Bryan O’Rourke shares his thoughts on technology, business, and consumer trends in health, fitness and more.
Rosy is an automatic translation robot, built on top of Wave and Google Translate, enabling real-time, multilingual, collaborative communication.Watch this brief snipit of the Wave demo presentation around Rosy.
Democratization of publishing continues with MagCloud, HP's new cloud solution to publishing magazines. It costs you nothing to publish a magazine on MagCloud. To buy a magazine costs 20¢ per page, plus shipping. For example, a 20-page magazine would be four bucks plus shipping. And you can make money! You set your issue price and all proceeds above the base price go to you. Remember "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." Watch the CMO of HP, Michael Mendenhall, explain the business model below. See an example of a successful fashion magazine using the tool as mentioned in the NYT here.
Saletan's recent post on Slate explores the convergence of the digital and physical world, referencing a 2007 NYT article which said...
"New technology, already in use in parts of Asia but still in development in the United States, allows [cell] phones to connect everyday objects with the Internet. In their new incarnation, cellphones become a sort of digital remote control, as one CBS executive put it. With a wave, the phone can read encoded information on everyday objects and translate that into videos, pictures or text files on its screen. ...In Japan, McDonald's customers can already point their cellphones at the wrapping on their hamburgers and get nutrition information on their screens. Users there can also point their phones at magazine ads to receive insurance quotes, and boardairplanes using their phones rather than paper tickets. And film promoters can send their movie trailers from billboards."
See My Click CEO talk about an example of this new technology.
Better methods of delivering intuitive answers to search will drive even higher adoption of the Internet . Now comes Bing, Microsoft's answer to this search opportunity. Functioning as what Microsoft is calling a "decision engine," rather than simply linking users to sites, Bing searches often end with information directly from Bing. For example, if you type in the name of a city you get local weather, hotel prices and other information without having to click anywhere. And, depending on the content licensing rules of sites that Bing draws from, it can sometimes display content directly — from Wikipedia for example — without the user having to click through. It even has a built-in shopping engine that, when you search for a product, shows you images, offerings from multiple merchants as well as product information, customer reviews and expert reviews. The search engine also helps you find travel deals and lets you book travel without having to leave the site. I'm not sure how well it works, but it includes a "price predictor" that helps determine if the price of the ticket you're thinking of buying is likely to go up or down. Find out more below.
At the D7 conference, Walt Mossberg, co-founder of the conference says innovation usually follows tough times. He touts "another seminal era" where mobile devices, cloud computing and social networking are combining to impact our world. Visit the conference web site
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