Orchestr8 also released its personal mashup platform this past week, AlchemyPoint. It's similar to MashMaker in some ways but also offers a bunch of capabilities MashMaker doesn't, like the ability to visually scrape or cut-and-paste web content, even dynamic content (search results, etc.). The tool was reviewed favorably on Mashable earlier this week.
From the license file:
"It may be freely used and modified for research and development
purposes. We require a brief acknowledgement in any research
paper or other publication where this software has made a significant
contribution. If you wish to use it for commercial gain you must contact
The MITRE Corporation for conditions of use."
I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking every day (carpal tunnel syndrome), and version 9 has around 99% accuracy, with around 98% out-of-the-box with no training. This means 10 or so errors out of a 1000 word dictation.
I didn't believe it either, until I actually tried it. Dragon is the first worthwhile speech recognition solution I've seen that's practical for general use (Though I'd love if they'd release a "programmers" version to compliment the Medial/Legal versions). I get about 99% accuracy (a decent microphone is *very* important!)
Dragon 9 also doesn't "technically" need training, but accuracy further improves if you do bother to train it a bit. The NYT reviewer was able to get 99.6% accuracy after a short training session.
I've been following the i2p project for a number of months, and it appears that the bounties are working quite well for this project.
One of the most popular features (responsible for much of i2p's press and public recognition), the i2p-bittorrent port, was the result of a Bounty feature.
I'd love to see more projects take this sort of thing up, or better yet-- someone should setup a NonProfit Bounty Hosting System, that allows users to contribute small amounts for specific features via Paypal, etc. This would most likely result in much higher bounties, and much increased usage of bounties among the various OSS projects (as the project maintaners wouldn't be responsible for collecting and dispersing $$).
If someone feels up to the challenge of putting together the backend scripting for such a Bounty Provider, I'll gladly donate hosting, database storage, etc on one of my dedicated servers at EV1. I'll even give an initial bounty of $50 to the person who does this!
I wonder how long until Yahoo's A9 search engine (or another company in a competing effort) incorporates this technology into their "Block View" street digitization project.
Yahoo has been digitizing the front of buildings in major cities for some time now. It'd be great to see this imagery merged with Google's satellite view data from their KeyHole acquisition, to allow for 3d flythroughs of your favorite metropolitan area.
This could take sites like MapQuest to a new level, providing 3d photo-realistic flythroughs of your route between two locations. Sure beats reading directions!
Skype has done well because it "just works".
Lots of VOIP applications have significant problems tunneling through NAT firewalls, especially if both ends of the connection are hidden behind NAT.
Skype always works, regardless of your NAT setup, symmetric NAT, asymmetric NAT, randomized UDP port allocation, etc.. things that normally cause significant problems with VOIP.
Combine that with the cross-platform capabilities, ease of installation, simple interface, and the fact that it's free.. and no wonder they've been successful.
Also, regarding Yahoo/AIM/MSN voice chat features, these are an afterthought to what are mainly text-based instant messaging applications. Skype concentrates on voice, and does it well.
Regarding other voice/video chat options, I've had alot of personal success with the Trillian chat client. It's interoperable with the Yahoo/AIM/MSN/iChat systems for voice/video communication, and works quite well through firewalls. One note, however: Voice chat is available in the free Trillian client, but if you want video chat, you'll have to buy Trillian Pro.
Okay, when are manufacturers like Korg going to realize that the all-in-one keyboard workstation market is dying, if not almost totally dead.
Workstations like this are totally inflexible, proprietary solutions that lock you into a single vendor (I find it ironic that Korg refers to this thing as an "Open Architecture" workstation, considering it runs proprietary software and has no published standard for 3rd parties to write extensions).
Also, Regarding price: A friend of mine is at NAMM right now, and mentioned the retail for this thing is supposed to be about $8 grand. total waste of cash.
For $8,000, you can buy a totally decked out machine running Cubase, Logic, or Pro Tools, along with a top-quality AD/DA converter, external controller (Mackie Control, Logic Control, etc), and a quality 66+key midi controller.
*and*, you have an upgrade path.
not only do proprietary all-in-one solutions like OASYS not give you a hardware upgrade path, but history has shown that all-in-one solutions usually end up doing everything in a mediocre fashion, rather than a few things well.
most professional music producers choose the best-of-breed solution for each aspect of the production process (midi sequencing, FX hardware/software, AD/DA converters, reverbs, etc).
This reference design is neat, but any commercial implementation would be in violation of international patent law.
MythTV currently relies on libavcodec on the backend to do video compression/decompression. The libavcodec library implements the various MPEG compression algorithms, which are *very* vigerously protected by the LA MPEG patent pool group.
Any commercial implementation of a DVR using MythTV would be at extreme risk of prosecution by the LA MPEG group for unauthorized usage of the MPEG patents.
It would be very nice to see MythTV transitioned to use the Theora (www.theora.org) video codec, as this is a patent-free video compression / decompression library.
Slashdot Mirror
Here are some screencasts of some pretty neat stuff being produced with a mashup tool:
Combining Myspace.com and Facebook.com People Search
Adding Better-Business-Bureau Reports to Yahoo Yellow Pages Listings
Adding 10-day Weather Forecast to Google Homepage
These mashups weren't made with MashMaker, but another competing mashup tool.
Orchestr8 also released its personal mashup platform this past week, AlchemyPoint. It's similar to MashMaker in some ways but also offers a bunch of capabilities MashMaker doesn't, like the ability to visually scrape or cut-and-paste web content, even dynamic content (search results, etc.). The tool was reviewed favorably on Mashable earlier this week.
From the license file: "It may be freely used and modified for research and development purposes. We require a brief acknowledgement in any research paper or other publication where this software has made a significant contribution. If you wish to use it for commercial gain you must contact The MITRE Corporation for conditions of use."
I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking every day (carpal tunnel syndrome), and version 9 has around 99% accuracy, with around 98% out-of-the-box with no training. This means 10 or so errors out of a 1000 word dictation.
g ue.html?ex=1154318400&en=6fd795114b3f72ea&ei=5070
y Id=5577523
I didn't believe it either, until I actually tried it. Dragon is the first worthwhile speech recognition solution I've seen that's practical for general use (Though I'd love if they'd release a "programmers" version to compliment the Medial/Legal versions). I get about 99% accuracy (a decent microphone is *very* important!)
Dragon 9 also doesn't "technically" need training, but accuracy further improves if you do bother to train it a bit. The NYT reviewer was able to get 99.6% accuracy after a short training session.
Here's a few reviews of version 9:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/20/technology/20po
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
I've been following the i2p project for a number of months, and it appears that the bounties are working quite well for this project.
One of the most popular features (responsible for much of i2p's press and public recognition), the i2p-bittorrent port, was the result of a Bounty feature.
I'd love to see more projects take this sort of thing up, or better yet-- someone should setup a NonProfit Bounty Hosting System, that allows users to contribute small amounts for specific features via Paypal, etc. This would most likely result in much higher bounties, and much increased usage of bounties among the various OSS projects (as the project maintaners wouldn't be responsible for collecting and dispersing $$).
If someone feels up to the challenge of putting together the backend scripting for such a Bounty Provider, I'll gladly donate hosting, database storage, etc on one of my dedicated servers at EV1. I'll even give an initial bounty of $50 to the person who does this!
http://a9.com/-/company/YellowPages.jsp
Yahoo has been digitizing the front of buildings in major cities for some time now. It'd be great to see this imagery merged with Google's satellite view data from their KeyHole acquisition, to allow for 3d flythroughs of your favorite metropolitan area.
This could take sites like MapQuest to a new level, providing 3d photo-realistic flythroughs of your route between two locations. Sure beats reading directions!
Skype has done well because it "just works". Lots of VOIP applications have significant problems tunneling through NAT firewalls, especially if both ends of the connection are hidden behind NAT. Skype always works, regardless of your NAT setup, symmetric NAT, asymmetric NAT, randomized UDP port allocation, etc.. things that normally cause significant problems with VOIP. Combine that with the cross-platform capabilities, ease of installation, simple interface, and the fact that it's free.. and no wonder they've been successful. Also, regarding Yahoo/AIM/MSN voice chat features, these are an afterthought to what are mainly text-based instant messaging applications. Skype concentrates on voice, and does it well. Regarding other voice/video chat options, I've had alot of personal success with the Trillian chat client. It's interoperable with the Yahoo/AIM/MSN/iChat systems for voice/video communication, and works quite well through firewalls. One note, however: Voice chat is available in the free Trillian client, but if you want video chat, you'll have to buy Trillian Pro.
Sheesh, this is getting crazy. We're averaging about 2 google stories a day.
Okay, when are manufacturers like Korg going to realize that the all-in-one keyboard workstation market is dying, if not almost totally dead.
Workstations like this are totally inflexible, proprietary solutions that lock you into a single vendor (I find it ironic that Korg refers to this thing as an "Open Architecture" workstation, considering it runs proprietary software and has no published standard for 3rd parties to write extensions).
Also, Regarding price:
A friend of mine is at NAMM right now, and mentioned the retail for this thing is supposed to be about $8 grand. total waste of cash.
For $8,000, you can buy a totally decked out machine running Cubase, Logic, or Pro Tools, along with a top-quality AD/DA converter, external controller (Mackie Control, Logic Control, etc), and a quality 66+key midi controller.
*and*, you have an upgrade path.
not only do proprietary all-in-one solutions like OASYS not give you a hardware upgrade path, but history has shown that all-in-one solutions usually end up doing everything in a mediocre fashion, rather than a few things well.
most professional music producers choose the best-of-breed solution for each aspect of the production process (midi sequencing, FX hardware/software, AD/DA converters, reverbs, etc).
this thing is just, well.. stupid.
I'm also using a Hauppage card for my MythTV box (PVR-250). Great piece of hardware.
MythTV currently relies on libavcodec on the backend to do video compression/decompression. The libavcodec library implements the various MPEG compression algorithms, which are *very* vigerously protected by the LA MPEG patent pool group.
Any commercial implementation of a DVR using MythTV would be at extreme risk of prosecution by the LA MPEG group for unauthorized usage of the MPEG patents.
It would be very nice to see MythTV transitioned to use the Theora (www.theora.org) video codec, as this is a patent-free video compression / decompression library.