Hulu Hops Onto Caption Search Technology

By Dave Fidlin

With the Internet maturing and online video become the norm - not a novelty item - enhancements are being created for streaming content. Caption searching, one of those enhancements, was added recently to the popular site Hulu. But a smattering of smaller companies had already been offering a similar service before Hulu added the feature to its site in late December.

Hulu Labs, the online video portal’s development arm, is running the feature in beta while engineers continue to work on perfecting the technology.

In a statement, Eugene Wei, Hulu’s vice president of product, says the feature will enable users to search for captions of thousands of videos across hundreds of shows. For now, Wei says users can access the feature through Hulu Labs’ website. Eventually, a feature tab will be included on all Hulu shows that have captions.

Wei points out how captions search might be beneficial to a viewer of an online video. Wei says he was watching an episode of “House” recently, and a joke between main character Dr. Foreman and Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin took place. Wei says he was in a quandary when he wanted to watch the episode a second time.

“I couldn’t remember which episode it was in, let alone which moment within the episode,” Wei says in the statement. “With the new caption search, I just type in ‘Mike Tomlin,’ and voila.”

Jason Blackwell, practice director with ABI Research, says features like Hulu’s caption search will be an asset to users with online content growing exponentially each year.

“It’s going to be important for all service providers,” Blackwell says. “I think (Hulu’s caption search) is an important step in what will become the future.”

Blackwell says ABI will soon begin to study features like caption search and examine specifically how it can be beneficial not only to online video, but other specialized services, such as pay TV and other cable and satellite services with a user interface.

While Hulu’s caption search is breaking new ground for the company, it is not a pioneer in the technology. Numerous smaller companies have offered similar services, some as long as five years.

One of those companies, Realtime Transcription Inc., offers a service called Transendia. Tanya Ward English, technology director for Realtime Transcription, says Transendia offers a video search based on the full text of a transcript, in addition to glossary tags for non-spoken information within a video.

Ward English says Transendia caters to a higher-end market. Many of the company’s clients do not want videos hosted on such public sites as YouTube. Instead, she says, those clients opt to use a customized player with full search and playing options from Transendia.

“One of the most useful and unique things about our technology, I think, is something upon which we have a patent pending,” Ward English says. “That’s the ability go pin-point search video or audio files directly from a text search engine like Google or Bing.”

Ward English, a self-described advocate for people with hearing loss, says caption search technology is especially beneficial for online users who have such a condition.

Blinkx, another smaller, specialized company, was launched in 2005 and went public two years later. Suranga Chandratillake, CEO and founder of Blinkx, says his company offers an advanced video search engine feature that gives online video users an opportunity to not only search for captions within a program, but to look for titles and episode names of particular programs.

“We can extract a lot of information from what’s going on inside a video,” Chandratillake says. “Our video search engine doesn’t just work on our own site. It can also get results from other sites like YouTube, or any other site with video out there.”

Chandratillake says Blinkx has been a popular service with advertisers, and revenue has doubled in the past three years.

More companies are sure to join Hulu, Realtime Transcription, Blinkx and others as the quest continues to make caption search technology an integral part of online video.

UK Launches Semantic Data Site: Will the Rest of the World Follow?

By Linda Broughton

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, credited with conceptualizing if not inventing the World Wide Web, is not finished yet.

Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, both appointed as Information Advisors to the UK Government, are coordinating Data.gov.uk. Data.gov.uk plans to provide the general public with a single access point to all the United Kingdom’s national, regional and local statistics, surveys and studies - all the information in the UK collected under the umbrella of the national government.

In a passionate speech at TED, Berners-Lee explains that no data is an island - it’s the relationships between different data that make the data valuable, insightful and useful. And these relationships are not often visible to the human eye - if anything, our own preconceptions and individual personalities often interpret rather than understand the relationships between different data, closing us off to real social trends and concerns.

Berners-Lee wants to use the Web to bypass the human attempts to dress up data for personal or political purposes. Instead, he wants the Data.gov.uk platform to expose the real significance buried within the data-to-data relationships through encouraging the digital mapping of raw, unadulterated social, political and economic data. Berners-Lee calls this ‘linked data,’ a precursor to the semantic Web that he believes will one day explain the meaning behind how we collect, calculate, evaluate and use the data that we post online.

Not all of these data relationships will be obviously significant - imagine an application that maps the relationship between data discussing the annual amount of Cadbury chocolate sold in Yorkshire and the corresponding annual number of failed marriages within the same geographical location and time period. However, the project is expected to help identify unexpected and insightful data relationships, insights that would normally take several decades and hundreds or thousands of brilliant socialist scientists, statisticians, psychologists, focus groups and public policy experts to simply suspect.

The automatic data relationship mapping will allow the UK government and the UK public to discover connections, trends and causal relationships that will inform public policy for decades to come. If implemented properly, Data.gov.uk could come very close to comprehensively mapping and explaining the past and real-time behavior of the public - and thus allow platform users to accurately plan the future of a society.

Of course, the key to the concept is the raw data. Currently, there are already third-party applications that map roads and potholes in the UK, provide statistics and information about the location of doctors throughout the UK, and give up-to-date information about local schools. This is useful data to aggregate but it is not yet generating anything that a few quick, targeted searches online can’t. The next push will encourage interested developers to create applications linking the different data to generate data relationship maps that give researchers at think tanks and academic institutions something to ponder and investigate.

Supporters of the open data movement are urging private businesses to follow the UK government’s example and release their raw data to the public. If the private sector keeps its data too close and too secret, the sector risks losing potential profits that would arise from information generated by an external comparison and review of their aggregated data. Moreover, the private sector makes up an important part of modern society. Accurately identifying, explaining and impacting public trends requires more than the government’s analysis of the population’s behavior, it requires an accurate understanding of the public’s practices in commerce and industry.

Data.gov.uk may soon be the way for the UK government (and anyone else interested) to keep several fingers not only on the pulse of modern UK society, but on its stomach, windpipe, eyes, mouth, ears, etc. The platform and its third-party applications may soon provide an in-depth and automatic monitor of modern British, Scottish and Northern Irish daily public life. Do the industries want to jump in now, developing their own applications and supplying their own data to complete the public picture, or will there always be a yawning gap in the data buried in the private sector’s own digital databanks?

http://www.opte.org/maps/tests/

A Mind of Its Own: Search Engine Technology Ever Pervasive

By James Zipadelli

Americans performed more than 15 billion searches in January, which is up 3 percent from the month before, the audience measurement service comScore says. The latest search engine rankings show that Google is still king when it comes to search engines. “Google Sites accounted for 9.9 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.6 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.7 billion), Ask Network (574 million) and AOL LLC (375 million),” the release says.

Although Google spokesperson Nate Tyler declined to comment on Google’s numbers, he did say that Google Suggest Technology is an effective way to help users search for what they are looking for.

“As you type into the search box on Google Web Search, Google Suggest offers searches similar to the one you’re typing. Start to type [ new york ] — even just [ new y ] — and you’ll be able to pick searches for New York City, New York Times, and New York University (to name just a few). Type some more, and you may see a link straight to the site Google thinks you’re looking for — all from the search box,” Google’s Help Forum says. (Ask.com and Microsoft were not available for comment at press time.)

Kevin McFall, co-founder of the vertical search engine RushmoreDrive.com, says the level of difficulty “is pretty high” for anyone trying to gain a share in the search engine market because established search engines spend large amounts of money on marketing and advertising. However, he says there are ways a new search engine can differentiate themselves from their competition. RushmoreDrive.com was a sister site of Ask.com and was shut down in June 2009 due to the recession.

“One must position the value of one’s search in such a way as to change existing behaviors and habits of those who already use Google, Yahoo, AOL or Bing by offering them a reason to change and then delivering a rich enough experience to warrant their frequent return,” McFall says. “One must also realize that instead of taking on the major search players head on, one must find a way to backdoor them to get a slice of the market share instead of trying to compete directly.”

According to McFall, he was able to do this with Rushmore Drive.com by marketing his website as a discovery engine and a search engine. “We achieved the ability to deliver a richer and more relevant set of results through our unique index and page ranking algorithm, along with a distinguished universal results page, which delivered text, image, video and blog results all in one page,” McFall says.

He also suggested search engines that have a social component would be more successful long-term.

There are also specialized websites that find search engine technology useful. For example, Healthline Networks uses search engine technology to help customers with health and drug information.

Healthline Networks CEO West Shell says, “We’ve found out that consumer search can be complicated when it comes to health. Consumers and doctors speak different languages, and often consumers don’t know what to look for when they start.”

Shell says the technology Healthline Networks uses is based on “semantic taxonomy,” or classification, of health information. He also says the technology is always being updated to ensure customers have the latest information available and that they are partners with health carriers like Aetna.

Rich Kahn, CEO of the search engine eZanga.com, says his search engine is being redesigned and should be finished by late 2010.

The redesign allows eZanga.com to “significantly increase the number of sources we pull information from, improve our relevancy algorithm so that our results will be more accurate to the queries performed by our users [and] designing new technologies, that are not used by any other search engine at present, that will improve how we display our results to users in a way that will be more useful to our users,” Kahn says.

2010 API Developers’ Conferences Round-Up

By Ron Callari

This year API developers’ conferences are flourishing as Web and Mobile Platforms are expanding the playing field. From well-attended repeat events like MacWorld and Apple’s WWDC to first-time events like Twitter’s Chirp event, official conferences for third-party developers will cover mobile devices, OAuth, geolocation, enterprise applications and much more.

In layman’s terms, to understand Application Program Interfaces (API) in its simplest form - it’s analogous to relying on others to perform functions that you may not be able or permitted to do by yourself, such as opening a bank safety deposit box. Similarly, virtually all software has to request other software to perform some functions to extend its usage potential.

The practice of publishing APIs has allowed web communities to create an open architecture for sharing of content and data between communities and applications. In this way, content that is created in one place can be dynamically posted and/or updated in multiple locations on the Web.

This year’s round-up of developers’ conferences is listed here chronologically.

360|iDev
April 11-14
San Jose Convention Center
San Jose, Calif.

360|iDev started in San Jose, March of 2009, and will be back in April of 2010. The Silicon Valley is exploding with iPhone development companies and iPhone related startups. After the initial success of their first 360|iDev, 360|iDev San Jose plans to build and expand on that momentum this year. The intent of the conference is to bring the best and brightest minds in the development community together for 3 days of intensive sessions, social interaction, best practices and innovative new ideas.

TWITTER Chirp
April 14-15
Palace of Fine Arts Theatre
Herbst Pavilion, Fort Mason Center
San Francisco, Calif.

Twitter’s first official conference for developers, Chirp was just scheduled for April 14-15 and will cost developers $469. It’s a two-day event with a conference covering OAuth, geolocation and streaming, among other topics, and then a 24-hour hack day for first-time developers to work with seasoned pros. There are only 800 seats available, so developers who have not signed up yet, are encouraged to do so at the earliest.

FACEBOOK f8 2010
April 21-22
San Francisco, Calif.

According to their fan page, on May 24, 2007, Facebook launched their Facebook Platform alongside 800 developers and entrepreneurs at their first f8 conference in San Francisco. Many developers built the innovative applications which paved the way for future development. Today, there are over 500,000 applications on Facebook.com, and over 300 of those have more than one million users each.

This year will be Facebook’s third f8, to be held in San Francisco on April 21-22, 2010.

Become a fan of their f8 Page on Facebook to get updates and information (including how to register) as they make these announcements. Check out the videos and photos from prior f8 conferences and developers can also share their stories and experiences from the past.

GOOGLE I/O
May 19-20
Moscone West
San Francisco, Calif.

Google I/O brings together thousands of developers for two days of deep technical content, focused on building the next generation of web, mobile, and enterprise applications with Google and open web technologies such as Android, Google Chrome, Google APIs, Google Web Toolkit, App Engine, and more.

I/O will feature over 80 sessions ranging from introductory talks to deep dives on the nuts and bolts of a particular technology or product. Fireside chats will also return this year, where you can ask questions to Google engineers in an informal, intimate setting.

The Developer Sandbox, first introduced at I/O 2009, returns this year. The Sandbox will feature over 100 developers who have built applications based on technologies and products featured at I/O. These developers will be on hand to demo their apps, talk about how they built them, answer questions, and exchange ideas.

WEBAPPS ‘10
USENIX Conference on Web Application Development
June 23-25
Boston, Mass.

Since 1975, the USENIX Association has brought together a community of engineers, system administrators, scientists, and technicians working on the cutting edge of the computing world.

Join them for the first USENIX Conference on Web Application Development. WebApps ‘10 is a new technical conference designed to bring together experts in all aspects of developing and deploying Web applications. Web-based applications are revolutionizing both the features that can be delivered and the technologies for developing and deploying applications.  The full program will be available at their Web site some time in March 2010. Check out their Web site for announcement details.

APPLE
World Wide Developers Conference 2010
Moscone Center, San Francisco
June 28-July 2

According to a Wikipedia listing, the WWDC 2010 venue is unknown at the present time, but the conference will, in most likelihood, be held in California as an Apple “corporate event” has been scheduled at the normal WWDC venue, the Moscone Center, for June 28 through July 2.  Information on last year’s event can be found at their 2009 event website.

MICROSOFT
Microsoft Professional Developers Conference
(No venue or date scheduled at the time of this posting)

Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (or PDC) is a conference for Windows developers.

It covers new and upcoming technology from Microsoft, and so only occurs in the years when there is something new to talk about. The conference is typically hosted by the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, Calif.

The Professional Developers Conference (PDC) is Microsoft’s premier gathering of leading-edge developers and architects. Attendees come from around the world to learn about the future of Microsoft’s developer platform, exchange ideas with Microsoft technology experts, and network with fellow professionals. This is the conference you need to attend if you want to stay ahead of the curve, and get a head start on planning your company’s products and technology investments.

Microsoft’s PR department has indicated that interested parties can learn more about the future conference dates, industry-leading speakers and registration info by visiting their website.

BLACKBERRY Developer Conference
September 27-30
Marriott Marquis
San Francisco, Calif.

Stay up-to-date on what’s coming up at the 2010 BlackBerry Developer Conference. The conference is a dedicated forum for the developer community to immerse itself in all aspect of creating consumer and business applications for the BlackBerry platform.

What you’ll take home is some of the following:

• The inside scoop on developing for the BlackBerry platform and the very latest in software, hardware and tools from RIM and its partners
• Invaluable information directly from RIM experts who will personally share their expertise
• First-hand experiences from developers who have successfully created, integrated and managed wireless applications
• Best practices from industry leaders to shortcut development cycles and drive new applications to market

For readers who have been involved with any of these conferences, feel free to provide us with your feedback. And if there are any Developer Conferences not listed here that you feel are significant, please comment on that as well.

Mobile Open OS Wins With Developers

By Barbara Gengler

Aiming to drive greater, faster innovation in mobile services, Android will go through the fastest growth of any mobile operating system.

Global market intelligence firm, IDC, says starting from a very small base of just 690,000 units in 2008, total Android-powered shipments will reach 68.0 million units by 2013, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 150.4 percent.

In a market once ruled by pioneers BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile, newcomers touting open standards like Android, Mac OS and WebOS are garnering strong end user and handset vendor interests, according to IDC.

While most innovative new web applications are still built for PCs, Android plans to change all that, so the next hot application will be built for mobile devices, according to Google.

“We are pleased with the positive response from the developer community,” says Google spokeswoman Katie Watson. “We’ve had thousands of developers registered worldwide, and there are more than 20,000 free and priced applications available in the Android Market catalog.”

According to Watson, Android Market is a critical component to Android’s success as a platform, as it provides a central distribution channel for developers, across devices, geographies and operators.

She also says Google recognizes the importance of a marketplace that is attractive to users, developers and operators. “We believe that Android’s openness and innovation allows consumers to use better and cheaper mobile computing devices and services,” Watson says. “Android Market is a distribution system that allows developers — including Google — to distribute their applications to users on a level playing field.”

Android has been built specifically for the Web, which means Android has been built to take advantage of a Web-connected world, which opens up new possibilities for features and applications, according to Google.

For example, Google says developers can lean on the creations of other developers instead of relying only on what’s in the operating system. And Android brings “mashups” to the mobile world, where developers can put together building blocks of technology from many sources, resulting in more powerful applications for everyone.

With Android, everyone has access to all the code necessary to run a great mobile phone, or any other device, without restrictions. The source code to the Android platform is available at source.android.com and most of the code is licensed under Apache 2.0.

Verizon Wireless spokesperson Debra Lewis says the company launched the Verizon Developer Community (developer.verizon.com) last year to give developers for all platforms, including Android, a simple way to understand how these applications might reach Verizon Wireless customers. Verizon has more than 3,000 registered developers to date and more than 90 million customers.

“We’ve announced several phones with the Android operating system, the Droid by Motorola and the Droid Eris from HTC, and coming soon the Devour from Motorola,” Lewis says. “We’re excited about continuing to bring great devices with great service and applications to the marketplace.”

In early February, Verizon Wireless and Motorola took the wraps off a new Android-based phone, the Devour, which will be available in March. The Devour will be the first Verizon Wireless phone to feature Motoblur, Motorola’s Android-powered content delivery service.

The Devour, which includes Gmail, with posts, messages, photos from sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, syncs contracts from work and personal email services. It also sports a 3.1-inch capacitive screen with a HVGA resolution, pre-loaded applications such as Google Talk, YouTube and Google Search and will ship with an 8GB microSD card pre-installed.

Google and Verizon Wireless have delivered Android-based mobile applications and devices as part of a new agreement between the two companies. The two plan to co-develop several Android-based devices that will be pre-loaded with applications from both companies as well as third-party developers.

The two also plan to create, market and distribute products and services, with Verizon Wireless supplying nationwide distribution channels.

Enderle Group analyst Rob Enderle points out Android really isn’t Linux, rather it is more of a hybrid between Linux and a proprietary Google product, much like the MacOS isn’t really UNIX but a hybrid between UNIX and Apple.

“The end result has been a vastly more consumer-friendly product than Linux alone has proven to be,” he says.

Enderle says Windows Mobile 7 is expected in market by year end and it is expected to be a major change from prior offerings blending Zune UI elements and embracing a much more robust application store environment.

“Still Microsoft has lost a lot of developers to Apple and Google and since these developers have limited resources it will be tough to get them back,” Enderle says. “Right now the big battle for developers is between Apple and Google and the latest surveys I have suggest Apple is winning.”

Barbara Gengler more than a decade experience covering the Silicon Valley hi-tech market before moving to the East Coast. She previously worked for trade publications and for print and online magazines.

Google Steps Up White Space Chase

By John Greaves

Google recently made a significant move in the battle over white space by proposing to the FCC to be one of several administrators of a TV bandwith’s geo-location database. This is in response to FCC filings requiring such a database to minimize signal interference between white space devices and broadcast signals.

This is a key component of the fight to make unused white space available for bandwidth expansion, as signal interference is one of the key arguments made against such a move by white space opponents like the National Association of Broadcasters.

According to the proposal, Google would build and oversee the database as well as provide data repository, registration and determination of available channels/query process.

Having Google, a major industry player, be one of the administrators begs the question of whether letting Google keep track of what channels are available for bandwidth as well as the location and identification of all white space devices might not run counter to an open and competitive marketplace.

However, Rick Rotondo, CMO for Spectrum Bridge, which deployed the world’s first TV white spaces network and also applied to be a database manager, says Google’s proposal does not surprise him.

It’s a competitive environment,” Rotondo says. “But I think Google is actually trying to make the playing field more level.”

In a Jan. 8 blog on the Spectrum Bridge site, Rotondo had previously explained that the FCC is not granting unlimited authority in authorizing white space database managers.

“Specifically, in the case of TV white spaces database managers, the FCC is authorizing companies to represent themselves as being able to meet the minimum requirements the FCC has set out in its previous ‘Report and Order,’ as well as some new requirements spelled out in the recent Public Notice,” the blog states.

Rotondo’s comments echo Google’s official position on this issue. “I see myself here, in D.C., as playing kind of a defensive role, in terms of maintaining open platforms where they exist today, and more offensively, trying to be constructive in terms of creating new platforms and particularly ensuring that those new platforms also remain open to innovation and consumer choice,” says Richard Whitt, Google’s Washington Telecom and Media Counsel, in a January 2009 interview for CircleID.com.

That view has not changed. A Google spokesperson who asked not to be identified tells DMB, “We strongly supported the FCC’s decision to adopt an open, unlicensed model for white spaces, similar to what exists for Wi-Fi. Much as open, unlicensed access to the Wi-Fi spectrum has led to its widespread use, open, unlicensed access is also crucial to fulfilling the potential of white spaces.”

Whitt further supports the argument. “From the Google perspective, the C-Block, to us, was a successful story. We came into it with the hopes of triggering the openness conditions, by making the bid that would enable that to happen, which we did.”

Some may wonder if Google’s move signals the impending doom of 3G and 4G technology. However, such fears are unfounded, according to Digital Society analyst George Ou, a former network engineer who built and designed wired network, wireless network, Internet, storage, security and server infrastructure for various fortune 100 companies.

“The idea that you’re going to take unmanned white space and replace 3G and 4G is wrong. The guys that like white space always talk about propagation, and how Wi-Fi doesn’t have enough propagation,” Ou says. “What they don’t understand is propagation sounds like a good thing but it’s a bad thing. The more you can propagate the less you can use. The lower the power, the more the signal dies as it gets further away, the more you can use the same spectrum channels. That’s why Wi-Fi has such pathetically low signal strength, so you can reuse the same signals.”

Google tends to take the opposite view. A Google spokesperson says, “This spectrum is extremely valuable and has the potential to transform the way we connect to the Internet. As Larry Page has put it, ‘white spaces’ are like ‘Wi-Fi on steroids’ - wireless Internet with much faster speeds, stronger signals and more affordable costs.”

As far as the database is concerned, Spectrum Bridge’s Rotondo points out that the vague nature of the FCC’s ruling has left the door wide open for interpretation. “There is nothing saying you have to tell a device the best channel, you just have to give a list of available channels,” he said.

Google says it has yet to hear from the FCC regarding its proposal, which is understandable due to the enormity of creating a national broadband plan and presenting it to Congress in time for the new March 17 deadline.

John Greaves is a writer living in Dallas, Ga. His work has appeared in newspapers, magazines and websites.

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