Searching for the right word…
I had to go to dictionary.com after reading this article.
My first thought was “bombastic” but that wasn’t quite right, so I tried “pretentious” but still not quite the word for what I was reading.
I had to go to dictionary.com after reading this article.
My first thought was “bombastic” but that wasn’t quite right, so I tried “pretentious” but still not quite the word for what I was reading.
Click here for the only information I could find on this, having heard about it on the radio tonight. The BBC has released the latest series of Doctor Who on a DVD it describes as the World’s first that is fully accessible, meaning that it has audio menus for everything, simple button press menus that don’t require visual navigation, and audio captioning on every scene, as well as the usual sub-titles.
This is really cool stuff. We try hard to impress our clients with the importance of accessibility. It’s a legal requirement of course, but developments like this make the argument a lot easier.
http://www.digitimes.com/bits_chips/a20061117PR200.html
Materials and manufacturing costs for the 20GB model exceed the suggested retail price of US$499 by a total of $306.85. For the 60GB version, costs exceed the US$599 price by US$241.35. And look what people are doing to them once they’ve got them out of the store:
Excellent sledge-hammer action.
This is very interesting: a banner advertising O2’s UK mobile phone service, in Polish. There have been a few stories recently about media focusing on the Polish market, including a local paper in Reading publishing a Polish edition as a trial. The price is in pounds, so this isn’t a Polish banner that’s lost its way: it’s intended to be served in the UK.
What I’m interested in is how the media buyers decide where to buy this campaign, and what languages to use for which campaigns in which sites? The site I caught this on isn’t one devoted to a specific national group, the content is in English, so what led to the decision to serve a Polish banner ad?
The UK is so international today (which is a good thing) that I’m now wondering what languages I might see next. And how those of us who work in online advertising ought to be communicating with a multi-lingual international audience.
In his blog Jupiter Analyst Barry Parr is enthusing about the development of user generated video today, recollecting how he felt about the arrival of the mass-market web in 1994.
He’s suggesting that a lot of the pioneering work is going to be done by amateurs with pro-sumer technology. The shift from broadcast TV, in the hands of a few well-funded companies, to individuals and small groups, and to broadcast over IP by thousands or millions is well underway.
Can’t help but love this.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDxMQaMqsig]
Sigur Ros are getting very popular here… The BBC have picked up on them and they’re using them a lot in links and trailers. Rather like what they did with Lemon Jelly a few years back.
When your mate gets a new phone, do you worry you might not be able to call him any more? Your old phone and his new one might be incompatible somehow?
Me either.
So why doesn’t the new Skype beta work with the previous production version? My colleague in New York had to downgrade again after installing the latest version, because he was breaking all of our conversations.
We used to have something called regression testing, when I was a developer.
I saw this site a while back, but it was demonstrated to me again at a meeting with Autonomy this week.
Autonomy do search, and they do it very well from what I’ve seen. The BBC use them, as do the Financial Times and the CIA apparently, so I think we can assume their search solution works well.
What really intrigued me, was that they have the ability to index the speech in videos, in multiple languages. Speech recognition software has been around for many years, but it requires training, and hasn’t really worked to date as a mass market offering. The Star Trek computer that recognises your speech while there’s a massive inter-stellar battle and lots of shouting going on is still some way off.
But the limitations of speech recognition don’t really matter when it comes to search, as it’s fuzzier in its requirements. If it only hears 75% of the words, it probably still works well enough. So Autonomy’s use of speech recognition for search starts to sound pretty interesting.
So here’s the demo: Blinkx. It’s indexing speech in video content all over the world, and providing users with a search interface that’s really very nice. Have a look at this and see if you can figure out what I searched for.
I like this a lot, and I can think of lots of clients who would like it too. We work with Five on their CSI Video Store, for example. Imagine the tool that shows you the episode where the car blew up. Click here to visit Blinkx.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn_78k4Jq84]
This video was created to attract attention for the new hidefchamber website we’ve built for BT. I had serious doubts about my colleagues’ mental health the day it was being made. Why are they all screaming at their PCs?
No “when we roll we roll big” in this one…