The Tech Update

Anyone interested in the evolution of smartphone apps should get a kick of considering the future of voice recognition apps. Siri, Apple’s voice recognition personal assistant app for iPhone and iPad, is certainly in a league of its own. But that league has more than one team. The Android app, Iris (yes, they actually had the audacity to just spell Siri in reverse), released in October of 2011, approaches the industry with a similar service. Android appears eager to reclaim its mantle of voice recognition king, though Iris is lacking in many respects. It performs similar tasks as Siri and is activated in much the same way. The user taps on the mic and issues and command and then Iris follows orders.

Made by the Dextera team in less than eight hours, Iris is more limited than Siri. It’s mathematical skills are sparse and most of its references come from Wikipedia. Additionally, the app requires Google’s voice recognition software, which is prone to error. But Iris stands to inherit considerable improvements in the future, when it moves out of its current alpha phase. More than anything, the hackers who made Iris showed how quickly something approximating Siri could be put together.

But Iris isn’t the only app that looks to challenge Apple’s Siri. Vlingo, which can be downloaded for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry, provides a Siri-like service, with features like being able to create alarms and reminders, compose texts and update Facebook. Another Android challenger, Speaktoit, is still in beta but assists with information retrieval, app launching, weather reports, currency and measurement conversion, and social media services. Dragon Go! is perhaps the leader of the pack in terms of voice recognition but is not nearly as compatible with or integrated into your device, instead operating as web reference. Finally the Android app Edwin, offers a variety of fresh web options, connected as it is to Wolfram Alpha.

The future of voice recognition assistant smartphone apps could see some major new players. Kinect’s voice recognition system is good enough that it’s not hard to imagine the sensor itself evolving into a Siri-like service. The Amazon voice search tool Yap, which will be compatible with Kindle Fire and could be a major part of the Amazon online store in the coming years. Another possible contender is called Teneo, which was created by ‘natural language interaction’ consultant Artificial Solutions. One thing is for certain, the next few years should be very active in the voice recognition app field.

The tech world jumped for joy last week when both the Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act fizzled out on the floors of Congress. Undoubtedly, the stoppage of these bills from becoming law was due to the overwhelming amount of public outcry against such legislation. But regardless of your particular position regarding such measures, it’s worth knowing that while the issue may fade away from mainstream tech and media attention, anti-piracy legislation isn’t leaving the hill anytime soon.

Almost immediately after the defeat of SOPA and PIPA, a similar bill was introduced onto the floor of Congress. For media conglomerates and the government alike, there are huge incentives for getting such laws passed. It makes it much to shut down sites where copyrighted content is shared, and prosecute the owners of these sites for copyright infringement. The money and power behind these incentives is of an enormous quantity. While many powerful individuals, including the President, have spoken out against such laws, countless more either secretly or openly support their existence.

Needless to say, it’s foolish to expect the defeat of two bills in Congress to signal victory for anyone who did not support beefed up measures to enforce copyright laws in the United States. Bills are written, submitted, sometimes debated, voted on, and occasionally passed on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. Nothing stops any member of Congress from writing virtually any bill they want, and it only requires minimal changes to allow for old ideas to be once again brought onto the floor for debate.

Those against SOPA and PIPA seemingly did all they could by contacting their elected members of Congress and raising a stink across the World Wide Web. Those in favor of anti-online piracy legislation are doing all they can by not stopping in their efforts to see the thing through. They have the money, power, and influence that it takes to have bills repeatedly pushed through Congress. Any amount of tech lobbying that speaks out against the dangers of such bills turning into law is minimal compared to the amount of lobbying those in favor of anti-piracy legislation practice in the nation’s capital.

In order to continue to prevent the success of anti-piracy legislation, those against it will have to do more than flood their elected officials’ email inboxes. Ultimately it will come down to money. Techhies who despise the thought of a far more tightly regulated information superhighway will have to suck it up and send money to the organizations that make it their mission to convince Congress that such laws will prove disastrous for the country.

In short, it takes more than a week to win a war over the rights of the World Wide Web.

Zynga, the San-Francisco social network game developer popular for Farmville and Cityville, is looking to spread its reach into the world of real-money online gambling, according to the latest reports. Zynga—which already owns the world’s largest online poker game, played by over 7 million people a month—says the move to real online gambling is in the works as they talk with multiple partners. The major hurdles to this foray are, of course, overcoming state and federal regulations, as well as the considerable licensing fees and costs of installing more robust security features. This will likely require Zynga to partner with a major online gambling agency, something the company seems prepared to do.

This is not necessarily a brand new direction for the revolutionary gaming giant, nor is it particularly surprising. Facebook, whose online gaming platform is heavily dominated by Zynga, has been seeing escalating profits from casino games and applications. It stands to reason that two of the most addictive trends in society, gambling and social media would be combined to create a profit goliath. For years now, people have been gambling for virtual currency; the move to real currency could be a cash cow, though it’s unlikely Facebook, still reeling from blows to its brand over privacy breakdowns, will support such a controversial feature.

But that’s not to say other media giants won’t be investing considerable money and effort into making real-money online gambling continue to grow. Two major power moves in the last half year have pointed to this as not just a possibility but a probability. Firstly, International Game Technology, a major video poker developer, absorbed Double Down Interactive for the price tag of $500 million. Clearly, their spending that much money indicates they see a considerable payoff. So too apparently does Caesars Entertainment, who for $90 million acquired Playtika, known for the game Slotomania.

These moves toward more online gambling games are taking considerable financial resources but Zynga, worth over one billion after its initial public offering, has the money in the bank to fund such an endeavor. Clearly, with the popularity of its Facebook games and poker and casino games in general, as well as the incredible promise of combining gambling and social media, Zynga thinks it will be well worth the financial, legislative, and corporate wrangling. In the meantime, fans can keep harvesting their Farmville gardens, waiting to spend some of the virtual currency on big winnings at roulette and blackjack.

According to figures released by Nielsen, Google and Facebook were the two most-visited web brands in 2011. Google led the way with 153.4 million unique visitors per month, followed by Facebook with 137.6 million and Yahoo! in a close third at 130.1 million. YouTube and Microsoft’s Bing were the fourth and fifth most-visited sites.

The dominance of Google and Facebook comes as little surprise in a year where the two companies grabbed plenty of headlines. Facebook, for its part, showed plenty signs of healthy growth. The social media site gained its 800 millionth member, it acquired several smaller sites, and it went on a high-profile talent acquisition search. It is expected that the company will hire several thousand new employees in the next year, an incredible testament to its growth in an otherwise stagnant economy. Facebook has also made news with its plans to go public in the next year – and initial public offering that many experts predict will be the largest ever. To prepare for the I.P.O., the company has worked to shore-up its advertising strategy, comply with F.T.C. privacy requests, and ensure that Facebook users face a high switching cost if they decide to start using a different social media platform. The new Timeline feature goes a long ways towards that end.

Google has also displayed strong signs of vibrancy and growth. The most obvious of these is its stock price (GOOG): since January, stock in Google have risen almost 9% to $645 per share. This outperforms both the Dow Jones Index and the NASDAQ, not to mention competitors such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, and AOL. Google has shown growth in other ways as well. It has invested considerably in the smartphone industry, introduced Google+, and brought its Street View program to a variety of new countries and locations. It has also continued to invest in Google X, a secret experimental laboratory whose existence nonetheless makes it no secret that the company is flush with cash.

Google and Facebook also dominate their respective markets. Google is by far the Internet’s most-used search engine, while Facebook is well ahead of Blogger and Twitter (45.7 million and 23.6 million visitors, respectively) in the social networking arena. Will these two giants continue to dominate in 2012? All indicators say yes, but only time will truly tell.

As anyone could have expected, the recently-completed holiday season marked the absolute arrival of tablet sales in the mainstream. The iPad 2 was a top seller, the Kindle Fire shrugged off mixed reviews to achieve stellar sales, and millions of new tablets entered American homes. Now, as we look to 2012, Amazon and Apple should be confident with their current standing in the tablet world. But what does the upcoming year have in store? What new tablet products can we expect to see?

Thus far, most tablet rumors have centered around the expected release of an iPad 3. These rumors predict that the arrival of such a product is imminent and that its biggest upgrades from the iPad 2 will be in the areas of battery life and screen resolution. A couple rumors even speculated that Apple would simultaneously launch two different lines of the iPad 3.

So where is the truth in these rumors? What can we actually expect? For one, the speculation regarding two iPad 3s appears to be just that – baseless conjecture. Experts and Apple insiders discredited that rumor in the past week, noting that there would be two models only in the sense that the company would continue to differentiate between Wi-Fi only and 3G versions. These same people struck down rumors regarding the timing of Apple’s release. Contrary to reports, the upcoming iPad 3 will not be released at the MacWorld Expo in late January. Instead, sources predict that its arrival will come closer towards the end of the first quarter.

Rumors about the product’s design and features appear to carry more truth. It appears as though a QXGA screen with a 2048 x 1536 display will come featured on the next iPad. This would increase the product’s display quality and resolution. Couple that with IGZO technology and we can expect to see screens that are both thinner and better – a combination that most consumers will find favorable.

Battery-related rumors also seem to have credibility. Currently, the iPad 2 has a battery capacity that is rated at 6930 mAh. The new iPad 3 will double that capacity to around 14000 mAh, thereby theoretically doubling the product’s battery life. Incredibly, this could translate into up to 25 hours of use.

Beyond that, there aren’t very many predictions we can make with certainty. Pricing is one such area of speculation: while Apple will likely try to compete with Amazon’s lower costs, it certainly won’t be able to cut it so low as to enter the $200 range. For an idea of the actual price, we’re just going to have to wait. Fortunately that wait shouldn’t be too long – that is, if the rumors are true.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is under no immediate threat of being overthrown, but neither was Mubarak’s Egyptian regime in the weeks prior to its eventual collapse at the hands of protesters. Regardless, the elite of Saudi Arabia are seemingly getting the hint about the importance of social media, and perhaps more importantly, the importance of having some control over it. While in no way indicative of a particular political philosophy or plan, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the wealthiest man in the Arab world, has bought up a $300 million stake in Twitter according to CNN. It was a move made, according to the prince, because of his recognition of social media being a dominant influence on the future of the Middle-East as well for the rest of the world.

With oil running out, real estate unmoving, and most industries scaling back due to an uncertain economic outlook, the world’s leading billionaires are busy thinking of new places to put their wealth. Social media is proving to be a popular choice, as more and more members of the global elite are seeing the unwavering value of an ever increasing technology. Until a plateau is reached, companies such as Facebook and Twitter seem to have nowhere to go but up. Eventually some sort of social media bubble will burst – but that’s likely years down the road and in the meantime, there’s much cash to be made.

But there’s more at stake in the acquiring of social media stock than just profit. World leaders, movers, and shakers have been unquestionably rattled by the worldwide protests of 2011. While not spawned from the existence of social media, such technology was undoubtedly vital in the success of many public protests, especially those in the Middle-East that saw the removal of despots once considered untouchable. The ability for members of the public to organize en masse and do so relatively clandestinely is a power individuals didn’t have even as few as five years ago. Now that it is here – in a world blighted by economic flat-lining – people have not hesitated to use it to their advantage.

Those at the top – individuals tied to established regimes, forms of government, titles, and the prestige inherent with these connections – have little to gain and plenty to lose from the propagation of information via social media. Their livelihoods are often tied to the soft regulations and unrelenting cronyism that such protests are specifically out to fight. All the while, any efforts to combat social media with social media are meaningless at a time when the population of power brokers is far outweighed by the number of have-nots with nothing to lose. Billionaires smart enough to see the risk social media has on the future state of their power and wealth have very little choices in combating the ability of the masses to organize electronically.

One choice, however, is the classic move of the upper crust: buy them out. While 1/30th of Twitter isn’t exactly taking control of the social media giant, it’s an initial step in a self-perceived right direction. As far as Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is concerned, the best strategy in any attempt to exert authority on as free and popular a thing as social media is to take control of the company itself.

Slowly but surely across the globe, those with influence will surely start to follow a similar playbook. Under the guise of “safe investment” and “thinking of the future”, these top-tier investors will be positioning themselves to have a say on how social media is used for the rest of us to say what we want.

If you have ever been dragged to a wedding you already know that there are only three reasons to actually attend: an open bar, a gathering of single people, and the disposable cameras strategically placed on every table. The anonymity of the disposable camera is such a fun element to add to any celebration because you can capture candid moments that may go down forever in infamy. [...]

This is a Guest Post and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of The Tech Update.

Big corporations have been attempting to revamp legislation related to the Internet for years. Essentially their modus operandi has been to disguise pro-monopoly, anti-regulation reform as anti-piracy law and try to slip it by the public eye as quickly as possible. If SOPA (or the Stop Online Piracy Act) passes there will be drastic consequences for everyone who uses the Internet. They may start off as subtle changes, but they will lead to nothing less than a stranglehold over the free exchange of information. Here are the ways in which SOPA will impact us: [...]

As most people are probably aware, Facebook launched a new redesign last week, one of its largest to date. Called “Timeline,” the redesign changes the traditional user profile by making it more visual, more interactive, and – most notably — more like a scrapbook of that person’s life than an update of their most recent activity. It accomplishes this by adding a sidebar to the left of the profile with a list of years upon which that profile has seen activity. A viewer needs only to click on a given year in order to see status updates, pictures, and wall posts made during that time. The Timeline redesign is available to all users as of this week, and will automatically become the default profile for all Facebook members at some point in the next month. [...]

With Christmas less than a week away one can only hope that all your top-priority shopping is complete. But for those counting on end-of-year bonuses and those who still need to pick up any last minute items, the next few days are going to be a mad dash to acquire the best possible gifts with the lowest money spent. In that regard, how about augmented an expensive item you already have in the household or purchased as a present? In particular, gather up some add-ons for an iPad if you have one. The following are the top iPad add-ons perfect for the family this holiday season: [...]