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If you want to map a locale or score some directions but want to avoid driving into a pole, you can now use your pipes . Google Maps now recognizes Search by Voice on Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 phones. Google introduced Search by Voice in 2008 and has been rolling that functionality out into different parts of the Googlesphere since. Now Google Maps 4.1 comes with voice search. Sponsor The categories of search that Maps will now recognize vocally includes the full spectrum of search fields already enabled for mobile. business name business category city, state ZIP code postal address intersection, city, state airport code latitude longitude Hands-free it is not, however. To start the search you still need to open Google Maps and hit "call" prior to making your search. The install is available on qualifying phones at m.google.com/maps . An interesting aspect of the language settings the ability to select not just your language but, if it's English, the accent you use. I wonder if this functionality will be available to Spanish-speakers or whether the different accents within Yue Chinese will eventually be recognized. Discuss
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Google Mobile Announces Search by Voice for Maps
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Thanks to voice-controlled systems like Ford's Sync , drivers don't have to take their eyes off the road if they want to place a call or switch to the next track on their playlists. Today, Ford announced the next step in the company's roadmap to connect mobile phones and cars. With Sync AppLink, Ford is introducing a new platform that allows developers to offer voice controls for their mobile apps on Sync-enabled cars. At first, AppLink will only work with Android and BlackBerry devices, but the company plans to offer support for Apple's iPhone OS and other smartphone platforms next year. Sponsor The first Sync-enabled applications, which will be available later this year, are Pandora , Stitcher , and Orangatame's OpenBreak Twitter app. Even though Sync is based on the Microsoft Auto platform, Ford did not announce that it plans to support the upcoming Windows Phone operating system. Drivers will be able to control AppLink-enabled mobile apps through voice commands that will be routed through the Sync system, as well as from buttons on the steering wheel. The first car to feature this new service will be the 2011 Ford Fiesta . Ford plans to offer AppLink on all Sync-equipped cars next year. Existing Sync users will be able to update their car's software at a later point as well. Same Apps - Just Controlled by SYNC From the user's perspective, installing a Sync-enabled app is no different from installing a regular app on their mobile phones. The only difference is that the car will notice when you start a Sync-enabled app and allow you to control the app's function with your voice. This allows Ford to plug right into the existing developer ecosystems and distribution channels for all of these platforms and developers only have to make relatively minor updates to make their apps compatible with Sync. It's important to stress that these applications are running on the user's phone and not on the car's built-in Sync hardware. Sync only passes the voice commands on to the application but doesn't interact with the app beyond this. In Ford's parlance, these are "brought-in" apps, as opposed to "built-in" apps (like Ford's Vehicle Health Report and 911 Assist) or "beamed-in" cloud-based apps that send traffic information and turn-by-turn directions to the car. Sync AppLink for Developers Ford is currently working with a small group of trusted partners and plans to open up the Sync API and software development kit to a broader selection of developers later this year. Ford also announced the launch of a Sync developer community that will give developers a pathway to partner with Ford on Sync-enabled applications. Image credit: Flickr user Jim Trottier Discuss
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Ford Sync Will Soon Let You Control Your Mobile Apps by Voice
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Today at the Politics Online Conference , Microsoft unveiled a new crowdsourcing system hosted on Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Town Hall . TownHall is advertised as "software that allows you to easily create a destination for folks to voice opinions, identify problems, offer solutions and come together around common interests and concerns." Sponsor TownHall focuses on "rich engagement" in the political sphere, aimed at candidates and politicians as well as political interest groups. It allows for the creation of a social media-rich site that runs across platforms and provides methods for gathering information as well as expressing opinions, by furnishing architecture where visitors can make queries, vote on issues, posit and respond, and create community conversation. TownHall is currently available only for the PC. In the coming months, Microsoft intends to provide TownHall clients for the iPhone, the iPad, Google Android and Windows Phone 7. The software for TownHall can be downloaded free of charge. Users pay to host their site on Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing program. TownHall is just a part of a new Microsoft Initiative called Campaign Ready. The power of social media - the electronic version of listening to what the voters say - started with Howard Dean's abortive bid for the White House in 2004 and came to full fruition with Barack Obama's successful one. Subsequent to his election, Obama has shepherded through a series of open government initiatives, which require federal government agencies to seek transparent avenues toward public engagement. Microsoft has posted more Town Hall screenshots on Flickr. Discuss
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Microsoft's New Platform: Politics
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I love to sit on the beach. One of the coolest things about the beach is the number of layers of visual depth. Look at the sand and it's beautiful, but zoom your eyes in closer and you'll see a whole layer of life running around on the sand that you didn't see before. Look even closer and you can see individual grains of sand, water and light dancing between them. Look closer still and you see that each grain of sand is a unique object with its own texture. If your eyes are strong enough, or you have a machine to help you, you can see even more layers by looking closer still. That's what Twitter is going to be like with the launch of Twitter Annotations this Summer. It's a beautiful vision, with huge potential, but there's another way to look at this analogy: you don't build on the beach sand because it shifts too much. Will Annotations live up to its incredible promise? Sponsor What Annotations Are Last week Twitter announced a forthcoming feature called Twitter Annotations: it's a system for almost any metadata to be connected to any Twitter message when it's published. Inside every Tweet is now a space where you could put or find anything, including links out to further instructions or larger bodies of information. That's always been the case with the 140 characters of content - but now we're talking about systematic metadata intended for machines, to augment the content. The idea is dripping with potential, but also some risk. Isn't much of life's meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? Twitter has been considering adding Annotations for at least two years, according to Platform Team member Raffi Krikorian. That's a relatively large portion of the company's young life. Every time a new bit of metadata was added to Tweets, like geolocation information was last Fall, the company would ask itself "should we be doing this, or should we just open up the platform for and and all metadata?" Now the company has decided to do just that. Twitter publishing tools can now add a description to any tweet their users publish, not as a part of the 140 character message, but as a small machine-readable metadata field that travels along with the content. What might this look like? We could see Annotations fields like: Link to a media file, like podcast enclosures, photos linked to, etc. Context about the Tweet like where was the author when it was published, maybe what the weather was like there at the time. Your Twitter publishing interface could offer you a special option to write reviews of movies, books, or links you're sharing. The ISBN of the book, a link to a preview of the movie and the number of stars in your rating could be included in the Tweet Annotations. Any way you can classify, describe, append or otherwise enrich a Tweet with words or numbers can be included in Annotations. You Tweet, you attach a characteristic or quality, you define the characteristic and then you provide a value of how or what that Tweet did relative to the quality being referenced. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and more will make it easy for users to add these annotations. Yes, this is meaningful in large part because of the 140 character limit on Twitter messages themselves, but isn't much of life's meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? From Annotations Come Analysis Annotating a single Tweet is uninteresting, it's when you hit the Twitter databases and gather together all the Tweets that share a characteristic that thinks get exciting. When those selected Tweets can then be cross-referenced with other sets of data from outside Twitter - that's when the word fecund starts feeling inadequate. Show me all the Tweets from my friends that have links to music and play me those songs. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and others are going to make viewing that kind of data a whole lot easier. Tweetmeme's Nick Halstead believes that Annotations will be used most extensively to communicate webhooks, links to instructions for a Twitter client to follow. He thinks it will enable game play and help Twitter start acquiring more users again. "Because of the size of the data you can put in the annotations, I think people will come up with links to offsite resources. Seesmic is building their own platform for Windows to support plug-ins, but this reaches much further, but this lets Twitter clients augment a tweet with other services. Sf you were Stocktweets, you could attach a link in the namespace that's in stocktweets, Seesmic could follow that link back to Stocktweets and ask it how to render it. So you could put a chart and any other associated information. It's like FBML [Facebook Markup Language], the ability to embed applications inside the Twitter clients. Maybe threaded conversations. A game of Scrabble where the link points at a currently rendered scrabble board, so other people could look at the board and join in playing it. Annotations and webhooks would allow gaming to start happening on Twitter." Halstead believes an Alpha version of Annotations could be made available to developers in a month. How about showing me all the Tweets from anyone that are referencing the President of the United States (subject: POTUS?), analyze the sentiment in the messages, show me where those Twitter users were located and tell me how those local sentiments change over time. Send me an alert when one of those starts to shift radically. Show me all the Tweets by people in their 20's and in their 50's (imagine an author age tag in Annotations, why not?), living near the site of a disastrous event. How do those discussions differ? There are all kinds of interesting questions that could be tackled when the developer world's imagination runs wild on the terms of description applied to our messages. Of course it will be tempting to draw all kinds of conclusions from this rich data. We'll surely be able to draw a whole lot of value from it. "You can learn something from almost anything," Big Data cruncher and 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar says. "Just give me enough data, I'll figure out something." But let's keep in mind the words of social network scientist danah boyd, who wrote the following on her blog this morning: Time and time again, I see computational scientists mistake behavioral traces for cultural logic...Big Data creates tremendous opportunities for those who know how to assess the context of the data and ask the right questions into it. But mucking with Big Data alone is not research. And seeing patterns in Big Data is not the same as hypothesis testing. Patterns invite more questions than they answer. Tweet Power Politics Twitter's Krikorian says the site will probably list "trending annotations" just like it lists trending topics today. There will probably be a wiki where anyone can find out what namespaces are being used for what purposes. Really though, the classification system is going to be determined by the market. That's something that worries a lot of people. "People who believe in building standards are conerned about our blase attitude about how we want to run annotations," Krikorian says. He believes that the developer community will work things out for itself, just as it has in the past. "There has been a lot of emergent behavior around how to relate to tweets anyway, without our imposing much structure around it. The Twitter platform is continuously evolving - the developers will figure it out. Twitter developers iterate in public." That's likely to be cold comfort for people focused on the power of structured data standards. Many people are calling for Twitter to embrace the well-built efforts of the Semantic Web community. Krikorian says that 90% of Twitter developers don't know what the Semantic Web is but that there's certainly room for standards lovers to work within the Annotations scheme. Still, the absence of standard terminology could really be a problem. Annotations can't be changed retroactively, either. Krikorian says that major players will dominate the obvious use cases for Annotations and the company will monitor and highlight really innovative Annotations developed by people on the margins. We'll see how well that will work. Imagination will make the sky the limit for this publishing platform used easily by more than 100 million people around the world. But a shortage of forethought, planning and agreed-upon standards may bring that platform's aspirations back down to earth quickly in the future. Time will tell. Discuss
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What Twitter Annotations Mean
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Virtualization is a star - at least in the big stage of the iPad. Since the device launched, Citrix Receiver has been one of the top ranked business apps in the store. Chris Fleck, mobility leader on the Citrix team shares this demonstration showing a Citrix Receiver application enabled with four applications running side by side on iPad. He goes further to show the same apps running on a host of other devices. Sponsor Born to Multitask Citrix Receiver uses HDX, the name of the remoting technology Citrix has innovated based on the ICA Protocol (Independent Computing Architecture) the company has been developing on for over 15 years. Fleck tells us that HDX is conceptually similar to RDP/VNC but it includes significant optimizations for WAN performance, Multimedia, and user experience across multiple devices and OS's. Here is a clip from the demonstration video showing four side-by-side apps running on iPad. Citrix Receiver is able to zoom on in each application to make it full screen, or display all four simultaneously. Many Apps - Many Devices The demonstration continues showing each device in this picture, from Mac to PC, iPhone to Android, all running the same applications. At one point, Fleck goes on to demonstrate how to "flick" multiple applications on the iPhone. This demonstrates one app showing full screen and the four other applications are swipable, like photos in your photo library. This seems like a natural extension of the iPhone and really could be useful for building larger enterprise applications or portals. This demonstration reminded us of one thing, the apps matter. When we see an iPhone application on Android, or Windows 7, it still looks pleasing to navigate. Perhaps there is room in the enterprise for a Apple's Mobile Human Interface Guidelines . Enterprise designers, maybe it's your time to build insanely great apps for the enterprise that follow patterns of the iPhone and iPad. Whether new, or old, Citrix Receiver is breathing life into applications and iPad is getting down to business. The company plans to release this capability with its partner SoftwareFX at the Citrix Synergy event next month. Virtualization could become a default way to connect iPad in the enterprise - at least in year one. Discuss
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Coming Soon: Multi-Tasking on the iPad with Many-Device Apps
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