Jonathan Kessler, CEO of Hand Eye Interactive
(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)I'll be paying special attention to Hand Eye Technologies when the company gives its pitch at DemoFall 09 at about 10:40 a.m. PDT Tuesday. This company, as I said in "What to Watch," is trying to close the loop between television and the Internet, by using smartphones as secondary, interactive screens for people when they're watching typical broadcast shows.
As CEO Jonathan Kessler explained to me Monday night, the first step to making this work is to enable your smartphone to know what you're watching. First, you need special technology in your TV or set-top box. It knows what the screen is displaying and whether it's live or playing off a DVR or DVD. Then your phone needs to know what you're interested in that's showing on your TV.
One way to do this is to have the smartphone actually watch the TV with you. When you see something you like--something you want to buy, learn more about, share with friends, etc.--you press a button on the phone that communicates with the set-top, which causes the screen on your TV to overlay, briefly, some colored squares on the display that your phone's camera picks up. It can then tell what you were pointing your phone at and take you to the next step in your interaction with the content.
Hand Eye Technologies requires an app on the smartphone as well as on a box connected to the TV.
(Credit: Hand Eye Technologies)What's interesting about this is that Hand Eye Interactive Technology (HIT) takes the interaction off the main TV display and pulls it onto the personal, mobile, and much smarter display on users' phones. The TV isn't forced to become an interactive terminal, and the interaction a user has with content on his or her personal phone won't disrupt a viewing experience for anyone else watching the main show on the big screen.
Kessler said the technology could be generalized to work with any content on TV, but that the business model is to sell the platform to TV studios so they can embed it in individual smartphone apps they build for shows or networks. A shopping channel app is the most obvious example (Kessler is in talks with one of the networks) since it would enable commerce, but apps for other networks or even individual shows could work. For example, a Discovery Channel app could use HIT technology to kick off games or educational content (or DVD sales) on the smartphone.
The business also requires that set-top boxes (and network DVRs) get the core HIT technology embedded in them. Technically, this is simple. From a business perspective, I can only wish Kessler the best of luck. He will probably need it.
For HIT to succeed several different elements have to line up. But that high level of difficulty is also a barrier to entry, something that many Web-only businesses don't have.
Created by former Microsoft search head Ken Moss, CrowdEye gives several views of a topic based on the conversations taking place on Twitter.
(Credit: CNET)The former head of Microsoft's search unit may have left Redmond, but he is still very much in the search game.
Ken Moss, who led the search engineering team at Microsoft for five years, has spent the last months building CrowdEye, a real-time search engine that aims to allow users to better mine Twitter to get a pulse on hot topics.
The service, which is going into public beta on Thursday, offers up not only the latest tweets on a topic, but also a list of the most popular links on a topic and a tag cloud of associated terms.
Moss
(Credit: CrowdEye)"I think that real-time search is the next big thing in search," Moss said in a telephone interview. "It's an area that has been underexploited to date."
Searching Twitter is good for news, he said, but also for things such as finding the latest viral video or a solution to a new software bug.
Of course, Moss is not alone in this thinking. Twitter has its own search engine, while others such as Topsy and OneRiot, are also mining the twitterverse.
Among its features, CrowdEye has a historical view that allows one to see how the discussion on a topic has evolved. Although, for now, that historical period is only three days.
"Right now that's all we support, but its definitely something I'd anticipate growing over time," Moss said.
Moss has been working on CrowdEye for about nine months. For now, his only other co-worker is his wife, Becca Moss, also a former 'softie.
"Right now it is still the two of us for now, but we hope to expand that soon," Moss said.
Moss said he looks forward to listening to feedback once the product goes public and already has a long to-do list of things he would like to add, things such as adding more real-time sources beyond twitter.
"I think there's a very long list of exciting improvements that will take us a long while," he said.
The plan to launch CrowdEye was noted earlier by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley and on Seattle-area news site TechFlash.
The tip of Mt. Fuji, now in higher resolution from GeoEye-1 satellite imagery in Google Earth.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Google has begun offering the first high-resolution imagery from the GeoEye-1 satellite it helped sponsor--but only as an optional layer in Google Earth for now.
"In the coming months you will start seeing stunning GeoEye-1 imagery blended into our database and viewable through Google Earth, Maps, and Google Maps for Mobile," said Dylan Lorimer, strategic partner manager; and Jacob Schonberg, associate product manager, in a Google Lat Long blog post Wednesday.
Until then, some shots can be viewed by downloading add-on imagery for Google Earth from Google's GeoEye-1 preview site, they said. Because Google Earth now works as a plug-in to some browsers, the full Google Earth application doesn't need to be installed to get a taste. Clicking the thumbnail images in the film strip on the page will launch the in-browser version.
GeoEye launched the satellite in September and plans to launch another with a higher-resolution camera in 2011. However, U.S. government limits the resolution of the images Google shows to details measuring half a meter. GeoEye shared a view of President Barack Obama's inauguration and other teaser images.
GeoEye-1 imagery, such as this shot of Nukuoro in Micronesia, is available in Google Earth as an extra download.
(Credit: screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
(Credit:
Eye-Fi)
Eye-Fi's now ready to unleash its next generation of Wi-Fi SD cards on the point-and-shooting public. The Eye-Fi Share Video and Eye-Fi Explore Video cards, first announced at CES, extend the capabilities of their predecessors to support uploading video directly to YouTube and Flickr via Wi-Fi.
While it'd be great if the cards could upload from the increasing number of Flash-based camcorders, they still only work with cameras; according to the company, that's because they only transmit files found in the DCIM directory. Cameras have a single standard directory structures but camcorders don't.
Eye-Fi has to stash the geotagging information generated by the Explore Video card in a sidecar file as well, since video files don't have a standard for storing it.
The geotagging 4GB Eye-Fi Explore Video card will cost $99 when it ships at the end of this month; the 4GB Eye-Fi Share Video will run $79. The company also dropped the price on its 2GB photo-only cards.
On a recent trip to Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., I got a quick peek at one of the test rooms Google uses to track user interactions with its products. Gmail's product manager Todd Jackson told me it was just one of the many other user testing facilities the company had, and that collectively the testing had given the team important feedback of how people were using Gmail. Enough to change where entire features like user chat took up residence on a user's screen.
This Friday Google unveiled results from using this technique on some of its other products. In this case it's the results page from Google.com, the company's most heavily trafficked property. Unsurprisingly most people only care about what's on the top of the page, but what's really interesting is this video the company has put out that shows where one user's eyeballs are going and when:
What I found really neat though was that the mouse lagged far behind whatever the user's eyeballs were doing. We all do this, it's just fascinating to see it in action.
Anne Aula and Kerry Rodden, two of Google's user experience researchers, say this tracking technique led to the inclusion of thumbnails for photos and videos in search results. They also say that this actually made the page easier to parse without people getting confused. There are some before-and-after shots of what people looked at on this page. It's definitely worth checking out if you want to know where Google thinks your eyeballs will go too.
Firefox users looking to shorten their Twitter messages to fit inside the service's 140-character limit should check out TwitterEyes. This new, experimental extension takes a look at what you've written and shortens any words it can. This includes any extra spaces you might have put in, along with words like "and" which gets turned into "&" as well as "first" which becomes "1st." In future versions developer Danny Pier says he intends to add a user-controlled dictionary that would allow you to add your own words and their shorter replacements.
In its current iteration, the extension adds a little TwitterEyes option next to the send button that only shows up when you're visiting from Twitter.com. I found it to work pretty well in a new Firefox window, but after using it once it didn't work without closing the tab and re-opening a new instance of Twitter.
This is very reminiscent of all the URL shorteners and shortening extensions that can be used to make links smaller. Considering how many users send tweets from mobile and desktop applications, it would be nice to get this same functionality available from there as well. This is a great first step though.
Once installed, clicking the TwitterEyes button will shorten certain words to give you more space for your tweet.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Eye-Fi spies video on YouTube
This the card used for the photo version of Eye-Fi, but the video version will likely look similar.
For the last year or so Eye-Fi SD cards have allowed users to wirelessly upload photos straight from their digital cameras to their hard drives and photo sharing services like Flickr and Webshots. Now Eye-Fi is applying its technology to videos and YouTube.
At CES this week, Eye-Fi, inc. announced that it ...
Read the full post at CNET's CES 2009 blog.
It seems like a natural fit: Evernote, a Web service that turns random pictures of information into a searchable database and Eye-Fi, a company whose SD cards enable you to turn random information into pictures and upload them to the Web. In theory, it's a great idea. Evernote, which requires input ubiquity to be really useful, gains another data stream, and Eye-Fi gains a relatively compelling productivity application.
Eye-Fi Share
Having used both Evernote and an Eye-Fi card, however, I suspect a bit less than that rosy scenario. With Eye-Fi you predetermine the various places you want to send your photos--to your laptop, to a sharing site, and so on--via the Web site. Evernote will be added to this configuration process as a target for photos--all of your photos. There are no controls with the Eye- Fi card to send select photos to a particular location, just a global enabling and disabling of locations via the Web site. That's OK, sort of, when you're uploading to a photo-sharing service or sending them to your computer, but the stuff you'll want to send to Evernote is a more intermittent and selective stream. And you can already send to Evernote selectively from a variety of phones, though in many cases not as transparently. Still, there are some situations where I think the pair could greatly complement each other, such as for house or apartment hunting, documenting accidents, or assets for insurance purposes. What do you think?
This shot of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania is the first image from the GeoEye-1 satellite. Google is a commercial customer for the satellite's imagery. Click for a larger view.
(Credit: GeoEye)Golden Bears fans, take note: The first high-resolution photos from GeoEye's newest satellite, GeoEye-1, have begun arriving, and Kutztown University in Pennsylvania is the first subject of scrutiny.
These are the shots that eventually will show up on Google Maps and Google Earth; Google has an exclusive partnership to use the GeoEye-1 imagery for online services. The satellite's camera can capture image details as small as 41 centimeters, though commercial customers only get 50-centimeter resolution because of U.S. regulations.
The Kutztown University image was taken at noon EDT Tuesday while the satellite was moving south at an altitude of 423 miles at a speed of 4.5 miles per second relative to the Earth's surface, GeoEye said.
GeoEye launched the satellite on September 6; GeoEye-2 is slated for a launch in 2011 or 2012. It has a 25-centimeter resolution.
I took a premature look at PlanetEye in June. I found a conceptually interesting product that wasn't ready for real-world use. Since then, the site has opened to the public and gone through a redesign. It's now worth checking out for planning vacation travel.
The organizing principle of PlanetEye is the "Travel Pack," which is a way of categorizing your destinations. You can create a Travel Pack for anywhere you're going and then drop restaurants, hotels, and activities into it. Photos of your destination or activity (from other users) show up on a Pack page, and PlanetEye will put a Pack's items all on a map for you and let you easily share your Pack with others. I'm thinking of creating a "Rafe's S.F. Visitor Guide" pack to send to people who come to visit our home.
Activities, restaurants, and hotels get useful summary pages.
(Credit: PlanetEye)Packs also recommend alternate activities. At some point, they'll will be prioritized based on a social formula; right now they just seem to be highly rated professional reviews. Which brings us to the best part of this service: the content. PlanetEye aggregates professional reviews and makes them all easy to find and discover. There are a few useful expert articles on the site as well. And it's a very attractive site--more travel magazine than utility. Combined with its recommendation system and Travel Pack organizational scheme, it makes for a good system to collect activities, lodging, and dining options for a location.
However, the system doesn't do enough for you once you've built your checklist. Yes, it does connect you to hotel sites for reservations and to OpenTable to book restaurants. But there's no timeline view of your activities to go with the map view, so planning your attack on a vacation spot is still a manual process. I'd like to see a planner like TripIt, or a printed city guide like Offbeat Guides, to go with my Travel Packs.
Travel Packs can be private, or you can borrow a public one.
(Credit: PlanetEye)
