Wall Street apparently wanted something more revolutionary out of the Xbox One that launched today, as Microsoft’s stock is down 0.66 percent. In turn, investors pushed Sony shares up 9 percent, as they expect its new Playstation 4 to give the Xbox One a solid fight for console gaming dominance.

Microsoft’s debut of the Xbox One today touted features including live TV, Skype group video chat, split-screen multi-tasking, voice command, social recommendations, a more sensitive Kinect, and stronger hardware for next-generation graphics. A deep partnership with Electronic Arts, Steven Spielberg’s involvement in a Halo TV series for Xbox, and exclusive early access to downloadable content for the new Call Of Duty game were all announced as well. Still, there wasn’t one thing that left people saying “PlayStation is screwed.”

The complexities of integrating with live TV and the lack of an obvious killer feature contributed to $MSFT fall of 0.66 percent, or $0.23, to $34.85. At the same time, Sony’s stock rose 9.25 percent, or $1.94, to reach $22.91.

Sony tried to hijack gamers’ attention to updates on Twitter and Facebook this morning with ads touting the June 10th reveal of its new PlayStation console at E3. PS4 ads told viewers they could “See It First” by RSVPing to watch Sony’s event, and offered a teaser video hosted on both Sony’s site and YouTube.

Some of what Sony has in store for the PlayStation 4 was debuted at an event in February, but details were scarce. The corporation will need a hit, though, as Sony has been hemorrhaging money with a $5.74 billion loss in its 2012 fiscal year.

The real duel will go down at E3 where both Sony and Microsoft will spill more of the beans on their new consoles. Xbox One’s incremental updates could certainly be outshined if Sony can unveil some significant advancements, not just lifeless game demos and endless specs.

[Image Credit: Spill]

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The Xbox One was just unveiled at Microsoft’s Redmond campus and, true to multiple reports that circulated before the official reveal, the new console will indeed come with a Kinect.

And what a Kinect it is! The rumors of a vastly improved Kinect sensor array were right on the money — this next-generation model is capable of tracking motions as minute as wrist rotations, and Microsoft’s Marc Whitten said the new Kinect would even be able to read users’ heartbeats when they’re exercising or when players shift their weight. The new Kinect’s main camera is capable of recording 1080P RGB video at 30 frames per second (for a bit of perspective, the original model could only capture VGA video). Perhaps most importantly, the Xbox One will be capable of chewing on all the data the newfangled Kinect (no one has dropped an official name for the thing yet) captures at a rate of about 2GB of per second, which is probably partially why the onstage demos looked so brisk.

We got a brief glimpse of the new Kinect in action when Microsoft SVP Yusuf Mehdi called out commands and used minute hand gestures to manipulate content on the Xbox One — commands like “Xbox on” and “go to video” allow for near-instantaneous switching between running applications, and the Kinect is apparently also able to differentiate between users based on their voices.

In short, it’s a massive, massive upgrade compared to the venerable original model, which often exhibited issues with basic limb and motion tracking. Granted, demos we saw today were carefully staged, but the Kinect reacted to Mehdi’s commands and inputs without a hint of technical hesitation — if the new Kinect works in the living room as well as it did onstage, Microsoft may really have something here. And frankly, that’s saying something considering Microsoft managed to move 10 million of the original camera/sensor arrays between November 2010 and March 2011.

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While we don’t have all of the details on the new Xbox Live features announced at today’s Xbox One launch, it’s clear that Microsoft is going all-in when it comes to social and multiplayer gaming. First, they are upping the number of dedicated servers for online play from 15,000 to 300,000 and nearly all of your content and game data will be store in the cloud.

The service will also allow you to take in-game video and photos and share them over social media services. This is similar to Sony’s PS4 solution and is definitely a method allow users to create valuable and viral homemade content while still maintaining control of distribution. As games become more social and more cinematic, this will be an important differentiator and is essentially free advertising for game makers.

Finally, the new service adds asynchronous matchmaking, which means you can be searching for potential teammates (or enemies) while watching TV or playing another game. This increases the stickiness of multiplayer titles by nudging you back into the game when a worth opponent appears. Microsoft has also added “bigger matches with more players” and, most important, “living and persistent worlds.” This sounds to me like a direct attack on MMORPGs like World Of Warcraft and could make the Xbox a formidable force in the popular professional gaming subculture, a niche no console maker has yet cracked.

We should see further information about the Xbox One at E3 this summer.

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Now leading the pack in gaming consoles, Microsoft’s future growth lies outside the gaming sphere. We’ll surely see tons of games at E3 in a few weeks, but at the big reveal of the Xbox One, the company chose to focus on non-gaming features, such as media streaming and Skype conversations.

But what makes streaming and entertainment a true upgrade on the Xbox One, which already has access to almost all streaming platforms? Instant Switching. It allows you to switch between inputs, games, menus, internet explorer, and almost anything else almost instantly. And what’s more, it lets you layer the power of Microsoft partnerships and information across live TV.

The Xbox responds to the voice; saying “Xbox On” turns on the console to the homescreen. The UI is familiar, and lets you see what you were doing last, along with trending content from friends, and other panels like games, tv, etc. But then you say “Xbox watch TV”, and live TV pops on. “Xbox show Guide”, and the guide pops up letting you see what’s available on Live TV. “Xbox watch ESPN”, and bloop, ESPN is on. Instant Switching at its best.

And here’s where it gets interesting:

“Xbox show Fantasy,” and instantly, along the right side of the screen showing a Knicks vs Celtics game you’ll see a run-down on your fantasy league, letting you access further information and even make alterations in real-time, right alongside the game itself.

The company also announced a new partnership with NFL which will offer exclusive content and access to Fantasy leagues in Snapmode in real-time.

This is thanks to a feature called Snapmode, which will offer new interactive experiences for Live TV. This includes social, applications, and more.

Because Xbox is now tapping into your live TV, it offers a more targeted and complete entertainment UI, with favorites showing all of your favorite content in a single destination.

And it’s all powered by your voice, should you like. What’s that? Is that the voice of Microsoft telling the hundreds of thousands of Xbox 360 owners out there, who proudly revel in their ownership of what’s considered the most popular gaming console out there, that they should maybe think about upgrading?

Of course, Microsoft wouldn’t upgrade software without hardware (which you can read more about here), and that includes the addition of a Blu-ray player.

Alongside announcing the Xbox One, Microsoft also announced a partnership with 343 Industries and Steven Spielberg to develop a live action TV show about Halo. They didn’t go into much detail, but how much you want to bet there’s some awesome Snapmode features and Xbox SmartGlass features?

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It’s Xbox day! Almost exactly 8 years after the announcement of the Xbox 360, Microsoft is back with another one.

We’re live on the ground at Microsoft’s Xbox campus in Redmond, where the company is about to show its next-generation console for the very first time. We’ll be bringing you the news as it breaks with our up-to-the-second liveblog. Join us, won’t you?

The event is scheduled to start at 10 am Pacific (1 pm Eastern), but be sure to tune in a bit early — lets say… 9:30 am? Connectivity allowing, we’ll be bringing you photos and commentary fresh from the scene..

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Smartwatches are all the rage, and judging by the turnout and level of enthusiasm at the recent year one meetup for Pebble Kickstarter backers in San Francisco, there’s at least a passionate niche audience for the things. So it isn’t surprising to see them continue to pop up on Kickstarter. A new one called Agent has a few unique tricks, however, which its creators believe set it above the competition.

What the Agent has that others don’t is a combination of power management features and wireless charging. It has not one but two processors, for instance, one with higher performance capabilities and one extremely low-power variant to handle simple background tasks. There’s a new Sharp Memory Display that combines the advantages of both a traditional LCD and e-ink black and white, which is very power conscious, as well as wireless Qi induction charging with an included pad. Since it’s based on the widely-accepted Qi standard, however, it should work with charging pads from a variety of manufacturers.

The Agent is a refreshing change from other Kickstarter smartwatches in that it actually offers something new in terms of technical aspirations. The watch should get up to 7 days of battery life with its smart functions activated, or up to 30 days of standby in ‘watchface-only” mode. Even if that misses the mark by a bit, it should still beat the stated and actual battery life of existing devices like the Pebble. The gadget also features a 120HMz ARM Cortex-M4 processor, a 1.28-inch display, Bluetooth 4.0 (aka “Low Energy”), onboard motion and light sensors and an OS that allows developers to write apps for it using C# and Microsoft Visual Studio. It uses a Microsoft .NET runtime environment that Agent’s creators say will maximize memory and power efficiency, unlike with other smartwatches. The team says you’ll be able to start writing and emulating apps on the desktop as soon as the funding campaign is complete, which would be faster than the staged rollout of the Pebble SDK.

The creators of the Agent are Secret Labs, a team of engineers that has been building open-source products under the brand name Netduino since 2010, as well as smart home technologies, and House of Horology, a custom timepiece manufacturer that brings some real watch cred to the game. Early bird pledges get a pre-order for $129, where the final price is expected to come in at around $249 when the product ships late this year.

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Automated Insights, a startup that translates raw data into plain English, is launching a new product could make analytics data a lot more accessible.

The new product, called Site Ai, pulls data from existing systems (it started with Google Analytics and Clicky, and the company is currently taking votes on which service to integrate next), then it summarizes that data in normal sentences. For example, it can crete a daily or weekly report that will tell you how current traffic compares to past patterns, what referring sites are driving the most searches, what keywords are driving the most searches, and so on. (You can see a sample report near the end of this post.)

Is it really all that difficult to get that information from Google Analytics? I don’t think so, but there’s still value in going that final step and distilling the data into bullet points that everyone can understand. (At TechCrunch, for example, all the writers have access to our analytics, but we still send out a weekly email summarizing the major trends, and I had to create a similar team email when I wrote for VentureBeat.) Automated Insights founder and CEO Robbie Allen wrote a blog post in January criticizing the dashboard-based approach to analyzing data:

The problem with dashboards is that they don’t directly provide insights or deliver knowledge about the data. Even worse, most visualizations require the user go through the mental exercise of interpreting the results. Unless the user knows something about the way a visualization is constructed, (e.g., X-axis, Y-axis, units, scale, etc.), the results can be difficult to understand. For a segment of your audience (arguably a small segment), requiring this level of analysis and interpretation is probably ok. However, this also means many users will be excluded from being able to get anything meaningful from the data (I refer to this group as data novices.)

Put another way: With a Site Ai summary, you shouldn’t have to do too much thinking.

As the company name implies, all of the summaries are automatically generated by Automated Insights’ technology, not people. Allen told me that’s a big challenge: “Turning data into text is difficult because it requires marrying two skills that traditionally don’t play well with each other: programming and writing.” The reason Allen said he can do it is because he has a background in both technology (he worked at Cisco and has degrees from MIT in computer science), but also in writing (he’s the author of a number of books published by O’Reilly).

The company is doing something unusual with the pricing too. It’s offering free sign-up for 60 days, but after that, the price will depend on how many people sign up. If there are more than $10,000 registered users at the end of the trial period, the price will only be $4 per user. So people who like the product have more incentive to tell their friends — Allen called it “viral pricing.”

Beyond its new product, Automated Insights says it will produce 300 million personalized stories in this year for customers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and the Cleveland Indians. The company, formerly known as StatSheet, has raised $5.3 million in funding.

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This week on TechCrunch TV’s Ask A VC show, we have Mayfield Fund Managing Director Navin Chaddha in the studio. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them during the show.

Chaddha is a serial entrepreneur turned VC, and founded vXTtreme while at Stanford, which was then acquired by Microsoft to become Windows Media. At Mayfield, Chaddha focused on consumer, enterprise and energy tech investments and has helped lead the firm’s investments in Appcelerator, Bharat Matrimony (India), Brighter, CloudVelocity, Fab, Gigya, MapR Technologies, Poshmark, ShineOn (China), SwiftStack, Tejas Networks and WideOrbit.

We’re interested to hear Chaddha’s view on what opportunities are available for building companies in the post-PC and post-server era. Considering his investments in both cloud and mobile startups, he’ll be able to share his perspective on which technologies will be disruptive.

Please send us your questions for Chaddha here or put them in the comments below!

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While it was missing the skydiving antics of last year’s event, Google’s I/O keynote last week wasn’t short on product launches. In between the splashy updates to Google Maps, Search, Android and everything else Google announced, the company also briefly talked about Web Components for a few minutes. While Google’s Sundar Pichai noted that it’s still early days for this technology, he also said he believes that “the vision for it is clear” and that it will allow developers to build “elegant user interfaces that work across all form factors.”

Web Components are clearly a topic that’s close to the heart of a number of Chrome developers. Many of them, for example, cited it as one of the Chrome features they are most excited about at a fireside chat later in the week.

A number of Google engineers are also working on Project Polymer, which aims to write a web application framework that’s built upon the idea of Web Components and will allow developers to use the ideas behind Web Components on browsers that don’t even feature all of the necessary technologies yet.

The fact that it made an appearance during the keynote, right next to WebGL and other more established web development techniques, makes it pretty obvious that this is a technology that Google believes has the potential to change how developers write web apps going forward.

So what is this all about? Essentially, Web Components give developers an easier way to create web sites and recyclable widgets on these sites with the help of the HTML, CSS and JavaScript they already know. The ideas behind Web Components have been around for a while (and a few years back, Microsoft backed a similar initiative that never got any traction), but even today, this is still a topic that’s pretty foreign to most.

Building large, single-page web apps with a smart component models isn’t easy today. Web Components help developer encapsulate they HTML, CSS and JavaScript so it doesn’t interfere with the rest of the page and the page doesn’t interfere with it.

It’s worth noting that, for the time being, developers can’t rely on this to work in all browsers. Chrome Canary includes support for Web Components, but it’s hidden behind a number of flags. Mozilla will likely start adding support for it in Firefox soon, too. Most importantly, though, the Polymer project aims to bring the concept to all browsers with the help of a polyfill.

Web Components relies on four pieces – the template element, decorators (which apply templates to CSS), custom elements (which allow developers to create their own elements) and the Shadow DOM (which sounds ominous, but which really just defines how all of the other pieces play together and shield the other three pieces from the regular DOM if necessary).

Putting all of this together, including Custom Elements, developers can suddenly create their own HTML tags like after creating them using the tag. they can also extend existing elements. In addition, Web Components also allow developers to more easily separate content from presentation and the Shadow DOM ensures that the styles you create for the rest of your site don’t interfere with the widgets you build using Web Components.

All of this sounds pretty dry, but if it catches on – and there is no reason to think it won’t – this will change how developers write web apps (Google’s Eric Bidelman calls it a “tectonic shift for web development”) and there are some inherent advantages to Web Components that will also help it speed up the web browsing experience for users. In the end, though, this represents a completely new way for writing web applications and it will probably take a bit before the repercussions of this evolutions fully sink in.

If you want to take a deeper dive into this topic, take a look at this presentation here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Did Google’s conference succeed? It launched dozens of products and services in its 205-minute keynote, but did the world understand them? I saw some of the smartest journalists in technology struggling to handle the information density. But what’s the alternative? Break it up across multiple days, or even multiple conferences? Google’s breadth presents it with a challenge unique among the tech giants.

Apple? Its launches center around a discrete set of devices. That’s why WWDC works. There might be one radically new product, but then just a set of iterations on what we already know. The screen is bigger, the tablet is thinner, the software gets a new sheen. And since Apple is all about hardware you need to touch to believe, it has to do it all in-person. Journalists and pundits can easily digest the news and offer their insights to the world.

Facebook? It prefers the rolling thunder approach that works because it’s mostly a software company. Releasing things when they’re ready rather than waiting months for an event embodies its “move fast and break things” ideal. It reaches out to journalists almost daily about new updates. When it has something big, it throws a laser-focused, dedicated event like it did this year for content-specific news feeds, Graph Search, and Home. Even when it threw its last f8 developer conference 20 months ago, it kept it tight to just Timeline and Open Graph. The media could wrap its head around the social network’s plans.

Those conferences serve their purposes because they align with the identities of producers. Some see Microsoft’s events as a fragmented mess as they too embody their producer. Microsost has Build for Windows and developers, TechEd for enterprise, a partner conference, a management summit, and a whole event for SharePoint. By splitting them all up, it never feels like there’s one day where Microsoft rules the world.

But Google has its own identity and it’s causing I/O growing pains. The conference certainly captures the spotlight. The problem is that Google’s vast ambitions have left I/O bursting at the seams. This year’s mega-keynote tried to combine search, maps, Google+, YouTube, Google Now, Google Play, music, games, Chrome, Android, and a new phone. And that was just the consumer facing stuff! Then there were a huge set of developer announcements like a native client for C++, location APIs, game services APIs, cloud messaging for notifications, and a suite of mobile app building tools called Android Studio.

Did you watch the keynote? If so, did you remember all these things? Did you have time to read insightful analysis about them? Did journalists even have the bandwidth to write intelligently about it all? It could take a while to unpack everything from I/O. I know I have at least five stories I want to write. And inevitably things will fall through the cracks as a new week will bring new news from elsewhere.

And it’s only going to get more intense. Google employees I’ve talked to say Larry Page is really pushing his 10X innovation mantra and speedier product cycles. They explain that Google could have saved some stuff for another conference later this year, but by then it’ll already have whole slew of new things ready to show off. Plus, developers and futurists might not be willing to come from around the world for two events a year.

The single, 3+ hour keynote with no intermission did symbolized Google’s big theme of unification. Google wants to show it isn’t just a grab bag of different products. They all piggy-back on each other. Android ties mobile together. Google+ ties people together no matter what other Google products they’re using.

But I/O may be too dense and rich. Like a chunk of chocolate fudge, it overwhelms the senses and leaves you struggling to chew up Google’s vision. It was so mind-boggling it put Wired’s Mat Honan into a psychedelic trance.

The three days of developer sessions that followed the keynote were a success, in that they helped developers develop. But perhaps splitting the keynote into two bite-size sessions would make it all easier to swallow. One consumer keynote (Search, Maps, Google+, Hangouts, Music, phone) and one developer keynote (Android, Chrome, APIs, developer tools). They could be split across two days. Alternatively, it could be one keynote with announcements sorted into these two categories with an intermission in the middle. Either would go a long way to making I/O more comprehensible.

But for now, sticking with a single, epic conference may be the best route for Google to create momentum, convey unification, bring its community together, and impress the globe. Google is determined to innovate faster and deliver the future. The duty falls on us to keep up.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch