languagevalue(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)
For artists, YouTube is a 21st century canvas. Since the YouTube Play project was announced last month, more than 6,000 videos ranging in genres, topics and budget have been submitted from 69 countries, and the YouTube Play channel has received over 2 million views.

Today, we’re unveiling the jury for YouTube Play, which includes some of the world’s leading artists, from international film festival winners and renowned photographers to performance and video artists on the cutting edge of art.

YouTube Play jurors include musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson; musical group Animal Collective; visual artists Douglas Gordon, Ryan McGinley, Marilyn Minter and Takashi Murakami; artists and filmmakers Shirin Neshat, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Darren Aronofsky; and graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister, with Guggenheim Chief Curator and Deputy Director Nancy Spector serving as jury chairperson.

Over the course of the next few months, these jurors will watch countless hours of videos submitted by the international YouTube community and select the most creative and inspiring work to showcase at the Guggenheim museums in October.

Already, this campaign has drawn some remarkable talent, and we’re looking forward to seeing more of your submissions in our quest to find the most creative video art in the world and showcase it alongside van Gogh and Picasso. The deadline for getting your videos in is July 31. For more information about the jurors and to learn more about how to participate, check out youtube.com/play.

Posted by Ed Sanders, Senior Marketing Manager typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/MKuf
[video ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languageenvalue

So I get another call from my payola rep at Apple, and she’s like, “Hey, thanks so much for all the antenna-related links over the weekend. I just wanted to let you know how much we appreciate it, John.” They punctuate a lot of their sentences with your first name. Oldest trick in the book, but it works, even if you’re aware of it. Seriously. Anyway, I’m all like, “No problem, it’s my pleasure. You just keep those checks coming.” Laughs all around.

But then she gets serious, and says Apple will make it worth my while if I’d close out this antenna saga with a “Jackass of the Week” piece responding to Dan Lyons’s Antennagate story. So I say, “Who’d he write that for? I didn’t see anything on the Fake Steve blog about it.”

She says, “Newsweek, of course.”

“I thought they went out of business a few months ago.”

“No, they’re still around. I swear.”

She sends me a link to Lyons’s piece, “Apple’s Rotten Response”, which starts like this:

I wonder if panic has started to set in at Apple yet. If not, it should. Because today’s hastily called news conference — ostensibly to discuss problems with iPhone 4 and how Apple intends to fix them — only did further damage to Apple’s reputation.

Which is a polite way to start, because, well, we all know just how panicked everyone at Apple is feeling these days about the company’s prospects. (You’d be surprised at how many of the senior VPs at last week’s event reeked of booze, and it was only 10am. Nerves are frayed.) Lyons was kind to phrase it as a question.

So what should Apple be panicked about? Lyons’s thesis is that Steve Jobs has lost touch with reality, and the world is waking up to this. In this case, there’s something terribly wrong with the iPhone 4 antenna and Steve Jobs won’t admit it:

Some expected Apple might announce a recall of the phone. Others speculated it might announce some kind of software update that would improve reception problems. Instead, Apple CEO Steve Jobs came up with a two-part solution. Part 1: There is no problem. Part 2: Even though there is no problem, we’re going to give everyone a free case, which should insulate the antenna and prevent the interference that we just told you isn’t actually occurring.

I went back through my notes on the press conference, looking for the part where Jobs said there was no problem. I think it was right around the 13:00 mark in the video stream, where Jobs said, “And so the iPhone antenna went through all of this. We tested it. We knew that if you gripped it in a certain way, the bars are going to go down a little bit, just like every smartphone. We didn’t think it’d be a big problem, because every smartphone has this issue.” Or maybe it was a little later, toward the end, when Jobs said “A lot of people have told us, the bumper solves the signal strength problem,” where he claimed there was “no problem”.

So, Lyons concludes:

This is classic Apple behavior. No matter what the whole world can see with its own eyes, just keep saying that it isn’t true, and maybe, eventually, everyone will believe you. By refusing to acknowledge the problem, Jobs just reinforced the image of Apple as a company that is in deep denial and unable to admit a mistake — a company that has for so long been able to bend reality to suit its needs that it now has lost touch with reality itself.

I read that paragraph aloud to my payola rep, and told her that it was exactly why I’d be reluctant to criticize Lyons’s coverage. Apple really should have acknowledged reality. Sure, they’re giving out free cases because — in Jobs’s words — “A lot of people have told us, the bumper solves the signal strength problem”. Sure, Jobs said Apple “knew that if you gripped it in a certain way, the bars are going to go down a little bit”. Sure, the overwhelming majority of iPhone 4 owners seems delighted with it. But where’s the acknowledgement that the iPhone 4 antenna is this year’s Ishtar? Where’s the product recall? Where’s the “KICK ME” sign on Steve Jobs’s black shirt? Why does Bob Mansfield still have a job?

Jobs also said all other mobile phones suffer the same problems when you hold them in certain ways, and that “it’s a challenge to the entire industry.”

That’s ridiculous. It’s absurd. But that’s nothing new. Apple has a history of making ridiculous claims and having them accepted by an adoring fan base and worshipful press.

That’s the uncomfortable truth. The last honest man is Dan Lyons. Those videos from Apple showing other phones dropping bars? Fake. The similar videos on YouTube from owners of competing phones? Fake. Next thing Apple’s going to tell us, the Droid X has a flaky display.

With the launch of iPhone 4, for example, Apple pretended it had invented video chat — something that has been around elsewhere for years.

Lyons doesn’t name all those phones on which people are video chatting every day, because he doesn’t need to. Just look around and see them for yourself.

The real issue here is how the product is perceived. If you need to put a rubber case on a phone to make it work correctly, there must be something wrong with it, don’t you think?

Exactly. I mean, if the truth were that, in practice, the iPhone 4 works just fine without a case for most people — that it gets faster downloads and uploads and voice call quality is improved over the 3GS — well, that’d be a different story entirely.

Jobs clearly doesn’t. He seems scornful of customers who have complained.

It doesn’t show up on the video, but there was spittle coming out of Jobs’s mouth when he talked about the 0.55 percent of iPhone 4 owners who’d called Apple to complain about its reception. He seemed very upset about their gall.

Toward the end of the news conference, he blamed the media for blowing the problem out of proportion.

Apple’s rivals will have a field day with this.

Yes, one week out, this is looking like very good news indeed for Apple’s rivals. Apple’s goose is cooked and Lyons knows the score. People are going to look back at this piece a year from now and say, “By god, Dan Lyons saw it all along.” (Seriously: bookmark it.) It’s bad enough that I don’t have the courage to call Apple out on this blatant chicanery; the last thing I’m going to do is put my name on the line and argue that he’s a big dummy with a chip on his shoulder and that his work exemplifies the state Newsweek is in.

“You’re sure you won’t do it? We really think you could knock it out of the park,” my payola rep pleads.

“Sorry. Won’t touch it.”

typetext/htmlbasehttp://daringfireball.net/

View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalueBack in June, our Zurich engineering headquarters welcomed 100 of EMEA’s brightest computer science students to our annual Europe, Middle East and Africa Scholars’ Retreat. Recipients of the Google Europe Scholarship for Students with Disabilities joined Anita Borg Memorial Scholars and Finalists for three days of workshops, technical talks, poster sessions, networking events and, of course, lots of fun! Check out our video below to hear from scholars and speakers in their own words:



Our academic scholarships are designed to support a new generation of talented, diverse computer scientists from all backgrounds. If you want to learn more, visit www.google.com/university/emea for a complete list of scholarships, grants and other opportunities available to students and academics.

Posted by Caitlin Pantos, University Programs Specialist typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/MKuf
[education scholarships ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalue

I’m seeing lots of tweets saying I caused Flipboard to have a bad first day. Why? Because its servers were overwhelmed and it wasn’t letting new users sign up properly and even existing users, like me, were having trouble getting to the service and getting utility out of it.

Is that my fault? Yes and no. If I were the only one hyping it and if the product didn’t resonate after I hyped it they would have only gotten a few hundred visits. The problem is that Flipboard is the real deal. If you can get in and get it to work it’s a revolutionary product and hundreds, if not thousands, of people on Twitter and blogs said so. The reviews still are coming in and they almost all are positive. That I didn’t do, even if I was the first to tell the Internet about it.

What’s funny is I just hit the Twitter fail whale three times. Twitter is a company that has been around for three years and continues to have scalability and reliability problems yet we all keep using Twitter. It has gotten so commonplace that we sort of accept it, too, even in discussions with venture capitalists who helped fund Twitter, like the conversation I witnessed yesterday with Fred Wilson. He said Twitter was never built right to start with.

I see on iTunes that Flipboard is getting some bad reviews because of this reliability issue. Is it fair to judge a startup badly based on 24 hours of extraordinary growth? Yeah, a little. They could have been better prepared — I sent them plenty of notes telling them they were the best startup I’ve seen so far this year and I kept telling them about reactions of influencers — all which matched my observations.

In fact, when I showed it to famous actor Ashton Kutcher he was so excited about the product (said it was “a revolution in publishing”) he turned to me and begged to be introduced to the company. “I want to invest in this,” he told me. A week later he was, indeed, an investor.

The former head of MTV had the same reaction this weekend.

So they had some warning that their first day would be incredible and see an much larger amount of hype than they would otherwise see.

What’s my failing? I tried to get them to use Rackspace for hosting their service. I failed, they are using another cloud provider. I failed so badly that I couldn’t even convince them to change providers a few months ago when their provider was down when I visited them to get an early look at this company. I think I must take some sales lessons and get retrained. Sigh. But even with Rackspace’s help would we have been able to keep them up? I would like to think so. After all, Rackspace hosted YouTube for its first few years of life and has helped many startups scale.

But this is a world we’ve never seen. Things get faster, bigger, than any time in human history.

The number of people who’ve worked at companies that have seen this kind of growth — all in 24 hours — are almost non-existent. Even experienced entrepreneurs, like Flipboard’s CEO, who started TellMe, which sold to Microsoft for $800 million, have never seen this kind of growth.

I remember back to 1996. ICQ that year released November 1 to 40 people. It took six weeks to get to 65,000 users. I bet Flipboard got close to that in just their first day (I don’t know their numbers, but, heck, a few weeks back I had a VIDEO watched by half a million people in a week, so I bet Flipboard is seeing those kinds of numbers based on the hypestorm that I see continuing around this company).

It is a new world and this new world is bumpy.

Anyway, just my way of saying to cut a team of 10 people who’ve done something extraordinary some slack. No one else has launched a company to this kind of hype, er, adoption, and stayed up as well as Flipboard has. At least none that I know of. Do you know of someone who has had a better first day?

Onward for all of us. Flipboard is working hard (its developers are on Twitter and I can see them responding to customers as to what they are doing to get and stay up) and I’m back on the street looking around the tech industry for the next hot startup.

Got one? Email me. scobleizer@gmail.com

Update. I just added a photo of Flipboard’s team to this post. Left to right (forefront folks):
co-founder, Evan Doll
engineer, Troy Brant
engineer, Charles Ying
engineer, Gene Tsai
co-founder, Mike McCue

UPDATE 2: PC Magazine has an interview with Flipboard’s founders, asking for patience.

typetext/htmlbasehttp://scobleizer.com/feed/
[Web ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalue

Early last year after reading a book about Lucasfilm, I wanted much more information on my beloved games like Maniac Mansion, Secret of Monkey Island or Loom. I ended up browsing Wikipedia for info on these titles, and that in turn gave me the idea of turning the Wikipedia articles into a book of its own. I’ve started the project with Google Docs but after hitting the usual limits, went to offline HTML editing and setting up several tools to get the formatting right, and then started a Lulu self-publishing project for this.

What I did was edit the Wikipedia articles through heavy or light rewriting, depending on what I figured the article would need to look good in book form. I then went to find additional information from other sources where I felt having more could be fun, and I added screenshots. And then I conducted interviews with many people who were involved in producing the classic graphic adventures. I interviewed creators like Al Lowe of Leisure Suit Larry, Lucasfilm’s David Fox, and Michael Bywater, who worked with Douglas Adams on the game Starship Titanic. The book took much longer than expected... the original idea after all was to merely compile an encyclopedia from Wikipedia, a book for perhaps a small but dedicated group of fans like me. But after sending myself the first draft version, I realized much more editing was needed to have something really fun.

To make a long story short, the book is now available at Amazon and Lulu and also got a page of its own here! It’s called “Graphic Adventures: Being a Mostly Correct History of the Adventure Game Classics By Lucasfilm, Sierra and Others, from the Pages of Wikipedia”, and includes games like Maniac Mansion, Labyrinth, Time Zone, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Zork Nemesis, Myst, Indiana Jones, Monkey Island and Grim Fandango.

50% of the book revenues will be donated back to Wikimedia. Your feedback as usual is welcome. I’m not the author but just the editor or compiler of the info – the authors are everyone who ever edited Wikipedia, and by Wikipedia’s rules the full copy of the book can also be downloaded for free in an editable version. This book is a project of love for the genre of graphic adventures, so if you were or are a fan of that too, I hope this fan project will also give something to you.

[Thanks to all who helped with the book through Wikipedia editing, getting interviewed, providing screenshots, or giving feedback and other help!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Graphic Adventures, the Book | Comments]

[Advertisement] Books about Google available on Ebaytypetext/htmlbasehttp://blogoscoped.com/rss.xml
[Technology Internet Google Search ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalueThis is part of our summer series of new Search Stories. Look for the label Search Stories and subscribe to the series. -Ed.

My sister is my best friend in the world. But that wasn’t always the case. When we were young, my sister and I always had our sibling rivalries. Quarrels over who got more (or fewer) birthday presents, ongoing debates around whose week it was to walk the dog and your average diary lock-picking weren’t uncommon. But now that we've grown older, it's become clear that those moments have brought us closer together, and today my sister is my best friend.

Our search story this week really struck a chord with me, and I’m excited to help introduce our latest video, “Brother and Sister.” It’s a fun, playful snapshot of an evolving sibling friendship. I hope you enjoy this week’s video as much as I did.




Posted by Bernardo Hernandez, Head of Consumer Marketing typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/MKuf
[search stories ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languageenvalue

A few follow-up points from yesterday’s “Antennagate Bottom Line”:

Regarding the Delta in Dropped Calls Between iPhone 4 and 3GS

One theory to explain this would be that the iPhone 4 antenna is simply worse than the 3GS’s antenna, perhaps even only because of skin coming into contact with the infamous spot.

Jobs’s “pet theory” is that iPhone 3GS owners were far more likely to have a case than 4 owners, which, interestingly, implies that even the iPhone 3GS gets better reception when in a case. (I asked about this during the tour of their antenna labs; the answer I got was “We don’t know.”)

Here’s another one, though, suggested by at least a dozen DF readers so far. Quoting from one such email:

In Antennagate Bottom Line, you mention the comparison of numbers of dropped calls, but I argue that this is not the right metric. What one needs to know is if the iPhone4 drops a call that would not be dropped by a 3GS. If the additional drops are in areas that the 3GS would have never connected in the first place, then the statistic isn’t telling us what everyone claims it is. All that would mean is that there is a large drop rate in regions that were previously regarded as dead zones. That’s an improvement, not a regression.

I’ll go out and acknowledge that this line of thinking is arguing that the iPhone 4’s higher dropped call rate is a good thing, which, on its face, sounds nutty. But is it outlandish? There are widespread reports — none better than Anandtech’s — that the iPhone 4 gets usable reception in areas where previous iPhones got none. Those may well comprise many of the extra dropped calls.

It’s also only fair to point out that I’ve also gotten many emails from DF readers who say they drop more calls with their iPhone 4 than their previous iPhones, from the same locations. I’ve gotten more such emails from readers claiming the iPhone 4 gets better reception, but for some, it’s worse. One thing I’d feel safe betting on: the extra dropped calls from the iPhone 4 are not evenly distributed among all iPhone 4 users. Some are getting a lot, and most are getting very few.

Regarding Apple’s Field Testing of the Antenna

Over the last few weeks I’ve probably gotten at least 200 emails posing the following theory:

We know from the Gizmodo stolen iPhone that the prototypes were disguised in cases when outside Apple’s campus. Maybe that’s why Apple missed this flaw in the antenna: they never noticed it on campus because they have a strong AT&T signal, and never noticed it off campus because the iPhones were always inside cases, and cases mitigate the skin-touching-the-spot problem.

That’s just not possible.

For one thing, the strength of the AT&T coverage on Apple’s campus has no bearing on the testing they perform in their lab. There is no signal from AT&T inside those anechoic chambers. There is no signal from any external wireless source in those chambers. That’s the point of them. The way the chambers work is that they create their own little mini network inside the chamber. They run tests where they create strong signals, weak signals, and everything in between. They also run tests with people holding the phones being tested.

For another, they do test antennas in the field off-campus with no case. They do so using a fleet of about a dozen mobile testing labs. These are vans — more like small buses, maybe — which contain a slew of testing and measurement equipment.

The iPhone Gizmodo obtained was, in Apple’s internal lingo, a Design Verification Test (DVT) unit. These are one step below production units. My understanding is that when DVT units are deemed ready to go, the factories start churning them out as actual production units. Those DVT field tests are the final tests, certainly not the only tests. During the tour of Apple’s labs, Ruben Caballero — Apple’s senior antenna engineer, who led the tour — said the iPhone 4 antenna design had been in testing for two years.

Lastly, here’s what Steve Jobs said during the press conference:

Again you have to build these rooms, because if you don’t shield what you’re testing from all the outside interference, you don’t get accurate tests. And you can’t put your equipment in the room either. The equipment’s all got to be remoted outside the room. Now this is a state of the art antenna test facility. We have 17 anechoic chambers. These things are not cheap. We have invested over $100 million in antenna testing facilities over the past 5 years. We have 18 PhD scientists and engineers on our staff.

And so the iPhone antenna went through all of this. We tested it. We knew that if you gripped it in a certain way, the bars are going to go down a little bit, just like every smartphone. We didn’t think it’d be a big problem, because every smartphone has this issue.

Honestly, I thought the entire point of the lab tour was to reinforce this point: the iPhone 4 antenna is behaving exactly as Apple expected it would.

Laying It All on the Line

I posited yesterday that Jobs’s peevishness while announcing the free case giveaway had to do with the profits Apple is going to lose, which I estimated conservatively at $100 million. (On the analyst conference call yesterday afternoon, Apple estimated the cost at $175 million.) What I didn’t write about was whether I thought this was a good idea or not. I say yes.

Here’s the thing. Early last week this antenna story was spinning out of control. Letterman made a Top Ten list about it. Consumer Reports was posting updates every day, each getting a lot of traffic. CNN.com had a front page story stating that iPhone 4 owners could “fix” their phones with strips of duct tape.

It’s possible that if Apple had done nothing, the story would have died by now, perhaps drowned out by Apple’s spectacular quarterly results announced yesterday. I think they decided it wasn’t worth the chance — that if they did nothing, the fire might have gotten worse rather than died out.

And I think they decided, wisely, that if they were going to hit back in response to the story, they should hit back with everything they had. No use dribbling out responses one at a time. So: a live press conference, not just an open letter from Steve Jobs; a new section on Apple’s website specifically explaining Apple’s argument, and revealing their heretofore secret antenna testing facility; and, yes, free cases, for iPhone 4 users who are having signal problems that go away when the phone is encased.

In short: they weren’t going to take any chances. Except they did take a chance, insofar as Jobs mixed in a second message: media criticism. The message Apple needed to make was about the antenna (yes it has a weak spot, but it’s a worthwhile trade-off and it isn’t resulting in product returns, support calls to AppleCare, or a spectacular number of increased dropped calls) and about their concern for customers (we want them to be happy, so we’re waiving the restocking fee on returns and we’re giving a free case to any iPhone 4 user who wants one).

The extra message Jobs delivered was to the media: that they botched this story, that coverage was “so overblown it’s incredible”. Surely that’s what Jobs actually believes, and I think it’s the truth. I don’t think it was a good idea for Apple to make that case at the event, though. If the Antennagate PR problem was so dangerous that it warranted a significant response from Apple — and I think it did — then it was dangerous enough that it shouldn’t have been mixed with a message that might further antagonize the media — the very media whom Apple was clearly hoping would spread the facts Apple had presented regarding the antenna and its concern for customer satisfaction. It doesn’t matter whether Jobs was right; it distracted from the core message, which was all about dissipating the meme that the iPhone 4 antenna is severely flawed.

typetext/htmlbasehttp://daringfireball.net/

View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalueThe most significant Google Image Search redesign comes with many useful features and a lot of bugs.

If you type a query in Google Image Search, click on the search button, scroll the page, click on the Google logo, type another query and select the "images" option, Google scrolls to a random part of the page. For example, it could scroll to the page 57.


Another issue is that Google's large thumbnails for PNG files are sometimes pixelated JPEGs.


Clicking on the "more" link in Google's sidebar refreshes the page and doesn't show additional Google services. When you go back to the results page after clicking on the results, you need to wait until Google scrolls to the right position and some of the images are loaded again. Scroll the results page, resize the browser's window and you'll notice that Google readjusts the images and jumps to the top of the page.

The new interface has too many bugs and should have been tested more thoroughly before being released. Google offers an option to switch to the previous version at the bottom of the page, but it's not persistent.

{ Thanks, François Beaufort. }

typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleOperatingSystem
[Image Search ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalue

Google has revamped its image search. Instead of showing image information right below individual images in the results overview, you’ll now get just the image thumbnail. Hover over it, and the thumbnail will grow a bit in size and show its information text below it, like file name, originating site, and contextual keywords (you can also click on “Similar" for some pics to find similar imagery). Thumbs are presented border-less, and rather close to each other.

When you scroll down the results page, new images will be dynamically loaded into the page without a manual page switch (you’ll still see headers reading “Page 2”, “Page 3” and so on, perhaps to give a bit of direction). Looks like Google is getting more Bing-like here. In a blog post, they also mention their new thumbnails are larger than before.

Clicking through to an individual page shows an interesting new layout as well. Many of us sometimes just want to get to the individual image, and only later (sometimes not at all) look at the context page. What Google previously did in the US – in countries like China this differed already – was to show a two-frame page, and if you clicked in the image in Google’s top frame, you’d see the big version without context, saving you from scrolling down on the origin page to look for the image.

Now what Google does is show their own side pane to the right, then dynamically overlay a big version of the image onto the slightly darkened web page it originates at. (Sometimes, an even bigger version is linked to from Google’s side pane.) An X button in the upper right of the bigger picture closes both the pic, as well as Google’s side pane. All in all, I think this is a nice solution that creates a very usable mixture of getting the origin page to show its face, but also letting the user see the big image immediately... and Google’s side pane can be closed easily, too. Admittedly, the origin page may now be getting less visitors to look at it closely than before, hard to tell.

[Update: In case you don’t like the new Google Images version – when you scroll way down to the end of the page, there is a link named “Switch to basic version”, which brings back the old design.]

Added to above changes, Google in their post says that for their advertisers, they’re “launching a new ad format called Image Search Ads. These ads appear only on Google Images, and they let you include a thumbnail image alongside your lines of text.”

For what it’s worth, the thumbnails in the results of the the old image search were often blocked here in China (often only a small portion of the pics would show). The thumbs in the new version all show up fine for now, though I’m not sure if this is perhaps a recent change in no relation and so just the usual mysterious blocking flicker.

[Thanks Juha-Matti and Morgan!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: New Google Images Design | Comments]

[Advertisement] Books about Google available on Ebaytypetext/htmlbasehttp://blogoscoped.com/rss.xml
[Technology Internet Google Search ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalue

.bbpBox19059326384 {background:url(http://s.twimg.com/a/1279056489/images/themes/theme14/bg.gif) #131516;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block}

@Scobleizer My point is that I think Flipboard is a nice imitation of a print magazine. But isn’t that a step backwards?less than a minute ago via TweetDeckNova Spivack
novaspivack

Nova Spivak has been debating with me tonight about how much more efficient he feels news readers are if they stream items down like you’ll see on Twitter.com, or in social media clients like Seesmic or Tweetdeck bring.

I used to agree with him. It was hard to get me away from Seesmic or Tweetie.

But now? I’m a changed man.

Keep in mind that I read about 19,000 inbound on Twitter alone. On Facebook I have 1,800 friends and on Google Buzz I’m following more than 1,000.

I read a LOT of social media. Heck, in the past year alone I’ve FAVORITED 20,000 tweets! (Not counting the ones I’ve retweeted).

So, I’m always looking to be more productive. Yes, I’ve tried Pulse and I’ve tried lots of other readers (I was one of the first to use NewsGator and Google Reader). But nothing is as productive — for me — as Flipboard is.

I actually measured this. I got about 30% more favorites done in a day using Flipboard than I got done in the same amount of time with a streaming reader. And using Flipboard is 10x more fun!

Why is this?

For that I have to go back to my newspaper design class. I remember that early eye tracking research showed that pages that had a single headline that was twice as big as any other headline were more likely to be read. Same for pages with photos. If you put two photos of equal size on the page, it would be looked at less often, or less completely, than a page that had a photo that was at least twice as big as any other.

I won a newspaper design contest in college because of this — my designs made sure that they included headlines that were twice as big as any other and photos that were twice as big as any other.

This might not seem intuitive, but it is how our brains work and eye track research has proven that over and over again. Some of my favorite reading studies were done by the Poynter institute, here’s one such study.

Notice that having large headlines and photos gives eyes an entry point onto the page.

Now, what’s missing in, say, Seesmic or Tweetdeck? That’s right. Any kind of editorial weighting to the headlines and photos are totally missing. Entry points are gone.

Not all tweets are the same. One about Apple’s financial results SHOULD be bigger and more important than one about what I had for lunch today. In Flipboard, which isn’t always perfect because it’s done by algorithms, there is weight and photos and an attractive design.

I’ve come to realize that we’ve actually gone backward in our news media design in the past few years as we’ve gone away from newspaper and magazine-style layouts and toward streams.

One other thing I’ve noticed: my eyes get less strained after using Flipboard for four straight hours when compared to using Twitter’s iPhone or Android apps, or Seesmic or Tweetdeck style apps. In looking why, it gets back to this weighting. Our brains are awesome pattern recognizers and our brains like it when there’s a clear pattern of “look here first, look here second, look here third.” In streams that pattern is gone completely, other than “look at the newest thing first, then this second newest thing, then this third.” That might seem to be more efficient, but it really is not.

Not to mention that a LOT of what value we get out of the world is photographic or videographic.

On tweets you just get a bit.ly link on most readers. Not in Flipboard. That makes it MUCH more productive.

How about for you? Which do you prefer? Streaming like Seesmic or Tweetdeck? Or paginated like Flipboard?

typetext/htmlbasehttp://scobleizer.com/feed/
[Web ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalue

You’ve seen Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic, but you’ve never seen one like this.
You’ve seen news readers like NewsGator, Google Reader, or, even, newer ones for iPad like Pulse, but you’ve never seen one like this.
You’ve seen news aggregators like Techmeme, Google News, Skygrid, Yahoo News, Hacker News, or Huffington Post, but you’ve never seen one like this.

What is “this?” It’s Flipboard.

It’s from a new company you’ve never heard from before. Embedded here is an exclusive interview with CEO Mike McCue. You might have heard of Mike before. He sold a company, TellMe, to Microsoft for about $800 million dollars. Flipboard, the company, has already had one round of funding from Kleiner Perkins and today is announcing a new round of funding along with an acquisition of the Ellerdale Project (http://www.ellerdale.com/).

What is Flipboard? It turns your Facebook and Twitter account into something that looks like a magazine. It also lets you build a custom magazine, either by choosing from Flipboard’s pre-built curated “boards” or by importing Twitter lists. This is a very powerful and engaging way to read Twitter. You can also turn a single person’s Twitter account, or a single brand’s Twitter account, into a Flipboard. For instance, you can follow Techcrunch on Twitter with it and it will turn Techcrunch into a beautiful magazine-like interface that’s easier to read than any other reader.

The differentiator for Flipboard is the design. Lots of touches that make it engaging:

1. Touch an article and it “zooms” to reveal more.
2. Touch a video and it plays inline.
3. Turn your iPad and everything reconfigures, even photos switch from vertical to horizontal formats.
4. Touch “read more on Web” on longer articles and instantly be transported to the original website that was the originator of the information discussed in the tweet.
5. When you bring in your Facebook friends your friends’ photos, status messages, will all be laid out in attractive pages.
6. You can touch to share, favorite, like, or retweet, depending on what you are reading.

To get a sense of how dramatically different Flipboard is from any other Facebook or Twitter client, you should watch the video we filmed with McCue where he demoed the app for our cameras. In the interview he covered the philosophy of this interesting new company, demoed the product for us, and talked about where the company is going.

So, why is this disruptive, or even, revolutionary? Revolutionary isn’t our word, either, but is what actor/entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher said when we showed him the app to get a feeling for how it would affect the content businesses he’s involved in. He’s not the only one, either. We showed it to Wolfram Alpha’s CEO, Barak Berkowitz and he said “it’s one of the most awesome iPad apps I’ve ever seen.”

Techcrunch has covered that in a second post about why Flipboard is a killer app that — on first look — appears very disruptive to Twitter client producers, news readers, and news aggregator/publishing companies. In that second article we’ve also laid out why Twitter and the iPad have set in place the ingredients for a real media revolution — one that goes way beyond other publishing systems and one that further moves our reading behavior away from RSS aggregators.

But here let’s discuss how it works.

You add in your Twitter and Facebook accounts. It builds tiles, or “sections” out of your accounts. If you are an advanced user you can add in other people’s Twitter accounts, Twitter lists, or choose from a pre-done set of custom boards to choose from. More on those in a minute.

You then click on the section it builds after you flip past a “cover” that is made from photos that it finds from your friends and people you’re following on Twitter. The cover itself is pretty interesting, but the meat is inside, so we’ll focus on that.

Click on “Facebook,” for instance, and you’ll see your friends’ photos, tweets, status messages, articles, and videos. Just drag your finger through page after page, er, board after board, of these things. This is your Facebook news feed, but in a way you’ve never seen it before — all laid out like a newspaper. Click on any item and you can see the originating status message and all comments. You can “like” the item, or comment on it too.

How did Flipboard find these things? After all, I have 1,800 friends on Facebook and am following 19,000 people on Twitter and it filters out most of the noise I see on other Twitter and Facebook readers. Well, it has a set of algorithms that are looking for highly engaged items. You know, items that have lots of comments, likes, or retweets. It also has an algorithm that senses photography that’s been linked to from Facebook status messages and it lays those photos out.

When you reopen Flipboard it re-paginates the whole set of boards (you can only display nine sections at a time, which is a major limitation of the first version, but more on limitations in a second.

Along the bottom is a timeline that you can run your finger across to see a menu of all items. If you get to the end of the timeline and want to see more, just flip the last board over and it will go and get more pages for you to view.

LIMITATIONS

This is quite remarkable, and addictive to play with, but there are lots of things we’d like to see Flipboard add. More section tiles, for instance, is desperately needed. I have 25 different Twitter lists of just my own, for instance, and if you go to Listorious you can find thousands of lists on all sorts of different topics, all of which make good Flipboard sections.

Some might wonder why RSS isn’t used. That will be a limitation for some people, especially if you are trying to follow a blogger who doesn’t yet put their stuff into Twitter (naughty!) In reality, though, there is so much that IS on Twitter or Facebook that this limitation isn’t that big a deal. If you find some cool blog you can Tweet it and then it’ll show up in Flipboard anyway.

After playing with this I wanted to have Flipboard on my Android and iPhones. Unfortunately the team has chosen to focus solely on iPads for right now but are considering other devices for the future.

There’s no advertising, which leaves us guessing as to what the business model will be in the future. Mike McCue told me they are looking at new, design-centric, advertising that could possibly fill a page or a portion of a page.

A major limitation is that this is a reading and commenting app, not one where you can build your own tweets or Facebook status messages. I found myself often wanting to tweet from inside the app as I was reading.

It also doesn’t use LinkedIn or Google Buzz, both social networks I’d like to turn into Flipboards.

WHAT IT GOT RIGHT

Flipboard got a LOT right. It shows how you can enter a crowded space of Twitter clients with something that’s beautiful. The interaction design is beyond anything I’ve seen from a startup since Siri came on the scene earlier this year (and was almost instantly purchased by Apple).

They are totally right to bet on Facebook and Twitter. These are the default information sharing systems for most people now and are both mature enough to serve as news sources. I have a Twitter list of world news brands, for instance, that is awesome in Twitter. http://twitter.com/scoblemedia/world-news-brands Lots of people haven’t seen the power of lists like these, but now they will, and they’ll also understand that Twitter isn’t just about telling people what you’re doing.

WHAT IT DID NOT GET RIGHT

There is a lot missing from Flipboard. First, the #1 thing we need is more tiles, or what they call “sections.” Nine is simply not enough.

Second, we need a far better “store” from which to find new sections, er, Twitter lists. Yes, you can eventually figure out that you can search for people, lists, etc, but we need a better way to do that. I wish there were a stronger tie between Listorious, which I find has a very nice way to find lists, and Flipboard, which makes it somewhat difficult to find new lists to make into Flipboard sections.

Third, as a content producer, I’m very worried that this takes too much of the brand and advertising dollars away from the content producers. If I share a Techcrunch article, for instance, I get more credit than Techcrunch does inside Flipboard. That’s not good. Also, they need a better way for content producers to tell Flipboard just how much of the text they are using. Right now Flipboard looks for an RSS feed from a content producer to see if they’ve set full text, or partial text, or headline only, to figure out the syndication rules but there needs to be a way inside Flipboard for publishers to communicate their wishes since I’m sure lots of publishers won’t like what they see inside Flipboard. From a user standpoint, though, I find this reading experience to be unparalleled, so media producers should work with Flipboard instead of flipping out, as I expect some of them like Rupert Murdoch to do.

There are still some bugs. I often see duplication of articles, especially in my lists that follow larger numbers of people (Flipboard’s own curated lists have small numbers of sources to keep them cleaner). I also occasionally see bad text or bad headlines that were pulled in. But those are minor problems for a 1.0 beta and will be fixed, the team says.

THE FUTURE OF FLIPBOARD

The acquisition of the Ellerdale Project, this morning, gives Flipboard lots of new “trending” features to build as well as some strong algorithms to further reduce the noise and pull out great items for us to read, no matter what the list is we’re aiming Flipboard at.

Overall this is an extraordinary iPad app and one that will shake the media world for quite some time.

ANALYSIS OF WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT:

Every once in a while I get an early look at a “killer app.” I still remember the day I first saw Pagemaker (back then from a company named Aldus, which later sold to Adobe). That app, along with a $5,000 laser printer from Apple, was a “killer app” for the Macintosh. Why? Because if you wanted to do a new form of publishing you needed to buy a Macintosh, a laser printer (back then $5,000) and Aldus’ Pagemaker.

I’ve been using my iPad since the very first day and have been looking for that “killer app” that would give me a reason to tell you why you must get an iPad. In other words, an app that would justify buying an iPad for a large number of people.

We’ve seen other companies get close. Last month Techcrunch wrote about Pulse, a news reader for the iPad. I downloaded it, but it wasn’t revolutionary, just a nicer done RSS news reader. Earlier this week another nice news app, Apollo, was announced in Techcrunch, but I quickly answered back on Twitter that I had already been beta testing something that went far beyond what they were offering.

“So, Scoble, spill the beans already!”

The app I’ve been using? Flipboard. See the news article elsewhere on Techcrunch for more details, since Flipboard also announced new funding and an acquisition too.

It does something very simple: it turns your Twitter and Facebook into something that looks like a magazine.

But, don’t miss what’s happening here, because there’s a news revolution that has been born due to Twitter. First, you must see that Twitter has moved from being just for a way to follow your friends to a way you can follow news brands. Techcrunch, for instance, has a Twitter feed that I follow in Flipboard and other Twitter readers like Seesmic, Tweetdeck, and Twitterrific. But go further, I have a list of 216 news brands like the BBC, CNN, New York Times, etc at http://twitter.com/scoblemedia/world-news-brands. You add that into Flipboard and you have the most complete newspaper-style media you’ve ever seen. You can follow just the BBC, or just the New York Times, or just your local newspaper on Twitter.

The problem is that when you see the New York Times on Twitter.com it looks boring. You don’t see the great photography that the New York Times provides. You don’t have an easy-to-read layout. And if you try to read the New York Times along with my list of news journalists or if you want to follow Techcrunch’s staff writers on Twitter you’ll see them all mixed together with all the noise that comes with that. If MG Siegler posts what he’s drinking on Friday night, as he did last week, it is weighted the same as a New York Times article of international importance.

This makes reading Twitter far less useful than it could be and it lays out why Flipboard is a publishing revolution. Oh, don’t take my word for it. I showed actor/entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher Flipboard and he turned to me and said “this is revolutionary.” Then he asked me for an introduction to Flipboard so he could invest in the company (which he did). Nearly every person I gave a sneak peak to Flipboard said the same thing after playing with it.

It’s disruptive to several groups: those who publish media, especially news organizations; those who produce Twitter clients; and those who produce news aggregators.

“One of the most awesome iPad apps I’ve ever seen,” is what Barak Berkowitz, CEO of Wolfram Alpha, told me after he saw it. “It brings to life the real capabilities of social media.”

“It takes a lot of the stuff from nerddom to mainstream,” Gary Lauder, VC at Lauder Partners, and TED speaker. “My mother is not going to read tweets, but she will read Flipboard.”

But it isn’t just the app that makes this a significant new company.

It also is backed by an interesting team, starting with co-founder Mike McCue who started TellMe, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2007 for $800 million. < << http://www.crunchbase.com/company/tellme >>>

It also has already made an interesting acquisition, of Ellerdale < << http://www.crunchbase.com/company/ellerdale >>> which has been building algorithms using semantic technology that filters the real-time stream by topics, instead of keyword strings. Basically, this means that Flipboard has some cool trending topics features and noise control that will come in future versions.

It also has a list of impressive venture capitalists, including Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, Google investor Ron Conway, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, The Chernin Group founded by Peter Chernin, Alfred Lin, Peter Currie, Quincy Smith, actor/entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher, and major investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Index Ventures.

But that’s not why I view this as disruptive. It just is plain fun to use. I’ve spent more than 50 hours on it so far and love that it removes most noise from my Twitter feed, makes me much more productive in finding interesting items, and is plain addictive to use. It also makes me feel like I’m reading an old-time newspaper with beautiful design that helps me find important items to my life. Not every Twitter item is interesting and Flipboard focuses on that.

What do you think? If you have an iPad already do you agree that this is a “killer app?” If you don’t have an iPad does this push you over the purchasing decision line?

typetext/htmlbasehttp://scobleizer.com/feed/
[Web ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languageenvalue

What is not in dispute: the iPhone 4 antenna has a weak spot in the lower-left corner of the frame, marked by the black line in the frame. When covered by your hand, this antenna suffers from attenuation. This is much like other smartphones. Further, because the antenna is external, the iPhone 4 can suffer from a different kind of “holding it wrong” signal loss: bridging the gap on the lower left corner of the antenna with your skin.

This conductive bridging issue is either (a) a critical design flaw that never should have been released, and renders the iPhone 4 a dud product; or, (b) a minor problem resulting from a reasonable design trade-off, different but no worse, in practice, than the “regular” signal attenuation seen in most smartphones, including the iPhone 3GS, and weak spot or no, it’s no reason not to buy one.

In short, (a) implies the iPhone 4 antenna is a design that Apple should regret; (b) implies it is not.

Apple, obviously, says it’s (b). They backed this up on Friday with three pieces of “hard data”:

• Only 0.55 percent of iPhone 4 owners have called AppleCare to report problems with reception.

• The return rate to AT&T stores for the iPhone 4 is 1.7 percent, compared to 6.0 percent for the iPhone 3GS during its first month on the market. (According to Jobs, even the 3GS’s 6.0 percent return rate is considered good for a smartphone.)

• According to AT&T’s data, the iPhone 4 indeed drops more calls than the 3GS, but the difference is less than one call per hundred.

Are there some iPhone 4 users for whom this problem is significant? Yes. Will the free cases and offer of a full refund suffice? It seems so. In terms of practical real-world effect, the worst you can say about it is that it tends to drop about one more call per hundred than the 3GS.

Now, you can argue that that’s a euphemistic way of presenting the call-drop statistic. Farhad Manjoo, in his coverage of Antennagate for Slate (headline: “Here’s Your Free Case, Jerk”), writes:

While Jobs did admit this fact in his press conference, he mangled the stats to make the iPhone 4’s dropped call increase look minor. “The iPhone 4 drops less than one additional call per 100 than the 3GS,” he said. As Jobs sees it, that’s not a big rise in dropped calls. Yet that’s not an obvious conclusion. Last year, an AT&T spokesman told me that AT&T’s average iPhone dropped-call rate is 1 percent — in other words, the old iPhone dropped one call out of 100. If the iPhone 4 drops nearly one additional call out of 100, that could be close to a 2 percent dropped-call rate — or double the dropped-call rate of the old iPhone. That sounds a lot more serious, doesn’t it?

Jobs stated during the event that, for competitive reasons, AT&T would not allow Apple to reveal the absolute dropped call rate — only the delta between the dropped call rate of the 3GS and 4. I think it’s safe to say most people would consider a number of, say, 5 percent to be shockingly high, even with AT&T’s reputation. And at the other end, I’d have a hard time believing that the 3GS’s dropped call rate was significantly lower than 1 percent. So the increase in dropped calls for the iPhone 4 must range between twice as many to 1.2 times as many.

Here’s an academic paper by M.V. Simkin and J. Olness (PDF, via this thread on Hacker News) which estimates the mean industry-wide dropped call rate to be 2.4 percent — all phones on all carriers. The paper was published in 2002, however, so it’s impossible to say how applicable it is to the industry-wide dropped call rate in 2010. But it sets a reasonable baseline — a baseline that suggests a “less than 1 per hundred” increase in dropped calls is, though disappointing, not particularly alarming.

[Update, 21 July 2010: According to slide 11 of this PDF presentation from AT&T back in January, their network-wide dropped call rate for 3G was 0.91 percent.]

I have a theory, by the way, for why Jobs sounded a tad annoyed — that is, a tad more annoyed than his already annoyed tone throughout the entire event — when announcing Apple’s offer of free cases for all iPhone 4 owners through September 30. I’ve seen many argue that the existence of Apple’s bumpers is an indication that Apple knew all along that the iPhone 4 had reception problems that were alleviated by a case (e.g. Jean-Louis Gassée yesterday). I think it’s simpler than that, and requires no less cynicism to believe.

After revealing that the iPhone 4 has a slightly higher dropped called rate than the 3GS, Jobs said:

“Even less than one is too much for us. We’re trying to find out why. We want to drive this lower than the 3GS. But this does put it in perspective. So, I have my own pet theory on this, which we have no proof of, but I’ll give it to you anyway. When the iPhone 3GS came out, we did not change the design from the iPhone 3, and there was a healthy market of cases for the iPhone 3G that fit the 3GS perfectly because the design didn’t change. And in our stores, 80 percent of the iPhone 3GS users walked out with a case. iPhone 4 has a radically new design; none of the old cases fit. Since we didn’t show it to anybody, none of the new cases are ready, and we can’t make enough of our bumper cases. And so in our stores, about 20 percent of the people are going out with a case. And I think that has something to do with this disparity.”

So for the 3GS, when cases were in plentiful supply at the debut, 80 percent of iPhone buyers at Apple stores walked out with a case. I think Apple wanted in on that market. And because the 4 needs different cases than the 3G/3GS, Apple had the iPhone 4 case market all to itself for a few weeks, and mostly to itself for a few months. At $29 a pop retail, I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that Apple saw this as a $100 million opportunity — say, 5 million bumpers at $20 profit apiece. They could have made money with their own cases a year ago with the 3GS, but nowhere near as much as they could have now, as the only case in town that fits the iPhone 4.

Put in context, the fancy secret antenna testing lab Apple revealed Friday cost, said Jobs, about $100 million. Now, Apple’s a multi-billion dollar company. A few hours ago they released quarterly results showing them making over a billion dollars in profit per month. So $100 million isn’t that big a deal. But the way you get to be a billion dollar company is by having a nose for opportunities. $100 million is $100 million. So if you want to know why Jobs sounded annoyed when he said (around the 25:25 mark of the video feed), “Why don’t you just give everybody a case? OK. Great. Let’s give everybody a case,” well, I think you can explain why he sounds peeved by reading that quote as, “Why don’t you just give away $100 million? OK. Great. Let’s give away $100 million.”

Anyway, bottom line on the iPhone 4 antenna: it has a weak spot but there’s no evidence that it’s a significant, let alone catastrophic, problem in practice. It’s telling that the criticism surrounding this issue has shifted, quickly, from speculation about a technical defect in the iPhone 4 hardware to criticism over the tone of Apple’s response to it.

typetext/htmlbasehttp://daringfireball.net/

View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalueGoogle launched a new interface for Google Image Search which replaces pagination with infinite scrolling, hides the information about the results until you mouse over an image, shows bigger images and uses space more efficiently. When you click on a results, Google shows a larger thumbnail on top of the web page that included the image.



Google says that the new layout is more dense, you can get up to 1,000 images when you scroll and you can scroll using keyboard shortcuts like Page Down and Page Up. Google still shows page numbers "so you don't lose track of where you are".

Another new feature is image search ads that will replace the text ads that are displayed at the moment in Google Image Search. "This ad format combines an image with text, offering richer, more relevant advertising on Google Images search results pages."

It's interesting to see that Google reintroduces two features previously tested without success: image ads and a simplified interface that hides useful information about images. Infinite scrolling was one of the distinctive features of Bing Image Search and Windows Live Image Search.

Google Image Search's new interface makes it easier to scroll through results, but I don't think a regular user will look at hundreds of images. Google's goal is to find relevant results, so showing too many images is overwhelming and a lot of the images aren't useful. Hiding information about the image's size, the domain that includes the image and no longer showing a snippet from the page is a purely aesthetic decision. Sometimes it's useful to know if an image is large, if it's included by a site you trust and even the filename could offer relevant information. Google offers a "show sizes" option in the sidebar, but it's not enough.

Old interface:


New interface:


Bing:


If you don't see the new interface yet, try a different browser. Google says that only 10% of the users can see the new UI and it will be available for everyone in the coming days.

typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleOperatingSystem
[Image Search ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalueWhen you think about “information,” what probably comes to mind are streams of words and numbers. Google’s pretty good at organizing these types of information, but consider all the things you can’t express with words: what does it look like in the middle of a sandstorm? What are some great examples of Art Nouveau architecture? Should I consider wedding cupcakes instead of a traditional cake?

This is why we built Google Images in 2001. We realized that for many searches, the best answer wasn’t text—it was an image or a set of images. The service has grown quite a bit since then. In 2001, we indexed around 250 million images. By 2005, we had indexed over 1 billion. And today, we have an index of over 10 billion images.

It’s not just about quantity, though. Over the past decade we’ve been baking deep computer science into Google Images to make it even faster and easier for you to find precisely the right images. We not only find images for pretty much anything you type in; we can also instantly pull out images of clip art, line drawings, faces and even colors.

There’s even more sophisticated computer vision technology powering our “Similar images” tool. For example, did you know there are nine subspecies of leopards, each with a distinct pattern of spots? Google Images can recognize the difference, returning just leopards of a particular subspecies. It can tell you the name of the subspecies in a particular image—even if that image isn’t labeled—because other similar leopard images on the web are labeled with that subspecies’s name.

And our “Similar colors” refinement doesn’t just return images based on the overall color of an image. If it did, lots of images would simply be classified as “white.” If you’re looking for [tulips] and you refine results to “white,” you really want images in which the tulips themselves are white—not the surrounding image. It takes some heavy-duty algorithmic wizardry and processing power for a search engine to understand what the items of interest are in all the images out there.

Those are just a few of the technologies we’ve built to make Google Images more useful. Meanwhile, the quantity and variety of images on the web has ballooned since 2001, and images have become one of the most popular types of content people search for. So over the next few days we’re rolling out an update to Google Images to match the scope and beauty of this fast-growing visual web, and to bring to the surface some of the powerful technology behind Images.

Here’s what’s new in this refreshed design of Google Images:

• Dense tiled layout designed to make it easy to look at lots of images at once. We want to get the app out of the way so you can find what you’re really looking for.
• Instant scrolling between pages, without letting you get lost in the images. You can now get up to 1,000 images, all in one scrolling page. And we’ll show small, unobtrusive page numbers so you don’t lose track of where you are.
• Larger thumbnail previews on the results page, designed for modern browsers and high-res screens.
• A hover pane that appears when you mouse over a given thumbnail image, giving you a larger preview, more info about the image and other image-specific features such as “Similar images.”
• Once you click on an image, you’re taken to a new landing page that displays a large image in context, with the website it’s hosted on visible right behind it. Click anywhere outside the image, and you’re right in the original page where you can learn more about the source and context.
• Optimized keyboard navigation for faster scrolling through many pages, taking advantage of standard web keyboard shortcuts such as Page Up / Page Down. It’s all about getting you to the info you need quickly, so you can get on with actually building that treehouse or buying those flowers.

And for our advertisers, we’re launching a new ad format called Image Search Ads. These ads appear only on Google Images, and they let you include a thumbnail image alongside your lines of text. Check out our Help Center for more info on how try them out; we hope they’re a useful way to reach folks who are specifically looking for images.

These upgrades are rolling out in most of our local interfaces worldwide over the next few days. We hope they not only make it easier to search for images, but also contribute to a better aesthetic experience. We see images as a major source of inspiration, a way of connecting the world—and their growth is showing no signs of slowing down. We’ll work to make sure Google Images continues to evolve to keep up.

Posted by Nate Smith, Product Manager, Google Images typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/MKuf
[search ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalueGoogle added an option to preview the fonts from the Google Font Directory. Before embedding the code, you can edit the sample text, change text size and spacing, capitalize the text, add underlines and shadows.

"The Google Font Directory lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Font API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and are served by Google servers," explains Google.


Google offers a lot of tools for web developers and the nice thing is that Google hosts the required files. Google has an impressive API for charts, Google hosts many popular JavaScript libraries and open-source fonts, Google offers APIs for processing feeds, displaying maps, adding search features and more.

{ via tobestobs }

typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleOperatingSystem

View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalueGoogle Chrome Frame is a plug-in for Internet Explorer that uses Chrome's rendering engine to display web pages. It's especially useful for those who can't install other browsers, but want to run web applications that use HTML5 features and need a powerful JavaScript engine.

Google's description is really beautiful: "Chrome Frame renders the Web of the future in the browsers of the past. It's like strapping a rocket engine to a minivan." Google thinks that Internet Explorer is a "browser of the past" that can't handle "the Web of the future", so it needs a plug-in to make it faster and bring it up to date.

Fortunately, Internet Explorer 9 addresses these issues and it will finally make Internet Explorer a modern browser.


Chrome experiment in Internet Explorer 6, using Chrome Frame. Screenshot licensed as Creative Commons.

typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleOperatingSystem
[Google Chrome ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalueWhen we decided in 2007 to voluntarily become carbon neutral, our intent was to take responsibility for our carbon emissions and promote sustainable environmental solutions. We approach this goal in three ways. First, we minimize our energy consumption; in fact, we’ve built some of the world’s most energy efficient data centers. Second, we seek to power our facilities with renewable energy, like we did in Mountain View, CA with one of the largest corporate solar installations. Finally, we purchase carbon offsets for the emissions we cannot directly eliminate.

We just completed a substantial 20-year green Power Purchase Agreement that allows us to take responsibility for our footprint and foster true growth in the renewable energy sector. On July 30 we will begin purchasing the clean energy from 114 megawatts of wind generation at the NextEra Energy Resources Story County II facility in Iowa at a predetermined rate for 20 years. Incorporating such a large amount of wind power into our portfolio is tricky (read more about how the deal is structured), but this power is enough to supply several data centers.

The wind farm, which began operation in December 2009, consists of 100 GE 1.5MW XLE turbines.

By contracting to purchase so much energy for so long, we’re giving the developer of the wind farm financial certainty to build additional clean energy projects. The inability of renewable energy developers to obtain financing has been a significant inhibitor to the expansion of renewable energy. We’ve been excited about this deal because taking 114 megawatts of wind power off the market for so long means producers have the incentive and means to build more renewable energy capacity for other customers.

We depend upon large quantities of electricity to power Google services and want to make large actions to support renewable energy. As we continue operating with the most energy efficient data centers and working to be carbon neutral, we’re happy to also be directly purchasing energy from renewable resources.

Posted by Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President, Operations typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/MKuf
[green ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalueThe unofficial blog google.org.cn reports that Google tests a new interface for Image Search. The experimental interface uses bigger thumbnails and no longer shows information about images. To find useful information like the size of the image or the domain that links to the image, you need to mouse over the image.







Google's new UI is very similar to Bing Image Search's interface. It's not the first time when Google tries to hide image details. In 2007, Google launched an image search interface that only displayed information about a result when you hovered over an image, but a lot of users complained and the old interface has been brought back.

{ Thanks, Chen. }

typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleOperatingSystem
[Image Search ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languageenvalue

Have a stack of books to read? Can’t find motivation? Maybe you have several books to finish for a class deadline. Or reading that classic novel feels as tough as running a marathon.

Just as athletes or apprentices crave feedback on the way to mastery, ReadMore can help you understand your reading habits, and encourage you to keep reading. Featured on the front page of the iOS App Store in June, ReadMore tracks your reading sessions, holds notes, predicts for you, gently prods, and more! Check out the demo video of this great app.

Read more, and read smart!

typetext/htmlbasehttp://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalue

I hate lock in. It’s one reason why I have used Wordpress for so many years. With it I can move my blog between hosts and, even, can export my blog to a database and import it into another tool. Dave Winer (the developer behind many of the technologies that run underneath blogs) and Matt Mullenweg (the guy who brought us Wordpress) have written about, and spoken about, how lock-in is anti customer and anti innovation quite a bit over the last 10 years.

Over the years I’ve asked developers, CEOs, and CTOs why they went with open source solutions rather than buying something from Microsoft or Oracle and they invariably answer something about how they don’t want to be locked in. WIth open source, they tell me, they can see the code, poke around in it, and, even, take it and build their own systems with that code.

That’s exactly what Rackspace is doing today in announcing OpenStack. But that’s not the only big announcement we’re making. Already 25 companies, including NASA, have already started using the OpenStack code to build some impressive things, but more on that later.

This is the biggest strategic announcement we’ve made since going public.

Why?

1. It means the end of lock-in for cloud customers. Don’t like Rackspace for some reason? Take your cloud-based apps somewhere else. We already have competitors who are using OpenStack to run their own cloud infrastructure. Compare this ability to ANY other cloud infrastructure available on the market today and you’ll see we’re the only one who has absolutely no lock-in. How will Rackspace compete? Plain old customer service and fanatical support.

2. It means that new capabilities are coming your way, including those developed at NASA, who have also open sourced cloud infrastructure as part of OpenStack developed to run NASA’s Nebula Cloud Platform.

3. This is a true open source announcement, not one of those “we’re open” announcements where you find out by looking at licenses that something key has been kept proprietary. Compare our licenses to ANYONE and you’ll see we’re the ones who went fully open source.

4. OpenStack will include several cloud infrastructure components, the first being OpenStack Object Storage, a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files, available today at OpenStack.org. The second component, OpenStack Compute, will be a massively scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula compute project and Rackspace Cloud Servers technology, available later in 2010. Any organization will be able to turn physical hardware into massively scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving tens of thousands of customers and large government projects.

5. An OpenStack Design Summit hosted by Rackspace was held in Austin, Texas on July 13-16, where more than 100 technical advisors, developers and founding partners had the opportunity to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap.

So, what does this mean? Why would Rackspace turn over code it spent 10s of millions of dollars acquiring and developing?

1. It puts the focus on Rackspace’s famous “fanatic” customer service like never before. Because we have no lock-in anymore there is only one way we’ll keep customers: provide the best support.

2. It extends Rackspace’s development efforts far beyond what we could achieve otherwise. And we have been building some awesome software development teams. You might have missed but we hired most of the MySQL Drizzle development team, among many other great developers. But this wasn’t enough when faced with new cloud competition from Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. One company headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, just was never going to be able to take on companies with market capitalization in the 10s of billions of dollars. But as you’ve already seen from the new capabilities that NASA has brought to OpenStack this brings a massive new group of developers into this and the entire world will benefit from that.

3. It has already helped hiring and employee morale. I didn’t grok just what it would do here. I guess that’s part of my Microsoft background. You know, the one that says “why would a company give away its crown jewels?” But it has turned working at Rackspace for many of my coworkers from just a job to one that’s a mission. After all, our code now is going to be used by NASA. Think about what that does. Also, it’s a lot easier to recruit great developers when they get to work on an open source initiative. I almost didn’t talk about this on the blog because this effect has been so pronounced. I believe it’ll force other cloud companies to go open source as well because they’ll lose key hires to Rackspace and they already have.

4. It further aligns Rackspace with the industry it serves. Go around the industry as I have with my video camera and you keep hearing “we’re betting on open source and companies that don’t lock us in.” Every startup, nearly, uses the LAMP stack and those who don’t go that way tell each other at private industry events like the one I’m at right now in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, that jumping off the open source stack brings negative results for companies. I’ve been talking with CTOs, VCs, and CEOs and they are excited to have more choice in cloud-hosting. More on that later as this announcement rolls out.

Here is the official press release. You can learn more at OpenStack.org and also on the official Twitter account for OpenStack.

Rackspace Open Sources Cloud Platform; Announces Plans to Collaborate with NASA and Other Industry Leaders on OpenStack Project

More than 25 companies, including Citrix and Dell, support open source cloud platform to accelerate industry standards

San Antonio, TX – July 19, 2010 – HYPERLINK “http://www.rackspace.com” Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE:RAX) today announced the launch of OpenStack™, an open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability. Rackspace, the leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, is donating the code that powers its Cloud Files and Cloud Servers public-cloud offerings to the OpenStack project. The project will also incorporate technology that powers the HYPERLINK “http://nebula.nasa.gov/” NASA Nebula Cloud Platform. Rackspace and NASA plan to actively collaborate on joint technology development and leverage the efforts of open-source software developers worldwide.

“Modern scientific computation requires ever increasing storage and processing power delivered on-demand,” said Chris Kemp, NASA’s Chief Technology Officer for IT. “To serve this demand, we built Nebula, an infrastructure cloud platform designed to meet the needs of our scientific and engineering community. NASA and Rackspace are uniquely positioned to drive this initiative based on our experience in building large scale cloud platforms and our desire to embrace open source.”

OpenStack will feature several cloud infrastructure components including a fully distributed object store based on HYPERLINK “http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/files” Rackspace Cloud Files, available today at OpenStack.org. The next component planned for release is a scalable compute-provisioning engine based on the NASA Nebula cloud technology and HYPERLINK “http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers” Rackspace Cloud Servers technology. It is expected to be available later this year. Using these components, organizations would be able to turn physical hardware into scalable and extensible cloud environments using the same code currently in production serving tens of thousands of customers and large government projects.

“We are founding the OpenStack initiative to help drive industry standards, prevent vendor lock-in and generally increase the velocity of innovation in cloud technologies,” said Lew Moorman, President, Cloud and CSO at Rackspace. “We are proud to have NASA’s support in this effort. Its Nebula Cloud Platform is a tremendous boost to the OpenStack community. We expect ongoing collaboration with NASA and the rest of the community to drive more-rapid cloud adoption and innovation, in the private and public spheres.”

Rackspace and NASA have committed to use OpenStack to power their cloud platforms, and Rackspace will dedicate open-source developers and resources to support adoption of OpenStack among enterprises and service providers. An OpenStack Design Summit hosted by Rackspace was held July 13-16 in Austin, where more than 100 technical advisors, developers and founding members joined to validate the code and ratify the project roadmap. More than 25 companies were represented at the Design Summit including AMD, Autonomic Resources, Citrix, Cloud.com, Cloudkick, Cloudscaling, CloudSwitch, Dell, enStratus, FathomDB, Intel, iomart Group, Limelight, Nicira, NTT DATA, Opscode, PEER 1, Puppet Labs, RightScale, Riptano, Scalr, SoftLayer, Sonian, Spiceworks, Zenoss and Zuora.

“OpenStack provides a solid foundation for promoting the emergence of cloud standards and interoperability,” said Peter Levine, SVP and GM, Datacenter and Cloud Division, HYPERLINK “http://www.citrix.com” Citrix Systems.  “As a longtime technology partner with Rackspace, Citrix will collaborate closely with the community to provide full support for the XenServer platform and our other cloud-enabling products.”

“We believe in offering customers choice in cloud computing that helps them improve efficiency,” says Forrest Norrod, Vice President and General Manager of Server Platforms, HYPERLINK “http://www.dell.com/” Dell. “OpenStack on Dell is a great option to create open source enterprise cloud solutions.”

To download or contribute code and get involved, visit OpenStack.org. Follow OpenStack on Twitter @OpenStack.

About Rackspace Hosting
Rackspace Hosting is the world’s leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support® to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing. For more information, visit “http://www.rackspace.com/” www.rackspace.com.

About the NASA Nebula Cloud Program
NASA Nebula is a Cloud Computing service based at NASA Ames Research Center that provides high performance compute, network, and data storage services to NASA scientists and researchers. Nebula allows NASA to share and process large scientific data sets and was one of three flagship projects highlighted in NASA’s Open Government Plan. For more information, visit http://nebula.nasa.gov.

Forward Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of Rackspace Hosting could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including any statements concerning expected development of the OpenStack project; the acceptance of OpenStack technology as an industry standard; anticipated operational and financial benefits from any development of the OpenStack project; the participation of other companies or individuals in the OpenStack project; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that expected benefits from the OpenStack project may not materialize because the underlying technology is not reliable or generally compatible with industry standards; there are changes in technology that adversely affect the adoption of the standards, and other risks that are described in Rackspace Hosting’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2010, filed with the SEC on May 6, 2010. Except as required by law, Rackspace Hosting assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements publicly, or to update the reasons actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future.

###

UPDATE: Here’s some blog posts about this:

Techcrunch. “OpenStack.org: Rackspace Open Sources Their Cloud Services Platform, and Gets NASA On Board.”
The Next Web. “Rackspace issues a challenge to the cloud industry; goes open-source with OpenStack.”
RWW: “OpenStack: Rackspace and NASA Nebula Join Forces for Open Cloud Ecosystem.”
GigaOm: “OpenStack: An Open Source Cloud Project Emerges.”

typetext/htmlbasehttp://scobleizer.com/feed/
[Web ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalue

Last night I met an interesting inventor. He’s been involved in the invention of WiMAX, among many other things and is the founder and chief technical officer of CeLight.

But last night he showed me a laser system that could provide a community with much more bandwidth than even a fibre optic line (he claims his system will bring four to five times more bandwidth).

It’s not a point-to-point laser, either. Instead of aiming the laser at a sensor across the land, he saw the light at the top of the Luxor hotel and thought that is actually an interesting way to bring bandwidth to a community.

Last night he showed me how it works. A purple laser which is almost invisible to the human eye and which is inexpensive to buy (they are the lasers inside every Blu-Ray disk player — the lasers are actually purple light, the “blu” in the name is marketing) is aimed at the sky and an array of sensors reads data from the beam of light. Readable due to scattering of light due to the atmosphere. He showed me how this works: you aim a laser at the sky and everyone can see the beam. If your human eye can see it, sensors can see it too and due to some tricks can get massive amounts of bandwidth out of the laser.

I was fortunate enough to meet Isaac and here he explains how it works.

Why is this important? Because aiming a laser at the sky is a LOT cheaper than digging and laying down fiber. So, this might be how lots of areas get high-capacity backhaul capabilities. Translation: we’ll all get cheaper broadband that we’ll need to keep up with future HDTV and 3DTV.

typetext/htmlbasehttp://scobleizer.com/feed/
[Web ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalueEver since Google launched a new version of Gmail, back in 2007, some people wondered why Gmail's address includes a parameter called "shva".

"Just curious, what does the SHVA parameter in the new gmail URL stand for? Is it an acronym? I'm not really asking about the technical usage or the functionality; I'm just interested in the choice of name," asked BRKR. "I know GMail is not an Open-Source program so we can trace the code. But every website tries to make the URL shorter so they ideally shouldn't add redundant data to the URL," thinks Omar Dolaimy.


According to Mike Sego, a former Gmail engineer, "shva" is an acronym for "should have valid authentication". Apparently, the parameter is only included after a successful authentication.

typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleOperatingSystem
[Gmail ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevaluePicasa Web Albums added a link at the top of the page that lets you share most of your albums: "unlisted gallery". The URL includes an authentication key that can be reset from the settings page.

"Albums set to the most private visibility setting - 'Sign-in required to view' - will not be displayed unless the person viewing is included on an individual album's 'Shared with' list. Your unlisted gallery has an authorization key in the web address; this key is a combination of letters and numbers which makes the web address very difficult to guess," explains Google.


The name of this feature is confusing: while the standard gallery only includes public albums, the unlisted gallery displays both public and unlisted albums. At least you only need a single link to share all your public and unlisted albums.

{ via François. }

typetext/htmlbasehttp://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleOperatingSystem
[Picasa Web Albums ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalue

Dave Winer just re-tweeted someone who said that Apple is too arrogant to admit its iPhone 4 has a flaw.

That got me wound up. So, I used my iPhone 4 to call into Cinchcast from along the Snake River in Wyoming, you can listen into my call. The mosquitos were biting me and were making me downright ornery.

But the iPhone is the best phone I’ve used and here there are dozens of bleeding edge smart phones being shown off by VCs, CEOs, and geeks.

Yes, the iPhone has a flaw. But it still is the best phone I’ve used.

More on why I feel that way in my phone call. Oh, by the way, the call doesn’t drop.

Personally, I’m sick and tired of this issue. Techmeme is nothing but Apple today. Glad I’m on vacation with a bunch of geeks.

Onward.

typetext/htmlbasehttp://scobleizer.com/feed/
[Web ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share

languagevalue

It was the ultimate test. Could 3DTV get geeks inside from the beautiful scenery in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Just outside the window of the private home I was fortunate enough to visit today are the Grand Tetons. Yet inside we were sitting, watching 3DTV. Now, I’m sure some of you will say “what a horrid shame.” Don’t worry about us, we’re going back outside now, but we were here to hear a talk by Sandy Climan, CEO of 3ality Digital and get his view of the state of the art of 3DTV (audio interview I did with him after the talk).

Don’t know who he is? His company filmed the first NFL game in 3D. Among many other “3D firsts.” He’s a true pioneer.

Me? I was skeptical about 3DTV. At CES I went and looked at the different models and thought “this isn’t the year for 3DTV.”

I was wrong.

In the picture below, Sandy is the guy in top right corner in a reddish shirt.

And, after being in a living room and watching the current state of the art of 3DTV I can tell you I was doubly wrong.

Did you know that sales of beer in pubs in UK and Ireland went up by five times after the bar owners hung a 3DTV up? I believe it.

Sports is 3DTV’s killer app. We watched a hockey game. A boxing match. And more.

A week ago I was at Oakley. There, the designers are working hard on finishing off some new 3D glasses that don’t make you look like a dork and have even better quality than the ones I was handed here.

Last week I wondered why Oakley would be “betting the company” on 3D, but now I understand. Brilliant.

Anyway, watching sports makes 3DTV a whole new experience that I want in my home. Listen to this interview with Sandy Climan, CEO of 3ality Digital, and you will hear what excited me: a new way to experience events. In the interview Sandy covers production costs, TVs, glasses, and more. We really cover a lot of material, hope you enjoy it.

I’m sold. Now just got to wait for my gadget budget to be approved by Maryam. Heh.

typetext/htmlbasehttp://scobleizer.com/feed/
[Web ]
View original post | Add to del.icio.us | Share