Gamers' world reveals secrets of the next epidemic

A plague carried around the world by travelers, pets and curious teen-agers may show that experts have not taken everything into account when planning for an outbreak of disease, researchers said on Monday. Luckily, the world involved is an Internet game. The outbreak of "Corrupted Blood" indicates that specialists trying to predict what the next pandemic will look like might make use of a real-world laboratory -- the culture of online gamers. "It really looked quite a bit like a real disease," Nina Fefferman of Princeton University, who worked on the report with her then-student Eric Lofgren, said in a telephone interview. This includes stupid behavior, near-instant international travel and infection by pets.

ComScore refines search measurements

Online measurement company comScore Inc. is refining how it presents data on search market share to reflect changes in user behavior. Generally, search market share statistics have been accumulated by counting the entries in the boxes at sites run by Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and other engines. Now comScore wants to capture searches done in other ways and on other sites — for information on Wikipedia, for instance, and product listings at eBay Inc.'s auction site and the Amazon.com Inc. retail store. "Search is no longer the box we're all used to," comScore Chief Executive Magid Abraham said during a private demonstration on his laptop. "A more fluid definition of the market necessitates looking at search more broadly."

Paramount to drop Blu-ray high-def DVDs

Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. will offer next-generation DVDs in the HD DVD format and drop support for Blu-ray, further complicating the race between the competing technologies. Monday's announcement affects the upcoming DVD releases of the blockbusters "Shrek the Third" and "Transformers," along with movies distributed by Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, Paramount Vantage, Nickelodeon Movies and MTV Films. Movies directed by Steven Spielberg, however, will continue to be released in both formats. Paramount, which owns DreamWorks Pictures and handles home sales for the separate company DreamWorks Animation, previously released movies in both Blu-ray and HD DVD.

HiPiHi Seeks To Standardize 3D Worlds And Develop Interoperability

China’s answer to Second Life, HiPiHi, announced at the State of Play V conference in Singapore Monday its intentions to work towards standardized 3D worlds, with an aim of eventually delivering interoperability between various platforms. HiPiHi said it would cooperate with “global leaders in the Internet and communication industry to establish a set of relevant hardware and software standards for the development of the 3D platform.” The company would then work with other 3D virtual world providers to finalize these standards with the goal of allowing users to interact and transact between different virtual worlds. HiPiHi current platform is remarkably similar to Second Life in both looks and features, with users creating the world and being able to own land and objects. Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life has recently taken some steps towards opening its platform, including open sourcing the code for the Second Life client, however the Second Life world has remained closed to 3rd party servers. Linden Lab has previously said that they have “a vision of a globally interconnected grid with clients and servers published and managed by different groups” (indeed, they called it inevitable) so it will be interesting to see whether they join HiPiHi’s initiative.

Windows Live Messaging Coming To BeboBebo

Bebo has announced a new partnership with Microsoft that will see the introduction of the Windows Live instant messaging service to Bebo’s social network. The new service will allow Bebo users to chat to people outside of the Bebo network, from within Bebo itself. What makes the deal perhaps more interesting is that Bebo users will also now be recognized over the Windows Live platform; in effect the deal becomes a sort of merging of member databases. It’s also a first for Microsoft, who has remained somewhat distant from the growing social networking market to date. Bebo continues to trail behind MySpace and Facebook in the United States in terms of traffic, but as confirmed by comScore August 15, is the most popular social networking site in the United Kingdom.

Vlingo: Voice Enable Any Mobile Application

People really hate cell phone keypads for data entry. Anyone who’s called customer service knows voice guided phone applications aren’t new, but they’re a good way to navigate menus and enter text. And applications like Spinvox which incorporated speech recognition to turn verbal voicemails into written text messages, and TellMe, which uses voice recognition to power local search, are useful and popular. Cambridge-based Vlingo wants to make voice enabling applications easier, by using their own speech-to-text J2ME/Brew application API (Windows/Symbian later this year). With the API, developers will be able translate a user’s voice to text, and use it in their application as if typed directly into the program. One of their first examples was for local search and shopping. Vlingo voice-enabled a text box on the program you could fill out by holding down the talk button and saying a phrase, like “Pizza in San Francisco”. The system then fills in the form with what you said, letting you modify the text normally if it gets it wrong. In our trials the system generally worked with my Californian accent. However, an Australian accent had very little luck, highlighting the difficulties of internationalizing speech recognition. Often speech recognition companies make their jobs easier by limiting the vocabulary or training the system on a comprehensive lexicon of words and accents. But due to the breadth of their effort, Vlingo had to take a more general approach, using machine learning through statistical analysis so the system could work in a wider array of uses.

Zoho Goes Offline (in a good way)

Online office suite Zoho will launch offline functionality for Zoho Writer this morning, and other applications in their suite will follow shortly. The offline functionality was built on Google Gears, an open source project launched by Google in May 2007. Users will need to install a browser plugin to take advantage of the functionality. After that, an option will appear in the navigation bar to “Go Offline.” The feature works with Internet Explorer v.6 and higher, and with Firefox (including Mac) v1.5 and higher. For now they are offering read-only functionality offline. Read-write functionality will appear in 3-4 weaks, the company says. Zoho will also begin to roll out offline functionality for their spreadsheet, presentation and other applications in the coming weaks. Zoho, which competes head-on with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, managed to launch offline functionality on their product before Google did. The fact that they are using Google software to do this makes the story somewhat ironic.