Depending on your needs, and how you look on them, YouTube's embedded captions are either extremely useful, or an irritating extra that people abuse, distracting you from the video. The good thing is: Captions just got a whole lot cleverer.
YouTube notes that its captions are good for boosting a clip's profile in search, since there's more material to be searched for, and it also helps you jump within longer clips. Proper transcribed captions are also invaluable for hearing-challenged YouTube users. Although there's a degree of automation already, captioning is still pretty laborious--so it's not ubiquitous. That's why Google has added two new functions that boost the automation significantly. And by significantly, I really mean "wow that tech is amazing!" Check out this demo video to see what I mean:
Automated machine-generated captions is the big new trick, and is made to work with technology lifted directly from Google Voice's voicemail transcribing system. Basically it listens to the clips, transcribes the text, and auto-overlays the captions over the video at just the right moment. Google notes that it's not perfect, but that the "technology will continue to improve over time"--and, get this, you can even auto-translate them into other languages. But if you've already got a transcription written out, the tech is even more accurate--you just upload it and Google speech-recognizes the video and pins the relevant captions in the right place.
It's an experimental feature, so the auto-caption thing is being rolled out for just a few channels, such as MIT and PBS, at the moment. (Presumably it's in trials because it's extremely processor-intensive, and its recognition reliability needs a big boost.) The auto-timing feature is, however, being made available for all videos in English on YouTube.
Why should you care about this? Well, if you're deaf or partially deaf, then it's obvious. But it's also an indication of how seriously Google's taking YouTube, and it hints at just how much search engine power is going to expand--if it can target the spoken text of online video, what will be next? It's also a reminder of how sophisticated the seemingly light-hearted world of online uploaded user video can get.
Ed. Note: This piece has been edited significantly from its
original version to reflect factual inaccuracies related to exactly
what the California Energy Commission has proposed. We regret the
earlier error.
The Consumer Electronics Association has publicly reacted to California regulators' new requirements on inefficient TVs by saying "You're all dumb, with about the same grasp on technology as Homer Simpson." I'm paraphrasing, of course, but the CEA's outrage is worth closer examination.
The California Energy Commission (CEC) just voted to limit sales of flat-screen TVs to those that meet its energy efficiency criteria, starting in 2011. Though there's plenty of debate to be had over whether this is about efficiency or energy management and budget, the regulations seem mostly reasonable.
Not to Consumer Electronics Association's SVP for industry affairs Jason Oxman, though. He says his association is "extremely disappointed" in the decision. So, presumably, are its vested interests. Oxman goes on to say that this is simply "bad policy" that's "dangerous for the Californian economy" and decries the fact that "The commissioners repeatedly rebuffed attempts from the CE industry to provide input or correct the litany of errors and flawed assumptions upon which these misguided regulations are based."
CEC spokesman Adam Gottlieb tells Fastcompany via e-mail, "This regulation will save consumers money, conserve energy, and achieve it with available technology. Today, Californians can choose from more than 1,000 energy efficient televisions of all sizes and types that meet the proposed 2011 standard and do not cost more than other models. Californians buy four million TVs each year and deserve the most energy efficient products. And, there is no evidence to suggest the regulation will reduce sales of televisions."
But what of these flawed assumptions? Are the HDTVs we're all buying like crazy just really energy-munching monsters that are bad for the planet? The answer is, of course, no. The story is complicated, as you might expect, because it depends on what technology is powering your TV as much as how big it is. Oddly enough, those hulking old cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs we used to own are not too dissimilar in power-hungriness than some flat-screen TVs... so it's not that switch-over that's important. More telling is that CRTs were size-limited by technology and by how much space the damn things took up--a situation HDTVs don't suffer, hence we're all up-rating our TV screen size. And, roughly speaking, bigger screens do eat up more electricity, especially plasma ones since their energy-consuming light-emitting pixels scale up as you increase the size.
But different TVs of the same size from different makers use different amounts of power, and even within manufacturer product lists there's a great variation. Newer TVs that incorporate new lighting systems (like LEDs for LCD screens) also tend to eat less power, and that's a constant downwards trend exhibited as the screens themselves get shallower--since there's less room for cooling ventilation behind them.
In other words, Oxman is worried about the CEC draping a vast, complex field with a blanket ruling that bears little relation to the fine details of the products it affects.
Whee, the Apple Tablet merry-go-round spins and spins: Today adds a clutch of rumors that, if you grapple them all together, are another quietly confident tick in the "it's definitely real" box. But one suggestion is that the beast is delayed, which is the kind of rumor we hate to hear.
Conde Nast Getting Ready, Wired to have an iTablet Edition?
According to AllThingsD, beleaguered publisher Condé Nast is already tweaking their digital magazine publishing format to suit Apple's Tablet, despite the fact there's not a public shred of confirmation from Apple itself that the thing is on its way anytime soon or even that it's real--much less what formats it will support.
Whether it's fallen for the rumors or just wants to jump on the publicity bandwagon, Condé Nast has said it'll have a digital tabletized version of Wired (a very fitting choice) ready first, sometime around the middle of next year, and follow with versions for all its 18 titles. Further information suggests they'll be using a custom package from Adobe to make this work--which makes sense. Adobe already makes the software that Condé and many other magazine publishers use to design the print versions. But the driving technology will be Adobe's AIR--which doesn't work on the iPhone due to limited processor power, RAM considerations and battery-drainage. Would Flash or AIR be included on an iTablet, which faces none of these restrictions? It's likely.
Of course, Tablet Wired and the rest of them will also be compatible with other tablet/slate PCs (like the CrunchPad - where is that thing anyhow?). But the clear intention behind Condé's thinking, if the rumor is reliable, is to latch onto Steve Jobs' newest project like a limpet to a rock, in the hope that the iTablet's successes can revolutionize Condé's whole industry like the iPhone's changed the smartphone game. By the way, Fast Company is also working on a Tablet version of the magazine--go ahead and write about us.
iTablet Hardware: LCD and OLED Displays, Delay Until Later in 2010
Over at Digitimes there's a rumor that once again tackles the screens the fabled iTablet will have. According to sources inside the Chinese manufacturer pool busy making the hardware, Apple's changed its mind about the screen technology recently. Foxconn, Quanta Computer and Pegatron Technology are the companies concerned, and between them they'll be supplying Apple with two models of iTablet: A 10.6-inch LCD touchscreen model, and a 9.7-inch OLED touch version.
This tallies with previous news about Apple's tie-up with LG to supply $500 million worth of displays, which actually includes OLED technology--a tech LG's gearing up its 4.5G production line to produce. It also re-invigorates earlier Apple OLED rumors, and gives us a rule-of-thumb way to calculate an approximate cost for the OLED version. Since 9.7-inch OLEDs are currently going for about $500, the high-end iTablet may cost as much as $1,500... placing it in the luxury, MacBook Air-like Apple product class. Luckily Digitimes sources report an $800 to $1,000 figure for the standard LCD screen version.
This matches with the existing white MacBook price, and could even be seen to imply that the machine will have a full OS X implementation, versus a boosted iPhone OS X. That's because the higher price compared to the iPhone/iPod Touch implies more than just a bigger screen inside the box--it suggests there's better processor power and more memory in there too, tilting favor toward the full OS side of the argument.
The bad news is these same sources now suggest a delayed launch date in the second-half 2010. This matches Condé Nast's news, but is disappointing to those rumor-followers who have previously been looking forward to an early 2010 Steve-note launch to serve as an antidote to their Consumer Electronics Show hangover.
Microsoft's in-house dev team revealed an experimental tool called Pivot, a whole new dynamic way of interacting with data on the Web and on your PC. Will it change everything? Maybe not, but it is a sign of the way things will go.
Pivot combines the ideas behind web-browsing, web search, image organizing and text information into one big data soup that has some clever graphical tools to help you sift through it for the information you're interested in finding. To extend that analogy further, Pivot's real power is that it lets you see the whole data soup at once, stir it around to see new details within it, or zoom right in to see some of the individual ingredients. If that confuses you, watch this short demonstration video:
As Microsoft notes on the Pivot Web site, the goal is to change how we interact with the Web--because the Web itself is growing at such a fast rate, adding data exponentially, and the current model of flipping through the information (kinda like dialing through pages on a rolodex) is already becoming a terrible way to do it. It's a similar story for snuffling through data on your own PC too.
Hence Pivot's graphical, Seadragon-esque interface which lets you reorganize vast piles of data ("collections" in MS parlance, which could be images on the web, text "cards" subtracted from an encyclopedia like Wikipedia or Web pages) in a very dynamic way. You could dismiss this as just another misguided attempt to reinvent the wheel, or at least to reinvent it in ways that are just technically clever and not very interesting. But this tech is partly cloud-connected, meaning it's using the web to view the web, which is novel at least. And discovering fine links between pieces of data is more likely when you view it in a new way like this, which means Pivot could actually teach you something about the information you're looking for. Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, it's a step on the road to the kind of computer interface Microsoft is imagining we'll all be using in the future--check out the Vision for 2019 clip if you don't believe me--so at least the company is being true to its word, and features like this are likely to make their way into future Windows code.
There's just a single thing holding me back from being very impressed by this: Microsoft has, yet again, somehow slapped a feeling of "yawwwwn!" over this tech. There's a spark missing somewhere, a spark I imagine would be present in an Apple or Google implementation of clever code like this (just compare this with the hype surrounding Wave). But maybe that's just me, and if you're interested (and you're running a high-end, high-graphics Windows 7 PC) then you can try out the experimental code here.
An iPhone app that lets you control your Mercedes Benz. An iPhone app that lets you control your Mercedes Benz. An iPhone app ... I mean, what more do you need to know? It's damn cool enough by itself isn't it?
Mercedes Benz has released an innovative iPhone app before, but it was actually somewhat boring, being mainly designed to let Mercedes owners with finance plans better manage their accounts. But now Mercedes has teamed up with Hughes Telematics to integrate all sorts of snappy automated systems in its new line. The system is dubbed mbrace, and it'll also integrate with BlackBerry phones, which should please many a high-powered business person--you can even retrofit it to existing cars that have the Tele Aid option.
What'll it let you do? Navigation, of course. But also remote door locking, vehicle finding, dealer connect, stolen vehicle location, automatic alarm notification, roadside assistance calling, and automatic collision notification (a potentially worrying one--presumably it'll let you know if your partner has pranged your lovely Merc). If that's not enough, there are premium extras that give you location-based weather and traffic info, and a concierge service that lets you book hotels, find stores, make restaurant reservations and so on.
These are mainly upgrades you can already add to your vehicle through a number of third-party applications and hardware bolt-ons. But the exciting thing is that Mercedes has realized the power of the smartphone, and sees how it will integrate totally into our lives in the future. And though this is clearly a luxury system for those with deep pockets at the moment, it's a clear sign of how we'll be interacting with our vehicles in the future. Plus, the designers have been watching one too many James Bond movies.
If the Matrix or I, Robot's view of artificial intelligence sent chilly shivers down your spine, then prepare for frostbite: IBM's artificial brain is now as smart as a cat--just a stop or two down the line from human powers.
Speaking at the SC09 high-performance computing conference this week, IBM representatives from the cognitive computing team will be unveiling all the technical details behind their successes with large-scale cortical simulation and brain-like emulation. But it boils down quite neatly to news that the team has, for the first time, performed an in-computer simulation of a brain's workings at a near-instantaneous speed.
The magic is all done in software, with particularly clever program elements that emulate the biochemical and electrical activity of neurons and synapses in real flesh-and-blood brains. By hooking together over a billion simulated neurons and 10 trillion (that's 10,000 billion) learning synapses, the overall simulated brain is actually slightly more capable than the brain of your average house cat. On paper, at least--because there remains the huge problem of training the cyberbrain to do recognizably intelligent things, things that, say, a cat would do automatically.
Which is where the other bit of IBM's research comes in. Making cyberbrains more like real human ones means better understanding how our brains work. So IBM has also been studying real working human brains (non-invasively!) through magnetic resonance imaging and some processing on its Blue Gene supercomputer. The idea is to try and gain a better understanding of how communications happen inside the brain.
And here's the kicker: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was so impressed by the research, they funded more to the tune of $16 million, with the goal of producing a prototype cyberbrain chip about as smart as a mammal. Remember all those advanced robots we've shown you before? Yup. Imagine an IBM cyberbrain embedded in Boston Dynamics Big Dog, and then try and imagine what it would be capable of ... and I don't mean stuff like taking a robo-leak on the nearest battlefield tree.
To brighten up your dreary winter's morning, here's something to tickle the dreamer inside you: Exactly how might we be enjoying our digital entertainment in the future? Three news pieces today point to different TV-based ways to digest our media.
Hulu Joins the Online Music Fray, Kinda--With Video
Hulu's really shaking up the online TV and movie streaming business, but it's just launching a new initiative to that mixes the online music streaming game with a little MTV-like spin. According to a Hulu press release (and The New York Times), Hulu has partnered with record label EMI for a whole channel on Hulu dedicated to EMI artist Norah Jones. All her music videos, several interviews and four concert movies will be available online as a result. For those of you not fans of the sultry Ms. Jones, other EMI artists will be added later.
Hulu's SVP for content and distribution, Andy Forssell, noted that Hulu had looked at dumping thousands of music videos online as a business model, but decided that the single-artist route was "the best starting point" that's more in keeping with what Hulu users expect. But, with Forssell confident that all of the major labels will sometime soon be in a relationship with Hulu, it kind of turns the service into an on-demand MTV-like service, similar to the many music clips you can find on YouTube, but delivered through Hulu's own, much sleeker, content management system direct to your TV.
Future teenage kids, used to getting whatever they want digitally on demand, will love it.
Amimon's New Wireless Chip Consigns HDMI Cable to History
Chipmaker Amimon's just announced some tiny little modules that'll change how you think about streaming video content, and whether your PC is really a TV or your TV is really a PC. Due on the market next year, the chipsets are effectively wireless high-definition video transmitters that are designed to slot into PCs and effortlessly connect them to your TV.
The upshot, of course, is that your tiny notebook PC (or even high-end netbooks) will be able to act as a full high-definition video/music/home entertainment server for your home, with nary a wire in sight. Loaded your notebook up with hundreds of pics when you were on vacation? Use the wireless connection to turn your TV into the biggest digital picture frame you've ever seen. Have a 1080i 60 frames-per-second movie that you *ahem* just happen you have on your notebook? Amimon's chip can even cope with that Blu-ray-rivaling video power. The chips have a range of 100 feet, so there's no reason you couldn't transmit from a desktop PC to the TV in your bedroom, should you feel like changing where you are in the home mid-movie.
The point of this is that how you think about TV screens and PCs being divorced entities is going to change. We're already seeing some smart HDTVs with limited widget and net-connection powers, but they'll be almost irrelevant when your spanking new TV can simply act as a monitor for your PC without messing with wires. That's a big change, trust me.
Google's Image Swirl Makes Photo Albums Look Paleolithic
Leaping off the back of that whole TV/PC connection photo album thing, this Google news is interesting. Google just unveiled a whole new way of browsing images, dubbed Image Swirl. It's experimental, so it's still stabled inside Google Labs, but it's a big tweak to the system that started as Google image search in 2001. Google describes it thusly: It uses "new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface."
That sounds kinda dry. What it does is automatically scan through similar images of, say, the Eiffel Tower, and group them into little piles for you to surf through: Pictures of the tower at night in one pile perhaps, during the day in another, drawings and paintings of Eiffel himself in another. You can drill down and up into the piles to find the pictures you want, and the interface is graphically similar to Google's existing Wonder Wheel search filtering.
So far, so groovy. But imagine what this'll be like when Google improves the tech, launches it on the full image search site, and possibly even unshackles it from the cloud and lets you download it as a Googletool to use on your own PC--it'll enable totally new ways to browse your thousands of family photos, directly on your TV from your notebook perhaps. Those paste and paper photo albums we used to be so into are going to look like dinosaurs pretty fast.
And there you have it: One quick glimpse of how you'll be digesting music video and all kinds of computer-based video and image content--wirelessly and on your HDTV. Norah Jones fans will get the first crack at it, which seems a shame for all us died-in-the wool, technology-crazed U2 fans out here, but what the hey.
[Update: Could the Google phone be a data only, VoIP-driven device, rather than a standard phone? TechCrunch has a source that thinks so, and suggests that AT&T is already bidding to provide data services. (If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.) You can already port your phone number to Google Voice, after all. So you'd just make your calls over the data service instead.]
The guys at TechCrunch have popped an exciting post this morning: Multiple sources have suggested to them that the long-rumored Googlephone is for real and coming soon. Sadly, they miss the really exciting implications of this.
TechCrunch's leads come from their sources and are unconfirmed, but they're certain of a couple of things: Google is for sure building its own-branded smartphone that it will sell directly through the usual retail channels. It was to have hit the stores before the holidays, but setbacks have pushed the launch into early 2010. The hardware will, of course, be made by someone else (a "major phone manufacturer") and it will most definitely be Google branded unlike, say, the T-Mobile G1.
And that's about it for firm information. It's not much. More speculatively TC notes that they think the maker will be LG or Samsung, but with a bias toward LG as many elements inside the iPhone are made by Samsung. There's also going to be a "big advertising push" starting sometime around January to push the device into the public's consciousness. No surprises there.
But did you spot the yawning gap in this story? If its true--if multiple inside sources have confirmed that Google really does have its own Android phone on the way--then it's enormous news. Think about it: All the excitement that surrounded the Droid's recent launch would be eclipsed, and every other Android phone would seem less relevant. The Palm Pre would take a point-blank shot to the head. If Google is, as TC thinks, paying even more hands-on attention to how the phone works than they allegedly did with Moto's Droid, it'll be the most pure, unadulterated Android experience out there--something akin to the marriage between hardware and OS that makes the iPhone tick. With Google's giant name behind their own phone, and Android OS garnering much positive attention from users and developers, the phone could have a similar impact on the smartphone market as the iPhone did.
There's a single thought holding me back from saying it'll be a real iPhone challenger though, and it's important: Design. Google's design is naff, unappealing, uninspired across nearly every one of their online products. If they display the same prowess in designing the Googlephone, it'll flop, because everyone will compare it to the beauty of the iPhone.
Still, this is still all a rumor--if a high-profile one, as TechCrunch has launched itself headlong, if uninformatively, at it. What's your take on the news? Is it true, or even likely do you think? Is it going to be a serious contender for the iPhone's crown, or just an also-ran (like Microsoft's Zune versus the iPod)? Over to you in the comments.
There are rumors abounding that MySpace is in advanced stages of trying to social-network music system iMeem, and they set us thinking. Looking at Facebook's tie-up with Lala, and even MySpace's with iLike, is this all to outsmart Spotify?
iMeem's been in the wars a bit recently. Its business model of offering free streaming music to users and garnering income from targeted ad sales is a challenging one, and iMeem's fortunes weren't helped at first by the music industry's punitive licensing deals. Once championed by Nielsen as one of the top social networks of 2008, the company is now a MySpace target so that the bigger company can grab the smaller's tech to improve its own music offerings.
Peter Kafka at AllThingsD notes that this is a situation where "the last of the Web 2.0 music services are dwindling away." And he's kinda right...if you think about it, the plethora of Web sites that arrived as part of the Web 2.0 excitement, each offering a way to engage more with your music, and share and talk about it with friends, is reduced to a few big players. iTunes has snapped up the lead in online music selling, but as yet hasn't included a streaming/subscription service of the kind that characterizes these newer sites. Is it because of the enormousness of iTunes, and the feeling that at any moment it could leap into the same sort of game, the reason that smaller music sites are consolidating with other, bigger entities? Are they hoping that the hot-topic of "music discovery" via social media sharing will save their business models?
It actually might be a different threat, though: Spotify. This music sharing site is seeing extraordinary success overseas, and is definitely U.S.-bound as soon as the legal and financial paperwork is all sorted out. When it arrives it could, just maybe, be a threat to some of iTunes' business, since its key pulling point for the consumer is that to use it you don't necessarily have to spend a penny. It'll certainly sew up huge segments of the online streaming music market, which might be what iMeem and the rest are worried about, and why they're maneuvering at the moment.
But the question of whether Spotify will make a difference at all is a thorny one. The times they are a-changing in the online music game: Piracy has taken a very public blow from Pirate Bay's closure, iTunes is the number one music retailer in the U.S. and big names like Microsoft and Yahoo are trying to secure their grip on corners of the legal MP3 market. Maybe all this high-level shenanigans means there's not much room for the little guy with a different business plan--like iMeem--or even the medium-sized guy like Spotify.
Moto Development Group has thrown together a neat prototype device that could possibly be the future of casinos: A multitouch, automatic, cybernetic Blackjack table. Finger-flicking financial fun, perhaps, but also a way to cut down on cheating.
The Blackjack and Texas hold'em-playing gizmo got a public showing recently, where it showed off its circular screen, multiple player positions, and neat gesture controls--but it's really for the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas next year. These gestures are the key to the table's powers, and they make the experience much closer to playing on the real thing than do other computer-based games do. For example, when dealing cards, the dealer actually slides his hand across the table as if he were physically flipping you a new card. You also place bets by sliding virtual chips across the surface, and you protect others from seeing your hand while you peek at the card's corners with a curved hand gesture that'll be massively familiar to devotees of Poker After Dark on TV.
It essentially takes the idea of Microsoft's amazing Surface, adds in some custom-screen action and open-source spin, and mixes the whole bunch together in an innovative way that creates a very real use for large, flat-screen multitouch surfaces.
And you should take note, since Moto is also the design company behind the Zune HD and the Pure Digital Flip low-end digital video cams--just a few devices you might've heard about. Though this machine is just a proof of concept, handmade and hand-coded to suit its task--without any hints that a manufacturer is going to take it on board--it's still an indicator for the future. Why? Because it's going to make a casino's job--separating you from your cash--far easier. With careful programming, it's potentially harder to cheat this digital system--for a start, card-counting is an impossible task when the dealer has an infinitely large shoe. And with less man-in-the-loop action, there's scope for less human error. It's also faster to start and clean up entire games. In other words, this is definitely how the gaming tables of tomorrow's casinos may go.
According to 
Over at 
Chipmaker Amimon's just announced some tiny little modules that'll change how you think about streaming video content, and whether your PC is really a TV or your TV is really a PC. Due on the market next year, the chipsets are effectively wireless high-definition video transmitters that are designed to slot into PCs and effortlessly connect them to your TV.
