot represents someone on parole or probation wearing one of the company’s location-reporting ankle cuffs. As the people move around a city, their dots move around the map. “It looks a bit like an animated gumball machine,” says Steven Florek, SecureAlert’s vice-president of offender insights and knowledge management. As long as the gumballs don’t go where they’re not supposed to, all is well.

The company works with law enforcement agencies around the U.S. to keep track of about 15,000 ex-cons, meaning it must collect and analyze billions of GPS signals transmitted by the cuffs each day. The more traditional part of the work consists of making sure that people under house arrest stay in their houses. But advances in the way information is collected and sorted mean SecureAlert isn’t just watching; the company says it can actually predict when a crime is about to go down. If that sounds like the “pre-cogs”—crime prognosticators—in the movie Minority Report, Florek thinks so, too. He calls SecureAlert’s newest capability “pre-crime” detection.

Using data from the ankle cuffs and other sources, SecureAlert identifies patterns of suspicious behavior. A person convicted of domestic violence, for example, might get out of jail and set up a law-abiding routine. Quite often, though, SecureAlert’s technology sees such people backslide and start visiting the restaurants or schools or other places their victims frequent. “We know they’re looking to force an encounter,” Florek says. If the person gets too close for comfort, he says, “an alarm goes off and a flashing siren appears on the screen.” The system doesn’t go quite as far as Minority Report, where the cops break down doors and blow away the perpetrators before they perpetrate. Rather, the system can call an offender through a two-way cellphone attached to the ankle cuff to ask what the person is doing, or set off a 95-decibel shriek as a warning to others. More typically, the company will notify probation officers or police about the suspicious activity and have them investigate. Presumably with weapons holstered. “It’s like a strategy game,” Florek says. (BeforeBloomberg Businessweek went to press, Florek left the company for undisclosed reasons.)

It didn’t used to be that a company the size of SecureAlert, with about $16 million in annual revenue, could engage in such a real-world chess match. For decades, only Fortune 500-scale corporations and three-letter government agencies had the money and resources to pull off this kind of data crunching. Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) is famous for using data analysis to adjust its inventory levels and prices. FedEx (FDX) earned similar respect for tweaking its delivery routes, while airlines and telecommunications companies used this technology to pinpoint and take care of their best customers. But even at the most sophisticated corporations, data analytics was often a cumbersome, ad hoc affair. Companies would pile information in “data warehouses,” and if executives had a question about some demographic trend, they had to supplicate “data priests” to tease the answers out of their costly, fragile systems. “This resulted in a situation where the analytics were always done looking in the rearview mirror,” says Paul Maritz, chief executive officer of VMware (VMW). “You were reasoning over things to find out what happened six months ago.”

In the early 2000s a wave of startups made it possible to gather huge volumes of data and analyze it in record speed—à la SecureAlert. A retailer such as Macy’s (M) that once pored over last season’s sales information could shift to looking instantly at how an e-mail coupon for women’s shoes played out in different regions. “We have a banking client that used to need four days to make a decision on whether or not to trade a mortgage-backed security,” says Charles W. Berger, CEO of ParAccel, a data analytics startup founded in 2005 that powers SecureAlert’s pre-crime operation. “They do that in seven minutes now.”

Now a second wave of startups is finding ways to use cheap but powerful servers to analyze new categories of data such as blog posts, videos, photos, tweets, DNA sequences, and medical images. “The old days were about asking, ‘What is the biggest, smallest, and average?’?” says Michael Olson, CEO of startup Cloudera. “Today it’s, ‘What do you like? Who do you know?’ It’s answering these complex questions.”

The big bang in data analytics occurred in 2006 with the release of an open-source system called Hadoop. The technology was created by a software consultant named Doug Cutting, who had been examining a series of technical papers released by Google (GOOG). The papers described how the company spread tremendous amounts of information across its data centers and probed that pool of data for answers to queries. Where traditional data warehouses crammed as much information as possible on a few expensive computers, Google chopped up databases into bite-size chunks and sprinkled them among tens of thousands of cheap computers. The result was a lower-cost and higher-capacity system that lots of people can use at the same time. Google uses the technology throughout its operations. Its systems study billions of search results, match them to the first letters of a query, take a guess at what people are looking for, and display suggestions as they type. You can see the bite-size nature of the technology in action on Google Maps as tiny tiles come together to form a full map.

Cutting created Hadoop to mimic Google’s technology so the rest of the world could have a way to sift through massive data sets quickly and cheaply. (Hadoop was the name of his son’s toy elephant.) The software first took off at Web companies such as Yahoo! (YHOO) and Facebook and then spread far and wide, with Walt Disney (DIS), the New York Times, Samsung, and hundreds of others starting their own projects. Cloudera, where Cutting, 48, now works, makes its own version of Hadoop and has sales partnerships withHewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Dell (DELL).

Dozens of startups are trying to develop easier-to-use versions of Hadoop. For example, Datameer, in San Mateo, Calif., has built an Excel-like dashboard that allows regular business people, instead of data priests, to pose questions. “For 20 years you had limited amounts of computing and storage power and could only ask certain things,” says Datameer CEO Stefan Groschupf. “Now you just dump everything in there and ask whatever you want.” Top venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Redpoint Ventures have backed Datameer, while Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, have helped finance Cloudera.

Past technology worked with data that fell neatly into rows and columns—purchase dates, prices, the location of a store. Amazon.com (AMZN), for instance, would use traditional systems to track how many people bought a certain type of camera and for what price. Hadoop can handle data that don’t fit into spreadsheets. That ability, combined with Hadoop’s speedy divide-and-conquer approach to data, lets users get answers to questions they couldn’t even ask before. Retailers can dig into not just what people bought but why they bought it. Amazon can (and does) analyze its website logs to see what other items people look at before they buy that camera, how long they look at them, whether certain colors on a Web page generate more sales—and synthesize all that into real-time intelligence. Are they telling their friends about that camera? Is some new model poised to be the next big hit? “These insights don’t come super easily, but the information is there, and we do have the machine power now to process it and search for it,” says James Markarian, chief technology officer at data specialist Informatica (INFA).

Take the case of U.S. Xpress Enterprises, one of the largest private trucking companies. Through a device installed in the cabs of its 10,000-truck fleet, U.S. Xpress can track a driver’s location, how many times the driver has braked hard in the last few hours, if he sent a text message to the customer saying he would be late, and how long he rested. U.S. Xpress pays particular attention to the fuel economy of each driver, separating out the “guzzlers from the misers,” says Timothy Leonard, U.S. Xpress CTO. Truckers keep the engines running and the air conditioning on after they’ve pulled over for the night. “If you have a 10-hour break, we want your AC going for the first two hours at 70 degrees so you can go to sleep,” says Leonard. “After that, we want it back up to 78 or 79 degrees.” By adjusting the temperature, U.S. Xpress has lowered annual fuel consumption by 62 gallons per truck, which works out to a total of about $24 million per year. Less numerically, the company’s systems also analyze drivers’ tweets and blog posts. “We have a sentiment dashboard that monitors how they are feeling,” Leonard says. “If we see they hate something, we can respond with some new software or policies in a few hours.” The monitoring may come off as Big Brotherish, but U.S. Xpress sees it as key to keeping its drivers from quitting. (Driver turnover is a chronic issue in the trucking business.)

How are IBM (IBM) and the other big players in the data warehousing business responding to all this? In the usual way: They’re buying startups. Last year, IBM bought Netezza for $1.7 billion. HP, EMC (EMC), and Teradata (TDC) have also acquired data analytics companies in the past 24 months.

It’s not going too far to say that data analytics has even gotten hip. The San Francisco offices of startup Splunk have all the of-the-moment accoutrements you’d find at Twitter or Zynga. The engineers work in what amounts to a giant living room with pinball machines, foosball tables, and Hello Kitty-themed cubes. Weekday parties often break out—during a recent visit, it was Mexican fiesta. Employees were wearing sombreros and fake moustaches while a dude near the tequila bar played the bongos.

Splunk got its start as a type of nuts-and-bolts tool in data centers, giving administrators a way to search through data tied to the low-level operations of computers and software. The company indexes “machine events”—the second-by-second records produced by computing devices to keep track of their actions. This could include records of every time a server stores information, or it could be the length of a cell phone call and what type of handset was used. Splunk helps companies search through this morass, looking for events that caused problems or stood out as unusual. “We can see someone visit a shopping website from a certain computer, see that they got an error message while on the lady’s lingerie page, see how many times they tried to log in, where they went after, and what machine in some far-off data center caused the problem,” says Erik Swan, CTO and co-founder of Splunk. While it started as troubleshooting software for data centers, the company has morphed into an analysis tool that can be aimed at fine-tuning fraud detection systems at credit-card companies and measuring the success of online ad campaigns.

A few blocks away from Splunk’s office are the more sedate headquarters of IRhythm Technologies, a medical device startup. IRhythm makes a type of oversize, plastic band-aid called the Zio Patch that helps doctors detect cardiac problems before they become fatal. Patients affix the Zio Patch to their chests for two weeks to measure their heart activity. The patients then mail the devices back to IRhythm’s offices, where a technician feeds the information into Amazon’s cloud computing service. Patients typically wear rivals’ much chunkier devices for just a couple of days and remove them when they sleep or shower—which happen to be when heart abnormalities often manifest. The upside of the waterproof Zio Patch is the length of time that people wear it—but 14 days is a whole lot of data.

IRhythm’s Hadoop system chops the 14-day periods into chunks and analyzes them with algorithms. Unusual activity gets passed along to technicians who flag worrisome patterns to doctors. For quality control of the device itself, IRhythm uses Splunk. The system monitors the strength of the Zio Patch’s recording signals, whether hot weather affects its adhesiveness to the skin, or how long a patient actually wore the device. On the Zio Patch manufacturing floor, IRhythm discovered that operations at some workstations were taking longer than expected. It used Splunk to go back to the day when the problems cropped up and discovered a computer glitch that was hanging up the operation.

Mark Day, IRhythm’s vice-president of research and development, says he’s able to fine-tune his tiny startup’s operations the way a world-class manufacturer like Honda Motor (HMC) or Dell could a couple years ago. Even if he could have afforded the old-line data warehouses, they were too inflexible to provide much help. “The problem with those systems was that you don’t know ahead of time what problems you will face,” Day says. “Now, we just adapt as things come up.”

At SecureAlert, Florek says that despite the much-improved tools, extracting useful meaning from data still requires effort—and in his line of work, sensitivity. If some ankle-cuff-wearing parolee wanders out-of-bounds, there’s a human in the process to make a judgment call. “We are constantly tuning our system to achieve a balance between crying wolf and catching serious situations,” he says. “Sometimes a guy just goes to a location because he got a new girlfriend.”

Via SlashGear

By Chris Burns

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During a lovely September week in 2011, Microsoft Windows 8 was announced and launched for developers. The event this launch occurred at was what Microsoft was presenting as a welcome to Windows 8, especially in regards to the 5,000 developers at BUILD, launching the platform with there eyes directly fixed on applications, the whole situation a large opportunity for developers. This is the beginning of Windows 8 as it exists in a sense that there’s no product launch here from Microsoft, instead there’s an opportunity for 3rd party developers to get on board here right at the start of the next-wave OS. What lies beneath is a living document which takes what Microsoft Windows 8 is at the start here in 2011 and how it will evolve over time.

Three years ago was when Windows 7 launched, since then 450 million copies have sold. Inside September 2011, the amount of users using Windows 7 has finally trumped the amount of users using Windows XP on the consumer market. Microsoft tells us they know this because they’re working with the numbers coming from machines hitting the Windows Update Service. As with any update to a new version of a major operating system, one must ask a similar question as – and you’ll have to allow me to nerd out for a moment here – Alan Bradley from TRON when he asked what changes had REALLY been made to the system that Microsoft would find it necessary to give it a whole new number.

Turns out 1,502 product changes have been made to Windows XP since Microsoft released it to manufacturing, these all being non-security updates. Improvements galore! Now what does this mean for Windows 8? Does it mean that the software will be continuously updated as the folks at Microsoft see ways to improve it? Of course, that’s a given. How many changes have been made between the Windows XP and Windows 7 we’ve known between their inception date and this end-of-summer 2011 timeframe where Windows 8 is released? That’s a number we’ll have to figure out on our own.

Reimagining Windows

Microsoft brings you Windows 8 as a operating system that is said to improve everything they brought forth in Windows 7, and what’s more, every bit of software that runs currently on Windows 7 will be able to run on Windows 8 without a problem.

Chipsets

ARM chips equal integrated engineering. Where X86, Microsoft says, was the same for every system, ARM chips are optimized for unique situations. Like what Microsoft says about software made for working on Windows 7 now also working on Windows 8, so too does everything they present here work on ARM chips.

Boldness

What’s so bold about Windows 8 is that they’re envisioning an operating system that scales from small form factors, keyboardless tablets, all the way up to gigantic servers running hundreds of processors.

Julie Larson Green, Corporate Vice President of the Windows Experience at Microsoft noted during the week of the reveal of Windows 8 that they had started planning Windows 8 in June of 2009, before they even shipped Windows 7 out the door. Of course changes in both industry and technology spark change, and in this mobile landscape and move by many from one platform to another and/or the adoption of several platforms happening by the public, Microsoft planned accordingly. Microsoft wanted to top the release of Windows 7, but they did not want to do it in a way that was either linear or reactive – this being an interesting goal of course at that time as the idea of a tablet computer simply wasn’t a reality at the time – so what is there to react to?

In Windows 7 there were studies on form factor, user action models, and best of all touch. Microsoft has noted that they were the first group to add touch to a major operating system. As you know well, since that time, touch has all but consumed the mobile market, and recent developments in non-mobile computing have trended toward touch as well to a degree. With this, the demand for developers to create apps for every single little function, one by one, this showing itself prevalently again on mobile, but non-mobile beginning to take back what is theirs in the recent past as well with on-device app stores on all machines. These are only two of a whole slew of points Microsoft touched on during the BUILD conference showing off the first real look at Windows 8 in September of 2011.

Tablets and PCs

You begin with a lockscreen (seen at the top of this post). This screen doesn’t look unlike what you’re used to with Windows Phone devices, giving you pre-opening updates about time, date, updates, and of course its all displayed with a background of your choice. One of the new ideas Microsoft has to make this experience unique is “Picture Password”.

What Picture Password consists of is a specific photo or digital image that, when you see it, you’ll know to draw a certain combination of shapes and lines on your display. If you draw the correct combination, you will be logged in. Circles and lines are what’s at play here – perhaps drawing a hat on a squirrel will be your password combo?

Then there’s a Start Screen. This is the place where you’ll return all the time before and after moving to other screens and apps. You’ll again recognize the look of this space as being a rather Windows Phone experience, and as each app is represented by what Microsoft calls a “tile”, you’ll certainly feel at home if you’re an avid Windows Phone user. Each tile has the ability to show off different actions before its activated to reveal the app inside, movement and, for example, feeds showing social networking news. The “serendipity of the web” has here been brought into Windows.

Tiles can express essentially anything you want and are themselves resizable and customizable. Tiles can open up to apps or they can sit by themselves and work. There are “groups” that can hold tiles “like folders” as they say, and there’s a new feature called “Semantic Zoom.” What this Semantic Zoom does is to pull you back from your interface in a way that you’ve never been able to do on a Windows device before. Fast and fluid touch language throughout, allowing you access to all of your media, all of your content, all of your apps at once.

We got hands-on with the first Windows 8 tablet at BUILD 2011 as well, see the video unboxing and hands-on here:

Metro-Style Apps

There is a new kind of app called Metro-Style Apps. The first thing that makes a Metro-Style app what it is full immersion. What Windows has done here is to change what they’ve done in the past, that is adding widgets and “doodads” all around the majority of apps and is now being a bit more humble, letting the app take the show.

Any app on Windows Phone 8 can be turned into a Secondary Tile. You can, for instance, “pin” a webpage to your Start Screen – in this case you’ll have all the same features your original app had, here because this is a webpage and your original app was a web-based app, you’re able to see a changing feed straight from your desktop.

Charms

Charms are next – what this feature, activated by a swipe across your screen, is comprised of several icons, these depending on the app or location inside your system you are at. This may seem intuitive to those of you who’ve been using computers for years and years now, but as software engineers make the transition between mobile and stationary OS being separate to being one in the same, it’s little points like this that make all the difference.

What Microsoft is showing us here in Windows 8 is their next step towards a singularity in operating systems. Moving in and out of apps, shutting them down and opening them up, and even having more than one application open and working at once on the same page. This again is something that desktop mobile operating systems have been able to do for many years now, but as mobile moves into the fold, this is a big step taken.

Windows Key

There’s a button, be it physical or on the screen, wherever, that will always bring you back to your Start Screen. This is your Windows Key. If you’re using a Windows 8 tablet, you’ll likely have a physical or haptic-feedback-filled Windows Key. If you’re using a device with no physical keys, the Windows Key will be in some sneaky places for you to access.

Windows Store

For developers (who will be mentioned many more times before this guide is through), it’s the newly minted Windows Store that should be paid attention to. Windows users will be able to access this store for apps anywhere Windows is sold worldwide. Go wild!

Apps

Microsoft feels that all apps should be able to work together, all of this without any extra work done by the developers of the apps in question. One of the most obvious “contracts” this connectedness will be working on is sharing. Have a bit of content you’d like to share? Grab your Charms, hit the Share Charm, and share it through, for example, “Friend Share.” Here you’re able to contact your contacts through a huge variety of ways – share and go! The data package is taken by one app and sent to another app, all of this possible with any set of apps that have sharing activated.

Sharing can happen from any app in Windows.

Search is next, it being one the most essential bits in any successful computer system, operating systems a must. The Search Charm is present in quite a few apps and in the system to search files. You expect Windows to know how to search files, but here we’ve got a few new options, one of them being autocomplete of options if you like. You search your term and you get results PLUS you get a list of apps that are able to also search themselves. Search a term and find results on your own computer, then search through your web app, search a social networking site, search anything that supports search.

A hypothetical situation for this ability to search and select content from a variety of apps and services is if you’re creating an album of photos on a website. You can search from your local device, your app which seeks photos you’ve got on a cloud on the internet, and an app that seeks photos on your local network. Grab em all without having to launch every single app, all at once with search only. The selling point, if I may be so bold here, is that the apps are what makes up the system. Just like console video game systems, inkjet printers, and… well… every home computer in history, essentially, this system relies on the apps that it runs to run. That’s the promotion in part.

Spellcheck, auto-correct, “squiggle” underlining of words to show you they’re not necessarily understood by the system as English (or whatever language(s) you’ve got running). All of this is what you remember it as being from your current and past tens of years on your Windows machine – all of it’s intact here and is available free as part of Microsoft’s dealings with third party app developers. The same is true of the on-screen touch keyboard keyboard.

Measuring Style Device App / Connections

As you may well know by now, computers of all types, most recently mobile devices like tablets are able to connect to a plethora of other devices via Bluetooth, HDMI cable, USB, and a bunch of other slightly less popular means right this moment. In Windows 8, these connections will be handled by your Charms. Much in the same way that selecting File-Print works in most Windows systems now (though I’m sure some developers would disagree), you’re able to hit a charm, hit print, and if you like, work with a selection of settings. This interface has another name: Measuring Style Device App.

What a Measuring Style Device App does is represent a device in the system. This could be compared, if you wish, to drivers provided by manufacturers for specific devices, instead here it’s a whole new entity called a MSDA (for short) and has the ability to bring you a large set of options in, for example, a Charm.

Internet Explorer 10

The newest version of IE aka Internet Explorer will be available as a metro-style app. Full screen action for you lovers of your monitors with all of the same hardware acceleration (even more than IE 9 does), same performance and better, same compliance and standards as IS and better, same security and same privacy as IE 9. But it’s better, better I tell you! Here you’ve got a totally immersive mode like with the other metro-style apps, and you’ve got four big gestures that, like with a lot of the rest of your system here, do the following:

Top to Bottom: Use the User Interface, in this case see your controls for webpages.
Right Side: Charms.
Left Side: Go back.

Of course you can create new tabs including the forever helpful “private” tab, you can travel to webpages, go back and forth, and use the internet in the same sort of hands-off way that all great web browsers work with. Internet Explorer 10 is able to go full screen and will, with gestures, be able to access the same lovely menus many other Windows 8 optimized apps will be able to as well.

Whispers of Photoshop

Adobe’s photo editing app has become so well known and used that an edited photo in our modern world is better known as having been “Photoshopped” than it is as having been “modified” or “photo manipulated”. We know this week at BUILD 2011 that Windows 8 will work with Photoshop on a touch platform. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Adobe bring a Photoshop branded app to a mobile platform, but it is the first time we’ve seen what appears very much to be a full-fledged Photoshop app that, as you know from above, will be able to work with keyboard and mouse, but will here be able to work with touch in a way that’s only been available through third party touchscreen displays and drawing pads. What we can hope for is a much more optimized experience in the near future.

Pen (Stylus)

Handwriting, drafting, and graphic arts are promoted in Windows 8 by a new optimization and integration of the pen, or the stylus as you may call it. You may use pen with touch at the same time and you may navigate the whole system with pen as well. Much in the same way that the on-screen keyboard, the physical mouse, and the physical keyboard are all supported for 3rd party developers by Microsoft, so too is the Pen. Get your drawing hand out and try to remember what it was like to use a pencil!

Cloud Connections

Windows 8 will have the ability to work with online clouds of information, developers at Microsoft keeping in mind that this new operating system is most certainly going to be used to access the connected web on many levels and with many different devices and types of devices. Microsoft gives one of the most obvious reasons for this: what if you reach an awesome level on your favorite game, then you’ve got to switch to a new device? You’d have to start over if it wasn’t for the idea of cloud computing – all that information can be stored for access by multiple computers without a hassle, and Windows 8 is built with this idea deep in its heart. Settings down to the state you last left your app in can be saved to the cloud with this system. One you, one system, any number of multiple machines to work with.

Mail and Calendar

Improvements have been made to your basic Mail app on Windows 8. You’ve now got the simple addition of Folders to your Mail app, this right next to Inbox and Content. Organization is key, and the ability to place pieces of content in folders has been a tried and true way to make this happen. As far as Calendar goes, you’re now able to view more than one person’s Calendar at once. For instance if you need to see your wife’s calendar at the same time as your own to plan an event, this dual display mode can come in extremely handy.

People

There’s an app called People which organizes all the humans you know, each of the people displayed with connections to their Facebook, Linkedin, phone number, email(s), and more. This app People acts as an all-encompassing social network hub as you’re not only able to connect to People’s different profile pages on social networks, you can instant messenge them through what appears to be every single instant messenger network in existence, threads of conversation set up, organization abound. The networks take a back seat, Microsoft hopes here, to your connection to the person.

Photos

Your Photos library app connects you to your local photos as well as photos (and other types of images) you’ve got on a large number of photo hosting services and apps. This app, like the rest of the content browsing and interaction apps, appears to be working quite quickly and efficiently on every platform Microsoft is using to show off Windows 8 at BUILD 2011. This Photos app brings your photos together in a way that Microsoft hopes is easy to manifest and understand. Select photos, place them in your digital basket, and share them, only a few gestures from start to finish.

Skydrive

Connected applications is at the heart of Windows 8. Using Windows Phone, you likely know about Skydrive which allows you to place media for later editing and access from the cloud. Your Skydrive Camera Roll on Windows Phone automatically collects photos you’ve taken and uploads them to the cloud. When you’re emailing photos from your Photos app, you’ll automatically be doing so using Skydrive, this allowing you to have these photos hosted by Skydrive instead of having to pack them into the email. You’ve got the option of attaching to the email in a traditional way as well, but Skydrive gives you the ability to, in many cases, send a whole lot quicker.

Heading online to Windows Live and Skydrive will also be optimized to work with Windows 8 to give you access to any of your connected computers. For example if you’re out in the park and you meet Auntie Sue and you want to show her a picture of your half-uncle Fred but all your Fred photos are at your PC at home, you can connect to your PC at home with your mobile device by accessing Windows Live in a web browser and check your Skydrive, there’s your content.

Windows Phone

Along these same lines, syncing and cloud connectedness flows freely through Windows Phone which, at the time Windows 8 is revealed at BUILD 2011, is currently at Windows Phone 7.5 Mango. On Windows Phone here you have only to log in once and you’ve got all of your connections to your various services you

Via Nexus 404

by J Angelo Racoma

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Automatic content generators are the scourge of most legitimate writers and publishers, especially if these take some original content, spin it around and generate a mashup of different content but obviously based on something else. An app made by computer science and journalism experts involves artificial intelligence that writes like a human, though.

Developers at the Northwestern University’s Intelligent Information Laboratory have come up with a program called Narrative Science, which composes articles and reports based on data, facts, and styles plugged in. The application is worth more than 10 years’ work by Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum who are both professors of journalism and computer science at the university.

Artificial vs Human Intelligence

Currently being used by 20 companies, an example of work done by Narrative Science include post-game reports for collegiate athletics events and articles for medical journals, in which the software can compose an entire, unique article in about 60 seconds or so. What’s striking is that even language experts say you won’t know the difference between the software and an actual human, in terms of style, tone and usage. The developers have recently received $6 million in venture capital, which is indicative that the technology has potential in business and revenue-generating applications.

AI today is increasingly becoming sophisticated in terms of understanding and generating language. AI has gone a long way from spewing out pre-encoded responses from a list of sentences and words in reaction to keywords. Narrative Science can actually compose paragraphs using a human-like voice. The question here is whether the technology will undermine traditional journalism. Will AI simply assist humans in doing research and delivering content? Or, will AI eventually replace human beings in reporting the news, generating editorials and even communicating with other people?

What Does it Mean for Journalism and the Writing Profession?

Perhaps the main indicator here will be cost. Narrative Science charges about $10 each 500-word article, which is not really far from how human copy writers might charge for content. Once this technology becomes popular with newspapers and other publications, will this mean writers and journalists —  tech bloggers included — need to find a new career? It seems it’s not just the manufacturing industry that’s prone to being replaced by machines. Maybe we can just input a few keywords like iPhone, iOS, Jailbreak, Touchscreen, Apple and the like, and the Narrative Science app will be able to create an entirely new rumor about the upcoming iPhone 5, for instance!

The potential is great, although the possibility for abuse is also there. Think of spammers and scammers using the software to create more appealing emails that recipients are more likely to act on. Still, with tools like these, it’s only up for us humans to up the ante in terms of quality.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, a real human did write this post.

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Personal comments:

One book to read about this: "Exemplaire de démonstration" by Philippe Vasset

Via SlashGear

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Microsoft Windows chief Steven Sinofsky has taken to the Building Windows 8 blog to explain the company’s decision to keep two interfaces: the traditional desktop UI and the more tablet-friendly Metro UI. His explanation seemed to be in response to criticism and confusion after the latest details were revealed on the new Windows 8 Explorer interface.

On Monday, details on the Windows 8 Explorer file manager interface were revealed showing what looked to be a very traditional Windows UI without any Metro elements. Reactions were mixed with many confused as to what direction Microsoft was heading with its Windows 8 interface. Well, Sinofsky is attempting to answer that and says that it is a “balancing act” of trying to get both interfaces working together harmoniously.

Sinofsky writes in his post:

Some of you are probably wondering how these parts work together to create a harmonious experience. Are there two user interfaces? Why not move on to a Metro style experience everywhere? On the other hand, others have been suggesting that Metro is only for tablets and touch, and we should avoid “dumbing down” Windows 8 with that design.

He proceeds to address each of these concerns, saying that the fluid and intuitive Metro interface is great on the tablet form factor, but when it comes down to getting serious work done, precision mouse and keyboard tools are still needed as well as the ability to run traditional applications. Hence, he explains that in the end they decided to bring the best of both worlds together for Windows 8.

With Windows 8 on a tablet, users can fully immerse themselves in the Metro UI and never see the desktop interface. In fact, the code for the desktop interface won’t even load. But, if the user needs to use the desktop interface, they can do so without needing to switch over to a laptop or other secondary device just for business or work.

A more detailed preview of Windows 8 is expected to take place during Microsoft’s Build developer conference in September. It’s been rumored that the first betas may be distributed to developers then along with a Windows 8 compatible hardware giveaway.

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Personal comments:

In order to complete the so-called 'Desktop Crisis' discussion, the point of view of Microsoft who has decided to avoid mixing functionalities between desktop's GUI and tablet's GUI.

The Subjectivity of Natural Scrolling

Switched On: Destop Divergence

Is The Desktop Having an Identity Crisis