By tapping databases and connecting people, places, and things Google's Knowledge Graph enriches your search experience.

This week Google is rolling out a new search tool: the Knowledge Graph. Breaking with the old strategy of keywords and webpages, Knowledge Graph makes use of the vast amounts of online data to give you persons, places, and things that are related to what you’re looking for. This new search philosophy of “Things Not Strings” ceases to treat your query as a random string of characters, and treats them as real world ideas instead. And it’s only the beginning of the move away from having to wade through website after website to find what you’re looking for.

Without Knowledge Graph, Google search results are keyword-based and direct us to websites that contain our keyword or related keywords. But as we know words are often ambiguous. For example, if you type in “mercury” you could be interested in the elemental liquid, the planet, or the fleet-of-foot messenger of the Roman gods. By being connected to a network of relevant material, results become more narrow, getting us to our relevant “mercury” more quickly. They’re richer too, allowing us easy access to information about the first planet from the sun.

Now, instead of Googling to get to the Wikipedia page, much of the information you’re looking for will already be displayed in the results – a Googlepedia. Sort of.

When searching for a book, dog breed, or planet, an information panel will appear in that empty white space to the right of the results list. The section will contain a brief description, a collection of facts, the highest-ranking related images, related searches, and other related information such as a map, an upcoming concert for a band, or recently Google+ posts from people in your circles.

The information display won’t be nearly as complete as a Wikipedia page, and not all topics get an information display. Easily packaged subjects like specific sports teams, movies, locations, and famous people get a display. Cars, video games, and companies do not.

Of course, your facts are only as good as your sources. The Knowledge Graph draws from multiple online data sources including Wikipedia, the CIA World Factbook, and Freebase, an open database generated by Metaweb, which Google acquired in 2010. Wikipedia has nearly four million articles, and Freebase has data on over 24 million people, places, and things. Subject-specific information is gathered from sites like Weather Underground for weather and the World Bank for global economics. As before, data from Google searches are used to make educated guesses of what people are searching for and what webpages they want to see. They’ve only just started building it up, but already the Knowledge Graph includes 500 million people, places, and things with connections to 3.5 billion attributes. And the bewildering network of connections will be honed by people using it with a feature that allows users to point out incorrect or irrelevant information.

Like the real world and information about it, the Knowledge Graph is a work in progress. Here’s a short video that describes how Google is reshaping itself from an “information engine to a knowledge engine.”

What will Google look like after the Knowledge Graph has had 5 or 10 years to gobble up databases? If it’s true that Google was already making us dumber, get ready to donate a few more IQ points for the sake of convenience.

For many searches we probably won’t notice the “extra knowledge” in the results (incidentally, the Graph has yet to grace the Google page on my laptop), but already we can see where all of this is going. Along with Google, tools like WolframAlpha and Siri, have conditioned people to expect more out their software – they want useful information and they want it quick and easy. Google Chrome’s text to speech function makes that happen, and so do Google Glasses. It doesn’t get any easier than looking at things and talking to yourself. The Knowledge Graph adds to these as part of Google’s effort to both shape the direction that people interact with technology, and to stay relevant and competitive in this increasingly AI-driven world.

[image credits: Google via YouTube]
[video credits: Google via YouTube]
images: Google
video: Google via YouTube

Scientists have come up with an equation that can predict hit songs 60 percent of the time. Does that mean machines will soon begin making their own chart-topping hits?

Technology is continually getting better at predicting our behavior, and signaling to us that perhaps we’re not as unpredictable and free-willed as we humans like to think.
Software can predict where crimes are going to happen, scanners can guess what products we like based on what we look like, and brain scanners can eavesdrop on our inner dialogue just by reading our brain activity. One could plausibly argue that the aspect of human nature least likely to be called formulaic is artistic creation, such as making music. Researchers at the University of Bristol, however, want to turn our inspired musical notes into cold, calculated plusses and minuses. They’ve come up with an equation that predicts whether or not a song will become a hit. True reductionists that they are, the scientists plan to use the equation, not only for prediction, but eventually for production.

The equation, dubbed the “Hit Potential Equation,” seeks to break down songs into their component parts and then identify the components most important to hit potential. Parameters such as loudness, tempo, beat variation and “danceability” are assessed for their power to predict if a song will be a hit – reach top 5 on the hit charts – or become a flop – reach no higher than #30 on a top 40 list. The equation uses 23 distinct audio features in all to score a song’s hit potential.

How accurate is the equation? It correctly predicted when a song would make it into the top 5, or not reach above 30, on the UK Top 40 Single Chart 60 percent of the time.

Seems our musical leanings are too complicated to be captured in a single equation, at least for the time being. It’s not surprising that song popularity is not determined solely by their audio features. Like the comeback of the exposed midriff, style trends are affected by a multitude of factors, not just the number of sequins on a dress or the harmonic simplicity of a song. You’re more likely to enjoy country music if you grew up in Nashville rather than Boston. A song’s popularity also affects, well, its popularity. A 2006 study looked at how the appeal of a new song to a person was affected by how much others liked, or didn’t like, the song. They showed that whether or not study participants were aware of previous participants’ choices made a huge difference. Social influence led to the unpredictability of a song’s success.

And as we all know musical tastes change over time, which means the Hit Potential Equation has to change over the years if it’s going to have a chance at uncovering the next Lady Gaga. The audio features that were useful in picking the top 5 in 1961 are quite different from those useful in 2011. The scientists produced a video showing the shifting predictive powers of the audio features from 1961 to 2011. Unlike our parents, we like it loud.

The work was led by Tijl De Bie (pronounced “Tell De Bee”), a senior lecturer in artificial intelligence at the University of Bristol. Part of the Pattern Analysis and Intelligent Systems Laboratory, Bie is interested in using AI to recognize patterns in large bodies of data and then using that information. At the root of the Hit Potential Equation is a branch of AI called machine learning. The computer takes the hottest songs and “learns” what audio features they have in common.

Their analysis turned up some interesting musical trends over the years. Danceability, never before important in discerning between hits and flops, became important in the late 1970s when disco had its mercifully short period of popularity. Around 1980 the equation performed terribly, dipping to a 52 percent low. They speculate that the change in musical style from the late seventies to the early eighties was particularly pronounced, that the time was marked by exceptional innovation and creativity of pop music. The equation redeemed itself in the early ‘90s and year 2000 when it performed the best, coinciding with a decrease harmonic complexity. Pink Floyd, harmonically complex. Nirvanna, not so much.

Tracking loudness it’s pretty clear that music has been getting steadily louder since the 1960s. Right about 2008, though, the graph turns downward. Perhaps there’s a hidden ‘neighbor factor’ that’s causing us to not crank it so loud.

Taking a look at specific songs, the equation correctly predicted “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley, due to its danceability, low energy and loud signal. “Crazy” was a number 1 hit in 2006 for 6 weeks. The researchers classified “Crazy” as an “Expected Hit,” a song that matches a hit profile so well that they don’t need a computer to know it’s going to be a hit.

Twenty-three audio features, weighted differently, make up the Hit Potential Equation.

Other songs the equation gets completely wrong. It predicts a flop but in reality, the song indeed climbed the charts to the top 5. These “Unexpected Hits,” they theorize, do well because of factors that their equation doesn’t consider such as social context. One example was the 2009 release of Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror.” It did modestly well when it was originally released in 1988, reaching only as high as #21. Following Jackson’s death, however, the song peaked at #2. They say that the song should have been “too quiet and insufficiently danceable” to reach such a high mark.

Like any good scientist, Bie and his colleagues are loyal to their equation. When it predicts that a song should have appeared in the top 5 yet history shows that the song be a flop, they argue that listeners just got it wrong. They call these songs “Hidden Gems” that could be rereleased because of their hit potential. An example they give is “The First Cut Is The Deepest” by Sheryl Crow. I bet you didn’t know it was originally written by Cat Stevens in 1967. But cover versions of the song by P.P. Arnold, Keith Hampshire, Rod Stewart, and finally Crow in 2003 were all more popular than the original. They argue that the fact it became a popular cover several times over shows that the original had a potential that was unrealized at the time, a potential pointed out by their equation.

Bie and his colleagues want to share in the musical data mining fun. They’ve built an app, called scoreahit, with which anyone can score songs in their own collection or even songs they produce if it’s in mp3 format.

Because musical tastes change over time, predicting a musical hit is like hitting a moving target. To keep their equation as accurate as possible it is constantly recalibrated based on the success of recent releases. Additionally, the lab is trying to incorporate emotional content of lyrics into the equation. They think whether or not the song is uplifting or wallowing in its own sorrow will affect its appeal.

Despite the fact that the scientists are simply using music as a data source with which to test their data mining and AI capabilities, Bie thinks the equation can be a benefit to music makers. Don’t worry, he doesn’t envision a future in which computers replace inspiration as the generators of musical templates. But he does hope that scoreahit can help smalltime garage bands gauge whether or not their latest creation has hit potential. He hopes it can help them break into the market. The more people making music, he argues, the better for music as a whole.

[image credits: ScoreAHit and seemslegit]
[video credit: ScoreAHit via YouTube]
image 1: ScoreAHit
image 2: robots
image 3: equation
video: ScoreAHit

SkyLight co-founders Andy Miller and Tess Bakke.

The SkyLight is really a simple device derived to solve a simple problem: how to keep your smartphone still enough to take high quality photos through a microscope. Watching other people holding their cell phones up to their microscopes, SkyLight co-founder, Andy Miller, realized that he wasn’t the only one in search of a low cost and easy way to take pictures of microscope images. I recently had the joy of chatting with Miller and fellow co-founder Tess Bakke about how the SkyLight came to be, and how they think it will impact research, medicine and education.

The SkyLight is essentially an adapter that fixes a smartphone to a microscope. Using the phone’s camera to peer through the eyepiece and snap photos, you get images that are practically indistinguishable from images taken with professional microscopy cameras. The big difference is that conventional microscope cameras can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, while the SkyLight is just $60. Of course, you’ll need a smartphone too, but you probably already have one in your pocket.

The SkyLight adapter consists of a movable platform that the smartphone fits into, and a base that locks onto just about any microscope eyepiece. After connecting the smartphone to the eyepiece, you adjust the platform position to align the camera correctly, and adjust it up and down for focus. Lock it up, and you’re ready to take pictures.

“I was building a microscope in college,” Miller tells me casually, as if microscope-building was as normal as joining the chess club, “and I was trying to attach a telephone to that microscope and I realized, well, it’s fine if I can attach one cell phone to one microscope but it would be pretty feasible to have a universal adapter that would allow me to attach any phone to any microscope.”

Miller likes to build microscopes, but there’s a purpose behind his geeky pursuit. While studying bioengineering and global health at Rice University, he designed and built the Global Focus microscope – a simple, affordable microscope that can be built for areas of the world with limited resources. With off-the-shelf lenses and mirrors, an LED flashlight for a light source, and running off batteries, the microscope could take bright field and fluorescent images and cost only $240 to make. Right now there are 20 prototypes being tested in the US, Central America, and Africa.

Not too shabby: a 10X image of esophageal cells taken by an iPhone 4S.

As the Kickstarter page confesses, “Now he’s bent on making meaningful change through design.” The SkyLight is a simple idea that could have profound results. Connecting a cell phone to a microscope not only saves money, but in a developing country, it makes the difference between quality care or not. Don’t have a pathologist in your rural Kenyan village? No problem. Just send the images to the hospitals in Nairobi. SkyLight can literally bring together innovative solutions such as the Global Focus microscope and the $80 IDEOS Android smartphone, which 350,000 Kenyans had scooped up as of this past summer, to extend the reach of much needed quality healthcare.

The idea for the SkyLight came to Miller while building the cheap microscopes in Africa. The lack of resources available there forced him to create a general design. “How do you make it work with anything you might have?” He made a product that would work with any cell phone. Had he been in the US and had all the resources he needed, Miller expects the adapter he’d have come up with would have been specifically built for an iPhone and only an iPhone, or a specific microscope together with a specific phone. The tightened constraints in Africa forced Miller to make a more general use device, and it’s all the better for it. The SkyLight can work for different phones and different microscope with different kinds of eyepieces. And even though they’re focusing on microscopes at the moment, the team expects that SkyLight will eventually be used to mate smartphones with other types of cameras such as spotting scopes, the telephoto cameras used by birders. Check out their gallery of images here.

Think you could tell the difference between images taken with a phone and conventional camera? While they haven’t rigorously compared the images taken by their smartphone with images taken by conventional microscopy cameras, they’ve already passed the eyeball test. As Miller tells me, the Kickstarter page “received the most attention from…doctors, pathologists who want to do doctor-to-doctor consult.” Some physicians actually contacted the group and asked that they take pictures of samples. They took the pictures with an iPhone 4S with a resolution of 8-megapixels. After posting the pictures on their website they were contacted by multiple pathologists who told them that it’s good enough for them to make diagnoses.

The SkyLight won the Proto Labs Cool Idea! Award in the program’s inaugural year. According to their website, Proto Labs is the “world’s fastest” maker of CNC machined and injection molded parts. Their Cool Idea! Award is aimed at producing high quality prototypes for startup businesses that might not have the resources to follow through on a good idea. In a press release about the award, Proto Labs cited how SkyLight enables researchers, clinicians and educators to communicate in new ways by combining tools already available to them. Winning the award was a key achievement for SkyLight’s mission to make the adapter available to those who need it. The mold that Proto Lab has created lowers production cost and makes it more affordable. The SkyLight was listed on Kickstarter for $60, but Miller and Bakke hope to work with an NGO in the future and offer the adapter for even less.

Bakke emphasized SkyLight’s social enterprise aspect, mentioning their 5 to 1 promise: for every five SkyLights they sell they’re going to donate one to schools or other places like a local health program that could use them.

We shouldn’t forget that the camera in use is still a phone. Miller and Bakke point out that SkyLight could be used live; that is, you could connect a collaborator with a live view through your microscope all the while having a conversation.

“Can you move it a little to the left…great, now zoom in.”

As an easy and inexpensive way to generate and share images, SkyLight is an ideal telemedicine tool. Wanting to explore SkyLight’s potential, the company has sending their prototype to telemedicine researchers to tap their imaginations. At the same time they’re encouraging apps developers to come up with apps to improve image-based smartphone telemedicine and telediagnosis capabilities. Miller mentioned one app that would be universally useful would be an app that pushes images directly to a server, and labels and organizes them. That way people wouldn’t have to email or text themselves every image they want to keep.

Right now the adapter is still in its testing and production phase, but they expect SkyLight to be ready around the first of March. When that happens there will be no shortage of takers. Their first production run will be aimed at filling Kickstarter orders and getting feedback for improvement.

Kickstarter is great for turning great ideas into real tools. SkyLight’s goal was to raise $15,000. They ended up with over $22,000. I have no doubt that these two, enthusiastic young people and the SkyLight will get a lot of attention in the coming months. All they did was find a way to combine technologies that already existed, showing us once again you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to create something useful.

[image credits: SkyLight]
images: SkyLight

Scanadu's Medical Tricorder works with your smartphone to takes vitals and diagnose disease non-invasively and at home.

Star Trek fans rejoice, the Tricorder is here.

Medical tech startup Scanadu has created a scanner that appears to have been inspired by those of Drs. McCoy and Crusher. The ‘Medical Tricorder’ scanner can take vitals such as blood pressure, pulmonary function, and temperature, and sends them to your smartphone. The device can make the difference between a needed trip to the emergency room or a waste of time and money for conditions that don’t need treatment.

The company just raised $2 million in funding from a group of investors that includes Sebastien De Halleux, co-founder of social network game maker Playfish. The money’s an impressive accomplishment considering Scanadu isn’t even a year old. Founded in January 2011, the company is staffed with a team of visionaries like Walter De Brouwer. The Belgian futurist co-founded Starlab in 1996 with MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte. He first got the idea for the Tricorder while at Starlab but the technology wasn’t mature enough at the time. In 2006 his son was in a serious accident and hospitalized for three months. De Brouwer again got to thinking about leveraging technology to empower people by allowing them to auto-diagnose and make informed decisions concerning health.

De Brouwer is joined by fellow futurist Daniel Kraft, a physician-scientist who chairs the FutureMed program at Singularity University. Kraft gave a TED talk this past June entitled “Medicine’s future? There’s an app for that.” He drives the main point behind Scanadu’s philosophy that today’s health care needs to catch up to the tools it’s surrounded by. As co-founder and COO Misha Chellam said in a press release, we can do a lot better than the thermometer and band-aids in our medicine cabinets.

In its early days, Scanadu is targeting the Tricorder to parents who want to monitor their children’s health better. Watch the company’s trailer to get an idea how it might work.

Scanadu’s diagnostic scanner is being entered into the Tricorder X PRIZE, a $10 million competition launched this past May to develop mobile diagnostic technologies. Their goal is to put health information directly in the hands of “health consumers.” The competing Tricorders will be up against a panel of doctors to see if they can match the doctors in diagnosing an array of diseases.

Wireless technologies are revolutionizing medicine. Wearable scanners that give patients and doctors health information is expected to reach 80 million by 2016, according to ABI Research. The smartphone is already being used to read our glucose levels, check for sexually transmitted diseases, read a digital stethoscope, and give a doctor access to patient medical records. Earlier this year the FDA approved an app that allows doctors to view images from MRI, CT and PET scans on their iPad or iPhone. One company is working on a pacemaker smaller than a penny that will communicate wirelessly to a smartphone. There are even virtual clinics appearing in your corner drug store where you can dial up a doc if you have questions about a medication or condition.

The ‘Tricorder’ that wins the X PRIZE will add yet another tool to our augmented medical reality. Of course, these tools are not meant to replace doctors but to improve how both doctors and patients manage health. It’ll probably take a while for people to learn to trust the Tricorders, as it should. I can totally see parents ignoring “Get rest” and taking a trip in to see the doctor anyway. Until the Tricorders have a proven track record, people will probably head over to sick bay just in case.

[image credit: Scanadu]
[video credit: IvoClarysse via YouTube]
images: Scanadu
video: Scanadu

Text alerts lead users to find coupons and messages they can store for later use. Push notifications are evolving and Urban Airship is playing Darwin.

In the future, apps on your smart phone will know where you are, what you want, and how to grab your attention. That future is here. For those that own a smart phone or tablet, the app is an unavoidable product – the table on which all the delicious software of Apple and Android is served. As apps evolved they found a way to communicate with users through short alert messages called push notifications and now pushes are almost as universal as apps themselves. One small company in Portland is at the head of this wave of app communication. Urban Airship enables developers to easily incorporate notifications into their apps. They recently handled their 8 billionth push via one of their 25,000+ developer clients. They send more than one billion pushes a month, a figure they expect to double early next year. No longer simply text pop-ups on your smart phone, Urban Airship’s “Rich Pushes” are HTML creations that look like web pages and can function as coupons, public opinion polls, and much more. With millions in funding, and colossal growth in 2011, Urban Airship is ready to make sure that when apps talk, users sit up and pay attention.

Typical smart phone and tablet users will have dozens of apps on their device, but will use relatively few on a daily basis. Push notifications allow apps to operate independently, finding content to share with their users that will shoot them back into the limelight. The Facebook app lets you know when a friend has commented on your photo, the Chess Master app lets you know when an online opponent has taken their turn, and various weather apps alert you when a tornado is a comin’.

With the growing presence, perhaps necessity, of notifications, Urban Airship has done something very smart – they’ve allowed developers to farm out the inclusion of pushes in their apps. Why go through all the hassle of creating your own push system when you can simply use Urban Airship’s API? The following promotional video explores more reasons why this company’s targeted niche has allowed them to grow from 8000 to over 25,000 clients in just a year.

Yet any company might find success by taking on odious development chores for clients. Urban Airship distinguishes itself by innovating the very nature of what constitutes a push. Text filled pop-ups are simply the beginning. Apps empowered by Urban Airships Rich Pushes give users an in-app library of notifications (no more disappearing messages!). That library can contain full HTML messages, meaning that these notes appear almost like miniature web pages, complete with images, thumbnail links to videos, polls, etc. A big feature of Urban Airship, and Rich Pushes in particular, is that they enable in-app purchases. Add a little Java-Script to a push and you can have users buying products with just a few taps on the screen. That’s a very important feature in a field that constantly struggles to find ways to bring in reliable revenue.The following demonstration video shows you what you can expect to see in a Rich Push:

*Note: This demo discusses Air Mail, an earlier Urban Airship product which has since been upgraded/morphed into the more general library and API that the company uses today. Despite the name change, the video still gives you a good look at the how the concept works:

Another impressive feature of Urban Airship’s handling of push notifications, is the backend data they collect on user activity. How many pushes does your app send out, how often is your app opened, and how long do users spend inside the app? Urban Airship gathers that information for its clients (without personally identifiable data on users) and synthesizes valuable reports practically in real time. In just a few minutes, developers can know how well a push affected the traffic in an app, what kinds of topics users are interested in, and how often they took advantage of the features seen in Rich Apps.

Data collected via Urban Airship allows developers to track their user's attention.

There’s little doubt that Urban Airship is great news for app creators, but what about all the millions of users out there? Are they fated to endure an endless wave of notes from apps? I spoke with Sasha Mace, Director of Product at Urban Airship. He points out that users can easily opt out of receiving any pushes on an app, and that his company encourages developers to take advantage of user-friendly tools like quiet time windows – setting times during the day when an app will keep its pushes to itself. More importantly, however, is the basic philosophy at Urban Airship that pushes should serve both sides of the app. Their clients should get a better way of talking to their users, and users should get content they actually want. It doesn’t pay for a developer to get abusive – users will just shut off notices. Instead, Urban Airship and its clients are finding new ways of bringing value-added experiences to users.

A key part of bringing that dream to fruition is SimpleGeo. The San Francisco based startup was acquired by Urban Airship this year following an earlier successful product partnership. SimpleGeo lets developers easily incorporate GPS based data into their apps. Urban Airship is going to leverage SimpleGeo’s location-based expertise to help create a new generation of location-aware pushes. According to Mace, the first cases of this merging will appear in Q1 of 2012 and will allow developers to target pushes based on where a user is located. This smart segmentation of the user base was the subject of the original Airship-SimpleGeo partnership, and gives clients a great way of making sure content is relevant. Who wants their shopping app to send them coupons to stores they can’t find in their home town?

Looking further down the line, the acquisition of SimpleGeo will allow Urban Airship to explore largely uncharted territory. Will users want their apps to know they went into one of their favorite bars and automatically ask their friends to join? Could SIRI remind you to take your keys before you leave the house? Maybe Yelp will remind you that you’re about to pass by that restaurant you’ve been meaning to try.

The vast potential of geographically enhanced Rich Pushes is one of many reasons why Urban Airship has had a killer year. 2011 saw the company’s revenue increase by 600%! October, which included the arrival of iOS5 and the iPhone 4S was insane for the Portland pushers – traffic shot up by a factor of ten. They are well on their way to 2 billion notifications served a month. All this success attracted a great round of Series C funding, with $15.1 million raised in Q3 from big names like Verizon, Intel, True Ventures, the Foundry Group, and SalesForce. That brings Urban Airship up to around $26 million in funding – plenty for a company of 50-60 employees looking to add another 20 or so in the upcoming months. All signs point to Urban Airship enjoying even more growth through winter and into 2012. Pushes are almost certain to continue their important role in the app-shere and Urban Airship is poised to remain at the top of that world. Great expectations for the company abound.

Whether the underlying concept of push notifications will ultimately be a boon to users, however, remains unclear. Mace talks a good talk about finding common ground between users and developers, but there may be a struggle to establish where the line between invasive and informative content should be drawn. Portable devices connect us to the digital world almost anywhere, but they also open us up to a barrage of ads, and notifications are just the latest tool for making digital products unavoidable. Let’s hope that Urban Airship’s quest to improve push notifications will make them more valuable to everyone involved, and far less, well you know…pushy.

[image and video credit: Urban Airship]
[sources: Urban Airship, SimpleGeo]

Jeppesen's Moblie FliteDeck – everything a pilot needs, and fits easily into your carry-on luggage.

Everyone’s getting free iPads these days. Students, NFL football players, new car buyers – well, until recently. Now iPads are being handed out to commercial airline pilots in an effort to bring the cockpit into the digital age and do away with the tens of pounds of paper schedules, maps, and charts that pilots normally lug around from destination to destination. By the end of the year 11,000 iPads will be handed out to all United and Continental Airlines pilots. It’s part of a wider effort among airlines to, not only make their cockpits smarter, but also more green.

No longer will pilots have to thumb through thousands of sheets of paper to find the information they need. Now they’ll be able to access all the information they need with a tap of the finger. A pilot’s flight bag – named for the manner in which it was historically toted around – is a collection of operating manuals, reference handbooks, navigation charts, flight checklists, logbooks and weather information. Jeppesen, a subsidiary of Boeing, digitizes all that information and puts it on the iPad with their Mobile FliteDeck app. “The paperless flight deck represents the next generation of flying,“ Captain Fred Abbot, United’s senior vice president of flight operations, said in a press release. “The introduction of iPads ensures our pilots have essential and real-time information at their fingertips at all times throughout the flight.”

"I thought you said you had Angry Birds on your iPad." "No, you said you were going to download it."

A single source of information will not only be a load off pilots’ minds, but off their backs too. For an average commercial pilot today a flight bag includes about 12,000 sheets of paper and weighs about 38 pounds. The convenience of carrying an iPad instead that weighs just 1.5 pounds is obvious. Going paperless also reduces clutter in the cockpit, and makes the planes a little greener. According to United Contiental Holdings, Inc. the holdings company for both airlines, the decreased weight will save 16 million sheets of paper and 326,000 gallons of jet fuel per year. Of course the true carbon reductions must be questioned when manufacturing 11,000 iPads and their occasional replacements are weighed against a body of paper that is relatively unchanged over time.

The move to an iPad flight bag comes just months after iPads were approved by the Federal Aviation Administration. iPad’s were already being used by pilots as reference materials, but until this past February the FAA prohibited them from being the pilot’s sole source of information. But following a rigorous testing period, which included simulating the rapid decompression that would occur at 51,000 feet, the tablets performed just fine. In May Alaska Airlines started handing out iPads to its pilots. United and Continental are the first major airlines to do so.

As flying airplanes becomes more streamlined with technology, I wonder if we run the risk of it getting, well, boring. Let’s just hope downloading Angry Birds to pilot iPads is prohibited.

[image credits: United Business Media and Jeppessen]
image 1: FliteDeck
image 2: pilots

That 'discarded' piece of tupperware near your campsite might just have a logbook in it.

You might not be aware, but there could be a hidden treasure very close to you. And someone’s probably coming to find it. No, not gold bullion from a long lost pirate booty but more a treasure of trinkets long lost in someone’s attic. Geocaching is a decade-old game that combines the relatively new GPS technology with the age-old thrill of treasure hunting. In ten years, what started out as one person’s experiment has exploded into a hobby played by over five million people in over 100 countries and on all seven continents – yes, even Antarctica.

It was May 1st, 2000 when President Bill Clinton predestined a generation of the would-be geocachers. At the time GPS, a US Department of Defense creation, was thought of as a government tool primarily, and a civilian tool secondarily. The first GPS devices offered to civilians were intentionally scrambled to decrease their resolution. When President Clinton turned off the scrambling program – called Selective Availability – civilian GPS devices went from an accuracy of about 100 meters to about 10 meters. Two days later Dave Ulmer, a computer consultant of Beavercreek, Oregon, hid a bucket containing a few trinkets including a slingshot and, optimistically, a logbook. He posted the container’s location to a USENET newsgroup – coordinates 45°17.460´N 122°24.800´W – and called it “The Great American GPS Stash Hunt.” Then he sat back and waited to see if anyone would take the trouble. On the post he specified only one rule: “Get some Stuff, Leave some Stuff!!”

The stash was found within a day. A man by the name of Mike Teague from Vancouver, Washington had wasted no time in finding the Stuff and logging the find on the website. He further demonstrated his enthusiasm for the new game on May 8th by starting a cache logging website. Soon a mailing list was started that grew as the number of half-buried, trinket-storing containers grew. On May 30th the participants of The Great American GPS Stash Hunt decided that they weren’t comfortable romping through the woods looking for a “stash.” They started calling their hidden treasures geocaches.

Ten years after Ulmer’s first geocache 5 million geocachers around the world have logged more than 1.3 million caches on multiple websites. When the hobby celebrated its 10th anniversary last year there were nearly 600 separate commemorative events on six different continents – geocaching on Antarctica is one thing, partying there is another. More than 350 of those events were in the US. Geocaching has been covered by tons of local and online media and a few major ones. The Washington Post recently ran a TechCrunch article about the GeoMate Jr., a GPS device made simple so that five year olds with geocaching aspirations can join the fun. Much of the time, however, the hobby makes headlines because some non-geoacher mistook an oddly-placed ammo box of trinkets as something dangerous. Go figure.

So what’s so interesting about finding a slingshot? PRNewswire quotes Bryan Roth, one of the co-founders of geocaching.com, the global online headquarters: “People love treasure hunts. Just look at the popularity of the ‘Pirates of the Carribean’ and ‘Indiana Jones’ movies. …we’re able to deliver treasure hunting to everyone in a way that combines technology, outdoor recreation and a global community.” And, with a one-time cost of the GPS at about $100 it’s about as cheap as hobbies come. Says Roth, “Geocaching is accessible to everyone.” It gets even cheaper if you have an iPhone and maybe even more fun. The Geocaching app costs just $10 and locates the nearest geocache wherever you are with the push of a button.

The following video is a great illustration of the passion of geocachers. As they explain, a key joy is to simply get out and explore where you live.

Curious to know how close you are right now to a geocache? I was, so I registered on geocaching.com (it’s free). I was a little dubious, given the fact that I live in downtown Baltimore. The place doesn’t exactly conjure images of people with backpacks and hiking boots playing GPS-based games. To my surprise I discovered that there are ten geocaches within a mile of my home! And the nearest one just happens to be hidden in the same building in which I defended my thesis: Davidge Hall. One of the really neat things about geocaching is that it’s not always a simple matter of finding the objects and signing the logbook. Whoever places the geocache there will often take the time to write a blurb about the location. Davidge Hall is an historic building. It was built in 1807 as the original University of Maryland Medical School. The blurb on geocaching.com describes some of its history, including the bit of folklore that us locals are familiar with: how early educators took to hiding cadavers in whiskey barrels so as to not anger the mobs who didn’t quite accept human dissection just yet. A log shows that 107 people have found the Davidge Hall geocache since it was hidden April of 2010 – twenty-four unlucky people could not. The geocachers post comments to the online site, mainly how long it took them to locate their target (one person snooped around for 90 minutes before finding it – that’s dedication to the sport!). Pictures are quite common too.

Virtual caches is about discovering a location – such as McMurdo Station in Antarctica – rather than a container.

In the time since that first hide geocaching has evolved to include over a dozen different geocache types. To spice things up, organizers have come up with a multi-cache that include a series of locations, the final one being the container with the trinkets. Another example is the mystery cache in which you have to solve a puzzle to get the coordinates. They even have a Project A.P.E. cache that was placed in 2001 to celebrate the “Planet of the Apes” movie release. “Each cache represented a fictional story in which scientists revealed an Alternative Primate Evolution.”

Um, okay.

My favorite are the Trackables. They’re tags that you attach to the geocache, which is now referred to as a “hitchhiker.” Each trackable tag has a goal set by its owner, such as to “visit every country in Europe or travel from coast to coast.” When they’re found the hitchhiker and its trackable are collected and, if it’s lucky, moved to another geocache location that’s closer to its goal. Kind of like the “Where is George?” tracking site for one dollar bills, geocachers can check back to see how far their little plastic friend has traveled.

Connecting people through technology is nothing new, but combining online and real world activities is a big part of why geocaching and other location-based social technologies such as Foursquare appeal to so many. It’s nice to have technology urge us outdoors for once rather than tie us to our computers. It’s clear after a decade of steady growth this less-known hobby won’t stay hidden for very long.

[image credits: gpspersonalnavigation.com and wikipedia]
[video credit: GoGeocaching via YouTube]
image 1: geocacher
image 2: McMurdo
video: Language of Location

Thanks to technology, the South can get mad all over again.

I opened up the newspaper this morning to find out that the president was in D.C. to witness a demonstration of the latest artillery. The new arms included a highly-accurate rifle invented by Mr. Wilson Ager and an automatic rapid-fire gun that is operated by a hand crank. Upon seeing the gun in action, President Lincoln likened it to a coffee mill.

The article’s date, June 24, 1861, is exactly 150 years ago. At this point in history America is at war with itself. A new App called The Civil War Today, created by A & E’s History Channel, brings daily news stories for the entire four years of the war. I got the App and have been enjoying it immensely these past couple days. You can go back and read the news from days past (the first shot was fired on Fort Sumter April 12), but it doesn’t let you scroll ahead, making the immersion seem all the more lifelike. It’s an enhanced experience. The “A Day In The Life” feature includes letters and diary entries from the prominent, like Abraham Lincoln, to the common like Confederate private Charles H. Lynch. Each day includes a new “Photo of the Day,” a “Quote of the Day,” and a running tally of North and South casualties. There’s also a daily quiz, a daily photo gallery, and updated battle maps. There’s also a game feature through which the user can earn medals for answering quiz questions correctly or, for example, sending “messages in morse code.” A “Feature Story” also brings a broader picture to the daily events. The current story summarizes the role the Dred Scott decision played in the lead-up to the war. Made by Bottle Rocket Apps, The Civil War Today has a nice, old newspaper feel combined with enough quick-and-easy features to keep the user entertained for more than a few minutes each day without feeling like they’re taking on a chapter from a history textbook. Here’s a short video from Apple ‘N’ Apps that runs through nearly all of the features.

Was this the App that the pundits of yesteryear were thinking of when they predicted that the internet would revolutionize education? Probably not. But I remember how tedious it was to memorize names, dates, locations when I was learning about history. Despite my primary education’s best efforts to make me despise history, I’ve grown to crave books on history, documentaries, Steven Spielberg HBO creations. But The Civil War Today would most certainly have captured my fertile but fickle young imagination. It’s a fantastic opportunity for history teachers to put technology to use and tap their students’ enthusiasm. Given the increased use of iPads in classrooms, The Civil War Today and like Apps should become a regular part of today’s curriculum. This App could serve as a template to learn about all sorts of history. What about an App for WWI and II? We could follow the daily events of the Boston Tea Party, the French Revolution(s), or, if it’s your thing, the O.J. Simpson trial. The possibilities are endless. Having history at our fingertips that’s interesting and fun could do wonders to improve historical literacy around the world.

At $8, the price tag is a bit more than we’re used to paying for Apps. But for four years of content it sounds like a bargain to me. If you’re a history buff you’re going to want this. If you’re even remotely interested in the Civil War this App is a necessity. Whoever faithfully follows the news and diaries over those four years will be rewarded with intimate details appreciated over the war’s true timeline. I’m going to keep up on events, not only because it’s a lot of fun, but also because I can’t wait to see who wins it all in the end.

[image credit: ipadvideoapps.net]
[video credit: AppleNApps via YouTube]
image: Civil War Today
video: AppleNApps

After the Japanese earthquake, users turned to simple apps to help them in the disaster.

Every global tragedy teaches humanity something about itself. Of the many lessons we may learn from the recent Japanese earthquake one could be this: we’ve come to think of smart phones not as tools of convenience, but of survival. According to Phandroid, a free flashlight app for Android phones was downloaded by more than fifty thousand users just hours after the earthquake struck. “Tiny Flashlight+LED” created by Nikolay Ananiev isn’t the most sophisticated app on the market, but it allows you to use either the screen or camera flash as a reliable electric torch. It’s a free app and doesn’t require any internet connectivity once it is installed – perfect for use in the aftermath of a disaster. Watch the video below to see how the program works. The surge in flashlight downloads is another sign that we depend on our phones for so much more now than we could have ever predicted.

I’m a little doubtful as to whether the people downloading Ananiev’s app are actually in the disaster zones of Japan. Many of those locations have intermittent access to telecommunications, and it makes just as much sense that unaffected users sought out the app once they were reminded by the earthquake that such measures could be helpful in the future. For my part, I no sooner read about this surge in downloads than I got a copy of a similar app for myself on my iPhone.

No matter its cause, recent success for the app hasn’t gone without notice by its creator. According to Phandroid, Ananiev reached out to them to notify the site of the app’s popularity. The page for “Tiny Flashlight+LED” on the Android Market even has this to say: “If you are currently in Japan, you may want to download this app just in case the electricity stops.” Clearly everyone is aware that the app fits into a valuable niche at the moment. It’s not alone, obviously. There are dozens of free flashlight app for all manner of smart phones. Looking at the Ananiev’s app in action, however, you can see how this one may be particularly appealing. It’s pretty versatile and even without the recent surge, it’s enjoyed more than 2.5 million downloads – a testament to its usefulness:

While many other disaster minded apps take an all-encompassing approach to saving lives through smart phones, the success of “Tiny Flashlight+LED” may tell us that a compartmentalized tactic may sell better to consumers. Do we want to believe that we’ll need a disaster recovery app? Perhaps not, but maybe a flashlight app, with its more mundane uses, seems like a less tragic purchase we’ll be willing to invest in. Not sure. Yet I have little doubt that however we get these emergency apps onto our phones, they can save lives – we’ve seen it happen before in Haiti. Hopefully the lessons we’re learning in Japan now will help convince app developers to pursue this market aggressively. Humans are depending on their smart phones for more and more every day. We need products that make such dependence something besides a recipe for disaster.

[video credit: glfyt]
[sources: Phandroid, Android Market]

Parrot's Asteroid brings Android OS into your car.

Sure your car can go from 0 to 60 in less than four seconds, but can it play Angry Birds? French wireless specialist Parrot has developed a break-through in automotive accessories: the Android- powered car radio. Known as Asteroid, the system uses 3G, Bluetooth, and GPS to provide you with internet radio, hands-free calling, maps…and apps. With its Android OS Asteroid will be able to run a variety of smart phone applications, as well as some developed specifically for in-car use. Parrot has already demonstrated Android apps for locating the lowest gasoline prices, closest parking, and even speed cameras. The Asteroid was on display at this year’s CES, and its capabilities are shown off in the cool promotional video below. While pricing is still unknown, the radio will be available in the EU in the beginning of Q2, and in North America starting in Q3 of 2011. Looks like we’ll have Android cars on the road pretty soon.

Like many of the latest car radios, Asteroid is designed to be as hands free as possible. You can make outgoing calls simply by pushing a button and stating the name of someone in your address book. Do the same with an artist in your playlist, and you’ll be given some of his or her music. Or, you can listen to that person on Pandora. There’s an external double microphone that sits on your windshield to pick up your commands, and of course the audio plays through your car’s sound system.

All of that is well and good, but the real innovation is seen through the 3 inch screen on the right side of the radio. Users can select different apps from their library, and employ them on the road. Maps are the clear first application, but there are so many others. I personally like Coyote, the app that allows you to avoid speed cameras (or at least slow down for them) and that will alert you if your path is bringing you towards an accident or other traffic jam. Third-party developers will be able to build apps for Asteroid, and the radio will likely be able to access many of the ones already on the Android market. That’s going to mean a lot of versatility, but will also mean you’re likely to incur other costs along the way. Coyote, for instance, has a subscription fee. Also, many of Asteroid’s web-based functions will require you to use your phone or plug a 3G USB key into the radio.

Lest you worry that your iPhone will miss out on all the automotive fun, Asteroid is compatible with any Bluetooth enabled phone. The back of the device is full of access ports to allow you to hook up the Asteroid to pretty much any device currently popular on the market. It’s clear that Parrot wants their radio to work for as many users out there as possible.

Asteroid looks ready to connect to most of your modern devices.

When I see Asteroid I see an idea that is going to be repeated many, many times over. Car radios with smart phone capabilities that tap into the growing market for apps? That’s a no-brainer isn’t it? Android is probably much easier for a company like Parrot to develop, but if this idea catches on, I’m sure we’ll see an iOS version as well. Or perhaps we’ll have radios that simply interact with smart phones via Bluetooth so that they can better use apps. Either way, the Android market is going to be in your car (Apple App store too at some point, I would presume).

New technologies in the car raise the potential for an increase in auto accidents, as texting certainly has proven. Yet Android applications could also avert accidents by alerting you to dangers on the road, helping you control your driving, or making it easier to interact with media without getting distracted. We’ve seen other pushes to bring driver-assisting technologies into the car, and I think that under the right influences devices like the Asteroid could serve a similar purpose. As I’ve said before, these helpful automotive techs will pave the way for fully automated cars. Whether it’s behind the wheel or behind the stereo, it looks like Google is going to be a part of your driving experience. From search engine to car engine, who knew?

[image and video credits: Parrot]
[source: Parrot]

Word Lens is augmented reality text translation. Welcome to the future.

Another part of the universal translator has fallen into place. Quest Visual recently released Word Lens, a killer iPhone app that lets you see the world around you translated into a new language. It’s a great example of augmented reality: images from the camera are screened for words; Word Lens then translates those words into a different language, and displays the translation on your screen replacing the original text. It’s like looking through a window into another world where everyone writes in the language you choose. The Word Lens App works for iPhone 4, iPhone 3Gs, iPod Touch 4 and is free to download. Language packets, however, will cost you $5, and currently Spanish to English and English to Spanish are the only ones available. Still, Word Lens is amazing to watch in action, as you can see in the announcement video from Quest Visual below. I recently downloaded Word Lens and tried out the free demo “languages” (text reversal and removal). The app is fairly limited right now, but it holds enormous promise.

Once you download the free demo onto your iPhone, it’s really simple to get Word Lens started. Just tap on the icon and you’re instantly in a window that is sampling from your camera and changing the letters you see. You can pause the video feed, select a region, even zoom in or turn on the light if you want (iPhone 4 only). Unlock the rotation icon and you can easily view things in landscape mode. With a little practice you can get Word Lens to find and change text all around. Billboards, gum wrappers, computer screens, you name it. When it works well this application is an absolute killer.

Quest Visual is the brainchild of Octavio Good and John DeWeese, who have been working on the Word Lens application for more than two years. Word Lens uses optical character recognition to find words in your smart phone’s video feed. OCR works best with clear legible fonts, and really can’t handle script or many words written by hand. It also can be hit or miss in even detecting which figure is a letter and which is part of a background design. Working with the free demo I constantly had to move the phone back and forth, or slightly rotate it in order to get Word Lens to find the words I wanted it to recognize. Octavio Good admits that this early form of the App has its limitations in the following video, but he promises that there will be more languages and improvements ahead.

When I see an idea like Word Lens I am both thrilled by the possibility and slightly disappointed by the reality. Word Lens absolutely is an amazing App when it works well. It crops out text, and replaces it with an easy to read font, and it does it all in real time. That’s awesome. But the OCR has its limits, as I just said, and the dictionaries they use are far from perfect as well. I’m not sure how I feel about Quest Visual deciding to use downloaded dictionaries rather than a Google API or other cloud-based service. Having all the necessary content on your phone probably makes things quicker, and it will definitely help in all those locations where AT&T reception is poor (pretty much everywhere). Still, I’d rather have a startup like Quest Visual focus on one task and perform it very well. The OCR based augmented reality is enough to deal with and needs lots of fine tuning. Does Quest Visual really need to split their focus by worrying about their incorporated translation software as well? I’m not sure how I feel about the $5 per translation packet either. Prices will go up to $10 on January 1st. That’s still a fairly good deal, but only if Quest Visual can continue to improve the quality of their product.

+10 points for good OCR, -100 points for bad translation. **UPDATE: As pointed out in the comments, this is actually an OCR mistake: confusing the "lt" for an 'n'. "Apunta muy ano" would mean "points very anus."**

For now, Word Lens is fairly unique among iPhone Apps for what it can do. (There is a related feature in Google Goggles that let’s you translate a photo, but that’s not real time like Word Lens.) That means that Quest Visual is pioneering new ground. We should expect some more bumps along their journey even as they make more amazing progress. In the end great technology like this is bound for one of three destinies. It could get bought by a larger developer (as Google did with BlindType), it could continue to grow on its own like FourSquare, or it could be replaced by competitors who improve upon their design (MySpace). I wish Good, DeWeese, and the rest of the Quest Visual team the best, and I’m really impressed by their work. That being said, I’m not sure which of the potential destinies for Word Lens will actually be most beneficial for end users like you and I.

Over the last two years we’ve seen the parts of a universal translator slowly arrive. Audio translators let you speak in one language and have your smart phone speak in another. Automatic text translations are becoming more ubiquitous online. Apps like Word Lens would be the next piece in the puzzle. Some time soon we should have the means to make real time translations from any form of input. That’s very exciting. It would be wonderful if Quest Visual was part of that process. Even if they are not, now that they’ve shown us what their piece of the universal translator puzzle looks like we are sure to have it the linguistic arsenal of the future. We’re getting closer to a world without language borders. I can’t wait.

[image credits: Jacqui Cheng/ArsTechnica]
[video credits: Quest Visual]
[sources: Quest Visual, ArsTechnica]

Apps just keep downloading on the AppWall. 5 billion and counting.

During his keynote at the World Wide Developers Conference this week, Steve Jobs announced that Apple’s App Store recently hit 5 billion downloads. To highlight that impressive figure Apple created the AppWall, a mammoth display formed from 30 24-inch screens. The AppWall visualizes which apps are currently being downloaded (5 minute delay) as falling icons which slowly fill up the screens. It’s a cool-looking reminder of the growing power of Apple’s market place. Check out a video of the AppWall in action, along with a few pics, after the break.

The concept of small-scale downloadable programs and content has certainly comes into its own. Along with 5 billion downloads, the Apple’s WWDC celebrated over $1 billion in revenue generated for its developers through the App Store. The versatility of “the App” is likewise amazing, we’ve seen these programs tackle everything from paperless access to Starbucks coffee to remote-controlled robot drones. While it has its flaws, the App Store is a remarkable medium for small-scale developers to create a viable product, and it is enabling the next generation of entrepreneur-programmers. In the future, that group will become increasingly important as genetics, AI, and nanotechnology enable us to program molecules, virtual reality, and life itself just as we would program any other App. Something to think about while watching icons fall on the AppWall. Don’t miss the wall reset (happens every 10,800 downloads) around 1:40 in the video below.

The current App Wall is an upgrade from one seen at WWDC 2009. That version had the 20,000 or so most popular apps on the screen and highlighted them when they were downloaded:

An up close look at the icons once they've fallen onto the bottom of the 2010 AppWall. Only the 50,000 most popular (out of 225,000) are shown.

This text appears on the 2010 AppWall, describing its specs.

[image credits: TechCrunch]
[video credits: MacLife, Kvanlandschoot]
[source: MacWorld]

Forgot your wallet? Just use your iPhone.

As if they needed to make it any easier to get a cup of their coffee, Starbucks has just released a new iPhone App that lets you pay just by showing the cashier your screen. The free Starbucks Card Mobile App lets you enter the number of any Starbucks Card into your phone and then throw the plastic away. Instead of swiping the card, the App displays a barcode that can be easily scanned. You can also reload your card or access your Starbucks account. Originally you could only pay with the Starbucks Card Mobile App in select stores in Seattle and Silicon Valley. Now though, the system is also accepted at the 1000 or so Target stores with Starbucks inside. Watch out, people, this is just the first of many Apps that will transform your smart phone into the only form of payment you need to carry.

Starbucks already had an online system dedicated to tracking and updating their gift cards, so switching from plastic to iPhone (or iPod Touch) wasn’t such a big leap forward. It’s all just digital information. By partnering with another major retailer (Target), Starbucks is attempting a huge roll out of this program. There’s no telling if consumers will actually want the new system. The App may cut down on the amount of plastic you carry, but it isn’t dramatically easier to handle. There is some added security (you can password protect your cards and/or your phone) and you’re less likely to misplace a smart phone. Is that enough incentive to get you to switch? Either way, if the Starbucks Card Mobile App succeeds, expect other major companies to follow soon thereafter. I suspect that other companies with similar card databases (Jamba Juice, Best Buy, etc) could follow suit very easily, and maybe even credit card companies could get in on the action. You wouldn’t need your wallet anymore. Who knows, we may eventually lose the electronics all together and just pay for food with our fingerprints.

[image and video credit: Starbucks]
[source: Starbucks, iPhone App Store]

The scanR App lets you convert photos to PDF and send them via email or fax number. Business just got more mobile.

Smart phones are becoming mobile business centers. Forget about texts, phone calls, emails, and web browsing, phones can now handle the ultimate office technology: the fax machine. Yep, ScanR has developed applications for iPhone, Nokia Symbian, Android, and Blackberry that let you turn the phone’s camera into a scanner and send documents via email or fax. Take a photo and the ScanR app will send it to their server’s to be processed into a high quality PDF that can be sent anywhere via email, or to a recipient in over 90 different countries via ScanR’s fax service. You can try a limited version of the iPhone App for free, or pay $4 for the complete software. I’ve got a quick video of the App in action as well as a sample PDF for you below. Check them out.

Yeah, I’m not sure how much you’ll use the fax capabilities of ScanR, but I can see the scanner (aka PDF converter) as fairly helpful. There are other such scanners in the App Store, but most are slightly more expensive and I can’t find a free one (anyone else want to try?). Executives may be a little wary of sending documents to ScanR’s server to be processed, but everything is automated and (ScanR claims) private. Typical processing times for me were less than 2 minutes, and sometimes much faster, as seen in the video:

Of course, the quality of each scan is really hit or miss. ScanR uses your camera phone after all, so expect all the benefits and tribulations that come with that. The curved surfaces of a book lead to some problems with converting image to text. I ripped a page out of a book (I apologize to librarians everywhere) and placed it on a flat surface. This really helped. ScanR lets you convert photos to PDFs as well, which I tried with a high contrast color photo of some flowers. The result was fairly decent. See for yourself below. Overall I’d say the ScanR App is user friendly, probably pretty helpful, and fast.

Click photo to see PDF document.

The original photo can be seen here.

But things are going to get much better. There’s at least one group out there trying to put far superior scanning technology in your phone. Eventually you could scan an entire book as easily as I scanned a single page. Smart phones already serve as fairly functional mobile business centers now. In the near future they’ll become what they were always meant to be: single point access to the rest of humanity, and the collective knowledge of the world.

[screen capture and video credit: Singularity Hub]
[image credits: Singularity Hub via ScanR]
[source: ScanR]

Give Siri a command and it will hunt down information on Yelp, MovieTickets.com, Google Maps, etc to get you what you want. Amazing.

You’re about to get your very own genie in a bottle. Simply talk into your iPhone and tell Siri what you want. Tickets for a show, reservations at a restaurant, a taxi to pick you up – the newest App can arrange to get you what you need. Best of all, Siri learns (with your permission) what you want, and gets better at understanding your commands. Just like a human assistant. Originally developed as part of DARPA’s CALO project, Siri represent more than five years of steady research and refinement. The App is sophisticated enough to filter through a sentence and identify the relevant key words and know which of its dozens of partnered APIs to engage. Want to find some live music in your area? Siri calls up LiveKick and understands to use GPS to determine what “in your area” means. It can handle most any command for six broad categories of interest: restaurants, movies, events, taxis, local information, and weather. In those fields, Siri can figure out what you want and how to get it for you. Best of all, the App is free. Look below for the cool demo video and a great interview of Siri founders by the Scobleizer himself.

There’s really no reason why you can’t do what Siri does all on your own. Want a restaurant review? Go to Yelp. Want a movie ticket? Go to MovieTickets.com. This isn’t hard, it’s just tedious. That’s what personal assistants are for, and Siri is an amazing personal assistant. It can understand complicated commands that use unspecific key words. “I’d like a PG-13 movie near my house that’s funny and romantic.” Siri can handle that by using its patented algorithm to learn how to translate words and phrases into actionable commands. Right now Siri is still a little awkward, they say so directly on the website, but it learns and improves upon its understanding of how you command it.

In other words, Siri’s an astounding technology that’s going to get even better the more you use it. The Siri company has more than $24 million in funding and has plans to expand to include reminders, flight stats, reference questions, and many more tasks. The App is currently only available for iPhone 3GS with OS 3.1, but it will eventually be offered for iPod Touch, iPhone 3G, and other smart phones. Hopefully it will also expand beyond English and the US. This is really a phenomenal App. An AI assistant on your iPhone. Remarkable.

[screen capture credit: Siri]
[video credits: Siri, Robert Scoble, Building 43]