Jas Business Blog » New Launch

Fictional Goggles turn realistic

Jas — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:09:34 +0000

This is the ideal stuff that one would imagine for year 2044 A.D – You are holidaying in Paris and the only French you know is “Bonjour” which you anyway spell with a rustic accent, taking count to zero. You are lost, need directions and communication being a roadblock here, you take out your phone and point to the buildings around you. The phone starts giving you information on the area you are in and maps you on an interactive map. You ask for some nice Italian pizzeria and it gives you a list of options and on selecting one of these, you get choice of routes to the selection. On the way a Greek restaurant catch your attention and you target your mobile, and you get all the reviews of it. You decide to try it out and ask for menu, point your phone on the menu and get the image results of the dishes and decide on your order. Just then you see a friend standing at the far end, you decide to play a prank; point your mobile to her and voila! Your phone gives you an option to call, SMS him, post message on his Facebook page, blah blah… So what is the story? Just that all this is not 2044 stuff, it has become possible as we speak! May I have the pleasure of introducing you to Google Goggles in case you two haven’t met already!

Background
Image recognition has been attracting lot of R&D efforts since late nineties and biggies like Google, Microsoft and Nokia etc are pouring millions into the research. Google has been focusing on non text objects since 2000; one would remember about patent filed by Larry Page in 2004 titled “Method for searching media“. They bought Neven Vision in 2006, which was into “next generation” face and object recognition technologies, and hence got handful patents too which were owned by Neven Vision. Google also brought Transformics in 2006 which enabled it to index the pages its Google crawlers were not able to – basically the unstructured information. Google then integrated this technology with its homegrown Picasa, and launched Face detection, though in primitive form, in 2008. With launch of Android phone, Google got the base on which it could bring out its future technologies and capture the feedback in legal and cost effective way. And a look into Google Labs would introduce this next generation image recognition application – Google Goggle.

Google Goggles was developed for use on Google’s Android operating systems for mobile devices. While currently only available in a beta version for Android phones, Google has announced it plans on making the software capable of running on other platforms, notably the Apple iPhone and Blackberry devices. See the video below to get the gist of Google Goggles-

Competition

IBM (Direct competition)
IBM came up with SAPIR (Search in Audio-Visual Content Using Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval) in 2009 which analyzes photos, sound files and even video queries. It has created its database by extracting data from Flickr’s ginormous archive and index features such as color structure, color layout, shape edges and texture. It also allows one to combine text with media to refine down the search.
Demo: Click here for YouTube demo video

Nokia (Can be a direct competition)
Nokia announced its Point and Find app for its handsets in April 2009, which can recognize barcodes and cinema posters. The software uses the phone’s camera, internet access and GPS to call up pre-programmed tags; that can then bring up local movie times, the ability to book tickets, and – eventually – price comparisons.
Demo: http://pointandfind.nokia.com

Microsoft (Indirect competition)
Microsoft has not come up with something as sensational in image detection as examples listed above as they have been focusing more on gesture recognition and object recognition. I have already blogged about Microsoft Surface, read the post at http://www.jasginder.com/bizblog/2009/12/microsoft_surface. You will also hear about the project Natal which is being used to develop XBox‘s next version to challenge Wii. As I mentioned earlier, focus of Microsoft is in enterprise and commercial sector rather than consumer side.

Like.com (from Riya.com, the start-up which introduced the concept of face recognition in personal photos)
Riya was the first website to introduce the feature of tagging friends in photo using face recognition. As Google and Microsoft made the inroads over here, Riya CEO Munjal Shah decided to become niche player by venturing into Like.com. Like.com is image search and takes images and text as inputs which only IBM has been able to replicate as of now. Say a user likes the watch that Megan Fox wore in some party then user can use it as an image query and Like.com will return results showing watches that look very similar. Right now it supports only shoes, jewelry, hand bags and clothing but it plans to expand over time to include other categories.

Microsoft Surface

Jas — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 03:06:31 +0000

If you have seen the last earnings presentation of Microsoft, you would have seen the biggest optimistic line in that presentation – strong product pipeline. We will see in couple of posts under this series – Emerging Technologies that in which all baskets is Microsoft putting its eggs. One such strong market is the (multi) touch based devices which has been betting on gesture recognition technology. And Microsoft is betting its next few devices, including XBox, on gesture and speech recognition. One such technology which Microsoft announced in 2008 is Surface. Codenamed Milan, Microsoft Surface is a software and hardware combination technology that allows a user(s) to manipulate digital content by the use of gesture recognition and has ability to interact with living as well as non living entities.

To keep things geekly simple, Microsoft Surface is a surface computing platform (where GUI is intuitively placed on a touch-sensitive screen and user interacts directly with it) that responds to natural hand gestures and real world objects. It has a 360-degree user interface, with a projector underneath the surface which projects an image onto its underside, while cameras record reflections of infrared light from objects and human fingertips on the surface. The surface is capable of object recognition, object/finger orientation recognition and tracking, and is multi-touch and is multi-user. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by placing and moving placed objects. This paradigm of interaction with computers is known as a natural user interface (NUI).

Enough of geekness, lets see what it can do. Surface lets you literally grab digital content with one’s hands and move information with simple gestures and touches, something which was revolutionized by Apple’s iPhone. Surface also sees and interacts with any object placed on the screen, allowing one to move information between devices or adding or accessing the information on those objects. Say one wants to order a hot cappuccino from 20 odd favors offered by a cafe chain, one can choose between the options using Surface, see calorie or ingredient information as one would see in internet, then place a customized order. Once the order arrives, Surface can understand when waiter places Coffee on it. Now you may want to leisure your time away, creating your play-list of your favorite songs on Surface, and browsing through the historic details of how coffee is made, see the videos of plantations from where your Coffee beans were plucked etc. Or say you just had a trip to Himalayas and want to share your images from camera to the Smartphone you are carrying. All you need to do is place compatible camera and phone on the Surface and it will recognize them giving you an options menu, you can then select to transfer the images to your phone without even touching any of these two, just by placing them on Surface! To be frank, this is one technology product which is still looking for the areas where it can be applied to, opportunities are endless but commercial viability and idea limitation are to play the devil’s advocate. Click here to see the sample applications which Microsoft showcases on its Surface website.

The idea of surface came when Microsoft in 2002 undertook a project to ensure that the company expands its role as a major player in the consumer market by creating, developing and marketing a new software platform. Microsoft hired Cheskin, a …., for ideation and to generate additional concepts. Each member was then issued pretend venture capital dollars to fund the concepts given by Cheskin that most appealed to them. This “VC investor” exercise had each team have only 10 minutes to pitch their concept to “potential investors.” PlayTable (now Surface) was the clear winner.

Microsoft is mainly looking at B2C market for acceptance of this product, hence is all set to woo businesses, and is creating enough noise about the product so as to increase the consumer acceptability once installations are done by businesses. As of now Microsoft has entered into partnerships with Harrah, Starwood Hotels, T-Mobile and International Games Technology (which produces Microsoft games). T-Mobile is planning to use Surface at its sales terminals. Surface will recognize a phone placed on the tabletop and provide the phone’s characteristics and a price list. Customers will be able to drag icons that represent parts of a service plan onto the phone and place an order for purchase. Starwood explores the possibilities of using the computers for photo sharing, music play-list browsing, food and beverage ordering, games and game-related activities, and as a ‘virtual concierge’. Harrah’s wants to use the Surface tables to let people access maps of its different properties, find out the details about events and venues, as well as create their personal itineraries.

The consumer version of the product is expected to come in 2015, in case the product picks up. So lets see what is in store for Microsoft Surface.

Adobe steps up the gas on web conferencing

Jas — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:26:38 +0000

A good piece of technology and a bad piece of branding – that is my view on Adobe Acrobat Connect.

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today introduced the Adobe® Acrobat® Connect™ software product line, the first web conferencing and collaboration solution to offer “always-on” personal meeting rooms. The product line, consisting of Adobe Acrobat Connect and Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional, enables knowledge workers to instantly connect online with nothing more than a web browser and the ubiquitous Flash® Player software.

Source: Adobe press release

With Connect, Adobe had introduced a new (re-branded) product line: Adobe Connect (hosted) and Adobe Connect Professional (hosted and on-premise). This product was part of Macromedia paraphernalia when it was acquired by Adobe in 2005-06 with the name Macromedia Breeze, which further was acquired as Breeze technology by Macromedia from Presidia. The product is based on Flash technology which has already made a mark and commands high availability paving way for higher acceptability.

The (re)branding though is a concern for many factors. First of all the product had already a decent acceptance in market as ‘Breeze’ so may confuse current users or people who know about it. Secondly the product has come out as an extension of Adobe Acrobat, a product which is widely known and has a very clear keywords attached to it – static page, non modifiable, preview file etc. All these keywords are not even closely related to this product. The very idea of a meeting or a discussion results in a document either modified or created, which is not possible with Acrobat. So it can be only used for plain discussion or presentation. If Adobe can integrate the solution with Photoshop or Illustrator like products of its, it may help production and print houses. Also Adobe may like to extend the Connect link to applications like Microsoft Office and browsers rather than just Acrobat.

For some brighter side points, unlike traditional web conferencing solutions, the Acrobat Connect products enable users to choose a simple and easy-to-remember web address for their online personal meeting room that is unique to them, much like a phone number or e-mail address . Accessing a personal meeting room is easy and instant, requiring little more than a web browser. Because there is no cumbersome software to download, knowledge workers can easily hold spontaneous, ad-hoc meetings that are virtually hassle-free to join.

Connect will have to fight for market share with products like webex and live meeting. According to Frost & Sullivan, Breeze had a 0.3% market share in 2007.

Below is the snapshot preview of Connect with various menus expanded to show case its features (which I have photoshopped to reflect features in single pic).

Though a nice product with great features, I must admit that though am a fan of Adobe’s thought process on the products, innovation and branding, the Acrobat -Connect combo doesn’t go down very well in synergy.

GSK launches Horlicks Nutribar

Jas — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:25:40 +0000

This post has been pending from a longtime, sitting in my Drafts section as I started it but then did not get time to finish it off, so here it goes.

Financial Chronicle reports that GSK will be exploring the possibility of extending the Horlicks brand in several food categories over the next 12 to 15 months. It’s significant sales initiative – Horlicks Vending machines has already wrapped up due to lack of sales, so such a step to expand the mature brand like Horlicks is a strategically important step in long run. Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) has launched a new product – Nutribar in Indian market under Horlicks brand name in this very regard. Few years back Horlicks had ventured into biscuits for same reason. Horlicks has about 60 percent of market share in the Indian health drink market with annual revenue close to Rs.1000 crore.

Horlicks Nutribar

You would have noticed the presence of these three different variants of Horlicks Nutribar stacked up just near the checkout section of your modern retail outlets or the kiryana shops. With this launch Horlicks has entered the cereal bar market in India, which until now had presence of only imported products like Ritebite. The Horlicks brand, owned by GSK, has gone in for a category extension with this launch. The earlier category extension for Horlicks was into biscuits.

“The nutrition bar segment is actually non-existent in the country. As per our estimates, presently the category sales would be anywhere around 10 crores. Globally it is huge. In US the market for nutrition bars is worth a billion dollars a year. It is a good time to enter and grow the category,” said Shubhajit Sen, executive vice president, marketing of GSK India.

Priced at Rs 15, Horlicks Nutri Bar it is targeted at young adults in the age group between 15 and 35. It is a nutritional snack available in three flavours Cereal ‘n’ Milk, Choco Crispy and Nuts ‘n’ Raisin. As per Sen, GSK wants to leverage from the Horlick’s strong brand equity and hence wants to extend its offerings through the brand (instead of launching as a new brand). GSK has,hence, used Horlicks brand as an endorser brand as of now and may later make Nutribar a parent brand itself if it captures market well.

GSK in India invests about 12 and 12.5 per cent of its sales on advertising and promotion activities. In 2008, the company spent around Rs 180 crores in the communication activities and has said it would maintain the same in the current fiscal year. The company overall turnover last year was Rs 16,00 crore.The cereal or nutritional bar market is a sub set of functional foods markets, the latter being pegged at about Rs 17,000 crores right now in India. Globally , functional foods have become a high growth market because of the health and convenience factors. India too has seen following such a trend.

Addendum

Nutribar may be shown useful in various ways, but as of now it has been marketed as an impulse buy. GSK has also come up with some innovation in modern retail merchandising. On right side below you can see a light plastic hanger which can be just fixed near the checkout counter or the shelves and is easy to install and dismantle. One single unit carries 27 units (9X3)with side part used as advertising space. It is effective as the salesperson can ‘install’ them when he comes to deliver the packs.

On left you can see the new packaging where the box itself is used as the branded shelf merchandising. If you see the box of Cadbury’s perk on left of this box, the person has ripped off the top of the box to showcase units inside, which has been effectively and elegantly handled by Nutribar package. The box itself takes care of right advertising as designer knew how it was supposed to be placed beforehand.

Innovative packaging

Merchandising innovation

ISRO’s Bhuvan to take on Google Earth

Jas — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 10:34:00 +0000

Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO)’s satellites have been making news all over world for their remote sensing capabilities. Come March 2009, ISRO will launch its own IRS (Indian Remote Sensing) image portal called Bhuvan. This was announced by ISRO Chairman G Madhavan Nair while delivering a lecture on “Benefits of Space to the Society,” organised at an inaugural function in Gandhinagar on Tuesday.

The portal will offer detailed satellite views of our subcontinent to users – akin to those seen on Google Earth and Wikimapia, but with a difference; this one will give sharper and more detailed pictures than provided by Google. Google Earth, which can zoom up to 200m, will have good competition in Bhuvan, which has a sharper zoom level capability of up to 10m.

While Google Earth provides single-layer information, Bhuvan would provide multi-layer information. Additionally, you would be able to view the images date-wise. The entire service makes use of Indian satellites and its focus will be the Indian subcontinent. ISRO plans to use it to enhance urban and forest planning and traffic management. Like Google Earth, a “special” version would be in the offing for professional and corporate users who might need higher resolution data. Of course, this would come at a price, though the base version would remain free. Apart from Bhuvan, ISRO is also readying an information portal called “Bhu Sampada.” Both services are expected to be operational by March 2009.

Nair said that upon being integrated with application-specific Spatial Decision Support (SDS) tools, these two unique portals would open up a new era of collaborative mapping in the country. “These are not mere image or information browsers, but are the mechanisms for providing satellite images and thematic maps to the user community for the purpose of development planning,” he said.

Indian entrepreneurship surging in recession

Jas — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:36:00 +0000

The fans of social bookmarking sites (like Digg) would be knowing how such a site – Reddit got its vital money during startup phase. YCombinator, an early stage investment firm had provided the seed funding for it, Scribd and many others. It idea is simple, help to get the new Internet ventures off-the-ground on the cheap, with typical investments ranging from $15,000-$20,000, when they need it the most – in earliest phase.

Well India has got its own version of YCombination in form of Morpheus Venture Partners providing seed capital and mentoring to startups in India. For some time they have been conducting interviews with the interested startups and yesterday only came out with the list of startups that they will be betting on. For the moment investments come directly from MVP’s partners as opposed to the fund, which is currently in the process of raising $5M from investors.

Here is the list of startups which are gearing up for new age challenges even as the traditional industries are trying to either converge or cut costs to survive the bear run.

1) CallGraph: Call Graph is a service to record, track, monitor, share and transcribe your calls. It is designed for distributed teams who use services such as Skype for their meetings, conference calls etc 2

2) Crederity: Crederity is a new service that applies sophisticated technologies and programs to helping people and businesses easily establish trust on the Internet. As the web’s first guaranteed trust builder, Crederity enables people and businesses to certify their own integrity and that of others.

3) DeskAway: DeskAway “simplifies teamwork”. DeskAway is a subscription-based online team and project collaboration service that enables small businesses & teams to organize, manage & track their work online.

4) Dhanax: dhanaX stands for exchange of dhana or wealth, works with the vision to connect people from different economic backgrounds and thus create wealth for them. dhanaX is an online/offline people-to-people lending platform that lets Indians to lend and borrow money from fellow Indians.

5) Fachak: A platform where you can share any form of content from a document to a video, it just needs to mean one thing to you – Fun! Fachak is in its pre-release stage right now but is soon going to be in private beta. You can register yourself for the launch invitation on the website.

6) LifeMojo: LifeMojo’s focus is on creating a platform for delivery of preventive health care services and partner with renowned health experts for their consultation.

7) SutraHR: Sutra HR is a full services People Consulting firm which has a unique partnering model with Digital, Mobile and Internet startups and entrepreneurial companies in India, to find retain assess and train talent to take them to the next level and beyond.

For additional details, check out the MVP website here.

VISA payWave – next wave in payment mode?

Jas — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 17:58:00 +0000

Reacting to the success of RFID as payment mode, VISA has branded its RFID card as VISA payWave. Called so as one just needs to wave his/her card near the accepting POS terminal for transaction to be carried. To ease the faster payment, one doesn’t even need to sign for most of the purchases made under $25.

According to the VISA website, over 32,000 retailers from 20 top brands accept Visa payWave payments, and the list is rapidly growing. Visa payWave is intended to make it simple to save time every day—at quick service restaurants, drugstores, movie theaters, convenience stores and more. The participating issuers are BB&T, Chase, INOVA FCU, SunTrust and Wells Fargo as of now. Some of the major names of merchants who are already accepting the card are Mc Donalds, CVS Pharmacy, 7-Eleven and Jack in the Box. The complete list of eligible merchants is provided at its sitepage –
http://usa.visa.com/paywave-merchants/

Well there are lot of benefits for users over here, like

Checkout is faster and easier for cardholder as no swiping needs to be done in RFID cards
VISA allows no signature for most purchases under $25
As you remain in control of your card during the transaction, the risk of fraud is greatly reduced
VISA is giving the Zero Liability this card too, which ensures you are not responsible for fraudulent or unauthorized transactions.
These cards also have a magnetic stripe so in case RFID reader isnt there, you can pay by normal swiping method.

But then it needs to be seen how much faith do cardmembers show in RFID payment methods. There has been recent reports of people being able to forge the RFID cards as what a legitimate merchant terminal can read from the card, a malicious scanning device can also read without a consumer’s consent or knowledge. Hence the design takes the prime importance over here. The most basic info of the card, the name of the cardholder is abused the maximum with these devices. There has been a good article on the vulnerabilities in First-Generation RFID enabled cards at blog of RFID Cusp, you can access it here -
http://www.rfid-cusp.org/blog/blog-23-10-2006.html

Visa has also announced that it is currently migrating to an enhanced global specification, Visa Contactless 2.0, to further support the growth of Visa payWave around the globe. The new global contactless specification is based on the international EMV chip standards, enabling Visa to take advantage of the industry’s most advanced cryptographic techniques for Visa payWave transactions, regardless of where the card was issued or where the transaction takes place.

“Visa payWave is an excellent example of Visa’s approach to innovation and our ability to extend the value of Visa to new stakeholders and new market segments,” said Elizabeth Buse, Global Head of Product at Visa Inc. “As the payments ecosystem expands, so does Visa’s opportunity to deliver innovative products and services to a diverse set of stakeholders.”

Sources: VISA websites

GTalk now provides the invisible model option

Jas — Fri, 30 May 2008 03:31:00 +0000

Probably one of the most important features I saw in chatting apart from chatting was the option of ‘invisible mode’. It lets you to have an important chat without everybody bombarding you with pings and hence your screen. It has been a strong feature that was missing in Gtalk and I know about many people who didn’t used to come online on Gtalk, me included, as everybody would be seeing you and hence it ends up a time consuming thing, especially when you have come online for some work on Gtalk.

But then voila, Google has now brought this option in its latest version of Gmail chat. For the people using AIM in Gmail (Google allowed AIM clients to be Google chat compatible few months back), invisible mode also makes them appear signed out on the AIM network. Invisible mode is one of the most requested chat features and so it’s a much awaited addition, starting in Gmail Chat, and in the future all Talk clients.

But at the same point Google’s official Gmail blog has mentioned that the chat may not be useful if lot of people go off line. So do give a feedback to them in case you have any opinion on this…

Yahoo all set to GLUE you to its new search

Jas — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:48:00 +0000

Yahoo has released a new type of search result for India called “Glue Page.” Instead of the usual text listing, some queries – like blog, Taj Mahal or asthma – will now trigger a comprehensive and very visual result page. This page contains different elements laid out in boxes; there’s “normal” search results, encyclopedic information from health sites or Wikipedia, news results, YouTube videos or Google blog search results (yes, they’re integrating results from competitors, though Google is also a partner of Yahoo in some areas) and more.

This is a very interesting prototypical service; part meta search engine and part original results from Yahoo, and a bit like Google’s universal search approach that brings in results from images, videos, maps, news, or other sources as appropriate. It is also similar in appearance to Ask since its redesign last summer.

What is interesting is that the option is available only in India, maybe because its result of Indian development center. Also its not available for all results but is only triggered in the “glue” approach when the topic is broad enough to yield lots of results from diverse services.

Yahoo Glue only works for certain categories of searches (sports, travel, entertainment, health, stocks, and tech), but it does produce a more satisfying experience than the traditional list of blue links. The only issue is that the results take a little bit longer to load. But humans are visual creatures and we respond better to the visual display of information. Yahoo Glue brings in results in three different panes, both from Yahoo and elsewhere. They can be images, videos, Wikipedia entries, HowStuffWorks entries, sports stats, and news, and results from other sources.

And the dynamism is the beauty of it. Search for the “Taj Mahal” and you get pictures and videos of the Taj Mahal, and a link to the Wikipedia entry. Search for Angelina Jolie and you get a bio, pics, YouTube videos, music charts, news, and results from Yahoo Answers. Search for “soccer” and you get league tables. The traditional link results are still available in the narrow left-hand column, but you almost ignore them.

Yahoo to Buzz

Jas — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 19:21:00 +0000

A new Yahoo service called “Buzz” that’s set to launch later this month. Widely understood as the competitor to Digg, the popular user rating site; it is a buzz tracker for news items picked not only by user voting (like Digg, Propeller, Reddit, et al), but also for items people are searching for both on Yahoo and on the company’s publisher network.

A subject’s buzz score is the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read. The data is collected from Yahoo! search log files. The Yahoo! Buzz Index counts the total number of people searching for specific subjects.Weekly leaders are the subjects with the greatest average buzz score for a given week.

By combining with the search results, Yahoo surely would have a great upper hand on other rating services. But then all other players are already established; so going should be tough. According to Valleywag, the release date is set for February 26th, which falls on a Tuesday.

Buzz, built under the direction of VP Tapan Bhat, will begin with a limited number of publishers — about 100 — and will rank stories based on popular search results and user voting. By summer, Buzz will open to the entire Yahoo Publisher Network. In other words, if you let Yahoo sell ads on your site, it will allow your stories to appear on Buzz. Word is Yahoo plans to launch the site on buzz.yahoo.com, which currently tracks popular search results.