Kyt Dotson
Latest from Kyt Dotson
Google Maneuvers to Further Horn in on Microsoft Office’s Turf with Cloud Connect
Google seems to have its eye on the unfettered office with the release of a new free tool that will ease the portability of Microsoft documents to the web for collaboration. The tool, Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office, will integrate into Microsoft Office products and enable them to wed their files with the Google cloud ...
Open Xerox Puts Software Research and Development into the Eager Hands of the Public
I’m not old enough to remember Xerox PARC, but its contributions to modern software and GUI design haven’t passed me lightly. Now, Xerox is looking to do homage to that explosion of innovation in the 1970s with an open research site that will allow users hands-on access to developing R&D projects. The site, according to ...
Microsoft Demos Advancements in NUI (Natural User Interfaces) and Kinect is in the Picture
Researchers at Microsoft show that they’re really thinking hard about how humans interact with computers and how the Kinect has provided a surge of innovation in this direction. Natural User Interfaces should be the next-big-thing and include a lot of things science fiction has brought into our zeitgeist like the Minority Report user interface (provided ...
Apple’s FaceTime for Mac Arrives in Mac App Store for $0.99 a Pop
It’s become official, Apple just released FaceTime for Mac in the Mac App Store today. Now Mac OS X users can chat with other Apple customers on their iPhone 4 and iPod Touch. With the video-chat feature entering into an already growing ecology of apps that do the same thing, some media writers are scratching ...
IBM’s Watson in Retrospect, Ken Jennings and Others Weigh In
Over the Valentine’s Day week, IBM’s expert-system Watson took on all-time Jeopardy! winners Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter and pretty much trounced them. This has generated a great deal of speculation and a lot of buzz for IBM. If nothing else, this has been a huge publicity for IBM and Watson and possibly even Jeopardy! ...
Microsoft’s Kinect SDK Could Open the Door for a PC App Store
The recent announcement by Microsoft that they intend to release a personal SDK for the Kinect that will enable the production of applications for Windows 7 has come with much fanfare. Commentary from Craig Mundie, the software giant’s chief strategy and research officer, has come out to enlighten us on Microsoft’s support of the developer ...
Generating Crowds: Astroturfing Propaganda Software and Social Media Collide
There’s a lot of research to be done on crowdsourcing—the method of turning minor human actions into large, complex activities or processes; but what about the opposite, certainly marketing could make use of the ability to generate the illusion of a crowd from a few people. Enter the power of social media and the Internet. ...
UberTwitter and twidroyd Restored by Twitter, Blackberry Natives Still Restless
From the looks of it two of the apps that Twitter gave the axe last week have gotten the keys to the API back and are once again back in the fray. UberTwitter, now known as UberSocial, and twidroyd have been returned to tweeting status as of yesterday afternoon after making multiple concessions to Twitter ...
What Does IBM’s Watson Tell Us About Potential Future Expert-Systems?
During the test-run of IBM’s Watson in a short series of Jeopardy! matches we saw the expert-system manage to answer a lot of questions quickly and correctly—but we also saw it make some extremely wacky mistakes. The lead researcher on IBM’s Watson project has been quoted saying that he doesn’t fully understand why Watson makes ...
Google Public Data Explorer Provides Extremely Cool Data Visualization
When it comes to dataset curation for public entities it’s generally up to them to purchase or learn software, run with it, and then publish their own results. Since public institutions generate a great deal of data, and generally run on statistics from economy to how to visualize population and government goals it’s extremely useful ...
