Google may have acquired Geoffrey Hinton’s DNNresearch and is now using his technologies to power its Google+ photo search features, but the academic work Hinton did on deep neural networks (DNN) is now also helping Microsoft to improve its speech-recognition systems. Microsoft today announced that it is using DNNs to double the speed of its speech recognition engine for Windows Phone while bringing down its word-error rate by 15 percent. Bing Voice Search, the company says, now also works far better in noisy conditions.

For now, these improvements are only available for users in the U.S.

Microsoft says it quietly started rolling this new system out to Windows Phone users over the last few weeks. The new system is the result of the Bing Voice team working closely with Microsoft Research, the company’s network of 13 research labs that work on anything from improving cell phone battery life and machine learning to research in game theory and economics.

DNNs, Microsoft says, help researchers build a smarter acoustic model to represent the acoustic representations of a language. Essentially, the idea is to build a model of how the brain listens to and interprets speech. You can find more info about how Microsoft uses DNN here.

There can be little doubt that voice recognition is a pretty hot area right now. Google, with its conversational search feature, is currently leading the way, but Apple (with Siri), Microsoft and a number of startups like Maluuba are also all working on products that use voice recognition, natural language processing and other techniques to get users just a little bit closer to the “Star Trek computer” ideal.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

RingCentral has hired David Berman, a former high-ranking executive from WebEx, a move that shows the market significance of a cloud-based approach to routing calls to different mobile devices similarly if they were extensions on a phone tree.

RingCentral is one of those companies that fits into new world of the work place by automating the phone tree. It abstracts the PBX just as software and service providers are abstracting almost any hardware you can imagine, turning every mobile device into an extension designed in particular for today’s work. It helps remove the struggle that comes with typing in a password for a conference call while in the car or routing SMS messages to the right people.

Berman brings a certain high-powered image to the company that will have to appeal to corporate IT executives who still have deep relationships with the PBX vendor crowd. But more so, it’s my bet he will use the web more than taking CEOs out for steak dinners. He does have SaaS chops to make RingCentral work. At WebEx, he helped drive sales through a web-based approach — something that’s critical in today’s sales and marketing world.

In an interview, Berman said the PBX market is worth $100 billion. It’s that market opportunity that he sees opening and a big reason he joined RingCentral. Berman started at WebEx in 1999 and stayed until 2008. According to LinkedIn, Berman is also on the WatchDox and Oovoo board of directors. He remains as chairman of Affectiva, a company with facial recognition technology spun out from MIT.

In those first years at WebEx, Internet startups were getting battered by the market fallout and the overall economy suffered an overall malaise. Web conferencing, though, boomed, as it represented a way to cut down on the costs of travel. It was one of the first signs of a market that would prosper with the advent of a funky new way to work, using the Internet and a new breed of mobile devices.

The PBX phone system still was the way to communicate; it symbolized the office of the IT age. Cool in its capabilities at the time, an office jockey had commands, touch-tone sequences really, to orchestrate communication. Taking calls. transferring, forwarding, conferencing — master it and the corporate network would wake up.  The PBX served as the domain of the office admin — a seat of power, the CEO’s communications artery. But then came mobile and here we are. Google Voice acts as a way to filter calls. And there is an ecosystem of virtual assistants that have emerged. Dexetra, Indisys and Nuance Nina just to name a few. There are also more business focused services and voice technology suppliers that Opus Research covers.

Today’s workplace has a different reality. We live in a new world where the office metaphor is giving way to the virtual metaphor. No longer can we think of the office as the place of work. It’s everywhere that we are — just like the cloud.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The days of a standard phone size are gone. 3.5-inch? 4.3-inch? 5-inch? Phone makers are less concerned with which size is right, and clearly becoming more concerned with offering as many sizes as possible.

Case in point: Engadget has surfaced a leaked photo of what appears to be a smaller version of the HTC One, or the One Mini. Obviously, the photo itself isn’t confirmed, nor is the phone, but the picture seems to match up to some earlier leaks, so at least leak volume seems to be lending credibility.

According to Engadget’s source, the HTC One Mini has a 4.3-inch 720p display, a metallic unibody design, Android 4.2.2 complete with Sense and BlinkFeed, and all powered by a Snapdragon 400 dual-core chip. None of this is confirmed, but we do call into question the metallic unibody design, as the picture appears to show a plastic bezel on the phone.

You’ll also notice that there is Beats branding on the phone, as well as the same front-facing speakers that HTC is pushing as a key feature of the One series.

Thrilling.

Perhaps more interesting than the phone itself, though, is the constantly evolving nature of smartphone size trends. Remember when Zoolander came out? Derek answered a phone that was the size of a mini army action figure, and finally heard the voice of God.

Before Apple ushered in the era of all-touch devices, small was the new new thing in cell phones. Clearly, that changed. Android manufacturers pushed against Apple in size, knowing that Jobs was reluctant to deviate past the 3.5-inch iPhone screen.

Galaxy devices had larger screens, Droids had larger screens, and HTC jumped on board, too. Until one day, Apple announced that the iPhone 5 would have a 4-inch display, the first time that the size of the iPhone display had ever changed. It was almost unsettling.

Zoom to today.

Android manufacturers are pulling back into 4- to 4.3-inch territory with phones like the Motorola Razr M, the Galaxy S4 Mini, and now the HTC One Mini. Meanwhile, rumors are swirling that Apple is experimenting with even larger screen sizes, according to a recent report by Reuters.

In other words, they’re covering all the bases they can. Perhaps I’m annoyed that my 4-inch iPhone 5 doesn’t fit as snuggly in the pocket of my jeans, whereas a friend of mine could be downright obsessed with the video viewing and gaming experience on his giant Galaxy Note 2.

People are different, and so must their phones be. But it also seems clear that phone makers, while spreading a variety of sizes out in front of consumers, are still looking for the sweet spot.

So where will we land? Your guess is as good as mine, but be prepared for some more back and forth before phone makers have figured out how to please our eyes, our hands, and our pants pockets all at the same time.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In an odd, throwaway line, Apple’s Eddy Cue mentioned that Siri, the voice control app for iOS 7, will let you search directly in “Bing.” In fact, the absence of Google was quite noticeable, reduced to a mention in the iWork portion of the event that the new web apps would work with Chrome.

Apple has been weaning itself off of Google for years now and with this release – and this pointed note regarding Bing – shows how deep the disaggregation has gone.

Earlier, the company shut down Google’s mapping app by creating its own (arguably sub par) solution. With this version of iOS the rejection of Google seems to be complete. While many will argue that the entire OS is wildly reminiscent of Android in the aggregate, this seems to be a catch-up effort that allows iOS to stack up to similarly outfitted devices from Google and Microsoft. Most important, however, it shows who Apple sees as its only – and most dangerous – competitor.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook’s empire was built on photo tags and sharing, but it’s a grueling process many neglect. Luckily, new Facebook patents give it tech to continuously capture video whenever your camera is open, rank and surface the best images, and auto-tag them with people, places, and businesses. They tease a future where pattern, facial, and audio recognition identify what you’re seeing for easy sharing.

The patents are for Automatic Photo Capture Based on Social Components and Identity Recognition (’80), Preferred images from captured video sequence (’00), and Image selection from captured video sequence based on social components (’65). The were filed for in October 2011 and granted over the last two months to Facebook and its employees Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, David Garcia, and Soleio Cuervo (who now works at Dropbox).

The patents cover some colocation technologies similar to that of failed startup Color, who came out of stealth in March 2011 a few months before Facebook filed for the patents. That may be no coincidence, and Color’s ideas for using every available sensor on a phone to tell who someone is with may have inspired Facebook to brainstorm in the space. Soon after Color emerged from stealth, I called on Facebook to develop its own colocation technology to help it forge an “implicit social graph” of who you spend time with. What it came up with could redefine the way we share.

As we look at what the patents include, I’ll be referencing the last two digits of the patents number and their PDF page numbers so you can follow along.

Shooting Video While You Take Photos

The foundation of the patents is the idea that Facebook can capture video of everything you see in the viewfinder while you use the camera in its main smartphone apps or its standalone Camera app. It’s like an infinite “Zoe” video that some Android cameras take surrounding a photo:

“Although the camera function operates in a photo-capturing mode, the camera function may continuously capture video…Instead of the user capturing a photo by pressing a hardware (or software) button, [it] can automatically capture…one or more images relevant to the user from the real-time video being captured by the camera function {’80 p4}.”

“[the] user may capture a photo…Meanwhile, the camera function can continue to capture the real-time video {’65 p11}.”

Basically, Facebook could let you take traditional photos while dicing up continuously recorded video into still images. As camera lenses, storage capacity, and wireless connections improve, these images will increase in quality.

Knowing What You See

What’s special is what Facebook could do with these videos and images. The patents describe the ability to scan the frames for important things like public figures via facial recognition, brands or products via image matching, and landmarks or businesses via pattern and text character recognition plus location:

“For example…a place (e.g., Eiffel Tower, Golden Gate Bridge, Yosemite National Park, Hollywood), a business or an organization (e.g., a coffee shop, San Francisco Giants), or a brand or product (e.g., Coca-Cola, Louis Vuitton)…The image selection process may tag one or more social networking objects identified in the selected frames to the stored video segment {’80 p5}.”

“An object recognition algorithm may use optical character recognition techniques to identify one or more characters (e.g., “HOLLYWOOD”, “San Francisco Giants”) in one or more frames and match against image data (or identity data such as names, logos)…[and] may use computer vision techniques to extract a set of features (e.g., edges, corners, ridges, blobs, curvatures, etc.) from an image. The object recognition algorithm may determine a match between two images by comparing respective sets of features {’00 p11}.”

You might not want to formally tag these things, but the tags would be pre-filled for easy sharing. Whether or not you display the tags, recognition of he presence of these objects and locations can tell Facebook what the most important frames of your video are, exactly where you are, and what types of businesses might want to reach you.

Colocating You And Your Friends

Facebook’s patents also give it exciting ways to figure out who you’re with. Instead of manually tagging friends, or even using facial recognition through the Face.com technology it acquired, Facebook could put to work all the sensors in the phones of you and those around you:

“The image selection process can access a GPS sensor…[detect] a user who has GPS coordinates within 100 feet from the first user’s current location…a user who is attending the same event, a user who has just checked in to the same location…data reports from mobile devices of other users that have interacted with the first user’s mobile phone via Bluetooth or Near-Field Communication…The audio recognition algorithm may determine a match between two audio files by comparing fingerprints of the two audio files {’80 p5}.”

That last capability, matching the audio recorded by the microphones of two users to identify that they’re right next to each other, was one of Color’s most exciting features.

Identifying What’s important

So Facebook knows who and what’s around around you. Then it wants to rank which frames of your video are the most interesting to you. To do that, it looks at your affinity to these objects (which friends, locations or brands you interact with most), and how popular they are to the public. It combines this data with extra audio and image cues of importance:

“The image selection process may analyze content of the voice segments (e.g., by using a speech recognition algorithm) for indication of importance (e.g., “Say cheese!”, “Cheese!”, “This is beautiful!”, “Amazing!”), and adjust a score of a frame…[and] may analyze picture quality of a frame  (e.g., blurriness) by accessing a motion sensor (e.g., an accelerometer), and adjust a score of a frame less favorably if the frame corresponds to a time period of significant vibration or movement of the mobile device {’80 p6}.”

Honestly, the idea that an app could hear you say “This is beautiful” and know the photos and video you take at that time are important is sci-fi brilliant.

Choosing Your Best Moments

At this point, Facebook can make well-educated guesses about what you want to share. It imagines splaying them out in what it calls a “media wheel” and showing the best frames as thumbnails when you share to the news feed:

“The image capturing process can cause the camera function to display in its graphical user interface (201) selectable thumbnails corresponding to the one or more selected frames in a scrollable media wheel panel (220) adjacent to the view finder (230) {’80 p6}.”

“the preferred image selection process can cause news feed engine (110) to construct a news feed entry comprising thumbnails corresponding to the selected frames {‘oo p12}.”

Essentially, Facebook would rank all the frames of your video, show you the best ones, and you could select your favorites to represent your video when you share it. When people want to watch the video, they can click on one of the thumbnails, and instantly view the video starting 10 seconds before that frame. As quality of the still images ripped from video improve, Facebook could likely even allow you to share the frames as photos.

Assisted Sharing

These patents could redefine how we share. You wouldn’t need to search for people, locations, or things to tag. They’ll just be there waiting for your approval. That’s a big win on mobile where you want to share and get back to your life. Your content will contain so much structured data that Facebook could better route it to the people who’ll find it most interesting. And when we consume video, an opaque medium that’s classically tougher to skim than photos, there’ll be anchors and highlights pointing us to the most important moments. These could all encourage sharing and expose us to more enjoyable content. Facebook could even use colocation to create collaborative photo albums and carry on Color’s mission to let you “Take photos together”.

There’s also huge implications for Facebook’s business. Likes are a terribly inaccurate graph of what businesses and places you care about. Today, recommendations of what to Like are scattershot, and it’s a chore to key them in. By recognizing businesses and brands in photos and videos, it can add them to its treasure trove of information about your preferences. That will help it fill out Graph Search, and target you with increasingly accurate ads and ecommerce opportunities.

Imagine if Coca-Cola could target ads to people frequently seen with cans of Pepsi in their photos — high potential customers who specifically don’t like them yet. A  restaurant could show push real-time ads to people shooting videos of a landmark next door. Facebook could open up ads APIs to surface characteristics like “currently with three or more friends” that a bar could take advantage of to advertise to nearby groups.

The war for ad dollars will be won with data. Facebook already sees over 300 million photos uploaded each day. These patents could be a diamond drill, allowing Facebook to mine much more business information out of every piece of user generated content it imports.

The world’s premier social network is 9 years old now. In some ways, that’s actually a disadvantage. People have forged connections with too many people and things they don’t actually care about. Facebook doesn’t know much about your offline life, or whether someone is a close friend or a distant acquaintance in that realm. That leads to a boring news feed — a huge danger to Facebook’s engagement-based business model.

Facebook has spent years trying to get people to put in work to explicitly prune and classify their relationships with Friend Lists and news feed filters, but most still don’t. Implicit colocation and business identification could bring new richness and detail to its social graph, so your meatspace experience enhances your world of ones and zeros.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Lango, the U.S. mobile picture-messaging app formerly known as Zlango and backed by Benchmark and DAG ventures to the tune of $20 million in total (raising $6m in its most recent round), is sharpening its focus on its target U.S. market by launching topical pop culture emoji and weekly packs of retro icons. Eight to 10 new textable emoji/icons will be released each week, plus retro icons on Thursdays, for users to download. The new emoji will be based on “current conversation” and gossipy trends.

Whether you want to call them topical emoji, icons or stickers — the latter being the term used by app rivals such as Viber and Line for their own visual messaging content — they are basically all the same thing, albeit Lango’s emoji are being designed specifically to tap into North American pop/gossip cultural. A move it’s clearly hoping will give it a lift vs its global competitors. However Lango is not alone in this thinking here. While Japan’s Line messaging app is most famous for its kawaii characters — e.g. Moon, Brown and Cony — it employees localisation teams to produce culturally specific stickers for each market. Thereby shrinking the ability for local messaging apps to stand out.

Still, you can argue that a few U.S.-flavoured stickers in a huge catalogue mostly comprised of sometimes-lost-in-translation kawaii is not the same as purely U.S.-centric emoji, released to coincide with and exploit the latest TV gossip sensations. Or that’s what Lango will be hoping anyway. Slated for upcoming release are a Game of Thrones icon on Friday — “just in time for the finale” — a Father’s Day pack next week, plus a new Duck Dynasty pack. On the retro front, icons based on classic cars and characters from throwback sitcoms like Friends are planned. This summer also expect it to release emoji based on celebrities’ babies, and a Tribute to America pack for the July 4 holiday.

Here is a handful of the sort of topical emoji Lango will be offering, including characters from TV show The Voice:

Click to view slideshow.

Tapping topical trends is an obvious way to piggyback on the cultural zeitgeist but Lango’s retro sticker packs are also part of its user acquisition strategy, since it plans to target these at existing enthusiast communities. “We are identifying the ‘queen bees’ or populators of specific interest communities and exposing them to our content,” the company tells TechCrunch. “People who love to follow retro cars online (there are thousands of fan groups dedicated to retro cars), love the idea of creating and sending messages with Lango images.”

Lango relaunched its app this March — pivoting from its prior global focus to specifically target the U.S. and also to pursue this “meme-like social sharing” instead of its past modus operandi of auto adding emoji for every word typed in a text, which sounds, well, pretty annoying. “The idea now is have each text centered upon a more descriptive emoji,” it explains.

It isn’t currently breaking out user numbers for the new Lango but says some of its previous users have transferred over (it hit a million users four months after launching its original app, back in 2012). It also says more than half (60%) of its user base have come from friends inviting friends, and the vast majority (85%) of all messages sent within its platform are using its icons.

As with lots of mobile messaging apps, Lango is tapping into the boom in social photo-sharing that has, in recent year, inflated Instagram and continues to produce new types of pictorial/visual messaging mediums, like SnapChat and Urturn.

Lango rowing back from the global mobile messaging space is likely a measure of how competitive it has become, with tech giants including Facebook (with Messenger) and most recently Google (with Hangouts) jumping in, joining long-standing established players such as WhatsApp and fast growing newer entrants coming out of Asian including Line and WeChat. Regrouping by dialling back and focusing on one market to build a local base seems to make sense with so many giants going global.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Between Disney axing LucasArts and Monkey Island’s creator waxing on about the sequel he thinks he’ll never make, the last few months have been a pretty big kick to the gaming crowd’s feels.

Here’s some feel-good medicine: the creator of 90′s nostalgia-factory Earthworm Jim is getting back into gaming, and he’s turning to Kickstarter to make his new game happen. Guhhhhhhroooovy!

While series creator Doug TenNapel lent his hand to at least eight games throughout the 90s, he’s best known for two: the aforementioned Earthworm Jim (and the resulting animated TV series, comic books, etc.), and the ill-selling but much-loved claymation point-and-click adventure game, The Neverhood. After his gaming company, The Neverhood, Inc, closed its doors in 1999, TenNapel shifted his focus to writing and inking graphic novels.

But he’s back! Or, at least, he’s probably back, assuming fans throw money at him.

TenNapel has teamed up with Pencil Test Studios, a new development studio lead by the animators behind both of TenNapel’s aforementioned games. Together, they’re trying to raise $900,000 to help them put together something new, having already put around $100,000 of their own funds into the project.

Called Armikrog, the new game is a sort of “spiritual successor” (read: a sequel that isn’t really a sequel… but is about as close as they can get before things get sticky, legally.) to The Neverhood. Much like The Neverhood, it’s a point-and-click adventure. Also like The Neverhood, all of its animations are arduously handcrafted, frame-by-frame, through good ol’ fashion claymation.

And they’ve pulled in some pretty crazy voice talent, just for good measure: they’ve got Michael J. Nelson, of RiffTrax and Mystery Science Theater 3000! And Jon Heder, of Napoleon Dynamite and Blades Of Glory! And Rob Paulsen, the voice of Pinky (of Pinky And The Brain) and Yakko! And Veronica Belmont, of Tekzilla and… the Internet!

While details of the plot are being kept pretty hush for now, here’s what they’ve shared so far:

Armikrog follows the adventures of a space explorer named Tommynaut and his blind alien, talking dog named Beak-Beak. They crash land on a weird planet and end up locked in a mysterious fortress called Armikrog. Then…the adventure begins!

Is it a bit risky to pursue a game so similar to The Neverhood, given that the original… didn’t really sell all that well? Sure! But remember: it’s been over 15 years. That’s forever in the land of game development. They’ve got indie-friendly game engines to build on now, like the Unity3D engine they’re using here. They’ve got Steam to distribute on, rather than hoping that a point-and-click game would sell at retail. They no longer have to try to compress a mountain of rich animation and textures down to a 750mb CD. Most importantly, they’ve got the advantage of the modern, wide-spread Internet to bring their fanbase together, spread the word, and to make something like this possible.

The Kickstarter page has been up for just over 12 hours now, and it’s already raised $70k of its $900k goal.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

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?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Keith Teare is the founder of just.me and a partner at Archimedes Labs. He is also the co-founder of TechCrunch. Follow him on Twitter @kteare.

Because of Google I/O, this was a momentous week for those of us who are watching the rapid transition that is taking place from desktop computing to mobile, and particularly for those focused on mobile-social as I am because of my job at just.me. Here is my take on what we just witnessed.

Standalone Hangouts. Google announced at its I/O event that Hangouts was to be launched as a separate app from Google Plus, taking personal conversations out from the G+ app and putting them into their own space.

Facebook Home problems. AT&T was reported to have decided to discontinue distribution of the HTC First – the Facebook Home Android phone – due to lack of sales. This comes on the back of publicity pointing to a large number of one-star reviews for the software on the Google Play store.

What is at stake?

There are many common themes and questions that underpin the launch and evolution of Hangouts as a separate app and previously led to the decision to launch the Facebook Home product. These products represent two very similar answers to a common question. The primary question is who will users look to to enable their social communications needs on mobile devices?

To set the context for an analysis let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room that is partially driving these decisions.

Mobile Messaging is rapidly becoming the primary way users engage socially on mobile. Figures released this week imply more than 41 billion messages a day are now being delivered via various “Over the Top”  (OTT) messaging apps.

Phones were created as social tools. Smartphones are especially good at being social, integrating text, voice, video and images in an endless number of apps that can serve a user’s needs, and all without the need for a web-based social network.

Users are able to communicate with anybody in their address book anywhere in the world with almost any content mix at any time. This has been compelling to users and has driven the growth of apps like iMessage, WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, KakaoTalk and some other smaller competitors. Almost 750 million users out of a smartphone population of 1.2 billion are already using these apps.

If you are Google, Facebook or almost any other major provider of social communications platforms originally developed for the web, this move to mobile messaging represents a considerable challenge.

Similar challenges exist from media-sharing apps. As users flock to Vine, Snapchat and, previously, Instagram, the social platforms are challenged to continue to be the primary provider of these services to the growing army of smartphone users.

The other core feature of Facebook and Google+, publishing to an audience for all or many to see, are increasingly becoming activities only a few engage in on mobile — and certainly less often than was the case on the web.

What Is A Platform Provider To Do?

If we look out a few years there is really only one product approach available.

That is to build single apps that embrace and extend the current features of the messaging market leaders — hoping to win users over from WhatsApp, LINE, KakaoTalk and WeChat — while also integrating the features of media sharing, private memory collection and publishing into single unified experiences.

Google and Facebook both seem to be pursuing this approach.

Breaking out Hangouts and going after the messaging audience with enhanced features makes sense. But Google also showed Google Now and Voice Search as possible points of integration for all of its mobile-social features. It’s early days here, but Android clearly wants to find a point of integration for all the users’ needs.

Facebook, with Home, revealed its integrated approach, while under the hood it has Messenger, Camera, Pages and the full Facebook app. Poor as Home’s reception has been, Facebook will certainly continue to deepen and refine its integration efforts and its attempt to be the primary UI a user needs on a smartphone.

Vulnerabilities And Strengths Of Mobile-First Companies

WhatsApp and its clones can be thought of as mobile-first companies. Their apps sit on top of the smartphone, particularly the mobile address book, and just help a user chat to their friends, family or colleagues.  Their success is their simplicity and the singular purpose they have addressed.

Insofar as they are vulnerable, it is due to being very narrowly focused on brief “in the moment” conversations in the form of a chat or instant messaging UI. They have added the ability to include media in those conversations, and some voice-calling abilities. But their goal is really momentary interactions with individuals or groups. Their requirement to have both sides of the conversation install the app is another liability.

Human beings have broader needs that are currently served by other single-use apps. Evernote for private memories, email for longer more enduring interactions, social networks like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter for public statements of all kinds and Path or Instagram for photo sharing. This is a little like the era of Windows before Outlook when apps tended to do only one thing and users used many apps.

Can Web Companies Beat Mobile-First Companies?

These recent moves by Facebook and Google represent early moves by the web-era companies to react to the successes of the mobile-first messengers. They certainly do not represent end points in any way, impressive as they are. And there is plenty of time for the mobile messaging apps to respond by offering a broader range of social features. 

There are already clues to the future – provided by users. The continuing use of email on mobile (trillions of messages in 2013) indicates that  users are not entirely catered for by the chat-centric conversational UI. The growth of Vine and Snapchat (single-feature based as they are) indicate not all media-sharing needs are catered for by these apps. There is a lot still to play for.

If we look five years out, it is likely that the iOS and Android core will support a far more integrated set of messaging tools that cater for many of the needs we use single-use apps for today.

Message saving for private use, shared messaging to individuals or groups, media sharing, video and voice messaging (both synchronous and asynchronous), Timelines to look back and recall what we did in the past. These will all be features of the operating system.

As mobile moves from its Windows 3.1 — single-use apps — era to its more integrated future, apps that used to stand alone will have their features sucked into the operating system. Google and Apple have an advantage here of course as they own the operating system.

The Future Is Being Fought Over Now

In that sense the current product focus – decisions about what features to separate into single apps, and how to integrate those into a unified UI all represent the first moves in defining who wins.

Facebook has Messenger, Camera, Pages and its primary app with Home as an integration point.

Google has Talk, Contacts, Mail, Plus, Hangouts perhaps with Now as a point of integration.

Apple is a little behind but has iMessage, FaceTime, Photostream, Mail and Contacts. iOS itself may be the point of integration.

WhatsApp, LINE, KakaoTalk, WeChat and the others will need to move beyond the chat-centric user interface into a broader set of asynchronous messaging features, and a new set of social features, probably with Timeline support, in order to stay ahead of the curve.

The End Of Social Networks And The Start Of A New Era?

The ground has been set for a fascinating next few years as the web-based social platforms seek to own mobile-social messaging and the mobile messaging apps seek to extend into more fully integrated social features.

As of this moment the mobile-first apps have the lead measured by number of users and levels of engagement. To keep it they will need to continue to innovate.

The human race is already social, and the smartphone has everything needed to enable them to act on their social needs. As the growth of OTT messaging and media sharing shows, a user’s social needs are being met with no need for a social network.

In this mobile-social world the only question is, whose software will we all use to enable human social activities? That is what this week was all about.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today, a day after discussing his voice issues, Google CEO Larry Page took the stage at I/O keynote. He skipped last year’s conference and a few earnings calls after it due to those same voice problems, which he has noted are improving. Page even did something a little new for I/O — taking questions at the end of his talk.

At I/O, Page discussed how important it is for both the developers and Google itself to keep dedicating themselves to technology, to make sure that people everywhere can get access to it. He also discussed his relationship with his father, and how important that was in influencing him when it comes to innovation:

My dad was really interested in technology. He drove me and my family all across the country to go to a robotis company. Then we got there, he thought it was so important his son would go to the conference.

He moved on to discuss how important it is to be able to put all of its work on every single device, making Google a platform to build from. Page notes that adoption of technology is now “much, much faster” and the smartphone itself shows that. Page wants technology to do the hard work, meaning that consumers should be able to use technology, not be used by it. Google’s latest design choices and product announcements reflect that line of thinking, specifically the ease of use that comes with Google Now.

His philosophy can be best summed up with this quote: “We should be building great things that don’t exist.” This is why Google doesn’t pay attention to competition who is working on similar products, it tries to stay one step ahead with things like self-driving cars and Glass.

Page being on stage is a big deal, as it shows that the company is unified under his direction, regardless of his medical condition.

When asked about freedom of information, Page said that in hundreds of countries in the world, Google is speaking to leaders of countries, specifically its Chairman, Eric Schmidt, to keep dialogue open about protecting users’ privacy as well as keeping your freedom of speech intact.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch