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Posts Tagged ‘Product Launch’

Fictional Goggles turn realistic

February 7th, 2010 No comments

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.

Categories: Technology Tags: , , , , ,

GSK launches Horlicks Nutribar

April 15th, 2009 3 comments

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

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

Innovative packaging


Merchandising innovation

Merchandising innovation

Categories: Marketing Tags: , , ,

ISRO’s Bhuvan to take on Google Earth

November 8th, 2008 5 comments
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.
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Yahoo all set to GLUE you to its new search

May 12th, 2008 4 comments

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.

Categories: Technology Tags: ,

Yahoo to Buzz

February 21st, 2008 3 comments

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.
Categories: Technology Tags: ,

Now a mouldable mouse

February 3rd, 2008 No comments


The market has been filled with mouses of all shapes and sizes, but some of you must be feeling that still something is missing. Well, thanks to the folks at Lite-On, you’ll never have to suffer the debilitating discomfort of an unshapely mouse ever again. The Mouldable Mouse will make all your bad memories of ill-fitting input devices float away, using a lightweight modeling clay combined with a nylon and polyurethane fabric to make up its surface. Once you’re palming your new best friend, you can shape its contours to whatever form you desire, though we’re pretty sure making a perfect cube will present a challenge. The “stick-on” buttons and scroll-wheel can be added to any location you like, and communicate via RFID (wow!).

It has also won a Red Dot design award. But a big question is on its feasibility. It may get hardened on some initial design which may not be very right as it may require creative skills, or else on other hand it may be too soft and soggy kind. So whatever, the real test will come when it comes to actual users out of lab.

Categories: Technology Tags: ,

The next age digicams

November 14th, 2007 3 comments
Our mobiles have gone from just a mobile version of landline phones to that of a small computer or hand held, the desktops have given way to the quad core functionality specific laptops or tablets, GPS has simplified the life for some and complicated for others and all the while we know that the digital cameras have just fought a linear fight of more Megapixels, more optical zoom and larger screen. Isn’t it? Though some vendors have been giving small features but nothing has changed the mainstream usage of digital cameras.

Well things may be in for a change now in next few years as many advanced features have already been integrated into these digicams and poise for a mainstream usage in next few years. These advanced pieces of technology can now not only identify which one of your friends are you clicking a snap of, but also if the person being photographed is happy, sad, angry etc. You would have already seen the adverts of Sony having launched the camera that can identify the faces from background and focus on these faces for better clarity, it can identify eight faces in one single shot! Take the case of Fujifilm’s new FinePix S6000fd, once Face Detection is activated, it automatically identifies faces in the scene and prioritizes them in as little as 0.05 seconds. It simultaneously displays a green rectangle around the top-priority face, and a white one around other faces before the picture is taken (see pic)

In another feature called auto tagging, the camera attaches tags as the pictures are taken. The tags can be of time, people names or geography etc. Like the cameras embed timestamps in photos, which makes it possible to sift through pictures by date. able to screen for photos only of a particular person could dramatically speed up the search process. Fotonation is one company which supplies face-detection software for dozens of camera models from vendors like Samsung, Pentax, and others. Location, too, is another useful attribute that can be attached to photos through a process called geotagging. Geotagging can be used both to look for photos whose location you know and to figure out what exactly is in a photo you already have at hand. Flickr launched a module in 2006 that lets people geotag their photos by dragging them onto maps. Photos tagged with location data before upload also can be shown on maps if a Flickr member chooses to enable the feature. The map can be set up to show photos from a particular time, uploaded by a particular Flickr member or tagged with particular text labels–”cable car” in this case. Flickr, which now houses 36 million geotagged photos–roughly 3 percent of its total archive.

Face recognition is another feature which is gaining commercial attention among the digicam software developers, these software can detect the images of people among a big set of images. Along with it a research into expression recognition is taking up pace, it understands what mood the person is – smiling, angry, anguish , sad etc. Marian Stewart Bartlett has showed results of her research of work at the Machine Perception Lab at the University of California wherein it lets a computer monitor 30 of the 46 codified components of facial expressions. That includes movements such as raised eyebrows and wrinkled noses.

Here as shown in the picture on the right, researchers have turned expression-recognition technology into an art exhibit showing the increasingly strained efforts by models to maintain a chipper smile for more than an hour. The top picture is when the model starts the show, but she wont be able to keep that smile for very long, which is acceptable, the software displays a green bar to show its acceptable. What wont be acceptable for channel’s marketer is a worn out smile, so the software observes the expressions and a buzzer goes off when a waning smile sends a monitor into the red zone. This sends a signal to the model to get the smile all backed up or to indulge.

In the demonstration, software tracked Stewart’s face from a video camera and recorded expression parameters. Analyzing the data, the computer can draw conclusions about people. For example, when comparing a video of a man’s face as he experienced actual pain from immersing his hand in cold water to another in which he faked the pain, people had about an even chance guessing which showed the authentic pain. The computer, though, had 72 percent accuracy, she said.

All in all you can say that the digicam R&D market is far from dead, rather than working on age old problems only say red eye reduction etc, the companies are pushing in the moolah to get the latest technological edge over each other and ask for premium from customer.

Photo Credits:
GeoTagging
Expression Recog

Categories: Technology Tags: ,

Sharp gets sharper

August 22nd, 2007 No comments

It is the strongest desire of every product manager to make his/her brand achieve a status of an icon and only handful of the toiling ones are successful. RAZR by Motorola not only enjoyed that status all over world but also paved the way of Motorola’s sales surge. After the long dominance of Nokia and complaints by people that Motorola has been too complacent and sluggish; the model made the company feel confident in telling world that they are technology company and will indulge in only tech superior products. The Razr has been one of the best-selling cell phones on the market since it was introduced in 2004.

The razor sharp features got the public crazy and soon the sales registers started ticking at incredible pace for the model. Motorola followed it with some lower end models which had similar features. While the Razr franchise has helped Motorola increase its market share over the past couple of years, the company’s executives have been criticized for commoditizing the product by allowing mobile operators to slash prices on the phone to entice subscribers to sign up for service.
The CEO Ed Zander commented in May that “The Razr is more than a product, it’s a brand,” Zander told reporters and analysts at Tuesday’s event. “When I reach for a tissue, I grab a Kleenex. When I order a soda, I say I want a Coke. And even when I talk about an MP3, I call it an iPod. The Razr is also a brand, and we will market that for years to come.”
But the sharp has just got sharper now; Motorola is launching its new RAZR2 across the world. It was launched in May end in Korea, a fortnight ago in US and will be launching it tomorrow in India. The Razr2 features a large external screen for viewing incoming calls and text messages without opening the phone, as well as a stainless-steel internal frame for durability and a scratch-resistant glass surface. Motorola included its CrystalTalk patented technology on the Razr2, which automatically adjusts the phone’s audio to make calls clearer in noisy environments. But the most impressive thing about the Razr2 is its multimedia capabilities, including a full HTML browser, Google mobile search, a music player, and a videoconferencing feature that lets the users stream live video calls. RAZR2 V8 comes complete with 512MB end user memory or 2GB memory, USB 2.0 high speed for fast music file transfers, Windows Media Player 11 synchronization for simple music management and a music touch screen on the external display for effortless control. Motorola plans to introduce a lot more phones — both smartphones and feature phones — with similar capabilities making the battle murkier for handset market.

But the billion dollar question is will the RAZR2 bring back Motorola stocks back from the doldrums? Nokia has been bothered by the recent mass recall of now infamous BL-5C batteries and iPhone is supposed to come quite late in India; so it’s a striking time for Motorola and they know it well!

The catch up on the marketing campaign related to the launch will be done in my marketing blog.
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Zune launches on Nov 17th !!!

October 17th, 2006 No comments

It has been quite a time since Microsoft came up with the teaser for Zune (see my blog post here). Finally Microsoft has come up with a date for its launch, not before the net got filled up with comparision and hatred sites. The date has been decided at November 17th, Tuesday with launch only for US market.

The Zune device will retail for $249.99 U.S. and is create new ways for entertainment fans to connect and share media experiences device-to-device through the use of wireless technology and new software scenarios.

Launching in 30GB storage, this places it head to head with other 30GB media players such as Apple’s iPod. The Zune features a couple of capabilities not present on the ubiquitous iPod including an FM tuner and wi-fi music sharing capabilities. In addition, the Zune marketplace is offering both pay-per-download songs for 79 Microsoft® Points each (99 cents) and a $14.99 per month “unlimited” music download option. The Zune will also come preloaded with a handful of music videos and tracks (See MS website for details)

Whether it will be all to take on iPod is yet to be seen.

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/sep06/09-28ZunePricingAvailabilityPR.mspx

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