research

Microsoft touches up video editing

Microsoft showed off a technology on Tuesday that could one day allow people to edit artifacts into video as easily as they do with digital photographs today.

The research technology, dubbed Unwrap Mosaic, was shown to do things like adding a mustache and rosy cheeks onto a person in a video. It works by sort of unwrapping a 3D object into a flat image that contains the whole object, in this case a face.

"What we've done is built away of patterning the essence of a video in a single pattern," said Andrew Fitzgibbon, who presented the … Read more

Essential back-to-school software

You might be enjoying the dog days of summer now, but look out! The school year is just around the corner, and teachers, books, classes, and winter will be here before you know it. Get a jump on the upcoming school year with a collection of downloadable software for communicating with classmates, managing your homework, learning new study skills, or harnessing the reference power of the Internet. You can even find software to let you call your parents free from college. (Seriously, your mom wants a call.)

Digsby

Facebook profiles, instant-messaging networks, various Web mail accounts...who can track them … Read more

Photos: Researchers focus on electronic eye camera

Researchers at the University of Illinois and Northwestern University have created a camera with a layout similar in size and shape to the human eye. The eye camera is based on "single-crystalline silicon detectors and electronics, configured in a stretchable, interconnected mesh," according to the University of Illinois.

The curved technology will put an entire image in focus, in contrast to today's cameras, which take images that are sharper in the center than near the edges, according to researchers. Plus, the technology could be a big step toward the development of a bionic eye similar to the … Read more

Forrester acquires JupiterResearch for $23 million

Tech analyst heavyweight Forrester Research just got a little bigger.

The Cambridge, Mass., company said Thursday that it acquired smaller rival JupiterResearch and its parent company JUPR Holdings for $23 million. The JupiterResearch brand will begin to serve Forrester's "Marketing and Strategy" client group.

JupiterResearch, considerably smaller than Forrester, had 83 employees and made $14 million in 2007, while Forrester Research, which has more than 1,000 employees, made $212 million.

Forrester also announced its second quarter earnings Thursday. The company had a $8.6 million profit on $63.5 million in revenue for the quarter ending … Read more

HP, Intel, Yahoo join forces on cloud computing research

This post was updated at 10 a.m. PDT to include further comments from the companies.

Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo announced Tuesday that they've teamed up to create a "test bed" project for research in cloud computing, the umbrella term for outsourcing hardware and software capabilities rather than handling them locally.

With the rather dry name of The HP, Intel, and Yahoo Cloud Computing Test Bed, the open-source project will consist of data centers around the globe "to promote open collaboration among industry, academia, and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in … Read more

Control, transparency, and customer contributions to open source

Joel West, professor at San Jose State University College of Business, and Siobh?n O'Mahony, professor at UC Davis Graduate School of Management, have produced some insightful research over the years. However, I particularly like a new academic study the two recently released: "The Role of Participation Architecture in Growing Sponsored Open Source Communities." It studies why developers contribute to certain open-source projects and don't contribute to others.

The key? If you want outside participation, you need to deliver more than mere transparency: Developers need to be able to change the direction of the project to make it worthwhile to stick around. (For a quick example of how too much control can stifle a community, take a look at Sun and OpenOffice.)

This is not surprising, but the research is helpful in detailing why this is so, and how firms cope with it. While most open-source projects attract little to no outside developer interest, corporate-sponsored open-source projects start with an implicit handicap by demanding control of the destinies of their projects:

By comparing the participation architectures that resulted from sponsors' design decisions, we identified two types of openness: transparency and accessibility ["Accessibility allows external participants to directly influence the direction of the community to meet their specific wants and needs"].

While transparency offered potential contributors the ability to follow and understand a community's production efforts, accessibility determined the degree to which external contributors could influence that production. In designing a community, sponsors were more likely to offer transparency than they were to offer accessibility to external community members. … Read more

University clears Tor snooping researchers of misconduct

An internal review by University of Colorado officials has found that a controversial research project conducted by a team of computer scientists did not constitute research misconduct. University lawyers have also stated their belief that the team probably did not violate US wiretapping laws.

As I reported in a blog post yesterday, a team of researchers from both the University of Colorado and University of Washington recently presented a controversial study in which they recorded a limited portion of the communications of users of Tor -- a popular anonymizing proxy network.

According to a written statement posted by the research team, … Read more

California hands-free law sparks Bluetooth boon

The numbers are in for Bluetooth headset sales in California, and the retail hype around the new hands-free-driving law seems to have paid off. The law boosted device sales to four times the national average, according to a report by retail market researcher The NPD Group.

NPD said California's four largest markets--San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Diego--saw a major Bluetooth boost in the months before the law went into effect effect July 1.

In March, San Francisco sold two times more Bluetooth headsets than the national average. By May that number had risen to four times the … Read more

O'Reilly study uncovers multiple reasons for open source's impressive rise

According to new research released today by Bernard Golden (Navica) and O'Reilly Research, there are at least six reasons compelling the rapid rise of open source. Agility and scale, reduced vendor lock-in, quality and security, cost, sovereignty (i.e., Local, not necessarily US-based development), and innovation. No wonder Sourceforge downloads continue to rise.

In one particular area, however, open source shines, in my opinion: The ability to reduce lock-in to a particular vendor. The report suggests:

There is little potential price competition for incumbent vendors: Because locked-in vendors have little fear of being replaced, they are in a position to extract expensive maintenance and upgrade fees, bleeding ever-shrinking IT budgets of precious dollars. For example, Oracle just announced price increases of 20% for its database software (accompanied by increases in ongoing maintenance fees as well), secure in the knowledge that very few enterprises are in a position to resist the increase due to the difficulty of replacing the products.

Whatever the price associated with getting into a relationship with Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, HP, etc., few enterprise buyers seem to reflect on just how expensive it will be to disengage from that relationship due to lock-in to proprietary technology. Things that may be good for buyers (like SaaS) can be safely avoided by the vendor that owns its customers.… Read more