New Florence. New Renaissance.

Linguistic Revolution

"Typing onto screens is becoming a dominant driving force behind the evolution of language, and this has brought vast ingenuity to bear on turning typed language into a medium as efficiently dynamic as spoken language itself."

"Beyond these lie many hundreds of increasingly baroque versions, targeting particular groups, services, ideas and idiolects – and extending deep into the cultural mainstream. One of the best-selling dance music bands of recent years is called LMFAO (slightly too profane to spell out in full here). In a still more typing-centric move, there's even a British indie band whose name, Δ, is pronounced "Alt-J" courtesy of a shortcut on the Apple keyboard used to produce the symbol for their name."

"Together, the "z" ending and deliberate misspelling of "lol" as "lul" denote a subversive strand in online culture. As embodied in the name of the notorious hackers' collective, LulzSec (standing for "Lulz Security" and boasting the motto "the world's leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense"), to do things "for the lulz" is to act in a spirit of anarchistic-bordering-on-nihilistic delight."

New Scientist (sub required)

and then there are the countless emoticons - another modern addition to language. Photo Credit

The "Glass Collective"

John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins on Google Glass

"New platforms are rare, but can be transformational, when they’re based on great products with robust APIs, powerful distribution and outstanding entrepreneurs. That’s exactly the goal of Glass and the Glass Collective. At KPCB, we’ve done this before, with funds making early bets on new platforms for mobile devices, social networks and Java.

Glass blends real and digital experiences in your daily life. With Glass you can take pictures, get reminders, look up directions, send texts, and update social networks – all without a keyboard or touchscreen. What’s striking is how Glass responds to the most natural input of all: your voice.

Smart phones put the Web in our pockets. Glass puts the Web where we want it the most: right before our very eyes."

Photo of Doerr with Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin with an early version of Glass in September 2011

 

The next generation of UI

Consider the tongue. It’s sensitive yet muscular, packed with taste buds and nerves, and without its acrobatic ability humans wouldn’t be able to eat or talk. It’s also our most versatile sense organ, and some computer engineers say it’s underused. Wicab, a Middleton (Wis.)-based company, has designed a small, square array of electrodes for the blind. When placed on the tongue like a lollipop, it turns the feed from a video camera into a pointillist pattern of tactile stimulation. The sensation is like sparkling water, or Pop Rocks candy, but after time and practice, blind users report the paradoxical sensation of seeing with their tongues.

BusinessWeek

the article also discusses Leap Motion, Google (with Glass), Ambient Devices and other UI innovators

Photo Credit

Google Nose

why should eyes and ears get all the UI attention?

BTW - will only work on April Fools Day

Tech leverage of lower limbs

Think of how little tech has acknowledged our legs compared to our hands, fingers, voice, eyesight etc.

in recent years that has been changing

• Charging units are capturing energy generated during walking
• Bionics are making tremendous progress with lower limbs
• Devices like the Kinect don’t just rely on hand based gestures

Now comes the 2013 Ford Escape tailgate which opens and closes with a foot gesture, a really nice feature when both your hands are busy. Extremetech explains the technology:

“Ford component supplier Brose Fahrzeugteile of Germany uses a pair of motion sensors and electronics (marked 4 and 5 in the diagram); they’re equivalent to Wii’s sensor bar that sits atop your TV. The two Ford sensors run along the rear of the car at bumper height and form an electrical field that is broken when an object comes near. Instead of looking for a tennis serve or snowboard move, these sensors look for a pair of shins to come into the field of view, then a gentle forward kicking motion with the foot, then the foot withdrawing. If that sequence happens and the remote has been detected, the controller module (3) commands an electric motor (1) to open the hatch. When the hatch closes, pinch sensors (2) guard against obstructions. A final control unit (6) can retract and redeploy the cargo cover if the automaker chooses that option.”

 

Google, Kurzweil and AI frontiers

SingularityHub

“It’s not surprising Google is interested in Kurzweil’s services. A few years back, Google cofounder Larry Page told Esquire, “We have some people at Google who are trying to build artificial intelligence, and to do it at a large scale…I don’t think it’s that far off.” In his latest book, How to Create a Mind, Kurzweil says humans can reverse engineer the brain to create artificial intelligence—and similarly says we’ll do it much sooner than anyone thinks. A good match, no?

Kurzweil specializes in machine learning and language processing and will focus on new projects at Google involving both. Some of those skills may help further hone Google’s learning search algorithm, language translation application, and speech recognition software.

But Google has plenty of talent already well versed in those technologies and the firm is known to invest in more ambitious undertakings. The special projects team, Google X, is working on self-driving cars, augmented-reality glasses, and a slew of projects outside the public’s purview. Kurzweil says he will work on AI, and one imagines that may include an attempt to reverse engineer the brain.”

Making enterprise software much more intuitive

The holy grail in enterprise software is to make functionality as intuitive as that a new user finds when they go to a site like Amazon. There is no help desk, no consultant to help you navigate that site.

We are still a long ways from that but a couple of weeks ago, SYSPRO showed me a series of short, online tutorials which get us closer to that reality. Here is one on a feature in the upcoming version 7 – starts around 0.27 and lasts only 2 minutes.

The iPad Mini

The official video which describes the features of the smaller, thinner, and yes cheaper package announced this morning

WellPoint: Big Industry Changes, Big Data

Nice interview with Lori Beer, EVP at WellPoint which (via various Blues) provides health insurance to 70 million people.

“About 80% of our consumers today are covered through employer benefits. As a result of the ACA (“Obamacare”), coverage will be available to more consumers, and employers are going to look at how they manage their costs and whether it's more effective for their employees to purchase insurance with the subsidies on the exchanges. We do believe that over time -- not early on, but over time -- there will be a transition from employer-based coverage to more consumers as purchasers. So we have a lot of focus on the consumer experience because today consumers are not really engaged in making decisions about quality, affordable health care.”

“Our health-data warehouse is bigger than the Library of Congress. We have a ton of information, and that's frankly one of the challenges in health care -- getting at the information that's relevant and that can make an impact. We've been focused on organizing that information. With our 34 million active members plus membership we had previously, we have data on around 100 million individuals. We have a lot of claim history, pharmacy data, laboratory data. The innovation around this for us was inspired by our work with (IBM’s) Watson. It has great information about research and emerging health care information, and all the knowledge from the evidence that it's collected. But to get to the right decision, you need an accurate, single best record of patient data, and that includes the data that we have, integrated with the rich clinical data that comes out of the electronic medical records that physicians have.”

EnableTalk

“A team of students from Ukraine has claimed the top prize in the software design category of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup student competition with gloves that use sensors and a mobile app to translate sign language into speech.

The team’s project, EnableTalk, uses a pair of gloves with 15 sensors and a microcontroller that recognize the patterns being made by the hands, then transmits data via Bluetooth to a Windows Phone equipped with Microsoft speech technologies that convert the language into audio.”

GeekWire