Thursday November 19, 2009
If you can't hear, digital streaming video can be pretty unfriendly. Some technologies don't support closed captions. YouTube does, but having videos professionally captioned is also expensive and time consuming.
Google is rolling out a new feature that will use the voice to text technology of Google Voice to auto caption videos on YouTube. The technology is less than perfect. Sometimes you get garbled results. That's still much better than nothing, and if you've ever watched the close captioning on your TV, you'll notice humans don't always do a better job.
Google is only rolling auto captions out to a few partner sites initially, but they're rolling another feature out to everyone else: auto timing. Previously you had to upload captions to YouTube as SRT files that included text and timing information. Now you just need a text file, and Google will figure out the timing for you. That's a huge time saver.
Wednesday November 18, 2009
The Xperia X10 is due out in the US sometime next year, but I had a chance to play with one today. The phone boasts a nice 8 megapixel camera, which is larger than the Verizon Droid's 5 megapixel offering. It has a large touch screen but no keyboard. It also has several software interface additions to the Android OS base.
The far more exciting announcement around this phone came this morning. Sony Ericsson is working with PhoneGap and releasing the Sony Ericsson WebSDK. What's the big deal? It's a wrapper for developing Android or Symbian apps, so developing a phone app is literally as easy as designing a website. You can even charge for them and use them on non Sony Ericsson phones. Will they be as robust as natively written apps? That remains to be seen. It's a problem for iPhone apps that run on Safari, but that's another phone.
Speaking of the iPhone, I was told by a PhoneGap developer that there are likely big changes underway. There were hints in their developer specifications that the screen was going to get larger and cameras might be mounted on the front as well as the back for video chat. This likely points to the long anticipated, frequently rumored Apple tablet. He was quick to point out that this was information already out in the public sphere, but he seemed to be hinting that he had some inside info on the rumor he couldn't yet divulge.
Wednesday November 18, 2009
Jeff Jarvis gave a presentation yesterday on an idea he's mulling over for a followup to his book, What Would Google Do? (Compare Prices) His current idea is to explore life as a form of beta with the idea of beta in the traditional Google sense. Beta means that the product is still evolving and will have interface and other changes.
It's a bit ironic considering Google's recent trend away from labeling all their products as beta. In order to sell business enterprise products like Google Apps, they've removed the beta label from Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk.
Tuesday November 17, 2009
It's day two of the Web 2.0 Expo. Many of us battled with power supply issues and slow Internet connections. This was particularly unfortunate when Tom Hughs-Croucher of Yahoo! tried to demonstrate fabulous HTML 5 sites and encouraged the audience to participate.
In many ways it highlighted the trend toward smartphones. As we experienced WiFi access issues, audience members whipped out their iPhones, Android phones, and Blackberrys and started taking photographs of slides, texting notes, and tweeting comments.
Perhaps the greatest pitfall of using Twitter as a conference backchannel occurred during Danah Boyd' s keynote address. She began the address on the wrong foot by reading a prepared speech, quickly. The conference displayed live Twitter posts tagged with the conference hashtag, so tweets like "Look up, Danah!" and "She's talking too fast" filled the screen. This was a huge contrast to Chris Brogan's keynote where compliments and quotes from his speech scrolled behind him as he spoke.
