•
Have you ever found yourself wondering why your friend hasn't called - even though they promised - only to realize you've been sitting in the cellular equivalent of the Dead Sea for the past hour and a half? Sometimes, it just happens that the spot you decided to wait out an important call had no coverage and now, you could know that beforehand. Even better, you can look at your city's coverage before you even choose a wireless service in the first place. Root Wireless today released its Root Mobile crowd-sourcing app for Blackberry and Android phones, which pulls data from phones and aggregates it into a street-level coverage map. Sponsor According to the company, the app is "a free beta application utilizing smartphones as network monitoring devices" to help people choose which cell provider to go with. Currently, the mash-up map , which is offered on CNET , provides information on 17 different areas for AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon. From the company on the specifics on the network testing: Root Mobile conducts tests that measure signal strength, data transmission speeds, network connection failures and other performance indicators. It is noteworthy that these tests differ from data transmission speed tests conducted by others using PCs, precisely because Root Mobile is engineered to determine real-world network performance as experienced by people using smartphones - findings that for the first time objectively measure and map true, real-world performance from the perspective of the smartphone consumer. Users can choose to run a network test when they want. The application otherwise runs unnoticed in the background. Apps for Blackberry and Android phones are already available with one for Windows Mobile phones on the way before the end of the second quarter. An iPhone app is said to be in development. We have to wonder if differences between handsets and reception have been taken into account or have we moved beyond that? The map lets us choose between what type of reported info we would like to see, whether "Signal", "Data" or "Network", but there is no device category. We can also see the number of zones reporting "No Bars", "Access Failure" and "Hot Zones" (such as dropped calls), but no information on how many people have reported these issues. With a crowd sourced app and mash-up like this, we'd love to know if the problem is widespread or if, in reality, there's been one person who's been there and not gotten any reception. Maybe they've dropped their phone one too many times? We don't know. Either way, it looks like a neat idea that we think we would like to compare with those carrier-provided coverage maps. Let's see if your map gets in the way of the game now, Verizon. Discuss
See the original post here:
Can You Hear Me Now? Check This Crowd-Sourced Mobile Coverage Map
Tags:
access-failure,
background apps,
beta application,
City,
coverage,
Dead Sea,
game,
measure signal strength,
mobile,
network,
performance,
perspective,
phone,
such-as-dropped,
windows,
windows-mobile,
wireless
•
Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia , will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can't be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment. But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and other online news sources? Sponsor Even Moka Pantages , the communications officer for the WikiMedia Foundation , said she agreed with this sentiment when she spoke this morning at the South By South West festival in Austin, at a panel entitled " Process Journalism: Getting It First, While Getting It Right ". Here's the thing - we have to say that everything she said before answering this question seems to say otherwise. Tackling Real-Time Content The panel featured journalists from the New York Times , SeattlePI.com , Journerdism.com and Gizmodo and a common theme was that user-created content - whether tweets, YouTube videos, or otherwise - could and should be used in breaking news coverage. The panelists all agreed that this content should be verified in some way and should be presented to the audience with a high degree of transparency. Each panelist spoke about a specific case study - the New York Times' coverage of last summer's protests in Iran, for example - and discussed how they gathered crowd-sourced information and attempted to verify its authenticity. Robert Mackey, the reporter for the New York Times, gave examples of translating chants heard in YouTube videos and matching up street signs that flashed on screen with Google Maps. Once he was sure of its validity, he said, he would add it to the coverage. "When you're sitting in an office in New York and you're trying to confirm that something was shot in Tehran that day was actually shot in Tehran that day, you're not going to be able to verify that," he said. "The idea is that it's a conversation on the web about this event." The Newsroom Moves Online Monica Guzman, a reporter for SeattlePI.com, spoke similarly about her website's breaking coverage of a shooting and the subsequent day-long man hunt. SeattlePI, formerly a print publication, has existed solely online for nearly a year now. Most of the breaking information that day, she said, came from Twitter. "The media collaborated with itself and it was one big swirling newsroom on Twitter," said Guzman. "We ended up using tweets as starting points. And Twitter did end up breaking a bunch of stuff." While SeattlePI was able to send reporters out and verify some of the information in person, how was the rest of it verified? "Common sense," she answered. The Seattle Times, she said, had more than 500 people collaborating on Google Wave to gather information on the same story. Wikipedia Takes On The Mumbai Terror Attacks Then came Pantages' turn to discuss how the Wikipedia community addressed the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai . While it is said, as we started out with, that Wikipedia just shouldn't be trusted, the case we heard for its coverage of a breaking news situation far surpassed what you might often see on your average blog or even traditional newspaper. One particular user, Kensplanets , was a driving force behind the coverage, using breaking news from IBN.com as a source. In cases such as this one, the crowdsourcing aspect not only allows multiple points of view, but also allows aggregation from multiple points in a number of different languages and locations. "It's not just U.S.-centric information," Pantages explained, "You have the New York Times, Reuters, Times of India - they're all there." According to Pantages , by the end of the first day of the Wikipedia article's life, it had been edited more than 360 times, by 70 different editors referring to 28 separate sources from news outlets around the web. While this could seem like a situation rife for misdirection and misinformation, the constant discussion swirling around the creation of an article, Pantages explained, is "really similar to what you would think should be in a newsroom." Nonetheless, we still disparage Wikipedia as an untrusted source of news. Wikipedia As News Aggregator Just like other news aggregation services, Wikipedia takes many sources and puts them in to a central location, but with the added benefit of human curation instead of algorithmic collection. "There's no real-time reporting going on in Wikipedia, it's real-time aggregation," Pantages said. So the very first level of information vetting, which happens at the reporting level, has already taken place by the time it reaches the site. Then the hundreds or thousands of editors continue to scrutinize the information, discussing edits and potential changes in the back channels. The news we read in our daily newspapers, on the other hand, is curated by only a small number of people. Surely, there is the question of qualification, but many of Wikipedia's contributors and editors are, themselves, professionals. In contrast, we often accept news from other blogs as immediately trustworthy, while a Wikipedia article such as this one, which is transparent in its creation, its sourcing and its transmutation over time, we dismiss as flawed from conception. Today, the 2008 Mumbai Attacks article sits at more nearly 43,000 words with over 150 different sources cited and 1,245 unique editors. While Pantages argues that "Wikipedia should not be a source, it should be a starting off point," we would have to argue the same for news media in general. In this crowd-sourced news environment we've entered, blindly consuming news and content, from any source, is an ill-advised path to follow. With that said, if we are willing to take crowd-sourced content - whether tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, videos or whatever else - as valid sources for information about our world, then a collection of these same media as carefully poured over and curated as found in a Wikipedia article should be even more trusted, not less, than those bits on their own. Traditional media get bits of breaking news wrong all the time, but we accept that as part of the game. To vilify Wikipedia for the same errors sets unequal standards and besides, you'll likely never see the same level of transparency in traditional media about where it went wrong. With Wikipedia, it's all laid bare for the world to see. Discuss
See the original post:
Why Wikipedia Should Be Trusted As A Breaking News Source
Tags:
aggregator,
coverage,
daily,
facebook,
game,
India,
online,
pantages,
question,
reporter,
seattle,
sxsw 2010,
times,
Wikipedia
•
Think the semantic web is all hype with no bite? Paul Allen backed semantic startup Evri will announce tomorrow that it has been acquired, we've learned from a reliable source. The service specializes in extracting the names of people, places and things from raw streams of text in order to facilitate smart user navigation and related content recommendation. The company launched a striking new version of its website earlier today. Evri launched just short of two years ago and raised $8 million from Vulcan, the fund of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. More interesting than the business side of this story, though, is the technology. Evri brings the semantic and the real-time web together in some very interesting ways. Sponsor We profiled Evri as one of 10 intriguing companies in the real-time web space in our recent research report The Real-Time Web and Its Future . Also included was the now Google-acquired Aardvark. (See our coverage: How I Loved and Lost an Aardvark ) Here's how we described the real time part of what Evri does in that report: Evri is a semantic Web recommendation service for online publishers. The company tracks the real-time Web to know when it needs to create or update a topic page for one of its emerging news topics. Evri watches news sources to see when a news topic is trending, including articles on Wikipedia that publicly available data shows have leaped in page views. Then it visits structured databases like Wikipedia and FreeBase to check for updates to entries about related entities. It then creates or updates a topic page with news links, photos and Twitter search results. The language used in those Twitter posts is analyzed and the names of news entities in the posts are linked to other Evri topic pages, like pivots. Evri has done lots of other things as well, including a blog widget, an iPhone app, automated content portals for publishers and a sentiment analysis product. The company didn't see a particularly large amount of hype but was closely watched. Robert Scoble, for example, named Evri one of his top startups to watch for 2010 , even a year and a half after it launched. We haven't been able to identify the company that has acquired Evri yet but the most obvious candidate would be its neighbor and kin Microsoft, where the service would compliment the Powerset team nicely and change the Bing user experience in news search dramatically. Now that we know that Google is working on building a real-time index of the web ( our coverage ) the prospect of a competitor upping the ante with near real-time semantic parsing, riding on top of real-time indexing, sounds like a hot move. A number of people have raised the possibility of an Amazon acquisition as well. Evri was also tested out by Yahoo! starting last Fall as a way to facilitate navigation throughout its Sports content pages. Take that, semantic web doubters. We'll update this post when the acquiring party is identified. Geeky types interested in an in-depth explanation of Evri's work would be well served by checking out a 6 part video series on YouTube wherein Deep Dhillon, CTO of Evri, discusses the company's technology with students at the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. Discuss
Follow this link:
Paul Allen Backed Semantic Service Evri Has Been Acquired
Tags:
amazon,
Business,
coverage,
Microsoft,
names,
news,
powerset,
real,
semantic,
sports,
technology,
Wikipedia,
yahoo