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WiMax promises faster speeds for a variety of mobile devices. With those faster speeds comes a number of impacts for the end user.
Engadget did a test this week in San Francisco to show just how fast we are talking about.
This series on wireless standards is brought to you by Intel.
Fast, huh?
You've invested good money in your web design, but do you know what your customers actually remember about your site? Clue, a new tool from Bay Area interaction design and design strategy firm ZURB, lets you create a 5-second interactive memory test that you can use to test what people remember about your product. The tool is available for free and you don't even have to log in to use it.
In a 5-second test, you get to see a website for 5 seconds and then you have to enter up to five things you remember about the screenshot you just saw. These tests are pretty common in usability studies and ZURB isn't the first company to offer a web-based version of this. FiveSecondTest.com, for example, offers more features than Clue, but it's also a paid service and you have to upload your own screenshots while Clue takes care of this for you.
With Clue, ZURB focused on making the creating of these test as easy to use as possible. To get started, you just have to enter the URL of the site you want to test. Clue will take a screenshot of the site and return a link that you can then give to your test subjects. As ZURB's lead marketer Dmitry Dragilev told us, the tool is mainly aimed at small businesses and mom and pop stores, as well as designers who want to quickly test an idea. Given that you can't password-protect your test results, though, you probably don't want to use it for confidential tests.
Writer and illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi is the author of several young adult fantasy novels, including the popular series The Spiderwick Chronicles. Earlier this week, his latest book, The Search for WondLa hit bookshelves in U.S., and within it featured an interactive augmented reality experience readers could unlock using their Web browsers. The book, published by Simon & Schuster, is one of the first of its kind and could be a glimpse into how kids will enjoy reading in the future.
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The novel features special emblems on three of its pages which can be used to unlock the augmented reality experience. By holding the emblems infront of their webcam, readers will see a somewhat-interactive 3D map that helps them picture the world of the novel. Animations and sounds play automatically as the experience guides the user around the map.
"The publishing industry is moving rapidly into the digital age," says DiTerlizzi. "I see the integrated use of AR as an ideal bridge, enhancing what readers love best about story and narrative while tapping innovation and imagination, to bring forth entirely new experiences associated with the book."
The days when TV viewers did nothing else while watching their favorite shows are long over. Instead, many viewers now multitask while watching TV and browse the Internet on their laptops, iPads and smartphones. Now, a new iPad app from ABC (iTunes link) wants to bridge this gap and turns the iPad into an interactive companion to the TV network's new "My Generation" series (a fake documentary) that will make its debut next week. The app uses the iPad's microphone to listen for audio cues from the TV and then displays relevant interactive content as every episode progresses.
While this is currently just an experiment focused on one show, it's not hard to image that TV networks could turn to similar apps for all of their programming.
The free My Generation Sync app will give users the ability to interact with the show by taking quizzes, for example. Viewers will also be able to access behind the scenes footage and bios of the show's characters. In addition, the app will also allow them to connect with other fans in real-time.
The app was developed on top of Nielsen's Media-Sync technology and uses the iPad's microphone to sync up with the show by listening for audio cues embedded in the show. Thanks to this, the app will also work when you are watching a time-delayed version of the show on your DVR, for example. The app will also display a limit set of information when it isn't synced with the show. For the full experience, though, users will need to use the app in parallel with the show.
Overall, this looks like a very interesting experiment. Even though it is currently limited to just one show, it will be interesting to see if other networks will launch similar apps. These apps will allow TV networks to draw viewers deeper into the show, while also getting them to focus more on ads (the networks have to make money after all). At the same time, this will also give the networks new analytics and a better idea of who their viewers are.
Can you see yourself using apps like this? Do you want your iPad to stay in sync with the show you watch, or will you continue browsing the Web while watching the show instead of waiting for interactive content to show up on your iPad?
At today’'s roundtable, I started with a presentation on blue sky opportunities in cloud computing based on our Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing (TLCC) research. I took the audience through five cloud-based business ideas, discussed why they are relevant and pointed them to the sources I derived those ideas from.
For you, readers, here they are:
1. Cloud-based collaboration among bio-medical researchers around large volumes of data
Dr. Marcos Athanasoulis, CTO of Harvard Medical School discussed this idea with me recently. There is a tremendous amount of data sitting at various pockets that bio-medical researchers are trying to collaborate around. The data needs modeling, processing, visualization, etc. – all activities in the domain of computer science, not bio-medical sciences. There is also need for researchers at various institutes to collaborate around this data and models, all problems that point towards a cloud-based solution. An entrepreneur should pick this one up ASAP. From cancer research to genomics, wide arrays of research areas are looking forward to your innovation.
2. Cloud-based legal records management, digitization, archival, retrieval
Michael Aginsky, CTO of Gibbons P.C. pointed me to the vast masses of paper archives sitting at law firms, waiting to be digitized, and archived in meaningful ways along with efficient retrieval capabilities. Law firms are looking for cloud solutions that include security, disaster recovery, and other goodies.
3. Charge-back accounting solution for large enterprises deploying cloud technologies
Ric Telford, VP of cloud services, IBM pointed me to the rather significant move towards rolling out private clouds at large enterprises, a move that IBM is spearheading by providing full stacks of infrastructure technologies. Now, let us say you are an enterprise that has rolled out a rather extensive private cloud, and all your divisions and business units are using it freely. How do you keep track of who is using how much of the resources? How do you account for the charge backs to the business units or functional areas? This is an open opportunity for an entrepreneur to build a custom solution.
4. Cloud-based flexible pricing solution for telecom vendors
Jim Dunlap, CIO of Alaska Telecom discussed with me the increasingly serious problem that telecom vendors are facing due to bandwidth consumption skyrocketing. Today, the telecom industry charges customers based on fixed price business models for data services.
But to keep up with the rate at which bandwidth consumption is scaling, telecom vendors almost certainly will need to adopt a variable pricing model, such that they can charge based on consumption, just as they charge for voice services. The utility industry charges based on how much energy or water is consumed, but the telecom industry assumes unlimited data usage for a fixed fee. Jim’'s interview with me (coming shortly) sheds light on why this will change, and how the infrastructure needs to adapt.
5. Cloud integration services around specific vendors
The enterprise community has been talking about the "social layer," for almost a year. It's the SaaS services such as Salesforce.com, Socialtext and Socialcast that have popularized the concept. Now the practice is entering a new phase.
The enterprise activity stream from SaaS services is flowing into consumer services such as Seesmic and Facebook. And now Google is looking at the social layer as the focal component of a service reportedly called Google Me that will surface activity across all Google products, including Google Apps.
The activity streams that surface information in the enterprise create a social layer that is valuable for the purposes of doing business. The activity stream in this context is a social aggregator. It works. In fact it woks far better than engaging in a pure social context.
The enterprise has always been averse to the concept of using social technologies. It stems from a concern that people should be working not using Twitter or other services to chat about the day. But the social aggregator is a different beast. Activity streams that surface information can help people do their work better, be smarter and more engaged.
The inverse is true for consumer grade social platforms. In the consumer world, the concept of the social aggregator has its passionate advocates but mainstream acceptance has been elusive. On the flip side, services such as Twitter do quite well as they provide what Fred Wilson calls "social intent." Twitter offers people a way to engage in a social context.
We ran across an interview excerpt with AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson that will run in the Sunday print edition of the Dallas Morning News.
There are two interesting takeaways from the interview:
First, AT&T is taking a deep interest in the cloud. Stephenson talks about the networking deals it is winning by providing infrastructure to major cloud computing services.
And second, Stephenson spent the interview showing off the Android-powered Samsung Captivate he's currently using.
Here's what Stephenson had to say about cloud computng:
"A classic case would be Royal Dutch Shell, a big multinational company, and they have hundreds of thousands of people around the globe, and a lot of these big companies manage their own networking capabilities. They came to us and said, 'This stuff is changing fast, it's moving fast. Would you just take this and all of our people and just manage it for us?' We won that bid. We did the same thing with IBM. IBM's global network capability, we took thousands of their people onto our payroll, took over managing all of their networks, and bam, we do it much, much more efficiently.
