Free News.me
News.me of NYT and Betaworks relaunches as a free Twitter/Facebook aggregator on the iPhone; http://eicker.at/FreeNewsMe
News.me of NYT and Betaworks relaunches as a free Twitter/Facebook aggregator on the iPhone; http://eicker.at/FreeNewsMe
hi siri
Well, she won’t hear you at this place. ;)
Hi siri
Hello
Hi Siri
Sometimes she has a little attitude
Hey siri.
how you doing today.
Hi Siri
Nuance adds Swype to its speech and imaging applications, brings Swype to iOS? http://eicker.at/NuanceSwype
UC: “Nuance has acquired Seattle-based startup Swype for something more than $100 million, says a source with knowledge of the deal. – I’m a big fan of Swype, and this is a brilliant acquisition by Nuance. … Nuance already has T9, a predictive text application first developed in the 90s, and T9 competes directly with Swype.”
TC: “Swype has been blowing minds since it first launched at TechCrunch 50 back in September of 2008. For those unfamiliar, Swype is the maker of an awesome app that allows users of touchscreen mobile devices to type messages with one swipe of the finger or stylus motion across the screen keyboard. The alternative (and patented) input method has proven to be super speedy, allowing data entry at over 40 words per minute, and has swept across Android devices. … The speech recognition giant has also been in the news of late, as it is has been in negotiations with Apple over licensing for Lion OSX. What’s more, while Apple did not confirm, MG held that Nuance is also a large part of the technology behind Siri, which will be native on all iPhone 4Ses.”
ATD: “As touchscreen phones became more popular, the predictive texting that eliminated triple-tapping became less necessary, as new forms of input on a piece of glass became mandatory. Nuance bought the technology from AOL. … The importance of voice and text entry became even more prominent this week after Apple unveiled Siri, a voice-activated assistant.”
TC: “Earlier today, I spoke with Swype CEO Mike McSherry, who explained the thinking behind the deal. ‘The broadest vision,’ says McSherry, ‘is we want to be the input for every single stream. You talk to your refrigerator and in-car navigation, you want your language models to follow you around.’ – When he puts it that way, Swype seems like a much more strategic acquisition for NUance than one which simply fills a hole. … Yes, Nuance is powering the new Siri Assistant in Apple’s upcoming iPhone 4S with its voice recognition technology. So does that mean that Swype could be coming to the iPHone as well? ‘I’d love to be able to see that,’ says McSherry, adding, ‘There are certainly lots of requests to see Swype on the iPhone.’”
RWW: “This could be the first steps to bringing Swype to the iPhone. We lamented after the iPhone 4S announcement that Siri, the voice input “assistant” coming in iOS 5, should have been Swype. Apple was a good working relationship with Nuance and if the parties can figure out a good graphical interface for Swype on the iPhone, it may be the next important feature in iOS. … Even if Swype never comes to the iPhone, Nuance has made a very astute acquisition. Nuance was already the leader in speech-to-text technology, ahead of others like Vlingo, The acquisition gives Nuance the clear lead in input methods for mobile devices. With Swype as part of the team, Nuance has planted its flag to be the leader in the vertical for the foreseeable future.“
Pew: 35% of American adults own a smartphone and 25% of owners mostly go online with it; http://eicker.at/SmartphoneAdoption
Apple‘s iOS stores user’s location histories on iPhones and iPads: huge security and privacy fail; http://eicker.at/iOStracker
Apple responds: “The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.“
MeFeedia: 63% of web videos are HTML5 compatible. H.264 > VP8 > Ogg. VP8 could get a YouTube boost; http://eicker.at/HTML5Video
Making business and systemic risks in proprietary ecosystems: Twitter suspends UberMedia; http://eicker.at/ProprietaryEcosystems
Gerrit Eicker 18:00 on 3. March 2012 Permalink |
News.me: “News.me is a small team based out of betaworks in New York City. We build applications that improve the way people find and talk about the news. – We have an iPhone app, an iPad app, and a daily email that deliver the best stories shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook.”
News.me: “News.me for iPhone delivers the must-read news from your friends on Twitter and Facebook. Reading the news has always lent itself to a social experience: from the breakfast table to the water cooler to the classroom. But on the social web we’re no longer just ‘readers’ – we are all publishers, curating and distributing links to our own audience of friends and followers. – Yet when it comes to finding news on Twitter and Facebook, we hear the same complaint over and over again: ‘there’s too much stuff!’ At News.me, we want to help people wade through the chatter to find the news that truly matters. – News.me for iPhone analyzes all the links shared by your friends to find only the most relevant news for you. News.me is smart – it does the hard work of finding the right news so that you don’t have to. Each article is then presented in a beautiful stream that displays the publisher, headline, photo, and most importantly, what your friends are saying about it.”
RWW: “News.me launched its free iPhone app this morning, which introduces Facebook integration, a saved offline reading list that syncs with the iPad app and Instapaper, and new, simple social dynamics of its own. It digests the links shared by Twitter and Facebook contacts, checks Bit.ly for their popularity, and presents a list of the top news stories in a clean, readable environment. … I hate ‘It’s-the-this-of-that’ tech news stories, but I hope this comparison is meaningful: What Instagram is to photos and Path is to personal moments, News.me is to news. It’s a one-thumbed way to connect with people over the news of the day.”
GigaOM: “News.me has an interesting history: It started as a skunkworks project inside the New York Times – an attempt on the part of a couple of NYT developers to come up with a way of filtering Twitter based on a user’s social network. The team formed a partnership with the New York-based incubator and venture firm Betaworks (creator of services such as the Bitly link-shortener and Chartbeat) and then News.me was eventually absorbed into Bitly and the New York Times wound up with shares in the company.”
TC: “A bit unusually, the part of the app that you’ll use first may actually be the least interesting. In some ways, the new app is just a redesign of what News.me was already offering through its iPad and email products – a list of news stories, pulled from your Facebook and Twitter streams, then curated based on signals from Twitter and bit.ly, and presented with the context of the initial tweet or Facebook comment. … Although the company has been focused on the iPhone recently, and even though the iPad app has been less successful than the email digest, it sounds like Levine plans to add the new features to the iPad eventually.”
AT: “The goal isn’t to just be yet another news service – the idea is that you’re more likely to care about what your friends and family are sharing (compared to a standard firehose of news coming from every direction), which is why you might want to use a service that analyzes your feeds for shared stories. ‘We’re bringing you the best of your Twitter and Facebook in a streamlined interface, along with a venue for you to converse about news with your friends,’ News.me developer Robert Haining told Ars on Thursday. … The News.me iPhone app also offers a Reading List feature, which is pretty much what you would expect. Like Safari’s Reading List or even Instapaper itself, you can mark stories from your News.me feed to read offline.“