#LeapInto Google I/O

#LeapInto Google I/O — from leapmotion.com; with thanks going out to Mr. Cal Keen at Calvin College for this resource

 Excerpt:

Over the past year, we’ve had a great time working with awesome people at Google on a variety of uses for the Leap Motion technology. On April 22, the Google Earth team announced support for Leap Motion (video here), which is now available to anyone (right now, our early access developers) that has a Leap Motion Controller plus the desktop version of Google Earth.

We’re excited to see the #LeapInto Google Earth experiences from our developer community, and now Google has asked us to share the fun with attendees during Google I/O May 15-17 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

What if the HCI within Leap could be applied towards an entire video wall / display?

 

Also see:

 

Yahoo! and Samsung form multi-year partnership to deliver Interactive TV — from dailyfinance.com by Business Wirevia The Motley Fool
Partnership to provide real-time, enhanced entertainment and advertising to homes across the United States

Excerpt:

SUNNYVALE, Calif. & RIDGEFIELD PARK, N.J.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Yahoo! (NAS: YHOO) and Samsung today announced an expanded multi-year partnership to integrate Yahoo!’s Broadcast Interactivity platform into Samsung 2012 Smart TVs. Yahoo! Broadcast Interactivity, powered by its automatic content recognition (ACR) technology, SoundPrintTM, will be deployed in Samsung’s SyncPlus platform, enabling new opportunities for intelligent content discovery, advertising and engagement, bringing an unprecedented level of interactivity in the living room.

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From DSC:
Another steps towards:

 

The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV

 

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A fifth of TV sets connected to the Internet by 2016 — from digitaltvresearch.com

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Welcome to Star Scholar U., where a personal brand is the credential — from The Chronicle by By Jeffrey R. Young

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Welcome to Star Scholar U 2

Keri Rasmussen for The Chronicle

Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason U., helped build an online-education site, Marginal Revolution U, based on a blog he runs with Alex Tabarrok. “In part we did it just to show it could be done—that you can have a Web site which looks nice and works,” Mr. Cowen said.

 

Excerpt:

A new kind of university has begun to emerge: Call it Star Scholar U.

Professors with large followings and technical prowess are breaking off to start their own online institutions, delivering courses with little or no backing from traditional campuses.

Founding a university may sound dramatic, but in an era of easy-to-use online tools it can be done as a side project—akin to blogging or writing a textbook. Soon there could be hundreds of Star Scholar U’s.

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5 perspectives on the future of the human interface — from techcrunch.com by Alex Williams

Excerpt:

The next generation of apps will require developers to think more of the human as the user interface. It will become more about the need to know how an app works while a person stands up or with their arms in the air more so than if they’re sitting down and pressing keys with their fingers.

Also see:

 

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Rethinking carrots: A new method for measuring what players find most rewarding and motivating about your game — from gamasutra.com by Scott Rigby, Richard Ryan

Excerpt:

The Player Experience of Need Satisfaction model (PENS) outlines three basic psychological needs, those of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, that we have demonstrated lie at the heart of the player’s fun, enjoyment, and valuing of games. By collecting players’ reports of how these needs are being satisfied, the PENS model can strongly and significantly predict positive experiential and commercial outcomes, in many cases much more strongly than more traditional measures of fun and enjoyment. And despite the simplicity of the model conceptually, it shows promise as a “unified theory” of the player experience by demonstrating predictive value regardless of genre, platform, or even the individual preferences of players.

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Pearson project will let professors mix free and paid content in e-textbooks — from The Chronicle by Alisha Azevedo

Excerpt:

Pearson, a major textbook publisher, continued its push into digital education on Monday by introducing a service that allows instructors to create e-textbooks using open-access content and Pearson material.

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A river of data — from educationnext.org by Bror Saxberg
Making the learning experience more effective

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How should teaching change in the age of Siri?– from MindShift

Excerpt:

 Short of banning smartphones (a short-term solution, at best), the evolution of artificial intelligence services like Siri means that there will be a shift from a focus on finding the answer as the endpoint to a greater focus on analysis. You have the answer, but so what? What does that answer mean in a real-life situation?

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Degreed launches crowdfunding campaign for reimagined ‘digital diploma’ — from gigaom.com by Ki Mae Heussner
San Francisco startup Degreed is challenging the traditional college diploma with an online service that tracks and scores educational achievements from established institutions as well as new online learning platforms. Ahead of a public launch in 2013, Degreed this week began a crowd funding campaign.

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A capitalist’s dilemma, whoever wins on Tuesday — from the New York Times by Clayton Christensen

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

In a way, this mirrors the microeconomic paradox explored in my book “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which shows how successful companies can fail by making the “right” decisions in the wrong situations. America today is in a macroeconomic paradox that we might call the capitalist’s dilemma. Executives, investors and analysts are doing what is right, from their perspective and according to what they’ve been taught. Those doctrines were appropriate to the circumstances when first articulated — when capital[From DSC: or from an educational perspective, we could use the word information] was scarce.

But we’ve never taught our apprentices that when capital is abundant and certain new skills are scarce, the same rules are the wrong rules. Continuing to measure the efficiency of capital prevents investment in empowering innovations that would create the new growth we need because it would drive down their RONA, ROCE and I.R.R.

 

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Gartner sees 821M unit smart device mkt in 2012; 1.2B 2013 — from forbes.com by Eric Savitz

 

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Today: Find me a weather channel. Tomorrow: Find me a channel on how to learn algrebra. By Daniel Christian

 

Excerpt:

The voice control functions of the Easy Remote app are powered by the AT&T Watson? speech recognition technology using AT&T’s Speech API, which uses advanced natural language processing to recognize and understand spoken words. Also developed in AT&T Labs, AT&T Watson? speech recognition technology has been powering advanced speech services in the marketplace for many years and is now available for third-party developers to use in their own apps.

Also see:

 

 

8 things to know about the new Microsoft Office  — from inc.com by Christina DesMarais

Microsoft starts integrating Skype into Office — from techcrunch.com by Frederic Lardinois

Next version of Microsoft Office puts emphasis on subscriptions with Office 365 — from techcrunch.com by Frederic Lardinois

Licensing is the Achilles Heel for the new Microsoft Office — from techcrunch.com by Alex Williams

Microsoft’s new Office: The cloud finally takes center stage — from cnet.com by Mary Jo Foley
A public preview of Microsoft’s coming Office 2013 client is out today. But Office 365 and SkyDrive are the real stars of the new Office show.

New Microsoft Office taps into the cloud — from cnet.com by Lance Whitney
Like Windows 8, the new version of Office will let you sign in with an online account, providing you with the same settings across different devices.

The new Microsoft Office — in pictures – from cnet.com

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http://news.cnet.com/2300-10805_3-10012965-15.html

 

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New Microsoft Office to embrace Windows 8 touch-screen tablets — from cnet.com by Lance Whitney
Demoing the applications in the new Office suite today, Microsoft emphasized the ability to integrate with Windows 8 using taps and other touch-based gestures.

Microsoft Office Home and Student 2013 to be bundled on all Windows RT tablets

Hands On: Microsoft Office 2013 and Office 365 — from PCMag.com by Jill Duffy

New Microsoft Office ropes in Skype, Yammer, SkyDrive — from gigaom.com by Barb Darrow

What the new Microsoft Office gets wrong — from fastcodesign.com by Austin Carr
Microsoft unveiled a preview of its latest version of Office, and the design is a schizophrenic mess. Here’s why.

Office 15: Microsoft’s Best Bet For Beating Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive — from FastCompany.com by Austin Carr
With one billion Office users worldwide, the newest upgrade to Microsoft’s productivity suite could give the company a significant hold on the cloud, which Gartner estimates will become a $149 billion industry by 2015.

 

 

 

 

Videos from Qualcomm Uplinq 2012 show the future of Smart TV
— from hexus.net by Mark Tyson

Excerpt:
Here are the feature highlights of these “redefined” Smart TVs:

  • Console quality gaming
  • Concurrency of apps
  • Miracast wireless technology allowing smartphone and tablet screens to partake in multi-screen interactivity
  • Personalisation and facial recognition
  • Gestures
  • HD picture quality
  • HD video calling

 

From DSC:
…and add to that list the power of customized learning and analytics!

Beyond Siri - A report regarding the future of Virtual Assistants -- from VisionMobile -- June 2012

 

Contents

  • Virtual assistants: four generations in 20 years
  • The evolving VA technology landscape
  • The VA Competitive landscape
  • VA business models: Revenue share rather than paid app downloads
  • Leaders and challengers in the VA value chain
  • Beyond Siri: What’s in store in the VA market

Behind this report

  • Lead researcher: Marlène Sellebråten
  • Project lead: Michael Vakulenko
  • Marketing lead: Matos Kapetanakis
  • Editorial: Andreas Constantinou

 

Leap Motion founder on why 3D input will dominate the future– from betakit.com by Darrell Etherington

 

 

leap-motion

 

 

Excerpt:

Leap Motion is a 3D controller that made its public debut this week, after two years of work on the device, during which time founders Michael Buckwald and David Holz raised $14.55 million in funding. The Leap Motion is a motion control interface designed for use with existing computers,and in demo videos the device calls to mind natural, sci-fi interfaces like the one found in the Tom Cruise blockbuster Minority Report. It’s motion control that doesn’t look gimmicky or full of compromises, and CEO and founder Buckwald told BetaKit in an interview that in terms of underlying technology, Leap is heads and tails above most of what’s out there.

“Our technology is the only one focused on bringing motion control to the desktop, rather than trying to take what’s been built for TV (large gesture sensing) and making it work for computers,” he said. “We incorporate natural motions in closer range (three cubic feet from the device), in far greater detail and sensitivity, than any product on the market, and we’re the only solution that tracks all 10 fingers individually in 3D space, making Leap about 200 times as accurate as other motion-control technologies.”

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From DSC:
I saw this yesterday, but I also wanted to thank Mr. Cal Keen who also brought it to my attention again today;  thanks Cal for reminding me I needed to post this! Cal mentioned it isn’t due out until Dec 2012 or Jan 2013.

 

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