According to Pocket-Lint, Sony Ericsson has signed a deal with GestureTek to utilize a software engine which uses a cellphone camera as a motion sensor. Because the software is currently used in the PS2 EyeToy, it will be used to launch a new range of Sony Ericsson motion sensitive games. And apparently, Super Monkey Ball and Crash Bandicoot are in the works (see photo).

Similar in function to the camera-based motion sensor in the Samsung Instinct, GestureTek’s technology is cheaper to implement that the accelerometers found in phones like the LG Secret and iPhone. It can also be retroactively applied to old Sony E cameraphones. Is Sony Ericsson finally getting serious about cellphone gaming? We’ll see. Check out Pocket Lint for more photos.[Pocket-Lint]

Source: gawker.com

In response to a survey that found a high number of people send text messages while driving, speech recognition company vlingo today called for a greater adoption of speech technologies in the mobile market.

"We thought we would add to the public dialogue on the issue," says Dave Grannan, president and CEO of vlingo. "We're not going to change human nature. If [people are] going to text in the car, it would certainly be safer to do it by voice than to have to type and manipulate by keypad."

The vlingo survey, results of which were released today, was conducted with independent research firm Common Knowledge Research Services. Of the 5,000 people polled, 55 percent polled said they used text-messaging services; 42 percent used their mobile phone for texting as much as they do or more than they do to make calls; and 28 percent said they have texted while driving.

The survey touches upon the safety and possible future public policies regarding DWT. Twenty-three states are considering making DWT illegal; and 78 percent of respondents said they believed DWT should be outlawed. If made illegal, the policy would affect younger users (ages 13-29) the most,  because that age bracket comprised the greatest text-messaging user base.

Grannan maintains that, in addition to business reasons, the report also touches on important issues related to public safety. Noting an instance in Massachusetts (where vlingo is based), in which a 13-year-old girl was killed by an 18-year-old driver who was DWT, Grannan says products like speech recognition would markedly improve driving conditions.

Vlingo's products, in addition to speech-to-text conversion in text and mobile Web applications, also allow users to have their completed text messages read back to them. This feature, Grannan says, further reduces the risks of driving while texting (DWT) because users do not need to look down to check the transcription's accuracy.

According to Grannan, the survey was originally conducted to understand the behavior of users of mobile Web services and applications, as well as DWT. He said the company publicly released the DWT statistics today because the results were so "surprising." Grannan also notes that the report could be useful in discussing consumer text-messaging habits with wireless carriers.

"At the business end of it, [the report] is really to publicize the report for our potential customers, the wireless carriers, so we can engage them in a deeper conversation," Grannan says. "We've got behavior and attitudes by operator, state, gender, and age. We can go into a Sprint or Verizon and tell them a great deal about how their individual user compares to the overall market."

The report also touched upon consumer usage of mobile Web applications. Vlingo, which recently worked with Yahoo! to develop the Yahoo! oneSearch speech-enabled mobile Web browser, identified a lack of user interest in accessing the Internet on their mobile phones. While 44 percent of respondents said the cost of mobile Internet was their main gating factor, 40 percent said it took too much time, while 30 percent noted difficulty in text entry. Grannan hopes software like his company's will be able to up that user interest.

"The people who make mobile apps…take it as self-evident that a speech user interface is the next evolutionary step to making the mobile data services more useful," he says.

Skyfire has raised a $13 million second round of funding as it ramps up its campaign in the mobile browser wars.

The Mountain View, Calif. startup’s goal, says chief executive Nitin Bhandari, is to make the mobile web experience as close to the PC-browsing experience as possible, rather than settling for the simplified web presented on most mobile browsers like Opera Mini. Some of that comes down to the interface: Like the iPhone’s Safari browser, Skyfire lets you see a full web page, then zoom in by touching the screen. Even more significantly, Skyfire supports web formats like Flash and AJAX that don’t work on many mobile browsers. For example, Skyfire is the only one to support the latest version of Flash, Bhandari says. And while Skyfire is not the only browser to support a format, it’s the fastest. Jake Seid of Lightspeed Venture Partners, which led the round, says the browser is normally five to 30 times faster than the competition.

Skyfire is currently in private testing mode for smartphones with the Windows Mobile operating system. Although Bhandari describes the initial response as very positive, he says it’s too early to release any numbers to back that up.

The company plans to add compatibility with other platforms soon, starting with the Symbian operating system, and Bhandari says he wants to leave testing mode in late summer. Apple’s iPhone has been credited with leading the way in popularizing mobile web surfing, but Bhandari says Skyfire doesn’t have any immediate plans for iPhone compatibility. That makes sense, since much of Skyfire’s promise is to bring a smooth browsing experience to mobile devices that aren’t as expensive as the iPhone.

As for making money, Bhandari will only say that there are players in different “layers in the [wireless] ecosystem” that are interested in partnerships.

Seid says one of the big reasons for Lightspeed’s investment is Skyfire’s vision of allowing phone users to access “the real web” rather than a watered-down mobile web. As an example, he points to Flash video site YouTube. Although the iPhone has a special YouTube application, and there’s also a YouTube mobile site, most mobile browsers can’t run videos from the real YouTube site.

Does that mean Lightspeed is essentially betting on the desire of users to access multimedia content on their phones? Not so, Seid says, because more and more web pages in general are moving onto Flash and AJAX: “It’s not a bet on [multimedia], it’s a bet that people want to access the web, period.”

Skyfire previously raised $4.8 million from Trinity Ventures and Matrix Partners, who also participated in this round.

By Richard Koman
Google has released Google Web Toolkit 1.5, which now supports Java 5. Bruce Johnson, Google's engineering manager, said the toolkit will let developers focus on Web applications rather than desktop platforms by resolving browser incompatibilities. Google also opened Google App Engine to let more developers host applications on its servers.

At the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco this week, the search giant announced a new version of its Web development kit and opened up its hosted Google App Engine to more developers.

Web applications written with Google Web Toolkit 1.5, which now supports Java 5, will run 1.2 to two times faster, said Bruce Johnson, Google's engineering manager. The toolkit is a step toward making the Web — not Windows, Mac or Linux — the computing layer that developers are concerned with.

"There's no question any more whether you're going to target the browser or a desktop app," Johnson said. "For almost any new exciting app, you're going to target the browser."

Microsoft's 'Market to Lose'

For a certain class of programs, Johnson said, the Web is "already better than what you can do on the desktop." He added: "For extremely low-latency applications, like video editing, I think we're still a couple years out."

Such statements are nothing less than a shot across Microsoft's bow — and while establishing the Web as a competitor to Windows is still an uphill battle, Google should not be underestimated here, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group.

"There is little doubt the browser is the best common denominator for new applications," Enderle said, "but the problem is that most people don't have network connections that are fast enough to live on it." That kind of connectivity likely won't come for a decade, which gives Microsoft a sizable window of time to fight back, he added.

"This is still Microsoft's market to lose, but to beat Google they have to lead and not follow to this new capability — and they have lost focus on their core defenses to this attack: Windows, Office and IE," Enderle said. "Google can't do this without Microsoft's help because people just don't change very quickly, and Google doesn't yet have the developer support to make this a reality."

But Google is leading the way — and Microsoft is "bleeding developers," Enderle said. "So, yes, they can do this, but Microsoft is still in a position to block if they can execute quickly enough. IBM in the '90s against Microsoft was a lesson in what not to do."

Navigating Browser Incompatibility

Google Web Toolkit helps developers quickly create Web applications by serving as a translation device between Java code and the JavaScript language built into browsers. Why not write directly in JavaScript? One of the biggest problems with Web development has been the multiplicity of ways in which popular browsers implement Web standards like Cascading Style Sheets and JavaScript. Earlier versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, especially, implemented the standards poorly, but Apple's Safari also featured odd implementations.

–

Welcome to check my blog: http://unitedstatesofearthbycozec.blogspot.com/
—————————————————————-

In a patent application dated April 24, 2008 and titled “Solar cells on portable devices” attributed to a number of Apple employees, Apple reveals possible plans to integrate solar cells into devices such as iPods and MacBooks.

Google, Facebook in stalemate over social data

–

Welcome to check my blog: http://unitedstatesofearthbycozec.blogspot.com/
—————————————————————-

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.This time there weren’t any imperial vs metric units frack-ups: the Phoenix Mars Lander touched down perfectly on the northern polar region of Mars, starting a three-month mission that will see the spacecraft digging in the dirt for frozen water and tiny green men.

NASA received the first signals at 7:53:44PM Eastern Time, which made engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California; Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver; and the University of Arizona, Tucson, to jump on their seats overjoyed. We can’t blame them: this is just the third time in history that a spacecraft has completed a soft landing on the red planet, 32 years after Viking 2. Now we only have to wait a couple more days to see if everything, including the critical 7.7-foot-long robotic scoop arm, is in working condition.

[NASA]

NerdMaster writes “Last week nVidia held their Spring 2008 Editor’s day, where they presented their forthcoming series of graphics processing units. While the folks at Hardware Secrets couldn’t tell the details of the new chips, they posted some ideas of what nVidia is seeing as the future of computing. Basically more GPGPU usage, with the system CPU losing its importance, and the co-existence of ray-tracing and rasterization on future video cards and games. In other words, the ‘can of whoop-ass’ nVidia has promised to open on Intel.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Whenever a new product comes out that has the early adopter set all atwitter — like say, Twitter, for example — there is a certain amount of discussion devoted to when or if the product will go mainstream. Sometimes we’re not even sure if a new web app or service maybe already has reached the masses. A lucky few new web apps will cross the proverbial chasm into the mainstream, but most won’t. Some those that don’t will nonetheless see their ideas co-opted by a site that is already undeniably mainstream — Facebook.

A lot of sites that early adopters love probably won’t fly with the mainstream because those users are a tougher sell. While most readers of this blog (early adopters) are willing to try a large number of new services each year, month, or even week, most casual users of the web can’t be bothered. It takes a lot more to get them to invest time into a new service.

Facebook, on the other hand, has already captured the collective mind share of the mainstream and can take the good ideas set forth by early adopter hits and repackage them in ways that their users are more apt to consume.

A study (PDF) by Yahoo! and Ipsos Insight in 2005, found that at the time only 4% of Internet users had knowingly used RSS, but another 27% used it via start pages like MyYahoo! without being aware of what it was. I’m willing to bet that those numbers have improved, but I am also willing to bet that a similarly low percentage of Facebook users would know what a lifestream was — even though they use one every day with the Facebook Mini-Feed.

Don’t Look Now, But Facebook is Eating Your Lunch

Facebook has status updates that you can update via SMS (watch out Twitter), they have a news feed that now accepts 12 outside inputs (watch out FriendFeed), they have the biggest photo sharing site on the web (watch out Flickr), they have a built in chat application (watch out Meebo). These features were all added as an after thought. Facebook has taken the most buzzed about early adopter-targeted applications, and turned them into features for the mainstream.

But Facebook keeps my data locked up, you might say. FriendFeed gives me an RSS feed of my activity stream, Twitter does the same thing, and both sites have an API. Those are good points, but not for the average web user, who will more often than not respond with, “Who cares?” or “I don’t know what the words you just said mean…”

It might be ironic that Facebook is porting data in from outside services, but not making it easy for users to go the other way with data created inside Facebook. But for most users, that thought probably doesn’t ever occur. Most users don’t care what’s under the hood, they just care that a service does what they want or expect it to. Mainstream users aren’t asking Facebook for data portability. That their status updates have to stay in Facebook doesn’t matter.

In 2006, Marc Canter said, “Users do care [about data portability] if for no other reason than they’re lazy and they don’t (want) to have to create all those relationships and upload their photos — all over again.” I think, though, that he’s actually not right. My unscientific survey of one average web user tonight led me to believe that mainstream users don’t care about the things that early adopters do. Even after explaining what data portability was and its benefits, the response I got was, “So what? In the past 5 years I’ve used 3 social networks — Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. I change services so infrequently, and the sign up process is so easy, taking my data with me doesn’t seem like something I really need.”

My guess is that mainstream users, by and large, are fine with their data staying in one place.

Of course that’s also not the point. Data portability is important, and some day, because early adopters pushed for it, mainstream users won’t say, “So what?” they’ll say, “It’s really cool that all my Facebook contacts are automatically in Yahoo! Mail,” all the while still not really being aware of the concepts behind data portability. In the meantime, though, Facebook is taking the ideas that early adopters love, and co-opting them into features that mainstream users will learn to love, without mucking about with all those things that early adopters demand. (That’s the point.)

Conclusion

I’m going to paraphrase something my colleague Sarah Perez said to me in a conversation discussing this post a couple of days ago. Facebook seems to have been built to let the entirety of web 2.0 flow into it. News feed (FriendFeed), status (Twitter), platform (web 2.0 apps/services), etc., Facebook is all about taking web 2.0 to the average, casual web user.

Will FriendFeed and Twitter go mainstream? You bet. But it will very likely be as features on Facebook. A commenter on our post yesterday about Facebook’s new profile design noticed that the new design makes Facebook feel like an operating system. That’s an astute observation and it seems to be where Facebook wants to go. Web 2.0 will flow through Facebook, and Facebook will become the mainstream everything. Will users stand for it? Early adopters certainly won’t unless Facebook makes it easy to get out what we put in, but mainstream users might just let it happen (and probably won’t really realize that it is happening).

Source: feedburner.com