Mining Mood Swings on the Real-Time Web

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This article reveals a startup provides free access to real-time data from the social Web.

By Erica Naone

Many companies are turning to social-media sites to gauge the success of a new product and service. The latest activity on Facebook, Twitter, and countless other sites can reveal the public's current mood toward a new film, gadget, or celebrity, and analytics services are springing up to help companies keep track. Social-media analytics startup Viralheat, based in San Jose, CA, is now offering free, real-time access to the data it is collecting on attitudes toward particular topics or products. One of the first customers for this new service--called Social Trends--is ESPN, which plans to use Social Trends to show live popularity rankings for different NFL teams.`
Live data: This widget shows current sentiment toward competing Web browsers.
Credit: Viralheat

Viralheat uses natural-language processing and machine learning to sift through Twitter, Facebook fan pages, viral video sites, and Google Buzz posts to determine the Web's collective sentiment toward everything from popular browsers to Pepsi to Steve Jobs. The company sells its data and analytics service for a monthly fee, but CEO Raj Kadam says that Social Trends will provide a free way to people to access data the company is already collecting. When a paying customer asks Viralheat to track a particular term, they have the option to share that information publicly. Kadam says that about 70 percent of users agree to share this information.

Social Trends uses this information to provide a widget that can be embedded on a blog or website showing the sentiment around particular terms. These widgets stay connected to Viralheat's data stores through an application programming interface (API) and are updated as the company collects more information. Viralheat believes the tool will be particularly useful for news sites wanting up-to-date infographics and for bloggers who want to track trends.

Anyone can create a Social Trends account and then search for terms they'd like to follow, although the company doesn't have data for every possible term. The system lets users create charts tracking a single term or comparing several terms. Kadam says that Viralheat is able to open up live connections to its data because its infrastructure can handle working with large amounts of information. Viralheat custom-built its software and hardware and optimized it for the analysis it needed to do. For example, it created a Web crawler that can sift through data on the Web and manipulate it as it is collected.

Kadam says his company isn't worried that its free offerings will decrease the number of paying customers. Social Trends widgets only offer a snapshot of the data that paying customers get access to (72 metrics instead of just five metrics), he says.

Viralheat is not the only company offering to mine Web users' sentiments toward particular topics or companies. Alec Go, a Stanford University graduate student who created the "Twitter Sentiment" analysis tool, says there are dozens of sites offering such services. But he notes that many commercial analysis packages are closed off from public access.

Experts agree that sentiment-analysis tools are becoming increasingly significant as companies try to stay on top of the discussions happening across the Web. "Companies have a love-hate relationship with social media," says Ed Chi, who is area manager for the Palo Alto Research Center's Augmented Social Cognition team. These companies recognize that social media can spread a message faster than anything else, he says, but they're also aware that it can easily get out of control.

Chi believes that eventually companies will need to track sentiment as part of a comprehensive public-relations effort. Future platforms could classify topics being discussed, suggest possible responses, and analyze a company's message to determine how likely it is to go viral. "Sentiment analysis will be a component of a much larger dashboard," Chi says.

Article Source:
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/26105/

Scandisk postage-stamp-sized integrated SSD

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Ultra-thin tablets, laptops and other mobile devices could be set to look even slimmer with the development of SATA solid state drives no bigger than a postage stamp. SanDisk's new integrated SSD (iSSD) device is just 0.072 inch (1.85mm) thick, tips the scales at a mere 0.029 of an ounce (0.83g) and is currently available in sizes up to 64GB. It's not the fastest SSD solution currently available but hey, it's got to be the smallest.

Before you start breaking open those jars of pennies, the iSSD is only being made available to selected manufacturers for evaluation at the moment. But with just 0.629 x 0.787 x 0.072 inch (16 x 20 x 1.85mm) dimensions and capacities currently ranging from 4GB (the lightest at 0.029oz/0.83g) to 64GB (0.045oz/1.3g), it may not be too long before consumers are being offered capacious, ultra-ultra-thin mobile devices where external storage is thought of as an additional extra rather than an operational necessity.

Article Source and Further Reading: Here

Kogan eBook Reader

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Kogan Technologies has launched a 6-inch eBook reader into the Australian market at a price of just AUD$189 (less than US$170 at time of publication). Around a third of an inch thick and weighing 228.8 g, the eBook Reader boasts good readability in bright sunlight via an 800 x 600 E Ink screen along with simple navigation system and long battery life.

Included with the reader are 1500 free eBooks, most of which are classics by authors as Arthur Conan Doyle, George Orwell, Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. Also included are several titles tailored to the Australian – it is great to see that Henry Lawson’s The Romance of the Swag is included.

Kogan’s eReader will sync with Adobe's Digital Editions software for managing eBook libraries and will support some 16 eBook file formats including EPUB, HTML, PDF, TXT, RTF files. It features six different languages (English, Italian, French, Russian, Dutch, and German); a battery life of 10,000 page turns, a leather carrying case, earphones, USB cable, and charger.

The unit runs on the Linux operating system and has 2GB of in-built memory, which can be expanded to 32GB with a SDHC memory card.

The AU$189 price tag has raised the bar for competition within the Australian market. It slightly undercuts Kobo priced at AUD$199 and is roughly AUD$50 cheaper than the Kindle after shipping costs.

Article Source and Furthere reading :  here

Marmota mobile AR identifies landscape features

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Augmented Reality, or AR, is currently one of the hot areas for mobile app development – for some reason, people seem quite smitten with the idea of being able to point their mobile device’s camera at a street, and having information about the buildings and businesses appear on their screen superimposed over the images in real time. Now, a prototype mobile AR device is being tested, that concentrates more on topography than urban exploration. The Marmota mobile AR can tell you things like what the names of those mountain peaks over there are, what their elevation is, and how far away they are.

The Marmota was designed by Michele Zanin, Claudio Andreatta and Paul Chippendale, researchers at the Technologies of Vision Unit (TeV) in the Information Technology Centre of Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) in Trento, Italy. "The system integrates technologies and findings from different disciplines, spanning cartography to computer graphics, and sophisticated machine vision algorithms,” said Zanin. “Each pixel of the image is associated with information such as altitude, latitude, longitude and distance from the observer”.

When activated by a user, the device locates itself with a built-in GPS, then sends that information via the Internet to the central Marmota server at FBK. Once those coordinates have been processed by that server, a data package of about 50 to 120 KB is sent back to the device, and displayed as a high-resolution 360-degree augmented onscreen overlay. The device itself reportedly only uses a small amount of memory, letting the server do all the heavy lifting.

Besides giving specs on mountains, the Marmota can also provide things like the names and locations of counties, roads, hiking trails, rivers and lakes, and will draw these items onto the screen to highlight them. It limits itself to what’s visible from the user’s point of view, so as not to create confusion with an overabundance of information.

TeV has been working on the project since 2007. The Android-based Marmota currently works anywhere in the world between 60 degrees latitude north and 60 degrees south. "User testing will follow in the immediate future and will involve volunteers from outside FBK and will hopefully identify critical points in the system, thus helping us to transform the current 'prototype' into an application that can be enjoyed by the general public” said Zanin.

Article Source:
http://www.gizmag.com/marmota-mobile-ar-prototype/16081/

Microsoft unveils Xbox LIVE games lineup for Windows Phone 7

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When Microsoft unveiled its Windows Phone 7 (WP7) Series at Mobile World Congress 2010 in February, it said that the device’s Games hub would put the power of Xbox LIVE in the palm of your hand. With the phone’s planned October release date rapidly approaching, the company has chosen Gamescon 2010 in Germany to reveal the first wave of Xbox LIVE games that will be available on launch.

The first wave of launch games is long and impressive (check out the full 50 game list below), highlighting Microsoft’s recognition that mobile phones are evolving into a major gaming platform. According to research firm In-Stat, mobile gaming is already a billion-dollar industry in the U.S. and will continue to climb.

Microsoft’s own internal research backs that up, showing that 80 percent of gamers in the U.S. have, or will purchase a smartphone this year, and a quarter of what gamers spend on games is spent on mobile gaming.
The list includes Xbox LIVE games from the likes of Gameloft, Konami Digital Entertainment, Namco Bandai, PopCap and THQ. The WP7 will also be supported by content from Microsoft Game Studios (MGS), which now has a dedicated group tasked with delivering all new mobile-specific games and extending the best console games onto Windows Phone 7. This includes companion titles to familiar names, such as "Halo: Waypoint," and "Crackdown 2," designed to extend the experience of these Xbox 360 franchises.
In addition to providing a single location to view and launch games from your full game library, the WP7 is designed to seamlessly integrate Xbox LIVE in other ways. Users will be able to:

• connect to their Xbox LIVE profile and Avatar, or create a new one
• earn, view, track and compare Achievements with friends
• see who’s online and what they’re doing on their consoles, PCs or phones.
• communicate with their Xbox LIVE friends through Xbox LIVE messages
• invite, connect and play against friends on other Windows Phone 7 phones or a PC with turn-based (asynchronous) multiplayer gaming

Microsoft says additional titles in the launch portfolio will be released as the phone’s release date draws nearer, with new Xbox LIVE titles to be added to the games portfolio every week once the phone launches.
For the moment, the list of titles is:

• "3D Brick Breaker Revolution" (Digital Chocolate)
• "Age of Zombies" (Halfbrick)
• "Armor Valley" (Protege Games)
• "Asphalt 5" (Gameloft)
• "Assassins Creed" (Gameloft)
• "Bejeweled™ LIVE" (PopCap)
• "Bloons TD" (Digital Goldfish)
• "Brain Challenge" (Gameloft)
• "Bubble Town 2" (i-Play)
• "Butterfly" (Press Start Studio)
• "CarneyVale Showtime" (MGS)
• "Castlevania" (Konami Digital Entertainment)
• "Crackdown 2: Project Sunburst" (MGS)
• "De Blob Revolution" (THQ)
• "Deal or No Deal 2010" (i-Play)
• "Earthworm Jim" (Gameloft)
• "Fast & Furious 7" (i-Play)
• "Fight Game Rivals" (Rough Cookie)
• "Finger Physics" (Mobliss Inc.)
• "Flight Control" (Namco Bandai)
• "Flowerz" (Carbonated Games)
• "Frogger" (Konami Digital Entertainment)
• "Fruit Ninja" (Halfbrick)
• "Game Chest-Board" (MGS)
• "Game Chest-Card" (MGS)
• "Game Chest-Logic" (MGS)
• "Game Chest-Solitaire" (MGS)
• "GeoDefense" (Critical Thought)
• "Ghostscape" (Psionic)
• "Glow Artisan" (Powerhead Games)
• "Glyder 2" (Glu Mobile)
• "Guitar Hero 5" (Glu Mobile)
• "Halo Waypoint" (MGS)
• "Hexic Rush" (Carbonated Games)
• "I Dig It" (InMotion)
• "iBlast Moki" (Godzilab)
• "ilomilo" (MGS)
• "Implode XL" (IUGO)
• "Iquarium" (Infinite Dreams)
• "Jet Car Stunts" (True Axis)
• "Let's Golf 2" (Gameloft)
• "Little Wheel" (One click dog)
• "Loondon" (Flip N Tale)
• "Max and the Magic Marker" (PressPlay)
• "Mini Squadron" (Supermono Limited)
• "More Brain Exercise" (Namco Bandai)
• "O.M.G." (Arkedo)
• "Puzzle Quest 2" (Namco Bandai)
• "Real Soccer 2" (Gameloft)
• "The Revenants" (Chaotic Moon)
• "Rise of Glory" (Revo Solutions)
• "Rocket Riot" (Codeglue)
• "Splinter Cell Conviction" (Gameloft)
• "Star Wars: Battle for Hoth" (THQ)
• "Star Wars: Cantina" (THQ)
• "The Harvest" (MGS)
• "The Oregon Trail" (Gameloft)
• "Tower Bloxx NY" (Digital Chocolate)
• "Twin Blades" (Press Start Studio)
• "UNO" (Gameloft)
• "Women's Murder Club: Death in Scarlet" (i-Play)
• "Zombie Attack!" (IUGO)
• "Zombies!!!!" (Babaroga)

Looks like there should be something for everyone.

By Darren Quick, Article Source:
http://www.gizmag.com/xbox-live-launch-games-for-windows-phone-7/16052/

deviantART launches free HTML5 drawing app

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Digital artists will no doubt be excited to hear that the online art community deviantART has just released Muro, a free, web-based drawing tool. And as an added bonus, Muro is built with HTML5 (read, 'no flash') which means you can use your iPad as a drawing tablet.

Muro is surprisingly powerful for a web-app, with full-blown layer capabilities as well as multiple brushes. In addition, there is a 'basic/pro' toggle switch which allows you to close some features and make the canvas a little bit wider. The app is compatible with Wacom drawing tablets and works with the pressure sensitivity plugin.

"DeviantART Muro is pure fun for anyone," says Angelo Sotira, the company's cofounder. "But it's also a highly sophisticated application that will meet and exceed the needs of professionals in the arts. DeviantART Muro offers the best brushes for pressure sensitivity on the web, and because of its design, we can continually expand the tool's features and functions in response to user comments or to new devices, almost on the fly."

This stated intention to continually improve the drawing application based on user feedback is a great advantage for Muro moving into the future given that deviantART boasts over 14 million members.

While there are a number of web-based image editors and drawing applications online already (see Pixlr and Aviary), most of them are Flash-based. Besides Muro, Mugtug's Sketchpad application is another notable HTML5 alternative on the web, as well as Darkroom, Mugtug's online image editor.

And just a few hours ago Adobe announced that a free Photoshop Express app is now available for the iPad and iPhone. While it's not a dedicated drawing app, it might be a good solution to users who have grown comfortable with Adobe products.

But as far as online drawing applications go, Muro already ranks among the best available on the net.

Article Source:
http://www.gizmag.com/deviantart-launches-free-html5-drawing-app/16027/

WikiReader

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 WikiReader, the palm-sized device that makes Wikipedia entries available offline, has gone multilingual. In addition to being able to store the more than three million English language Wikipedia articles, users can now download any of 14 other language versions of Wikipedia along with the virtual keyboards with characters to support them.

The lightweight battery-operated “Wikipedia in your pocket” was designed to provide access to the wealth of information stored in the online collaborative encyclopedia without the need for Internet access. Now readers of Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Norwegian, Greek, French, Finnish, Danish, Dutch, German, Spanish, Welsh, Russian and Hungarian can download those language versions of Wikipedia for referencing on the go.

"Now virtually anyone around the world can use WikiReader to feed their thirst for knowledge," said Openmoko CEO, Sean Moss-Pultz. "We are dedicated to putting knowledge at the fingertips of inquiring minds from the heart of Manhattan to Madrid, even to remote mountains in Nepal, where WikiReaders are now being used in community centers."

Openmoko, creator of WikiReader, encourages the use of multiple language Wikis on a single microSD memory card or storing them on numerous MicroSD cards and swapping them out in the device’s microSD slot. Versions range from 32MB for the Chinese Wikipedia to 5GB for the English language Wikipedia. WikiReader currently supports microSD cards up to 16GB in size.

The International version WikiReader with an 8GB microSD card is available now for US$99.

Article Source:
http://www.gizmag.com/wikireader-goes-multilingual/16004/

USB 3.0 adapters

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TRENDnet releases USB 3.0 adapters for laptops and desktop PCs

If your PC is more than a few months old, it's unlikely that you have USB 3.0. An alternative way to get the benefits of the up to 4.8Gbps speeds on offer is to add a USB 3.0 adapter to your existing machine and TRENDnet has now entered this sector by offering a 2 port Express Card Module (TU3-H2EC) for laptops and a 2 port PCI-Express adaptor (TU3-H2PIE) for desktops.

The TU3-H2EC will plug into any free Express Card slot on your Windows based laptop. It comes with a power adaptor to power your USB 3.0 devices.

The TU3-H2PIE will connect to any free PCI-Express slot you have on your windows based PC. It has a 4-pin power connector that you have to plug into the internal power supply to power your device. It is backwards compatible to USB 2.0 so your older USB devices will still work.

Further Reading : Here

Kamra augmented reality mobile browser developer preview announced

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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have announced the availability of a developer preview of Kamra, a mobile browser based on open web standards. The first augmented reality browser for the KHARMA (KML/HTML Augmented Reality Mobile Architecture) development platform, Kamra offers users multiple simultaneous augmented content overlayed on top of a live video scene.

The KHARMA platform allows for content creation using HTML and JavaScript web development tools already in widespread use and is said to cater for the overlay of almost any web technology into a live scene. At the heart of KHARMA is an extended version of a coding language currently used for such things as Google Earth, called Keyhole Markup Language (KML), which models and stores geographic features for display over a scene.

The platform has been built upon a framework of channel servers, infrastructure servers, geospot servers and an open source, standards-based mobile client. The Kamra browser allows users to open multiple augmented reality content channels, each of these being a URL that delivers visual additions to a live video scene and which could potentially interact with each other for an enhanced browsing experience.

Further Reading : Here

Dattoos would be the ultimate user/machine interface

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Five years ago, Frog Design founder Hartmut Esslinger envisioned a technology that “could influence notions of community, identity, and connectivity with minimal impact on the physical environment.” Using an online design portal, users would select and try out a customized electronic processing device that they would then print onto their own skin. The DNA Tattoo, or Dattoo, could include printable input/output tools such as a camera, microphone, or laser-loudspeaker – it would be up to the user, as would the Dattoo’s aesthetics.

Most intriguingly, it would capture its wearer’s DNA, to ensure an intimate user/machine relationship.
Conceived for the 2005 Forrester Consumer Forum, the Dattoo was a response to the still-increasing trend of self-expression through connectivity technology – in a sense, you could call it the ultimate smart phone skin. The idea was to “realize a state of constant, seamless connectivity and computability requir[ing] the convergence of technology and self.” This meant that the body itself would need to become the interface, and would supply the required energy. Because Dattoos would largely replace three-dimensional tools such as smart phones or laptops, the environment would be spared the costs of producing, transporting and disposing of those items.

Further Reading : Here

iPhone FaceTime not just for faces, declares phone sex industry

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Steve Jobs has done his level best to keep pornography and adult content out of the iPhone App Store, but if the history of the Internet has shown us one thing, it's that any attempt to place a wall between porn and the raging tide of user erections is the definition of futility – for each one you strike down, another one springs up stronger than the first. So it will come as little surprise that the adult industry has scrambled to take advantage of the new iPhone 4's ability to make face-to-face – or face-to-other-bits videocalls.

Can Apple's FaceTime do for videocalling what its iPad has done for tablet PCs? Videophone technology has been a recurring theme in sci-fi over the years, but it's been available for a long time now and the vast majority of calls are still voice-only.

Still, there's one sector of the tech industry that seems to be able to run with new technology faster than any other – and the adult entertainment business has clearly seen a big opportunity in the launch of Apple's iPhone 4, complete with front-facing camera and the FaceTime videocalling app.

Phone sex lines are surprisingly popular, representing a multi-billion dollar industry in the USA alone – and it seems savvy operators have been placing employment ads on various online boards looking for presentable young women to act as FaceTime video phone sex operators.

Presentable is a key term here – this isn't the sort of phone sex job where you could get away with taking calls in fluffy slippers, a bathrobe and curlers… except on very particular fetish lines.

And the technology itself presents a few new challenges that even webcam girls will be unfamiliar with – the front-facing camera on the iPhone 4 is pretty much designed to capture only your face when you're looking at the screen in a videocall… point it at other parts of your anatomy, as callers will no doubt demand, and you won't be able to see what's going on.

I'm sure the ingenuity of the horny will shine through – this is an obvious use of the technology, with Apple's track record and the new iPhone's massive sales suggesting there will be a significant pool to draw a market from – and if there's one thing that can be relied on, it's that randy, lonely men will happily spend money on self-gratification.

Article Source:
http://www.gizmag.com/apple-facetime-phone-sex-video/15910/