IMS Research - Wearable Technology Market to Exceed $6 Billion by 2016. Why every gadget you own could soon take voice commands just like Siri. Making a computer understand voice commands is tough—just ask Google, which has put some of its best engineers against the problem, or Apple, which is locked in an arms race with Google for king of the voice-control hill. But now Nuance, the company that currently powers Apple’s Siri voice assistant, is offering to any consumer electronics manufacturer who wants to buy a license, access to its own cloud-based voice-control system.
This means everything from your smart thermostat to your car could soon be accepting voice commands, whether or not a gadget from Google or Apple is involved. The first gizmo to roll out with this newly rechristened version of Nuance’s voice recognition software is the Omate Smartwatch, which is really a small smartphone that happens to have a wrist strap.
Omate is exactly the kind of independent, small-scale gadget maker that couldn’t possibly afford to build its own voice-recognition tech, so Nuance is a unique enabler for the company. 9 Data Sets Every Ecommerce Company Should Measure. To see big wins in e-commerce today, entrepreneurs need to cover all of their bases, from organic SEO to mobile advertising. Analytics tools can create a pretty detailed snapshot of where your business stands — too detailed, in some cases. Curious about which metrics really matter, we asked a panel of successful e-commerce entrepreneurs which pieces of data they measure regularly and what it tells them about their overall strategy. Their best answers are below. 1. User Acquisition Costs If you are in the e-commerce world and you don't know how many users are landing on your page, the conversion rate of users to paying customers and the cost of that user landing on the page (versus the profit you make in sales), you may not be in the industry too long.
. - Joseph Ricard, Tunebash Inc 2. You work hard to get people to your site. . - Brett Farmiloe, Digital Marketing Agency 3. In Google Analytics, you can now set up split tests called "experiments. " - Nicolas Gremion, Free-eBooks.com 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. #Science #Tech IT #Future DAILY. Why the path to social success means going mobile first. It isn’t every day an Android and iOS app gets scooped up by Facebook for $1 billion. Instagram’s success story is an inspiring one, and it proves once and for all that mobile apps play a major role in today’s technology tale. But Instagram is not the only mobile app to become more than just a mobile app. There are other success stories of popular networks and services that probably wouldn’t have made it big without a mobile app first. Here are some of Android’s finest. Instagram With just two years on the market and a $1 billion price tag, Instagram is one of the most popular mobile apps of all time.
They only recently came to Android, but the 1 million users that downloaded the Instagram app in the first 24 hours prove it was a hit even before the Google Play launch. Path Like mobile blogging but want to keep things low key? Shazam Shazam was around before Google Play came onto the scene, but it was the mobile app that helped the company grow to become a household name. Foursquare. A Hand-Cranked Tablet Unveiled at CES. People power: This eight-inch tablet is designed to bring education to poor regions of the world. More than 50 new tablet computers are expected to debut at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. But only one is meant for people in the poorest regions of the world, and comes with a hand crank as an accessory.
Known as the XO 3.0, the rugged green and white device has an eight-inch screen and was designed by the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child, which in 2008 launched the XO laptop, a device for people who are normally far from the minds of most computing companies. At a press preview held before the official opening of CES on Tuesday, OLPC’s chief technology officer, Edward McNierney, told Technology Review that the new device could be used by children as young as five. “We’re trying to provide a low-power, low-cost environment for education,” he said.
The tablet demonstrated was running Sugar OS, the Linux-based operating system developed by OLPC for its laptop. Is This the Tablet of the Future? Yes, the tablets of today are cool, handy devices, but if Samsung makes good on the promises from its latest video, showing a conceptual tablet with a flexible AMOLED screen, then the tablets of the future will make the current ones look ancient in comparison. In the video, a see-through device made entirely of a flexible, AMOLED touch screen is used to take photos, watch videos, read news, play 3D games and translate speech from one language to another - and it all looks amazing. Of course, a device such as this one is years — decades, perhaps — from mass production. One issue that immediately springs to mind is the problem of equipping such a device with a battery and the needed circuitry (all of which would also need to be flexible), and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
SEE ALSO: This Is What the Desk of the Future Looks Like [VIDEO] HTML5: The Technology Changing the Web. Exclusive: HP to hold all-hands meeting tonight, fate of webOS likely to be decided. Apple awards senior execs $60 million each. News November 7, 2011 02:33 PM ET Computerworld - Apple last week awarded six senior executives $60 million each in stock contingent on them staying with the company through mid-March 2016. In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last Friday, Apple said it had granted 150,000 restricted stock units to each executive.
At the close of trading Friday, the options were worth just over $60 million. With Apple shares down slightly on Monday, the options were equivalent to about $59.8 million as of 2 p.m. Restricted share units are not given at the time of the grant, but instead are awarded when they vest. Half of the shares vest in June 2013 and half in March 2016, assuming the executives remain with Apple. Those awarded the grants included chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer, general counsel Bruce Sewell and senior vice presidents Scott Forstall, Philip Schiller, Bob Mansfield and Jeffrey Williams.
Enter 'The $1,000 Minute' contest for Canadian tech startups. Tell us about your technology startup company in a YouTube video no longer than sixty seconds for a shot at $1,000. Here’s what you need to know to enter: The entry period for The $1,000 Minute has come to a close. Thank you for your interest in the contest, and especially all those who entered. We saw more than 30 videos submitted from tech startups across Canada. Everything from interactive motion projection systems to Facebook apps, to Web site services.
We invite you to view the elevator pitches at the link below. Let us know which one is your favourite. An example of an elevator pitch video. Please complete this registration form:Complete and official contest rules 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Duqu computer virus “sexy” and mysterious. As experts learn more about the Duqu computer virus it becomes increasingly clear that the latest high-profile cyber bug poses no direct threat to most people. But with it’s complex design and mysterious origins, Duqu is still captivating many. The virus was first discovered by researchers two weeks ago, but appears so sophisticated that it could only have been created by a well-funded team of expert hackers, says Vancouver-based computer security expert Chet Wisniewski. That knowledge in turn fuels speculation about exactly who might have bankrolled this project.
An evil billionaire with political aspirations? “It’s very sexy and 007-like,” says Wisniewski, a senior security advisor at Sophos Canada. On Thursday, security research from the computer security firm Symantec revealed that hackers had been using a Belgian server to mine data from computers infected with the Duqu virus, and said a similar operation had already been shut down in India. Almost never, according to the numbers.