Don’t touch a keyboard or see a screen: new open standards to make web open to all

Written on 12th February 2009                                                                                                              0 COMMENTS
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom

As part of ensuring the Web is available to all people on any device, W3C published a new standard on February 10th to enable interactions beyond the familiar keyboard and mouse. EMMA, the Extensible MultiModal Annotation Markup Language, promotes the development of rich Web applications that can be adapted to accept more input modes (such as handwriting, natural language, and gestures) and output modes (such as synthesised speech) at lower cost. 

EMMA was developed by the Multimodal Interaction Working Group which included these W3C Members: Aspect Communications, AT&T, Cisco Systems, Department of Information and Communication Technology – University of Trento, Deutsche Telekom AG, France Telecom, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) Gmbh, Hewlett Packard Company, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, International Webmasters Association / HTML Writers Guild (IWA-HWG), Korea Association of Information & Telecommunication, Korea Institute of Science & Technology (KIST), Kyoto Institute of Technology, Loquendo, S.p.A., Microsoft Corp., Nuance Communications, Inc., Openstream, Inc., Siemens AG, Université catholique de Louvain, V-Enable, Inc., Voxeo, and Waterloo Maple.

“As a common language for representing multimodal input, EMMA lays a cornerstone upon which more advanced architectures and technologies can be developed to enable natural multimodal interactions. We are glad that EMMA has become a W3C Recommendation and pleased with the capabilities that EMMA brings to the multimodal interactions over the Web.”

— Wu Chou, Director, Avaya Labs Research, Avaya

Learn more about Multimodal Interaction Activity at W3C.

Accessibility, annotation, EMMA, Extensible MultiModal Annotation Markup Language, Information technology, open standards, W3C

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Venture investing dip in Europe, decline of 35 percent

Written on 27th August 2008                                                                                                              1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

A report by Dow Jones VentureSource has a pessimistic conclusion: venture capital firms have invested significantly less money in European start-ups during Q2 than during the same period last year – the amount declined with 35 percent, to $1.3 billion. They’ve invested in 167 young companies, which is 42 percent fewer than last year. This year’s Q2 was the worst since at least 2000, when VentureSource started tracking European data.

The worst sector of all? Information technology. I assume that concerns our beloved Internet industry as well. The British IT industry, former leader, had to take the hardest punch, venture investment declined with a stunning percentage of 49.

Ram Srinivasan, a venture partner with European firm Wellington Partners explained to The New York Times what’s causing the slowdown in funding: “Europeans are wary of investing in start-ups until the United States markets stabilize and economic and political uncertainty recedes”.

The US venture investment also declined, yet not as sensationally as in Europe. The investments fell with 19 percent.

Dow Jones & Company, Dow Jones VentureSource, economy, Europe, Information technology, investment, United States, venture capital

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