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.

News : All New Technorati: No Longer Blog-Centric

Blog search engine Technorati made significant changes to its data architecture and user interface this evening. CEO Dave Sifry outlined the details on his personal blog. The changes, Sifry says, are largely in response to Technorati’s changing user base - more and more mainstream Internet users are using the service.

This is also a clear move by Technorati away from blog search, although many of the media search features have been around for a while. It may be an acknowledgment that they can’t beat Google Blogsearch over the long run, or it may be a strategy to go after a larger potential market for time sensitive content. Or both.

The most noticeable visual change is to the home page, which has been completely redesigned (see image above). Technorati has also eliminated search types (keyword search, tag search and blog directory search) in favor of a single search box. All search results are returned in the format technorati.com/tag/query (example) and show results from blogs, videos, photos and audio files all on the first result page. Users can drill down into vertical results via tabs. Users who want only blog search results can now go to search.technorati.com.

All signs are that Technorati is continuing to look for a replacement to Sifry, the founding CEO, and rumors that the company is looking for a buyer persist despite denials from the company.

News :Prototype Of Pandora Wifi Device Shown Tonight In San Francisco

Pandora made a number of announcements tonight at a press/user event at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, which we covered earlier. Deals with Sonos and Sprint were announced that bring Pandora Internet radio into the home and to mobile devices.

They also made a pre-announcement, however, of an upcoming Wifi music player to be built by SanDisk and powered by Zing. The working prototype that CTO Tom Conrad demo’d tonight was physically similar to the Sansa Connect device launched last month with Yahoo, although it was slightly longer and thinner. The Sansa Connect device is also powered by Zing.

Few details were revealed, such as whether the device would include a hard drive. Including a hard drive would add significant cost to the product, although it would also allow music caching for periods when the user was outside of wifi coverage. They could also bundle a service that allowed users to purchase and download songs that the like, although this would also require a partnership with a third party music service.

Screen shots below.

Tech News :Microsoft Launches Popfly: Mashup App Creator Built On Silverlight

Microsoft will announce the private beta launch of Popfly this morning, a new Silverlight application that allows users to create mashups, widgets and other applications using a very cool and easy to use web-based graphical interface. We previously covered the launch of Yahoo Pipes and compared five different applications that let you mix data and build applications online. At the time we mentioned how this space was really heating up - and how Pipes from Yahoo simplified the creation of mashups and mini-applications by providing a drag+drop interface. Microsoft are the latest entrants in this market, and they have completely leapfrogged every other application we have seen so far.

Popfly is a big leap forward from the competitors above because it lets you do so much more, and it is one of the nicest web application interfaces I have ever seen. With Popfly, you can create applications, mashups, web pages and widgets (gadgets) and it is all tied together in a social network (as part of the Live Spaces platform) where you can connect with other users and publishers of applications. Mashups are created by dragging in and connecting ‘blocks’ which produce an output. Blocks are modules that connect to various web services API’s, and even today there are dozens of different blocks that work with a whole variety of different web services.

Seeing applications like Popfly coming out of Microsoft is something that I couldn’t have imagined all too long ago - and together with the recent Silverlight announcements (which we were also very excited about) the new Microsoft is really starting to come out through their product releases. Popfly so far seems to be another potential big hit from the new Microsoft under Ray Ozzie (Ozziesoft).

Invites: While the private beta is very limited (even within Microsoft), we do have TEN invitations to send out. Leave a comment about how you would use Popfly and the best (or funniest) ten will be sent an invitation to the application.

Music, video phones may ride iPhone wave

Cell phones sporting bigger screens, music, video and Web-surfing capabilities may try to steal some of the spotlight when Apple Inc.'s (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) iPhone debuts next month.

Although few have seen or used the gadget, it could draw consumer attention to other pricier, high-end handsets, executives at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit said this week.

"One of the great advantages of iPhone for us is that it will heat up the music (phone) market," said Denny Strigl, chief operating officer at Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ - news)

"We're already seeing an interest in music on cell phones we didn't see just a quarter ago, and the gearing up the industry is doing in preparation for it," he said.

AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T - news) will be the only U.S. carrier to sell the device for at least two years. It will compete with phones made by

Nokia (NOK1V.HE), Sony Ericsson (6758.T)(ERICb.ST), Motorola (NYSE:MOT - news), LG Electronics (066570.KS), Samsung (000830.KS), Palm (Nasdaq:PALM - news), and carriers Sprint (NYSE:S - news) and Verizon.

While so-called smartphones, which marry music and other media features with data and talk features, have been around for years, their sales remain a fraction of the overall market. Typically they are larger and cost more than average phones.

"We were one of the first to get into the music business, one-and-a-half years ago, and it has been very difficult to get traction," Strigl said, adding that Verizon will launch new multimedia phones to take on the iPhone.

At $500 to $600, the iPhone's price tag has been called spectacularly high, possibly opening the door for handset makers with similar models. Still Apple, whose iPod music device and iTunes service dominate the market, expects to sell 10 million of the phones in 2008.

"They (Apple) will bring some things to the table that we have to be responsive to, but we have been investing in this area for some time," Nokia (NYSE:NOK - news) Chief Financial Officer Rick Simonson said. "We are leading in multimedia convergence."

Consumers juggling multiple devices -- such as a phone, digital music player and personal information assistant -- may warm to combined devices, overlooking their steep price tag.

"People are not uncomfortable plopping down a couple of hundred bucks for a music player or an iPod (and) $100 for a voice phone or a PDA," said AT&T's group president for operations support, John Stankey. "If you think about what a customer invests to solve a problem...I might suggest that the price isn't as substantial as it might look."

Still, Sling Media Chief Executive Blake Krikorian said the touch-screen iPhone, which has only one button, may not convert users for whom text-based wireless communication is key. They may stick with keyboard-based devices like Research In Motion's (Toronto:RIM.TO - news)(Nasdaq:RIMM - news) Blackberry, or Palm's Treo.

"I need a keyboard -- I still think e-mail is the "killer app" and (iPhone) ain't that. For that demographic I don't see it happening," said Krikorian.

Regardless of the iPhone's success, convergent devices are poised to grow in popularity, Sony Ericsson President Miles Flint said.

"The phone is capable of doing many other things," he said. "People want to have any content, any time, any where on their device and that is leading to the phone being a mobile Internet gateway entry point. the trend is clear."

Tech News :Camera phone pioneer ponders the impact

The chilling sounds of gunfire on the Virginia Tech campus; the hateful taunts from Saddam Hussein's execution; the racist tirade of comedian Michael Richards. Those videos, all shot with cell phone cameras and seen by millions, are just a few recent examples of the power now at the fingertips of the masses. Even the man widely credited with inventing the camera phone in 1997 is awed by the cultural revolution he helped launch.

"It's had a massive impact because it's just so convenient," said Philippe Kahn, a tech industry maverick whose other pioneering efforts include the founding of software maker Borland, an early Microsoft Corp. antagonist.

"There's always a way to capture memories and share it," he said. "You go to a restaurant, and there's a birthday and suddenly everyone is getting their camera phones out. It's amazing."

If Kahn feels a bit like a proud father when he sees people holding up their cell phones to snap pictures, there's good reason: He jury-rigged the first camera phone while his wife was in labor with their daughter.

"We were going to have a baby and I wanted to share the pictures with family and friends," Kahn said, "and there was no easy way to do it."

So as he sat in a maternity ward, he wrote a crude program on his laptop and sent an assistant to a RadioShack store to get a soldering iron, capacitors and other supplies to wire his digital camera to his cell phone. When Sophie was born, he sent her photo over a cellular connection to acquaintances around the globe.

A decade later, 41 percent of American households own a camera phone "and you can hardly find a phone without a camera anymore," said Michael Cai, an industry analyst at Parks Associates.

Market researcher Gartner Inc. predicts that about 589 million cell phones will be sold with cameras in 2007, increasing to more than 1 billion worldwide by 2010.

Tech News : AOL Acquires ADTECH

AOL have announced the purchase of a controlling interest in ADTECH AG, a German based online ad-serving company.

The acquisition gives AOL an ad-serving platform that features a variety of ad management and delivery applications that allow publishers to manage their online campaigns.

ADTECH will operate as an independent subsidiary of AOL’s Advertising.com.

AOL CEO Randy Falco said in a statement that the deal would give AOL the ability to provide publishers with a more complete set of advertising solutions.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Tech News: Lots of Product Announcements At Google

Lots of announcements today at Google during their Searchology event. My live blogging notes are here and I’ve posted on their pre-announcement of a cross-language search engine coming soon. See SearchEngineLand as well.

Cross-Language Search Engine

Google’s Udi Manber mentioned in passing that they would soon be launching a cross-language search engine. More details here.

Universal Search

Google’s Marissa Mayer announced what amounts to a first step towards a “universal search model.” This is effectively an integration of results from all of Google’s vertical search properties (video, images, news, maps, books, blogs, websites) which are presented for searches at Google.com and are ranked according to Google’s relevance engine. There are a number of example searches in my notes from the event earlier today. Videos from Google Video and YouTube are embedded directly in results for viewing.

Video Search Now Includes Non-Google Sites

In January Google launched a video search engine that included only Google Video and YouTube videos. Today they’ve expanded it to include video from Metacafe and “5-6 other large video sites.”

Google Experimental

Google Experimental launched today. This includes a number of enhancements to Google Search. Adding any of them will change your Google search results. These include a timeline or maps view, keyboard shortcuts, left hand search navigation and right hand contextual search navigation. Note that Google Experimental is not the same thing as Google Labs, which contains stand alone applications.

Google Navigation Bar

Google’s home page and many applications now include a navigation bar that gives on-click access to popular products like Gmail, Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets and Picasa.

Tech News : New Stuff At My Yahoo

The big guys are really starting to focus on personalized home pages, where Yahoo dominates and Google is coming on strong (by adding a link from the Google.com home page). Google says their personalized home page has been their fastest growing product over the last few fiscal quarters. Pageflakes and Netvibes are two notable startups in this space.

Tonight Yahoo is announcing a few enhancements to the recently relaunched My Yahoo: a new calendar module, a My Netflix module that uses the Netflix API and an update to the Yahoo Bookmarks module.

The calendar module has read/write functionality (as it should). My Netflix lets users see what movies have recently been released on DVD, the movies in your queue and movies you have at home. The main addition to the bookmarks module is the ability to add new bookmarks directly from the module.

The new features will be rolled out on Thursday. Screen shots are below. The first one shows the calendar and netflix modules.