autonomy

Imagine aiming a smartphone or a tablet at a cereal box and, instead of seeing the static image printed on the box, you see an animated feature appear as if it's playing on the front of the box. The same technology could be used to turn a picture in a printed newspaper into a video or--if pointed toward a product--it could launch a game featuring animated characters interacting with that product.

That's the aim of a new technology being introduced by Autonomy, the London-based company best known for its enterprise software.

Aurasma, which is a core technology designed … Read more

Microsoft plans to begin phasing out Unix and Linux platform support for its FAST enterprise search products, as of its next release.

According to a Thursday blog post from Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Bjørn Olstad, the team will be "investing in interoperability between Windows and other operating systems, reaffirming our commitment to 10 years of support for our non-Windows products, and taking concrete steps to help customers plan for the future."

Enterprise search remains a lucrative, if oddly fractured market. According to analyst firm Gartner, in 2008, software revenue (new licenses and maintenance revenue) in the enterprise … Read more

FORT HOOD, Texas--Click briefly through the parade of cautionary fireballs that make-up the Iraq/Convoy category on any video-sharing Web site and the message is clear; in war, people get killed making deliveries.

The military wants to do something about that--namely, get soldiers out of the driver's seat. To help move things in the right direction, a Robotics Rodeo at the sprawling Army installation here in the heart of Texas gave some companies a chance to show what they have to offer. The rodeo, which ended Thursday, was sponsored by the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and … Read more

It must be depressing to be Microsoft these days.

You spend $1.2 billion to acquire enterprise search leader FAST in January 2008 and then another $100 million on semantic search vendor Powerset in July 2008, only to have the excellent Apache's Lucene, an open-source search project, and Solr, an enterprise search server based on Lucene, offer better performance at a 100 percent discount.

Not very sporting of the open-source community, now is it?

Granted, Lucene and Solr still lack some of the spit and polish that Microsoft FAST, Autonomy, Google's enterprise search appliance, and other proprietary competitors … Read more

With the annual Web 2.0 conference only a week away, we're about to get bombarded with the latest avalanche of marketing hype about technologies that are supposed to change our lives. And if past is prologue, I'm quite sure the 24-hour attention cycle will again be dominated by more monotonous debates about the future of social networks and news feed platforms.

But as these debates play out among the usual cast of characters on TechMeme, pay close attention to the new rules of media engagement--and I'm using "media" in the widest possible sense here--where … Read more

Having had some fairly infuriating experiences with graffiti as property owners, we view the work of outfits like the Institute for Applied Autonomy with mixed feelings, to say the least. Its stated mission, after all, is "to study the forces and structures which affect self-determination and to provide technologies which extend the autonomy of human activists." Translation: They make stuff like graffiti robots.

Still, from a pure gadget-loving point of view, we can't help but admire their unabashed guerrilla-like audacity. Take, for example, the "StreetWriter" project, which is essentially a van that's been converted … Read more