Daily Bits

A Music Player from MySpace ?

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MySpace Music, the one stop for all music aficionados, could be graduating to a mp3 player, a la iPod. The suggestion was made by the MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco in a talk with Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. The MySpace Music service has been very successful if you consider the figures.

An excerpt from Reuters:

People streamed music more than 1 billion times in the first few days and have created 80 million playlists since the launch, DeWolfe said. Five million bands upload their music to the site.

But will the service be able to make a dent to the success of the iPod. Several attempts such as Microsoft’s Zune have not made much of difference. What could be the benefit of a MySpace backed mp3 player ? It could provide a platform for young artists to further their fan base. Also, by adding support for syncing with Linux, Windows and other operating systems the music player could boast a wider platform support than iTunes.

Social Network friendly features could be an added plus. With MySpace having initially started as a online space for music artists, this would be more like going back to their old days. The metrics are definitely favorable for introducing mobile devices tailored to social networking use but what MySpace will be figuring out is whether they are better off doing partnerships with handset makers, including direct support for cell-phones with Music Store support. Would you be interested in owning a device that carried your MySpace network too ?

iPhone, The Gaming Platform

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Apple’s iPhone has been a hit with the masses hooked to mobile internet. And hand-held gaming is one big market that the iPhone is touted to impact majorly. Games have been one among the most downloaded applications on from the AppStore and Apple stands to benefit from the easy centralized business model that it first introduced with its iTunes Music Store.

Sony and Nintendo are the current world leaders in the hand-held gaming segment. While the sale of iPhones could rival that of Nintendo’s DS consoles or Sony’s PSP, it would be a long while before Apple’s revenues from the games alone are substantial.

The iPhone’s interface has great many innovations but some of them are chagrin to the serious gamer e.g. lack of buttons. But recent events may pave a new coming for the age of hand held communication devices that also double up as awesome game consoles. T-Mobile’s G1 did show the kind of direction that technologies are bound to take. Innovations in one phone, when popular will be immediately taken up and replicated by other vendors as well. The Web based application store model means that users have access to their favorite applications / games at dead cheap rates.

The latest announcement of opening up of White Space to allow devices which could potentially provide broadband like internet over airwaves is another interesting development. Apple has its proven credentials in the Hardware + Software space. Apple could be leveraging this new development to further expand the reach of its applications-from-the-internet business model.

Google Crawlers Now Index Text from Images

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Google announced that its web crawlers are now capable of indexing textual data from images. Google’s interest in Optical Character Recognition had been evident in the past few years. Now, they are one more step closer to making all the information in the world searchable.

Google Blog aptly summarizes the new technology:

In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn’t be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document– so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe’s PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found. This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world’s information accessible and useful.

Early this year Google had made public details on a patent it had filed to read text from images and video. This also implied that text recognized from Google Map View and Street View could also eventually shop up on search results. The applications of this technology are immense. But the next progression is what will make all the difference.

Already technologies exist that index speech spoken in videos. With addition of capability to index the text in videos as well, product oriented search will become all more relevant. This might be great news for the business model driving search engines but raises several privacy issues as well.

Broadband Internet Over White Space

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November 4th has been marked as the day when the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) puts on vote the issue of opening up the white space spectrum. This means making the spectrum from 54 to 698 MHz available for use in products that could potentially lead to high speed internet access over a wide range of hardware (even for free).

The spectrum becomes available once the transition from analog to digital broadcasts for TV Stations is completed in US (Deadline is February 2009). The companies pushing for usage of the White Space spectrum include Microsoft, Google, Dell, HP, Intel, Philips, Earthlink, and Samsung Electro-Mechanics ( The White Space Coalition ). Technically, the White Space refers to unused frequencies, buffers between licensed broadcast channels. The devices operating in this would need to sense for presence of other transmissions and only communicate over the free channels to prevent interference. And this is where the bone of contention lies. The National Association of Broadcasters, telecommunication companies and media groups contend that opening up the airwaves would cause interference with devices such as cell-phones and wireless microphones.

Devices based on the white space spectrum could communicate over wireless broadband that is accessible over long distances and penetrates obstacles.

An excerpt from ZDNet:

“The 700MHz spectrum is not enough to compete against a service like Verizon’s Fios,” said Harold Feld, senior vice president of public-interest nonprofit Media Access Project, in reference to Verizon Communications’ high-capacity network featuring fiber-optic connections to the home. “It’s only 62MHz of spectrum. So you’re going to need a lot more. That’s why it’s important to provide access to licensed as well as unlicensed spectrum.”

Rural areas are to benefit most from usage of this spectrum as the airwaves are less densely used. For companies like Google and Microsoft, the spectrum means obvious results in more usage of Internet ( More eyeballs = more potential revenue sources ). For hardware companies its an opportunity to innovate beyond the standard cellphones and laptops but make available niche devices complemented with sensors accessible over the network. And for users, it will open the floodgates to devices tailored to high speed internet access at affordable rates.

Linkedin Brings Applications to Its Platform

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LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. More like an online resume, the website lets users interact with professional contacts which could lead to new employment leads and greater professional collaboration.

Almost an year back LinkedIn had started treading along the same path as Facebook with the announcement of its Intelligent Application Platform. The purpose of the platform was to make available access to Linked In from several other websites and now the recently announced applications that will be part of the users profile.

The Nine Applications that would be available are from:

  • Amazon : A Reading list to share books with others in the network.
  • Box.net : Application to manage files online.
  • Google : Integration with Google Presentation to include presentation slides in your profile.
  • Huddle : Online workspace for collaboration.
  • Six Apart : Application to link your blogs to your profile.
  • SlideShare : Sharing Presentation from Slideshare.
  • Tripit : To know and share your travel plans with your network.
  • WordPress : Another blogging platform application.
  • Company Buzz : A linked In application to receive information on companies you are interested in.

What sets LinkedIn’s approach apart from Facebook’s Application Strategy is the way they are introducing applications with well defined utility from the professional perspective. This also means that the applications would be highly tried and tested.

The applications are intended to provide more functionality to users to portray their professional tastes. In times of growing distress in the job market, web sites oriented to help users find new opportunities will gain popularity. And LinkedIn’s recent announcement is well timed for that.

Microsoft’s Cloud Framework – Azure Services

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As expected from the Microsoft PDC 2008 Conference, there is a new cloud framework on the block and its going to run on a new Cloud Operation System – Windows Azure. The Azure services platform would be hosted on Microsoft’s data centers and provide a range of services that developers can use to create applications that will be available via the internet. Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie also mentioned how the shift to cloud services fit the time line of computing from individual machines to the cloud based computing ( and hence Microsoft’s new product).

The list of services that would be available are :

  • Live Services : Building blocks to handle user data and application resources such as search, user identity and data storage.
  • Microsoft SQL Services : For Web based database access.
  • Microsoft .NET services : The Execution Environment and for communication among applications.
  • Microsoft Sharepoint services and Dynamics CRM Services : Will be provided in future for customer relationship and collaboration focused work.

    • Windows Azure will be the operating systems on which the cloud services would be available. While currently only Microsoft’s .NET framework and Visual Studio support writing applications to run on the cloud operating system, there are plans to support other frameworks (like Eclipse) and languages ( such as Python and Ruby ) in future. More options would lead to wider adoption.

    While Amazon may have had a head start in making cloud based computing services, Microsoft has had experience in managing large content based networks. Moreover, Microsoft development tools are widely used by enterprises, a prominent reason to expect wide adoption among enterprises and developers. How well the services will scale up to demand and manage outages is yet to be seen. There are videos and SDKs available at the Windows Azure website.