Microsoft's Project Pink Phones Show Up On FCC [ProjectPink]

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/k7A58Kk2lW8/microsofts-project-pink-phones-show-up-on-fcc

With MWC right around the corner, all eyes are on Microsoft for the launch of Windows Phone 7. And though we heard Project Pink was in trouble, this FCC filing suggests the Sharp-made Turtle may still be on its way.

The diagram for the model PB10ZU shows a short, stout device that bears an unmistakable resemblance to the Project Pink Turtle images we saw last Fall. The filing reveals that the PB10ZU packs dual-band CDMA, EVDO, Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity. Sharp being the manufacturer for the Turtle is in line with what we have heard from the beginning and makes sense, as they made the original Sidekick for Danger, who was acquired by Microsoft in 2008.

A second device with the model number PB20ZU is mentioned, though considerably less detail is offered. One could surmise that this might well be the Pure, the second, more traditionally-shaped slider that we saw in our original leak.

As Engadget points out, the FCC filing's details are being withheld until March 29, just after the CTIA conference in Vegas. That conference has been rumored as a potential venue for the debut of the Zune phone. Exactly what place the Turtle will have in the Windows Phone 7 line-up remains unclear, though it has been suggested that it is not the star of the collection but rather an "evolution of the Sidekick."

Presumably some of this will come into focus in the coming days at MWC, but until then you can bet the speculation will be at an all time high. [FCC via Engadget]

Sent from my iPhone

“Digitale omzet kan rendement van 50 à 60% opleveren”

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/frankwatching/~3/X6AHCoUmV0o/

Van-ThilloIn een boeiend video-interview gaf bestuurder Christian van Thillo een kijkje in de keuken van De Persgroep. Hij sprak over de lancering van het tabloid formaat van de Volkskrant (”dat komt in het voorjaar”), de veranderingen in de lay-out van die krant (”voor het einde van het  jaar klaar”) en de digitale strategie van De Persgroep (”denk niet in omzetaandelen, maar in rendement”). Lees meer

Sent from my iPhone

Microsoft to Introduce Windows Phone 7 Monday at MWC [Microsoft]

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/cn1tFOG3ZLg/microsoft-to-introduce-windows-phone-7-monday-at-mwc

The WSJ has confirmed that Mic will introduce their newest mobile phone OS on Monday at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona. WinMo 6.5 is dead; long live Windows Phone 7.

The announcement will almost certainly come during Steve Ballmer's Windows Phone press conference, scheduled for 3pm local time. According to the WSJ, Windows Phone 7 will have an entirely new user interface that closely resembles that of Zune. This backs up what we'd heard from a tipster last month.

Apparently, Windows Phone 7 will look to fix the mistakes of WinMos past by working more closely with OEMs:

With Windows Mobile 7, similarly, Microsoft has gotten more involved in hardware design by creating detailed plans for a small number of handset "chassis" on top of which hardware manufactures can build their devices, people familiar with the effort said. The idea behind the plan, these people said, is to limit the wild variation in quality of Windows phones and to make it easier for independent application developers to write software that runs well on them.

One of those devices to run off of Windows Phone 7 is expected to be Microsoft's Project Pink/Zune phone, although that handset's considered unlikely to be part of next week's announcement.

It's still going to be some time before we see any Windows Phone 7 devices on the market, but it's good to see Microsoft getting in gear to replace the inexcusable WinMo 6.5. [WSJ]

Sent from my iPhone

TED: Future of Mobile With Henry Tirri, Head of Nokia Research [INTERVIEW]

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/VJfLr3uN7XI/

Disclosure: Nokia is a sponsor of Mashable’s TED Channel

We had a chance to sit down at TED with Henry Tirri, Senior Vice President and Head of the Nokia Research Center, to talk about what the mobile landscape of the future holds. Read on to find out what we might expect from mobile technologies within the next five to ten years.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about what you do at Nokia?

A: I’m heading Nokia’s long-term research globally in our labs worldwide, from Santa Monica and Palo Alto to the easternmost lab in Beijing, and everything in between: Cambridge, UK, Los Angeles, Switzerland, and teams in Nairobi and Bangalore and so on.

Q: What emerging technologies do you see playing the biggest role in the next five to ten years: augmented reality, voice recognition, etc.?

A: Those two things are more user experience technologies, but you’re correct. We also talk about “mixed reality” — the terminology can be confusing, but there is a distinction between augmented reality, where I’m looking at reality and add information to that from the digital world, and mixed reality which means you can do vice versa also, and put things into the virtual world from the real world. To me it’s obvious that it’s such a natural way of looking at the world and interacting with it.

The key question is how simple and how immersive it becomes. My prediction is it starts with rather isolated services like search and navigation but by the end of the day it becomes part of the interaction. You don’t any more find it extraordinary that you can see the real picture and you get some digital information too or vice versa. And it might be visual digital information, or in audio, or even sometimes in sensing. If you’re talking about a five or ten year spectrum, we’re probably going to have some kind of haptic and sensing way of navigating and getting feedback.

All of this is a very Western view: The high end, cool things for those living in the “geek world.” But if you ask me then about growth economies and the emerging markets like Africa, India, greater China, Latin America and some parts of Russia, I would say that the experience and emerging technologies tend to have a different nature because of the constraints you have. You might not have the infrastructure to support data, for example.

So from an interface perspective, speech and gestures are very important there. But emerging technologies are not necessarily always related to the user experience, so things like energy-efficient networking are also a necessity in growth economies. Protocols like SMS are being used in these areas for things we wouldn’t dream of doing with it here because we have access to broadband. There are the “hundreds of millions” who are doing all these very sophisticated and cutting edge things, and at the same time there is emerging technology for the “billions” which can take a different track.

Q: Do you think there will be an upcoming involvement with biology? Are we going to bring these devices into our bodies? Will I have a phone in my wrist?

A: Yeah, chip embedding is already an old idea in computer science so we’re ready for that. I think there’s a natural continuum from biosensors — we already have heartbeat sensors connected to a wireless device and measuring you for sports and wellness purposes. So again, if you talk about the five to ten years era, the questions there are more related to the sensors. In some areas, the sensor development is slower than one would think. Mechanical sensors are faster, but chemical sensors are much slower, so even in the five to ten year domain, certain things are not so easy to do.

When you talk about implantable electronics, you start having … challenges with your biological rejection mechanisms and other problems for medicine to solve. I would say in five years it doesn’t become big, but in ten years I would be surprised if we’re not seeing a lot more of it. Five years is surprisingly fast, because when you think about large scale deployment of something, there’s a delay factor involved in getting the manufacturing process to be reliable and cheap enough.

I do believe health and wellness-related things will become part of our life, and may probably also merge with augmented reality too. Your body state will be communicated to somewhere, or you can start getting metadata and remote analysis on yourself.

Q: How important do you see cloud computing being for mobile, now that we have an increasing range of devices we cart around with us and are looking for a more seamless experience between them?

A: To me, the cloud has become, and will become, a much broader notion than a server farm sitting somewhere and doing something. So the cloud architecture will expand to more devices and the question is more of the seamlessness in actual usage. You may not even know occasionally what is computed close to you physically and what is computed far away.

There are two issues: One is energy. Sending information bits takes more energy than computing them, which means local computing consumes less energy. This is absolutely so fundamental that it will define the future of how our networks will be built. It implies that the cloud has to have a distributed architecture, because it will be too costly energy-wise for billions of people to be transmitting data. I’m not talking about the bandwidth problem — this is much more fundamental. Regardless of how much bandwidth you have in the dynamic user spectrum, you will still face this problem.

The second problem is sociological, which is privacy. People are much more positive about something physically close to them and physically in their possession because they feel like they have more control over it. You believe that if your personal metadata sits in the device, it’s better than to let it go away to some nameless server. So there will still be parts of metadata and bits of information sitting close to you for these sociological reasons.

But the cloud itself will expand, and I think the term will eventually disappear. It will just be our default network architecture.

Q: Do you think people’s notions of privacy might change over time too? I’m thinking of Facebook pushing on people’s privacy, Google taking Gmail more public with Buzz…

A: Yes, and my views on this have evolved a lot over the past 20 years. One dimension is that privacy is culturally dependent, so privacy in growth economies looks a bit different from privacy in the Western world. And even in the Western world, there are different approaches to privacy in Europe and the U.S. In Europe for example it’s very much regulatory — Germans don’t like Google Street View so they banned it. In the EU there’s a lot of regulatory resistance. In the U.S. it’s more like a community movement, “we’re going to make it public that you’re evil.” So it’s a different approach. Asia is somewhere in between.

There are also very contradictory arguments that have been presented to me on whether there’s a generation gap or not. Some say young people put more things up on Facebook or publish things people in my generation would never publish. I’m not totally sure if the generation gap is the right thing to ask. I think it’s more of a question of how much the technology is a part of your life, and it doesn’t as much matter what your age is, although there might be a correlation between the two.

I think it’s complex to predict how people will react, and if there will be negative consequences. Privacy is always considered with respect to the tradeoff you get in terms of utility. If one or two people didn’t get a job or get fired because of something embarrassing they posted on Facebook, but there were 100,000 people that were recruited because of their Facebook presence, how does the judgment come down regarding privacy? Privacy is always relative to the benefits you get, so if people see enough value in sharing and feel safe enough, privacy isn’t the same question anymore. There’s no simple answer — privacy is an evolving factor.

Q: What do you think of the renaissance of the tablet form factor, and will we see another range of devices occupying this middle ground between smartphone and laptop?

A: I’m a computer scientist and have been hacking with computers for 40 years, so I’ve seen the development from mainframes to mini-computers to PCs to laptops to PDAs. The sarcastic comment is that all of them are “fads” to some degree, they come and go and the form factor changes. But each can be a decade or two decades or more in popularity. On the other hand, the only thing that has really disappeared is mini-computers. Mainframes still exist, PCs still exist, and so on.

I don’t think the tablet will “kill” anything — I don’t think it’s strong enough. I would almost think that tablets and netbooks might see convergence. I don’t think the tablet will become so dominant that you will drop your laptop or netbook and use it as your only device.

Q: How will the advent of 4G change the computing landscape? Will we see new types of applications become possible?

A: This is the capacity question, and right now data-intensive applications cause bandwidth challenges. The interesting thing is we have tolerance thresholds for new features, where we want to keep doing things as long as it’s fast enough, but if the performance is below that threshold, we’ll just tinker with it for a bit and, and I think real-time online media streaming will become more prevalent.

Right now the latency time is not good enough. You can’t have 20 million people streaming their personal video streams around the world in real-time right now — that is not possible yet, but will become so. There will definitely be new applications emerging — it won’t just be the old ones getting faster.

Q: In terms of online media streaming, do you think that’s going to change things on the content provider end of things? There’s a user behavior issue to confront too, and I think about how hard things like mobile TV have struggled to take off. How many people really need to watch TV while they’re walking to their car?

A: That’s again extremely culturally-dependent too, looking at places like Korea that have had mobile TV for years. But for me, the real-time media streaming is more about the popularity of sharing your own personal experiences, like your kids playing soccer or when you’re out with your buddies at the bar. That’s a different thing from traditional content; for one thing it’s snippets so it tends to be shorter, but it’s also participatory and it’s human nature to want to exhibit yourself. It becomes a form of expressing yourself, and that will always be popular. And there’s always a long tail of people who are interested in you expressing yourself.

I think the most difficult thing is scale, so something like Twitter is interesting when you have few followers, and it’s great when you have 2 million followers, but if you have something like 10,000 followers it’s more like, “what do I do?” They are not my buddies anymore — I don’t know 10,000 people, and on the other hand I’m not famous like someone who has a million followers. I believe in this idea of federated local community: It’s good when you have this small audience, and federated means you have a common platform and you can actually reach things globally. There’s a certain community that is local enough in a network sense — not necessarily a geographic sense — to want to follow you.

Q: That makes a lot of sense, especially considering the landscape of user-generated content on the web — that’s a lot of what people want to share.

A: Yeah, they just want to share and if there’s an easy way of doing it and there’s a general platform, they will do it. Because there’s always some people who want to follow it.

Q: How far along are we in terms of bringing mobile and artificial intelligence together?

A: People talk a lot about intelligent agents, but I think in a computer form factor it doesn’t make that much sense. Think of the annoying Microsoft Office clip guy that no one wanted. The devices we’re talking about are much more personal, so if you can get help when doing real things and interacting in the world, it becomes more persuasive and appealing to have an intelligent agent or avatar type of thing.

The greatest intelligent agent’s behavior can be specified by a good secretary, who can predict a lot of the things I do, can handle a lot of tasks and information flow, and only checks on the things which are important for me. People want to do this and there’s a lot of development around it, but it faces the same problems that any AI activity does: Any time we introduce an automized way of doing something, our own cognition changes to a different abstract level to assume that.

When there’s a more intelligent layer in a device or in software, we start using that in a different way. This is very fundamental and has nothing to do with mobile devices specifically. But I truly believe there’s a good place for AI — we have elementary things in navigation assistants already that can provide intelligent traffic information. There’s actually a lot of hidden intelligence already and machine learning is already used a lot.

Radio technology will be using AI techniques too, in a deep and unseen way. Dynamical allocation of the spectrum based on availability has deep machine learning components — it has to learn to predict when certain spectrum is available and so on. So there is a lot going on, but it isn’t necessarily always as sexy as the intelligent assistant everybody is looking for.

Q: As location-based services become more and more popular, do you see any killer apps emerging?

A: The first things that come to mind are local search, really relevant search results based on your positioning. Social search is another no-brainer, because you want to start finding people based on physical proximity because it doesn’t make any sense to go to the bar with someone far away. These are no-brainers and they will be very big.

The things people don’t usually think about with location-based systems are aggregate things like traffic information, and collective information about air pollution and other environmental data. In growth economies there’s a need for health-related and epidemic information collection. Mobile devices are key to monitoring things like this because they are globally prevalent and always where we are. They will enable us to aggregate data and get information that would otherwise be very difficult to get — I call these aggregate services.

The pollution example is a very good one. You can start to get real-time information about the environment — your exposure to pollution in LA for example. We did this in traffic already, so think about generalizing it to weather, pollution, and others. The platform allows people’s position combined with something measured, and that gives us a new world.


Reviews: Facebook, Gmail, Google, Twitter

Tags: aggregate services, artificial intelligence, Augmented Reality, cloud computing, computing, future, Henry Tirri, interview, location, mixed reality, Mobile 2.0, Nokia, privacy, social media, tablets, TED, ted 2010, ugc

Sent from my iPhone

President Obama Wants YOU… to Twitter for Him

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/jFDPyG3l6dQ/

Think you’re such a social media expert that you could tweet for a living? Well, President Obama is looking for an official social networks manager, and you might be just the tech whiz for the job.

According to President Obama’s website, The Democratic National Committee and Organizing for America is in the market for a new hire. According to the Wall Street Journal, Mia Cambronero, who currently holds the position, said, “[I] will be stepping down from my infamous role as ‘Barack Obama’s twitterer… We’re looking for someone who is available to start immediately.”

And what exactly are they looking for over at the White House? According to the job posting:

“The Social Networks Manager is responsible for maintaining the Democratic Party and Organizing for America accounts on all social networks (such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace accounts, etc.) The Social Networks Manager works closely with the rest of the New Media department to execute grassroots campaigns to advance the President’s agenda for change.”

Said person must also be willing to work hard — “this isn’t a 9-5 job,” the posting said — and be “passionate about engaging millions of Americans in advancing President Obama’s agenda and changing the country.” Yeah, that’s not daunting at all.

Social media has been integral to President Obama’s career since the beginning. He launched his Twitter account back in 2007 (although he only really tweeted for the first time last month to support Haiti relief efforts after admitting back in November that he was too clumsy to use the microblogging tool), and recently used YouTube to engage with the nation after the State of the Union address.

Although both the Obama and White House Twitter feeds used to read like a stream of press releases, the tweets have become much more lively in the ensuing months. Whoever fills this new position will have to continue to up the ante when it comes to engaging with the American people. Will you apply?


Reviews: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube

Tags: facebook, myspace, Political, politics, president obama, twitter, White House

Sent from my iPhone

We Are the World 25 For Haiti Debuts on YouTube [VIDEO]

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/_87uA_Nlq-4/

Following up on the success of the star studded TV and Internet streamed “Hope for Haiti Now” event last month, a new version of “We Are the World” has premiered on YouTube, featuring more than 75 artists.

The video was directed by Paul Haggis, produced by Quincy Jones, and features a diverse array of artists including Mary J. Blige, Tony Bennett, YouTube phenom Justin Bieber, and a flashback to Michael and Janet Jackson performing the song 25 years ago in a similar fundraiser for Africa.

The charitable connection here is a digital download – all proceeds from sales of the song on iTunes go to Haiti relief. The We Are the World Foundation website also offers other ways to donate, as well as more information about the song.

On choosing to use YouTube for distribution, the legendary Jones says in a Q&A that “… with the stroke of a key on your keyboard or cell phone, images and messages can be transferred all around the world to hundreds of millions of people in seconds. That’s an enormous amount of power. How can you not try and harness that resource to help people in need?”

We imagine the results here will indeed be huge. In addition to the YouTube premiere, the song played during the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics earlier this evening.


Reviews: YouTube

Tags: haiti, video, youtube

Sent from my iPhone

Wired Magazine Launching iPad Edition By This Summer [Ipad]

http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/Lpx0_TIPshQ/wired-magazine-launching-ipad-edition-by-this-summer

We knew it would come and we've seen demos, but at this year's TED conference Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson confirmed that the publication would hit the iPad this summer. Unfortunately there aren't details regarding digital subscription costs yet.[Wired]

Sent from my iPhone

Le Figaro Goes Freemium: Should NYT Take Notice?

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheNextWeb/~3/DHdD1n5d_jE/

Le Figaro Goes Freemium: Should NYT Take Notice?France’s Le Figaro newspaper has announced a freemium pricing model for their online service.

The service, which is slated to go live on Monday, will implement a three-tiered pricing system. However, as the paper’s spokesman Antoine Daccord said in a statement today, “News will be free forever.”

If Newsday’s poor paywall subscription rates or McClatchy’s plans to stay paywall-free hadn’t caught the attention of the New York Times, hopefully Le Figaro’s announcement will.

The planned tiers include a free subscription, which allows users to read stories, post comments, receive emailed newsletters of top stories and create a personalized home page. The payment scheme also include two paid levels, which include access to the newspaper’s archives at set numbers of stories per month, digital copies of the paper, and premium content such as New York Times articles translated into French. Interestingly, paid subscribers also have access to a news self-publication feature similar to CNN’s iReport.

While it remains to be seen how many of Le Figaro’s 7 million unique visitors will pony up for the scheme, this particular payment model has clear advantages over the Times’ proposed model. Most importantly, the online site and its core functionality remains free to all. In addition, the value-added content that Le Figaro hopes to make its money from provides a clear upgrade to the base experience. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that this functionality will be enough to make the site worth paying for to some users.

The New York Times’ plans have met with some seriously unfavorable responses from the online community, and should be reconsidered. While a free site may not be feasible for their particular needs, a freemium site could allay readers’ concerns, while still retaining bits and pieces of a money-making paywall. This could be the solution everyone is looking for.

Sent from my iPhone

Micro-payments met Flattr

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MarketingFacts/~3/1Pl2lnLvr1g/

Peter Sunde, een van de oprichters van de bittorrent site The PirateBay heeft een nieuw project opgezet: Flattr (hier op BoingBoing). Het doel van dit project is : “to revolutionize how people pay and get paid for content on the internet.” De naam Flattr is een samenvoeging van twee woorden: “flatter” and “flat rate”. Met Flattr is het mogelijk om de makers van content te belonen met een klein bedrag. Aan het begin van de maand leg ik als gebruiker / bewonderaar van andermans content een bepaald bedrag (minimaal 2 euro) neer. Iedere maker van content heeft de mogelijkheid om een Flattr button op zijn website te zetten. Ik kan vervolgens als een teken van dank (=beloning) op de button klikken. Dit kan voor ieder stuk content dat ik interessant genoeg acht herhalen. Aan het eind van de maand wordt de balans opgemaakt en wordt mijn ingelegde bedrag overgemaakt aan de makers van de content. Klik ik slechts 2 keer dan wordt het bedrag door 2 gedeeld, klik ik 100 keer, dan wordt het bedrag door 100 verdeeld. “Many large streams will form a river”. Lees meer over: Micro-payments met Flattr.

Sent from my iPhone

Google Maps Get Labs With Nine Cool New Features

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Mashable/~3/DlzSxMbWbFY/

Here’s a nice surprise from Google’s Maps team: just like Gmail, Google Maps now also have the Labs feature (it’s the little green vial in the top right menu), which brings experimental new features for you to try out.

Right now, you can try out nine new features (all disabled by default):

Drag ‘n’ Zoom – lets you zoom in on a specific part of the map by drawing a box.

Aerial Imagery – gives you rotatable, high-resolution overhead imagery, but it’s only available in certain areas. Google plans to add more over time, though.

Back to Beta – OK, this one is a little weird. It lets you have a beta tag on Maps (just like Gmail). Only for hardcore Google users.

Where in the World Game – test your geography knowledge by guessing the names of countries from satellite imagery. I lost days playing a similar game on Facebook, and I forgot everything I’ve learned. Sigh.

Rotatable Maps – North facing up is just one way to look at a map. Now you can rotate it any way you like.

What’s Around Here? – Adds a second search button that searches for “*”, returning the top results in the current view. I’ve actually been waiting for this for a long time; it makes searching for certain POIs within some area a lot easier.

LatLng Tooltip – See the exact latitude and longitude next to your cursor.

LatLng Marker – Drop a marker anywhere on the map, showing the latitude and longitude of that location.

Smart Zoom – stops you from zooming into an area if imagery is not available.

Tags: Google Maps, labs, trending

Sent from my iPhone