Tomorrow is the second day of the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, and the awards for best Apps. Included in the nominations is an awesome app from Yorkshire based Appily Ever After.
A charming depiction of Little Red Riding Hood this app offers three ways to interact. The story can be read to you, you can read it yourself or you can colour in. The pages can be turned like a real book with wonderful hand drawn illustrations.
Buzz will begin to roll out in the next 9 – 10 minutes. Full roll out over the next few days. – We are updating, bear with us.
As we expected after yesterday’s breaking news, Google has officially announced a new product called Google Buzz, a real time status and filtering feature for Gmail.
Buzz is how Google wants to bring you the news, and keep the chatter to a minimum.
Google Buzz is a new way to share and discover inside of Gmail. It is akin to a whole new environment inside of Gmail, a “new world” in Google’s words. Buzz has a feature called auto-following (sound familiar?), to let you find a new social graph without all of the work behind actually looking for those people. Buzz will follow all of the people that you already email with, building on your current Gmail contact list.
In a move in support of privacy, Buzz will also allow for private and public sharing of updates. Read the rest of this post »
Last night at the monthly Tokyo 2.0 event, Google Mobile Product Managers Riku Inoue & Brad Ellis from Google Japan, gave a presentation entitled Convergence and beyond.
In my opinion the most interesting part was during the Q&A session that followed, I asked if Google had plans to add people or face recognition to Google Goggles? This would be possible since: Picassa has face recognition, Flickr has added people tagging, and of course Facebook has support for tagging people in photos.
Riku and Brad’s response was Google has person recognition working in a Google internal build of Goggles, but the feature was removed in the publicly released version due to privacy concerns.
However they also said, Google hasn’t given up on the feature and are trying to find the right approach to make sure people’s privacy is taken into account. When they do, the People recognition feature will be added to the public version of Goggles.
The 14 min. Google Japan presentation can be watched below in full Read the rest of this post »
In October 2009, after 2.5 years of using Twitter every day, I wrote a piece that explained the limits of Twitter that we’ll have to look past Twitter to see solved, because Twitter doesn’t seem to be trying to solve them.
Tomorrow, we hear, Google will announce a product that aims to take on Twitter. If so, here’s a list of features to look for. Any of these features would give Google a serious edge over Twitter. Maybe they thought of some things I don’t have on my list. It’s always nice to put your stake in the ground. I did it with the iPad with some hilarious results.
So here’s the list of must-have features:
1. Reliability. Twitter still has trouble dealing with high-flow events like last night’s SuperBowl. Lots of Fail Whales. So if Google is able to offer reliability, no matter how much of an advantage Twitter’s installed base is, it won’t matter. When Twitter goes down everyone will reassemble on Glitter. Read the rest of this post »
Update – NetFlix claims that the update in its roadmap was wrong. 1080p streaming will not be coming this year. However, closed captioning and 5.1 surround sound are a go.
Like a fine scotch, Netflix just keeps getting better with age. The company will rolling out 1080p streaming this year for its army of subscribers.
The company is moving away from DVDs as quickly and strongly as possible, attempting to get out of the saddle of a dying horse. The CEO of Netflix has expressed pessimism with physical formats, a bold move for a company that was built on shipping DVDs at light speed.
The company will also be addressing a long time gripe among its customers, the 1080p streaming will support 5.1 surround sound. Many users through time were annoyed when some streams, labeled HD, did not have surround sound. Read the rest of this post »
Social startup Pip.io has been enigmatic from the beginning. Claiming to be creating a web based “social OS,” they used to bill themselves as “what Wave should have been.”
You can now get a full look at just what Pip.io has envisioned for the future, today. The company has finally reached the end of their beta cycle, and have released their 1.0 version of Pip.io.
Along with some very welcome UI tweaks, the core of the product has been fully upgraded and is now, according to corporate sources, 60% faster with a half-size code base.
Applications and other open items can now be minimized to the top bar from the refreshed sidebar removing the clutter that was something of a problem in earlier releases. Read the rest of this post »
WSJ is reporting that Google will soon release a new Twitter like feature for Gmail.
The feature is reportedly designed to make it simple for users to share status updates, photos, videos with relevant people in their contact list via stream like interface.
WSJ reports that the feature could be made available as soon as this week, possibly as an integrated feature or initially as a Gmail labs addon.
The feature will apparently link to Gtalk’s status update feature but also provide a separate area to view a Twitter like stream, presumably with replies/comments too. Read the rest of this post »
Real time voice translation is on the way and Google aims to pioneer it.
The Internet giant wants to develop its smartphone technology to translate speech in real time.
The company would combine its advanced voice recognition know-how with its text translation service to create a mobile phone that acts as an instant interpreter.
Head of translation services Franz Och said: “We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time. Read the rest of this post »
Dcyder, a free online service, has launched to help women make decisions about their lives by putting dilemmas to other women to vote.
Should you ditch your cheating boyfriend or give him another chance? What to do about that annoying friend stealing your style? Dcyder lets you post it online and get the women of the world to help you decide.
Oddly enough, for a startup focused on delivering advice from women to women, the site was created by two men.
Australian co-founders Steve Hardisty and Stu Coleman explain the inspiration behind the site:
“Once upon a time women would seek advice from their mothers, or even write in to a magazine columnist or Agony Aunt for advice, but web 2.0 and social networking changes everything. Why ask just one person, when you can poll the masses?” explains Coleman. Read the rest of this post »
