Entries Tagged 'tech' ↓

How dedicated are you to using a Bluetooth microphone with your phone? Are you dedicated enough to drill a small hole in your teeth to install a tiny mic? Well, if so, here’s one for you. Hit the jump for a picture of it in-mouth and a word of warning about DIY dentistry.

The durable composite resin filling is designed to fit in a hole 2.2mm in diameter and 1.7 mm deep and will pick up sound and vibrations from your mouth to produce incredibly clear sound.

I don’t know about you, but I think I’d rather stick with a regular Bluetooth headset, especially when this thing still requires you to wear something in your ear so you can hear what’s going on. But hey, it’s up to you. And as Chinavasion, the seller, reminds you, don’t go drilling holes in your teeth yourself. “All dental work should be performed by a qualified dentist, Chinavasion does not take responsibility for injury resulting from the installation of this product.” Yikes. [Product Page via Geek Alerts]

This post was syndicated from Alt Search Engines, our alternative and niche search engines blog. Editor’s Note: the style of this post is different to what we’d normally do here, but we think the technology is interesting enough to run the post as-is.

eeggi (engineered, encyclopedic, global and grammatical identities) is the world’s first mathematically-based Search and Retrieve, Response, and Discovery engine (ReDi engine), capable of focusing on the concept of text and not just the text itself.

A ReDi engine is a new type of engine capable of not only searching and retrieving information but also responding to direct questions (in what country did Napoleon died?) and discovering data through pure rationality, which is possible thanks to our new technological breakthrough of Relational Intelligence.

Relational Intelligence (RI) is a new informational platform and network that implements a series of new algorithims, processors (or computers) and state of the art eeggis to produce a new type of machine Intelligence which is specifically designed to process concepts, their retrieval and/or their rational discovery. With substantial differences to that of current Artificial Intelligence (AI), RI opens new horizons on information retrieval and processing. For example, once eeggi is taught or discovers that “Mary” is a girl, all the attributes relative to a female human become available and/or distinguishable, thus allowing eeggi to retrieve and respond to all sorts of questions about “Mary” -the girl-.

Why use eeggi?

Because it is immensely more efficient, robust, responsive and comprehensive than any text-based technology.

A text-based engine gives no attention to meanings; as a consequence, it promotes the following problems:

a) Limits findings to the text itself crippling results, and inventory (avoids other equally meaningful data, synonyms, etc.),
b) Allows for numerous irrelevant hits.

On the other hand, instead of just finding the text, eeggi focuses on the meaning behind the text, avoiding the problems above by retrieving all “equally meaningful” data, not crippling inventories, and reducing irrelevant hits. In addition, eeggi is the only engine in the world capable of grouping results by meaning (words with multiple meanings, such as: Right = correct; Right = turning). In short, eeggi saves users’ time and enhances sales.

A Text-based search engine (technology used to search the Internet) finds only the text, exactly as entered, ignoring the concept of the query, thus retrieving millions of irrelevant results while treating words such as “photo” and “photograph” as if they meant different things; and words such as “light” (radiation) and “light” (weight) as if they meant identical things. But eeggi implements Relational Intelligence for retrieving results based on concept and to respect the words’ proximities and relationships.

Furthermore, eeggi permits questioning, such as entering “Where did Napoleon die?” to obtain a single compiled response or… “St. Helena” (not thousands of results), providing superior, conceptually matching, lesser but more appropriate results, with either very little or no irrelevance whatsoever.

With eeggi, searches can:

* Include synonyms (other words with the same meaning),
* Manipulate similarities (words such as “pretty” and “gorgeous;” yet respecting their conceptual intensities),
* Automatically organize results based on the word’s concept (text with several meanings),
* Reduce irrelevance (allowing very specific and detailed queries)
* Become multi-lingual (handle several languages simultaneously)
* Find conclusive and/or deductive results (other information native to deductive intelligence)
* Respect Directional Conceptuality (avoids inverted phrases and sentences)
* Utilize search controls (user can manipulate search magnitude and behavior)
* Respond to questions

Will eeggi search the Internet?

Yes, eeggi was designed to replace text-based technology, and to surpass language barriers effortlessly. Providing more sensible, organized, comprehensive, and conceptually meaningful results, eeggi is the optimum Internet Search engine.

I encourage you to visit the Demo for a trial of eeggi versus text.

To see an example of how an Internet Search engine is limited by its own text please click here.

Amit / Digital Inspiration Technology Blog:
Wow!  All Gmail Users Are Given Two Separate Email Addresses  —  You probably know how to create multiple email aliases in Gmail by adding the plus symbol and dots to your Gmail username but there's something more interesting.  —  When you create a Gmail account, you actually get two email addresses …

Last week Reuters introduced its Calais metadata generation web service, an open API available for commercial and non-commercial use. As described on their developers website:

“Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais categorizes and links your document with entities (people, places, organizations, etc.), facts (person ‘x’ works for company ‘y’), and events (person ‘z’ was appointed chairman of company ‘y’ on date ‘x’).”

Developers can call either a SOAP or a REST-based service with plain text or XML documents, and receive back the results of the metadata analysis in RDF format. The initial semantic analysis categories are geared towards business-related people and events, with more specialized metadata to come. English is the only language supported today, but the product roadmap indicates that this year will see a release for Japanese, Spanish, and French, and further capabilities for automatic metatagging of visual and audio content. The semantic metadata flows both ways – publishers who submit text for analysis can upload their own metadata, and the service will combine that information with its own generated metadata.

Calais is offering a bounty program for developers who make creative use of the API. The first contest is offering a prize of $5000 for the developer who creates the best Wordpress plugin that provides auto suggestion of semantic categories, a semantic tag cloud, and placement of a global identifier (GUID). This is now listed on our Contests page.

The Reuters technology looks to be based on their 2007 acquisition of ClearForest, whose API and 10 mashups are cataloged here including the example below, TopicTrends. The API itself is managed via ProgrammableWeb sponsor Mashery.

Open API developers previously had access to the Yahoo term extraction service, which has been available since 2005, but Calais ups the ante with a service goal of under 1 second response, a strong feature set, and terms of service that allow for commercial exploitation.

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No search engine since Google has been able to captivate me for more than a few seconds. But this morning I found one that I sorta kinda maybe liked. A bit. And that is huge news!

The service I am talking about is ManagedQ, a Palo Alto based startup company founded by engineers from Stanford. ManagedQ is officially in ‘deep stealth’ right now but apparently not THAT deep because anyone can use it.

ManagedQ is not a Search Engine, or so they say. They aspire to become the first Search Application. The difference? Well according to their blog “A Search Application is dedicated to helping you manage your entire Search Experience: from the keyword, to results, to previewing, to refinement and repeating with a new query”.

Their story is that regular search engines are not helping you much. It is simply a matter of entering a search query and getting a bunch of results spat back without any form of interaction beyond that. This makes the Search engines of today little more than front-ends to large databases. ManagedQ wants to guide you through the whole search process by showing you a large screenshot of every result from your query and then create an ‘Executive Summary’ of each link they found. Then they shows you Persons, Places and Things that are related to your query. By hovering over menus you see new results clustered around your query. This works amazingly well.

As Pete Warden (The guy who first discovered ManagedQ) describes:

Traditionally you do a search and then click through to the results pages, eyeballing each one for the information you want. If the results aren’t good enough, you’ll go back and refine your query, doing a complete new search.

With ManagedQ, you’ve suddenly got an interactive refinement stage that lets you poke and prod the result set and easily get a lot more information. You can instantly narrow your search by ignoring bad results that don’t contain terms you want, without throwing away all the others that could be interesting. You can get a quick feel for whether the results are worth exploring by throwing in good indicator terms that are likely to be in the ones you want.

So will I trade in Google for ManagedQ? Probably not. But I might use it to visualize connections between people, things and places connected to stuff.

UPDATE: I got a message from the management team at ManagedQ with some comments:

The reason we call ourselves a Search Application is because we actually run on top of Google. So you’re still getting the exact same Google results except with a radically improved Search Experience. So for all the Google users out there, you’re not going to suffer any reduction in Search quality, only a drastic improvement in the Search process.

Additionally, the back-end is modular so we can connect it to Yahoo, Powerset, enterprise search engines, or any combination of the above.

We know we’re still brand new to the game, and Rome wasn’t built in a day. But we are constantly improving ManagedQ and with the help of the community we’re going to have the best Search Product.

With some time Boris, we hope to win over all of your Searches. But for today, thank you for searching with ManagedQ.

Amazon’s EC2 service provides re-sizable compute capacity or a ‘pay as you use’ model for deploying web applications. This blog entry provides an overview for using such a platform with Java EE applications using a Groovy-based framework.

Ever wish you could just take over your Mom’s computer when she calls you with a PC problem? A free peer-to-peer app called CrossLoop lets you do just that, acting like one of those pricey, help-desk applications used by corporate IT departments. You have to first download it to both your PC and your Mom’s and then when it is launched you can remotely see whatever is on her desktop and take it over to fix it from 3,000 miles away.

The eight-person startup just raised $3 million in an A-Round led by El Dorado Ventures (which is also an investor in Coghead). CrossLoop’s P2P app has quietly gained a following among the do-it-yourself tech support crowd (it only works on a PC currently, but Mac and Linux versions are coming). “CrossLoop is for both family and businesses” says co-founder Mrinal Desai. The company says it has 300,000 users worldwide who have collectively used the application for more than 12 million minutes of desktop sharing. The first million minutes took 154 days to accumulate. The last million took only 11 days.

Today CrossLoop is also launching a redesigned site that comes with free accounts for anyone who wants to make a business out of CrossLoop, or just share their expertise. The profile page shows how many sessions you’ve had on CrossLoop, along with comments and ratings from the people you’ve helped (or whose computers you’ve messed up, depending on your skill). You can watch a demo video on YouTube.

The idea is that IT consultants could use these profile pages to build a reputation. And it is not just for help desk issues. You could use CrossLoop for remote training on applications like, Wordpress, PhotoShop or Final Cut Pro, really anything where you have to show someone how to do something on a computer. After every session, the person you helped can rate you and comment on the session from inside the CrossLoop app. That information then gets automatically updated to your profile. There is also a widget you can put on your own Website or blog that updates your CrossLoop stats as well.

CrossLoop

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Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Can’t see the video? Click here

There are a lot of ways to send large files online. One my favorites is Senduit from Davidville (the Tumblr guys), which I wrote about in April. I like its simplicity and how easy it is to use. Unfortunately, Senduit, which is built on the back of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, has a 100mb file limit and though speedy on the download, requires that the file first be fully uploaded before downloading can begin.

PipeBytes is a new service that cuts out the middle man. The service has no file size limits and lets recipients begin downloading before the file is finished uploading — in fact, that file doesn’t begin to upload until someone starts downloading on the other end. While files are being transferred, a YouTube video plays in the browser window to keep you occupied, and an animated status indicator shows you the progress of your transfer.

I was able to successfully send an 80mb MP3 file to Marshall Kirkpatrick via the service. Though we were both shown different videos, they seems uncannily matched content-wise to the file I was sending — which was a DJ mix, and I was shown a video of a turntable routine. I’m not sure if PipeBytes read the file note I left, which mentioned what type of music the MP3 was, and tried to match up a like video or if it was a coincidence (I think I’d lean toward the latter).

It’s not clear how PipeBytes works, but my guess is that the site is establishes a direct connection between the uploader and downloader. There are a few reasons I think this: 1. Your file doesn’t start uploading until someone is downloading, 2. It can only send to one person at a time, 3. Their FAQ says files “are sent directly to your peer.”

If that’s the case, PipeBytes should be spending virtually nothing on bandwidth. Though it does raise some questions about the usefulness of the service. If all it is doing is establishing a direct connection, what is the advantage over doing the same thing via instant messenger, Skype, or IRC (DCC Send)? The advantage of file sending sites like Senduit is that they allow the downloader to get quicker speeds on their end as a result of getting the files through a faster pipe. Also, they are asynchronous, so uploader and downloader don’t have to be online at the same time. When both of those advantages are removed, why not just use IM?

The Java collections framework is a staple for almost every enterprise Java project. In this entry, explore how some developers over at Google have extended this library and made these new features publicly available for the Java community.

JavaRebel reloads changes to Java classes on-the-fly without redeploy or restart including new methods and fields. It is a generic solution that works for standalone Java applications as well as application servers.