i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Google introduced a number of new features today, most notably real-time updates and searching by an uploaded photo. Real-time updates means that Twitter and Facebook statuses will immediately feed to Google search.

For several weeks now, Coke Zero has had spooky looking ads on the net saying: "If Coke Zero has Coke's taste, is it possible someone out there has your face?" The teaser features two faces that obviously belong to different people but look roughly similar.

Jessica did a wonderful job with the Shazam / Midomi demo.

For those intertested, here's a good article that compares the feature set of Shazam vs. Midomi...

http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/11/05/app-app-shazam-midomi/

Something mentioned in passing near the end of today's lecture reminded me of something I saw demonstrated at an Apple keynote a decade or so ago. The code name was V-Twin (technically the Apple Information Access Toolkit); it allowed you to paste in text and then use a slider to whittle down the text all the way to "key terms". It even showed the results live as you moved the slider -- pretty cool.

The magic behind it? Just what we've been learning: tf, idf, dimensionality reduction... .

Demand Among Poor Farmers Keeps an Industry Growing as Other Sectors of the Economy Are Jolted

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/08/twitter.shel.israel/index.html

In this article, CNN interviews Shel Israel, a 65-year old social-media journalist and author of a new book, "Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods."  In his book, Shel shows how Twitter flattens geographical boundaries and helps people connect with others around the world who share their interests.

This article, published by the BBC is available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8241029.stm.

The author talks about the need for the technology industry to make use of the huge amount of government data the Obama administration is making available to the public.

However, the problem faced, as noted by the article is that all that is being made available is raw data. Innovators need to take advantage of this opportunity to collect these data and combine them into useful information to make the public more knowledgable about the workings of their country.

With $15 Million in cash and $32.5 Million in stocks - Facebook acquired "FriendFeed" to start testing a trimmed-down version of its site that loads faster and is targeted at countries where broadband is limited. “Facebook Lite” is similar to the site’s mobile version which enables members to make comments, accept friend requests, post messages and view photos and status updates.

This Economist article describes the use of bar codes in conjunction with mobile phone cameras to provide users with real-time, context-sensitive information. An example of this is the traveller photographing a barcode at a railway station with his mobile phone to obtain train timetables. Despite of varying bar code standards, the author suggests their free, open standard nature will encourage wider adoption.&#1