Tech for Lunch!

Techcrunch had a great article about Microsoft’s new gizmo, the TouchWall. Basically, it is a cheap version of the Surface PC, meaning you could get some of the “touch” functionalities without the price tag of the Surface. In details, however, they are two completely different products. The Surface PC is a multi-touch and vision system that uses cameras to sense what is on the table, where it is and what it is doing. It can determine, for example, if a cell phone is on the table and then interact with the phone in a variety of ways, such as pulling photos off of it.

The TouchWall is a much simpler system which consists of three infrared lasers that scan a surface. A camera notes when something breaks through the laser line and feeds that information back to the Plex software. The machine runs Windows Vista and another software which understands the “touch” commands and movements, called Plex.

There are no plans to mass produce or commercialize this product just yet, but we can already see the applications and with a reduced price tag, this could be interesting. We’ll have to keep on following this one to see if it will become available at some point.

See the TouchWall in action in the following video:

Twitter has become very popular for keeping everyone informed about what you are doing almost instantly. There are a few ways to get information to and from the site, the most useful and popular one is via SMS - aka Text Messages from your mobile phone.

When the massive Earthquake hit China last week, Twitters used their mobile phones to update their statuses letting everyone know about their situation immediately. Many updates even came during the earthquake.. now that’s way faster than the media! Twitter reportedly became a source of information for major news organizations covering the China earthquake.

Twitter users get a maximum of 140 characters a message; ironically, Twitter designer Biz Stone envisioned its potential as a communication tool by a “tweet” warning he received about a California earthquake while about to board a train.

This is proof that even though it is sometimes mundane to know about every little move all your friends make in one day, it can also be extremely useful to have access to these kinds of services. Chinese users ended up notifying the world of an event, through a California-based service… that’s what I call Networking.

We are seeing more and more websites who do not come up with a brand new product, but rather a product that sits on top of someone else’s site. In most cases, these sites are simply an interface to another tool or directly enhance your experience. This is the case with Powerset’s new Semantics-based search tool for Wikipedia.

“Powerset’s goal is to change the way people interact with technology by enabling computers to understand our language. While this is a difficult challenge, we believe that now is the right time to begin the journey. Powerset is first applying its natural language processing to search, aiming to improve the way we find information by unlocking the meaning encoded in ordinary human language.”

The idea is to allow you to run a search based on a natural language phrase instead of having to figure out the best combination of keywords to use. As a proof of concept, they have decided to use only the information from Wikipedia because it is already using a fairly consistent structure and because this limits the amount of information to search through. Eventually, the plan would be to allow users to search through as much information as Google is able to offer and apply the same filters and tools as with Wikipedia.

Let’s take a look at what they are currently offering. When you run a search on powerset, you get all the results that could contain what you are looking for (keep in mind it has to be information that is available on Wikipedia for now) displayed in a relatively familiar manner. The top shows the best match with a summary and if you click on that article, you get the actual wikipedia article, but enhanced with Powerset’s tools. The most important addition here is the “Article Outline” box which appears to the right of the article. This box is always visible to the right and follows the scrolling window. Inside that box are two display options: Show Outline and Show Factz. The outline is simply the same one as the Wikipedia article, but it does make large articles a little bit easier to navigate. The Factz are a summary of all the important details found in the article and broken down following the outline. This is where Powerset’s algorithms work their magic. The Factz are a bunch of snippets which are “understood” from the main article and show some relevant information that you could be looking for.

This promotional video is certainly the best way to see and understand all the features that are built in Powerset. I hope they will be able to further develop their product to include a complete internet search and add their tools to the results.

The Search Engine world is a very competitive one and when something interesting is brought to the table, everyone usually follows. Combining search results for different categories is nothing new anymore. Google has had that for a while now and Yahoo! also offers the same thing. When you search for something, at the top of the results, you can switch between the traditional results and images, news, videos etc…

Some websites like Pageflakes offer the possibility to create your own homepage which gathers information from many places. These are called Mashups and some sites even offer the possibility to present results in the same manner. This is what Yahoo Glue is all about. When you run a search on Yahoo Glue, you get a results page that is far from the traditional text results we are used to. You get a complete break down of almost everything that is available on that subject.

You can try Yahoo Glue on Yahoo! India which is where the product is being tested right now. If you run a search for Britney Spears, you will get a bunch of different results and what’s really different is the presentation. You can see standard search results, along with a biography, images, videos, news etc… naturally the sources of the results are based on the keywords you enter. For example, Britney will return some Last.FM results which would not show for Katie Holmes. If you leave the celebrities alone and search for “Adobe Flex” ( yes I know… I can’t get Flex out of my mind), you will get results for Adobe’s Stock prices and job postings for Flex programming.

I think we should be seeing Yahoo! Glue get implemented in all other Yahoo sites pretty soon because the results are very impressive and become very useful if you don’t really know where to start on a new subject.

I’m sure most of you have heard of (and probably used as well) Napster. Napster changed the way we trade, discover and, most of all, download our music forever when it was launched in June 1999. After a very successful run and a whole bunch of lawsuits and pressure from the record industry, Napster closed in July 2001. It was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provided, while actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Even though traffic was abundant and the sharing services were practically flawless, there were many other problems and Napster was not a very profitable business. In fact, after the final blow of lawsuits, it had to file for Chapter 11 and liquidate it’s assets.

One of the founders of Napster, Shawn Fanning has been hard at work on a new startup called Rupture: “All Games, All Platforms. Connect, Share, Achieve. Rupture builds a profile for you based on your game play. It’s not like other profiles, however. We automatically pull information from many video games. Did you beat the Drums Tour in Rock Band on Expert? All your friends will know”. Rupture has been in beta for quite some time and so a public release hasn’t happened yet.

It turns out that Shawn Fanning will finally get some payback for his hard work because Electronic Arts has been keeping an eye on the site. EA is buying Rupture for $30 million in a deal that should be announced soon. They are looking to integrate this technology in their business plan because the social networking aspect based around Massively Multiplayer games is something EA has been wanting to add for a while now.

Shawn will be working for EA once the deal goes through. Looks like setting up a few Internet Startups may eventually get you someplace cool!

Earlier this week, I wrote about GTA IV and said that they had estimated hitting the $300 million mark for the first week of sales. Well, it turns out the estimates were a little bit off and not just by a couple million! Take-Two reported that they sold some 3.6 million copies on the first day of sales, on April 29th, and a total of about 6 million units during the first week. This global sales figure amounts to a grand total of $500 million for the first week of sales for GTA IV.

For those keeping score, this is one of the most lucrative events in the history of entertainment. Last year, Microsoft picked-up a tiny $400-million during the release of Halo 3.

Take-Two recently refused a takeover offer by Electronic Arts stating that the offer was too low. This should help them get a better offer while they hold the most sought after franchise in the video game industry.

I’m very curious to see what the final numbers will be for GTA 4 at the end of the year. What are your bets?

Microsoft announced Saturday that it is withdrawing its offer to purchase Yahoo!, due to the inability of both parties to agree on an acceptable sale price.

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer said in a letter sent to Yahoo! that the software manufacturer was willing to spend $47.5 billion to acquire Yahoo, or $33 per share.

But Yahoo! insist’s that the computer giant pays at least $53 billion, or $37 per share.

The original offer of Microsoft, dating back to January 31st, amounted to $44.6 billion, or $31 per share. Yahoo! had refused, arguing that it under-valued the society.

On April 22nd, Yahoo! posted its financial results for the first quarter as being higher than the expectations of analysts. Yahoo’s earnings had risen to $542 million, or 37 cents per share, more than triple that of $ 142.2 million, or 10 cents per share, garnered in the same period last year.

Most of this improvement came from a windfall of $401 million generated by the participation of Yahoo! in the parent company Alibaba.com, an e-commerce site in China.

If it were not for the provision of Alibaba, Yahoo! would have benefited of earnings per share of 11 cents, on the whole similar to that of last year. Profit per share was still two cents higher than expected on average by analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

Yahoo! has not raised its forecast for the remainder of the year. Microsoft had hopes that its bid would become inevitable if Yahoo! was unable to substantially accelerate its growth.

Microsoft had threatened to oust the board of Yahoo! of its 10 directors to accept its offer this Saturday.

Yahoo! felt from the beginning that it was worth more than what Microsoft offered, even if their share price had dropped to less than $20 at the time of submission of tenders.

Private shareholders are beginning to break silence and are publicly stating their disagreement with Yahoo’s decision to refuse the offer. Now would probably be a good time for Microsoft to come back to the table to make an offer and let the shareholders make their stand. There have been a few lawsuits against Yahoo’s board because of their position, and more are expected to appear in the coming days.

I recently said that I do not usually cover the gaming industry, but it seems that it is getting more and more difficult to ignore. Some games are just impossible to ignore and I’m pretty sure you’ve heard a little something about this franchise.

Take Two’s Grand Theft Auto 4 is most definitely the best one of the entire franchise and is out to become the best selling video game of all time. The game stands to sell an estimated $300-million during its first week and perhaps a $450-million during this year.

The Grand Theft Auto franchise has become well known for it’s immersive experience and is probably most notorious for it’s high level of violence. Many lawsuits and reports have followed the previous installments stating that the games are a bad influence for teens and make crime look like an interesting avenue. GTA4 takes it all even further, but most people will tell you that, although the game is very violent and realistic, it is not that bad an influence if you can think for yourself.

You play as Niko, a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant who gets caught up into a life of crime whether he wants it or not. You get jobs or missions from your employers and your decisions truely have an impact on the progression and the outcome of the game. Let’s say you have a choice of killing someone to complete a mission, that death could make someone very mad or very proud of you, and may bring revenge upon you or a helping hand later on when you need one. This makes for an even more interesting storyline because your experience is based on how you play the game.

The city itself is very impressive, even though it is not as huge as San Andreas was. The details and the realism are what makes it so incredible. You can see potholes and garbage strewn on the streets in a shady part of town, and compare that to the smoothly paved roads and posh stores in a wealthy part of town is like looking at any real-world city. But this goes even further with different clothing styles, different lingo and even different cars, depending on the neighbourhood. That’s what I call an incredible gaming experience!

The single player campaign is certainly very interesting to play, but the greatest addition to GTA is the multiplayer online game play. Supporting up to 16 players at one time, you can choose any one of over a dozen different match types for some thrilling action.

The reviews for this game are simply unbelievable. Almost everyone agrees that every aspect is well above every standard and sets the bar for next generation games to come. I recommend for everyone to give this game a try if you get the chance or at least just watch someone who is playing it, because it plays out just like a movie. Crime pays for Take Two.

It was thirty years ago, on May 3rd 1978, that the very first spam message was sent out. I’m not sure if this is a wonderful event to remember, but the first message was not of malicious intent contrary to the ones we sometimes get today.

Back then, the internet as we know it today was not quite born just yet.. The network was known as the Arpanet and was still government-owned. According to Wikipedia: “The ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) developed by DARPA of the United States Department of Defense, was the world’s first operational packet switching network, and the predecessor of the global Internet.” While I was digging around for this story I ended up reading a few documents on the origins of the internet and it’s original purpose and I’ll probably write an article about all of this later on.

Let’s get back to the subject at hand, the first SPAM message. Gary Thuerk, the guy who sent the message had to use a text-based email client (there was no Windows at that time ;-)) and had to type all of the addresses manually. Compared to today’s spam attacks, it was a very limited number of recipients. It was an advertisement (or actually an invitation to come see) for the new DEC Computers. DEC does not exist anymore, but not because of the spam. The message was sent to a whopping 393 people and was not sent without problems. The person who sent the message was not very familiar with arpanet and its rules, nor with the software to send messages. He typed in all the addresses in the TO: field but after 320 names, they started overflowing in the body of the message. The first recipients then received the email with a bunch of addresses before the actual message. When they figured out that the last 73 names had not been included in the first broadcast, they sent another one!

The response was not very friendly to Mr. Thuerk’s pioneering message. Because the Arpanet was only used by researchers and the U.S. Military, he received many replies telling him that the system was not for his business purposes. In fact, he had managed to connect one of his DEC Computers to the Arpanet, which was also a violation of the rules.

It was approximately 10 years before another spam message was sent out in another form, and the evolution of spam followed the networks. Spam was used on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), and today as we know it on the internet, where they account for about 90% of all emails sent in one day.

You can see the full transcript of the original message as well as many of the replies that followed here.

Sony has announced another delay in the launch of PlayStation Home. It is a project for a 3D virtual world for users of the PlayStation 3 console, a sort of meeting place, exchange and encounter for the members of this community.

Initially, the project was announced in July 2007, Sony had stated that everything would be ready in the autumn of 2007, but officials have seen fit to delay the launch to spring of this year. However, Sony now indicates that the first testing service (beta) will be held next autumn.

In a statement issued yesterday, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment, Kazuo Hirai, said that the project is not yet ready: “We are well aware that we once again ask the current and future users of the PS3 to be patient, but we have come to the conclusion that we needed a little more time to improve the product, in order to be able to offer a product that comes out of the ordinary.”

PlayStation Home aroused much enthusiasm in the PS3 community. Any user will be represented by a virtual character (avatar), which may interact with those around him, in a village in 3D, just like life in the community; this environment will consist of public and private spaces.

Each member of PlayStation Home will have its own “apartment” where he can receive one or several people, listen to music, watch television, discuss with your partner or group, decorate the walls with photos, etc..

As for public spaces, they will house cinemas which will be presenting trailers for movies or games, there will be game rooms, where people can enjoy, alone or in a group, different arcade games, billiards or bowling.

Sony has already announced that the virtual world, which will be downloadable from PlayStation Store, should not exceed 500 MB of memory on the hard drive.