Microsoft’s GM, Developer and Platform Evangelism Matt Thompson was on the DEMO stage talking about their vision for cloud computing and beyond. He refers to ‘mobile’ as the perfect platform for cloud and for them. (i.e, Microsoft.
Says Thompson, “we are embracing the cloud. Cloud is the BIG bet for the company. Everyone from our CEO down has embraced this. Cloud IS a PLATFORM, we’re all in on the cloud,” he goes on. Okay, got it Matt. CLOUD IS IMPORTANT!!!
Matt Marshall asks, “if you listen to what Google says, ‘private clouds don’t matter. Can you talk about that?” Thompson responds, “there are a couple of cloud conferences in the Valley, some say everything is going public. If you talk to anyone in the defense industry, public really isn’t a solution there. The other key one is healthcare. Microsoft has embraced this model where there will be private data centers just as there will be public clouds.”
He continues, “there’s this notion where you will be able to run our application across public and private, a hybrid solution. The world that we see is where both exist; clearly there will be private clouds (and you’re going to see thousands of them) and you’re going to see very large public clouds too, some of which will be run by corporations and some will be run by governments. We see the linking of these two pieces is what we can offer that is unique.” Video of his talk below:
Today, at DEMOfall in Santa Clara, CA, VoiceBase unveils a new search, share and store voice communications platform, which will allow users to easily access and organize meeting and conference content from any web-enabled device.
The goal of their new web-based service is to make voice communication as efficient and effective as e-mail communication. The new service offers storage, search and retrieval, as well as discussion and sharing of voice communications, through any Web-enabled device. Recorded content is uploaded to VoiceBase servers, where a time-synchronized transcription – human or machine – is added to the recording prior to its post to the participant's VoiceBase personal Webpage.
Basic use of the service is free. Content will be stored for one year, after which subscribers can purchase additional storage hours.
Video of their presentation and demo at DEMOfall below:
Matt Marshall interviewed Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on the DEMO Conference stage this afternoon in Santa Clara. Jack says of Twitter, “it still has a long way to go, but we built it initially because I wanted to use Twitter every day, I wanted my friends and family to use it everyday. You build things that you want to see in the world. Square(his new gig which is in closed beta) was built out of the same notion.”
Matt asks Jack about Square, where it currently is and how it will be used. “Twitter had this problem of being so abstract early on and no one knew how or why to use it. Square is similar, which started in February 2009. We’ve been working in a pilot.”
Jack says with conviction, “we want to make sure Square is known for its reliability as a payment network. We want to pace out the growth and get a lot of things right. We’ve been bringing more and more people into this pilot, to start processing cards, start taking payments over Square and currently we’re able to produce 10,000 readers to anyone who wants them. We keep fulfilling the readers to anyone who has signed up for Square, very similar to what Google did with Gmail.”
“That doesn’t sound too limited?” asks Matt. Jack, who doesn’t want to talk about ‘specific numbers, says, “we want to pace this out. We’re on the risk for frauds that come in and while we haven’t had any issues yet, we want to make sure that as we roll this out to millions of people, this will scale. We want every transaction, both from the merchant’s and payer’s standpoint, to be magical and to feel great.”
He returns to things he learned from launching Twitter and early days which apparently is hard to manage from an engineering perspective. “There’s a massive spike for an event and then it goes back to normal,” says Jack.
“One of the things I learned from the early days of Twitter,” he says, “while we were building a company based around transparency and open communication, in the beginning, we weren’t telling users why and when the system went down. Here they were spending hours on Twitter but we weren’t letting them into the conversation.
When we learned that and realized what we were doing, we started to have more outreach about what we were doing and our problems. Once we did that, we attracted a lot of new engineers, great tips and advice and our users were inspired by that communication. The issue was that we had no instrumentation, no data, no analytics about what was happening. We were pretty much flying blind.”
He adds, “my biggest fear for Twitter, for Square and for any company, is to cohesively move together, forward as one unit.” Jack says he’s a force for transparency and he wants Square to be instrumental in opening up transparency more and more, particularly with credit card payments.
Jack is a big fan of keeping a journal, you can really see your progress once its written down and you can see trends over time. On big ideas and coming up with big ideas, “it’s really about capitalizing on an opportunity and knowing how to tap into – it’s not about being lucky. It’s also about getting the ideas out of your head. Once they stay in your head, you come up with every excuse not to do it, not to make it happen.”
Below is the full interview on video: Parts I and II
Parallels world-premiered its Parallels Mobile iPad, iPhone and iPod touch app on the DEMO stage today, which enables customers to remotely access their Windows applications on their Apple mobile device from anywhere, any time and on any network. Users can download a free trial of Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac here and then get the complementary Parallels Mobile app from the app store and experience Windows, IE, Firefox and more from their Apple mobile device.
The app and service allows users of Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac and Parallels Desktop 6 Switch to Mac Edition, to use their iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch to access and utilize Windows applications running on a Mac from any network, from anywhere, at any time.
The Parallels Mobile app, a client and a service built upon the MyParallels services platform, is complementary with either edition of Parallels Desktop 6 and can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store after 12:00 p.m. noon PT today.
With Parallels’ new mobile app and MyParallels service, people can freely perform tasks that have been unavailable or limiting to iPad users such as printing, viewing Flash-based websites and full use of productivity applications like Outlook.
Below I’m talking to Zeno, a Hanson Robotics robot, the most human looking robot I’ve ever had the opportunity of interacting with, at least in this lifetime.
Zeno’s skin is made from Frubber, which Hanson has a patent on – it’s soft to the touch and feels like a cross between real skin and rubber. Made from a spongy, structured elastic polymer that expertly mimics the movement of real human musculature and skin using 1/20th the power of other materials, the robot can emulate over 62 facial and neck muscular architectures, has micro-cameras inside the eyes and has both facial and speech recognition built in.
Eye contact face-tracking, and conversational capabilities utilizing the latest AI software is incredibly advanced, so much so that if Zeno had legs and it wasn’t so noisy in the room, you might be fooled into thinking you’re having a real conversation with a human, albeit a very strange and mechanical one.
David Hanson is interested in human cognition – “if humans grow away from human, you get very strange results,” says Hanson. “The same is true with robots.” I also had a chance to chat with other AI researchers working on development at Hanson, including Matthew Stevenson and Kino Coursey.
Hanson robots include the world’s first expressive biped robot, Albert-Hubo, heralded by WIRED as “genius”, and the small Zeno robot, which is also previewed in this video. Sorry, but he’s just not as much fun as the leg-less Zeno with the bandana. BTW, Zeno has accepted a date with me. My plan? A date with Zeno when he gets his legs, likely in Dallas, but we’ll see what Zeno says when the time is here.
I’ve explored so many churches in my life that I tend to skip over the majority these days unless there’s something uniquely special about it. From turn of the century to turn of the last two centuries, I’ve meandered through churches in nearly every country in Europe, North America, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America and Australia. Little did I know what Quito Ecuador had to offer.
In Ecuador’s second largest town that dates from pre-Hispanic times, there are over 40 churches and chapels, 16 convents and monasteries with their respective cloisters, 17 plazas, 12 chapter rooms and refectories, 12 museums and countless courtyards. A more extensive blog post captures some of the visuals in the old town, including La Ronda, a narrow lane lined with picture-book 17th century buildings, with placards along the walls describing some of the street’s history and the artists, writers and political figures who once lived there.
La Basilica is a must visit; its tower visit is a mere $2. Be prepared to climb very high, but it’s well worth the experience. Gothic and overbearing in a glorious sort of way, it was built in 1926. Not the gargoyles of Paris, but as magnificent of a view and the architecture is incredible — every step of the way.
Instead of gargoyles, turtles and iguanas protrude from the church’s side. The highlight is the climb itself, straight up to the clock tower as well as the stunning views of Quito below. It requires crossing a rickety wooden plank inside the main roof and climbing steep stairs and ladders to the top…..all this after climbing a spiral staircase and three more sets of ladders. Loved every minute of it – below I capture the views and the experience of the climb itself in three separate short videos.
Canadian Ryan Janzen is part researcher, part scientist, part engineer and part composer. Below, he shows us how to use the Hydraulophone, a tonal acoustic musical instrument played by direct physical contact with water. As he plays, you’ll note that he gets one note per water jet as he plays the instrument. A cross between a piano and a wind instrument, he says that the people who learn how to play it quickly are those with both a flute and a piano background. (mixes how you play the notes with expression of how you play them).
The hydraulophone in the first sense was invented and named by Steve Mann, who gave a presentation on-stage the same day. Funtain.ca has more information on them and how to purchase one – apparently they come in different shapes and sizes and colors. Think tens of thousands for starters. As for where you can find them around the country? There’s very few, but museums in Houston and Chicago have one and there’s a permanent one housed in Toronto that is on display 24/7.
The instrument is addictive to play (I tried it and didn’t want to stop) and very hypnotic. hydraulophone or poseidophone combines the simplicity of the piano with the interface of the tin flute or recorder. You play the hydraulophone by stopping the jets of water with your fingers or hands. As Ryan demonstrates, by blocking multiple jets you can even play chords. It appears that the more expression you put into it, the wetter you get. Click play for more.
University of Toronto professor Steve Mann talks about surveillance and corruption and virtual reality on stage at the Singularity Summit in San Francisco recently. Steve is a pioneer in the study and practice of virtual reality and has been dubbed the world’s first cyborg. His book on cyborg living dives into his work in more depth: Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer.
After his presentation, Mann shows a blind woman how to use the Hydraulophone below – an instrument that merges the organ with water with string instruments with really great design. He also plays House of the Rising Sun for her on the Hydraulophone. Listen for the trickling water which is now part of the song.
I had a chance to talk to David Hanson of Hanson Robotics in-depth at the Singularity Summit in San Francisco on August 14. He holds the view that humans want robots to look, feel and sound human – after all, asking humans to think otherwise would be asking humans to re-wire the way they think.
The conversation that unfortunately didn’t make it into the video was around robot(ic) behavior – robots versus humans, more specifically robots versus actors. We were talking about some of the best actors who actually ARE the character, they don’t go INTO character. The two that immediately came to my mind are both women: Meryl Streep and Glenn Close. Both of them draw you into their character and make you believe nothing else exists BUT the CHARACTER.
I could imagine a world where you could buy a product that could be programmed to a particular character. I’d love an ‘open source’ robot like the PR2s that Willow Garage are building, and the ability to separately buy a program that enables the robot to go into a specific personality, just like I buy a DVD movie today. When I’m in a different ‘personality mood,’ I simply change it. What about other human aspects? Listen to David thinks about these topics.
