And we’ve just added an exciting new speaker to the already top-drawer list: Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of Spotify.

For those living under a rock, Ek (pictured here with co-founder Martin Lorentzon) leads one of the most exciting music services on the Web right now.

In fact, the Swedish entrepreneur is shaking up how and where people listen to and consume music.

As MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka–who will be interviewing Ek onstage–recently wrote of Spotify’s efforts to bring its hugely popular (and legal) streaming offering to the U.S. market:

In Europe, where Spotify has been a very big success, listeners can stream an unlimited amount of music, on demand, without ever paying a cent. But in the U.S., rival streaming services like Rhapsody, MOG and Napster generally only offer a very brief trial period of a few days before requiring that a pay wall go up.

For the past two years, Spotify has insisted that free, unlimited streaming is the only way the service will work, because that’s Spotify’s most effective marketing technique. Subscribers who do pay up get benefits like ad-free music, and the ability to port their songs to mobile devices like iPhones.

But the labels, most notably Warner Music Group, have insisted that unlimited free streams only serve to strip away their product’s remaining value–if you can listen for free on Spotify, why would you ever buy another CD or iTunes single?

The whole mobile music space is a riveting one to dive into, of course, and we think Ek is the perfect person to help us do so.

Ek will appear Tuesday morning, December 6, but D: Dive Into Mobile opens on Monday, December 6, with an evening onstage interview with Google Android majordomo Andy Rubin.

The new conference represents the very first brand extension of our D: All Things Digital conference, now in its ninth year of grilling the big names in tech and media to sold-out analog audiences and scores more on the Web.

And, as always, there will be no PowerPoints, no panels and definitely no pontificating.

What there will be are unrehearsed, unscripted and unexpected interviews with top players, taking a big-picture view of the broader digital landscape.

But, unlike big D, D: Dive Into Mobile is topic-focused, drilling down deeply into the ubiquity of mobile technology and devices, and its implications for brands, organizations and consumers worldwide.

Offering a more intimate and focused conference setting, D: Dive Into Mobile will feature other industry heavyweights, including: Dan Hesse, President and CEO of Sprint Nextel; Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of Research in Motion; Mike McCue, CEO of Flipboard; Joe Belfiore, Vice President of Windows Phone Program Management at Microsoft; Jon Rubinstein of Palm, now owned by Hewlett-Packard; Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley; Google Ad Products Management head Susan Wojcicki; and AT&T Emerging Devices President Glenn Lurie.

D: Dive Into Mobile will be held at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco and, as usual, we’ll be liveblogging the whole thing and also posting highlight videos.

Along with Walt Mossberg, Kafka and I, Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret will be conducting the interviews.

You can sign up here for D: Dive Into Mobile.

And while Warner, and the rest of the industry, had been hoping that Google might launch a music service that would give sales a boost this year, that doesn’t look likely. The new hope: Google arrives sometime next year.

That’s the line from Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. during his company’s earnings call this morning. Bronfman said he’s hoping that Google and other services “will come online in calendar 2011,” and that they’ll create “very significant opportunity both for consumers and the music industry.”

Any more detail than that? Nope.

But Bronfman did have a few nice things to say about Spotify, the much-hyped music service that has yet to launch in the U.S. Warner has renewed its European licensing deal with the service, which offers both free and subscription options, and Bronfman murmured some hopeful things about getting something done in America.

In Europe, the new Spotify deal “was a long time coming, [and] was not easy for us, and not easy for them,” Bronfman said, and says he’s “hopeful” the two companies can reach an agreement.

As I’ve previously reported, music sources say that Spotify and Sony have essentially reached an agreement for a U.S. launch. And the consensus seems to be that the service is close to getting something done with Universal Music Group, the world’s largest label.

So the question for Spotify is whether it needs to get Warner on board before it can launch in the U.S., something it continues to insist it wants to do this year.

Spotify officials have previously said that they’d only go forward with three of the big four labels on board, which makes sense–no point in launching a service that doesn’t have lots of the music people want to hear.

On the other hand, if the Spotify guys wait to get Warner–or EMI Music Group, the other major label–on board before launching, they could get held up for quite some time.

Speaking of EMI Music, what does Bronfman think of the label’s deal with Apple that brought the Beatles to iTunes? He thinks what most of you think: “I don’t know how impactful, after 10 or 12 years of digital business, their coming to iTunes will be,” he said.

But it does give Apple the ability to run a very cool marketing campaign, and that will get more people into iTunes. And that’s good for Warner–and everyone else who sells stuff there.

*You really can’t stress this point enough: We’re a decade past Napster, but the music industry still runs on CD sales. In Warner’s case, digital now accounts for 25 percent of overall revenue.

And Apple has an ad campaign cued up, of course.

If you’re the kind of person who keeps track of this stuff, you should note that the ads feature five songs:

• “I Want to Hold Your Hand”
• “All You Need Is Love”
• “Let It Be”
• “Yesterday”
• “Here Comes the Sun”

And if you’re really keeping count, you’ll note that there are two “Paul songs,” one “John song,” one “George song” and one “Lennon-McCartney song.” Alas, no Ringo.

Everything else is pretty straightforward, and designed to please both completists and samplers: $149 gets you the entire Beatles box set that the band put out a year ago on CD, or you can pick and choose.

If you really want to gripe, here’s something: Apple (and/or the band) doesn’t know how to handle the mini-songs on the second half of “Abbey Road” and has made the silly decision to sell them as individual tracks.

So if you really want to hear all 23 seconds of “Her Majesty,” but you don’t want to buy the whole album, you’ve got to shell out $1.29. But whatever. Buy the whole album.

Now, on to real news: There is no official news about the streaming music service’s attempt to land on U.S. shores. Spotify has yet to land a single U.S. label deal, even though it continues to insist that it will get things settled in time for a 2010 launch.

But the company has made progress with the labels in recent weeks, according to multiple sources. That’s in part because it is now willing to hand over real money, either in the form of advances or as guarantees spread throughout the life of a multiple-year contract.

How much money? Depends on who you talk to: One source thinks Spotify is now offering “tens of millions” to the labels to get a U.S. deal done; another person familiar with negotiations thinks Spotify will eventually end up spending $100 million to get the big four labels–or at least three of them–in line for a launch.

But money alone won’t get Spotify into the U.S. Or put another way: The amount of money will depend in part on the real sticking point in the negotiations–the amount of free music that Spotify users can listen to before they need to become paying subscribers.

In Europe, where Spotify has been a very big success, listeners can stream an unlimited amount of music, on demand, without ever paying a cent. But in the U.S., rival streaming services like Rhapsody, MOG and Napster generally only offer a very brief trial period of a few days before requiring that a pay wall go up.

For the past two years, Spotify has insisted that free, unlimited streaming is the only way the service will work, because that’s Spotify’s most effective marketing technique. Subscribers who do pay up get benefits like ad-free music, and the ability to port their songs to mobile devices like iPhones.

But the labels, most notably Warner Music Group, have insisted that unlimited free streams only serve to strip away their product’s remaining value–if you can listen for free on Spotify, why would you ever buy another CD or iTunes single?

“[Spotify executives] are perennially underestimating label resistance to the free stuff,” says an industry source familiar with the discussions. “And it seems the checks are either not big enough or the labels really won’t give on free.”

Until that gap gets solved–either via compromise or cash–Spotify can’t come to the U.S.

The company had recently been discussing a mid-November launch date, but unless things move quickly, that can’t happen. And even people who are optimistic about the company’s chances concede it may not get it done in time for a pre-Christmas launch, which would force things back to 2011. Spotify declined to comment.

Among the four labels, Sony appears closest to a deal, sources say–a pact is “essentially signable,” according to one source, though another insists there is nothing “executable.” Sony declined to comment. In order to launch, though, Spotify will also need Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music company, and either Warner or EMI Music Group.

Guy Hands’s private equity group has rounded up another $150 million from investors, which will allow it to avoid a looming default on debt held by Citigroup (C), the Wall Street Journal reports:

Mr. Hands’ success in tapping his investors hands him a victory in the latest round of his epic battle with Citi, which lent him the money to fund the leveraged buyout in 2007. With syndication markets closed as a result of the financial crisis, Citigroup was stuck holding more than £3 billion of EMI debt. The two sides have been unable to agree to a restructuring of the business, setting up a high stakes game of chicken.

The cash buys Mr. Hands nearly a year, to the end of next March, to execute on a turnaround plan for EMI, which has been buffeted by a shift in demand for music away from CD sales and the crippling debt the buyout saddled it with. Amid the problems, it has seen a number of big name artists flee the label, including Radiohead and Paul McCartney.

Bigger question: Does it really matter if one of the big music labels is owned by a private equity group instead of a bank? Maybe not. There’s still a good chance that EMI will end up getting broken into parts and sold off to rivals like Sony (SNE) and Warner Music Group (WMG).

Nielsen SoundScan says the drop was either one percent or .09 percent, depending on how you count, so this isn’t the bottom falling out. But it does look like a peak, and it has been in the works for some time.

Earlier this year, Warner Music Group (WMG) pointed out that it was seeing its digital sales slow and argued that one reason was because the industry had raised prices on most of its songs at Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes store in 2009.

That thinking is now pervasive across the industry, Billboard notes: “While consumers will still buy hit songs for $1.29, it seems that catalog tracks priced at that level are not selling as well as they were at 99 cents.”

But you could also make the case that digital tracks were going to decline anyway and that the industry is better off squeezing every penny it can.

And if you want to try to find a silver lining here, you could argue that since song sales are slipping, there’s no reason for the industry not to support rental/subscription models like Spotify, Rhapsody and MOG by cutting their licensing fees. But I wouldn’t bet on that happening soon.

That’s what Universal Music Group is hoping. The world’s biggest music label is pushing a plan to sell all its CDs at a retail price of $10 or less, Billboard reports. Given that all the big labels are currently selling discs at wholesale prices of $10 to $12, that’s a big price chop.

(An update from UMG, which says it hasn’t committed to the new pricing: “This test comes after extensive consumer research and conversations with our retail partners, and we will be looking at such variables as greater selection at sharper pricing on front-line releases. We expect to begin the test in Q2.”)

And it has been a long time coming, since on the Web, the price of an album ranges from nothing (via legal streaming sites and pirate services) to $9.99 or so on Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes.

You could argue that people still buying physical discs are unlikely to be comparing prices with digital alternatives. But there is indeed evidence that consumers respond to cheaper discs. Billboard relays the example of Trans World Entertainment (TWMC), which runs the F.Y.E. and Coconuts chains:

In the last few months, Trans World Entertainment began testing the $9.99 price point in over 100 stores, while Wal-Mart has been telling the majors to release shorter albums at lower prices more frequently.

The Trans World test–in which most independents and every major except for the Warner Music Group participated–produced units sales increase of more than 100%, according to label executives who participated in the tests. The Trans World test helped sell the new pricing model to the Universal labels, sources say.

On the reluctance by other majors to so far address the $10 retail price point issue, one source says, “The definition of idiocy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Things are not going to get better for CD sales unless the price point is addressed. One thing that the Trans World test shows for sure, $10 will drive sales and traffic.”

Can the magicJack Internet phone device you reviewed last week be used for faxing?

A:

The company says: “We do not officially support using faxing with magicJack.” It says it “sometimes” works with fax machines and suggests a number of steps to try this, including turning off error correction on the fax machine and setting the fax speed to the lowest possible, then gradually increasing the speed, testing at each level. However, I would advise thinking of the $40 device, which allows free unlimited domestic calls over the Internet, as a voice-calling product and nothing else.

Q:

You said that, if you buy a magicJack, you need to keep it plugged into a PC that’s constantly on and constantly connected to the Internet, to make and receive calls. But what if a call comes in and your computer is off or disconnected?

A:

Even if the magicJack isn’t plugged into a running, connected computer, the service behind it will still record voicemail you receive. In fact, magicJack’s voicemail includes a feature that sends each message as an audio file via email, which will also keep working. You can also check your magicJack voicemail from other phones. In addition, even if a magicJack is disconnected, its number will continue to be forwarded to other phones, if you have chosen the option to do so.

Q:

Can I use the Windows 7 CD that came with my Dell (DELL) PC for either the Boot Camp or Parallels installation on a Mac?

A:

I have heard of some who say they have done this successfully, and you can certainly try it. But I strongly recommend using a fresh copy of Windows 7. There are two reasons for this. First, Microsoft (MSFT) licensing policies may block your use of copies of Windows already in use on other PCs. Second, Windows disks that come with PCs are sometimes customized for the particular features of that PC, and might not work properly on the Mac.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com.

Comes now Jeff Bronikowski, who spent 11 years at Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest label, and left last year.

In an interview with Billboard, the former SVP of “global digital initiatives” explains concisely why his former employer and the other big guys are just playing out the string: CD sales are wasting away, and the digital boost they were counting on simply isn’t big enough.

Download growth is slowing down, dominated by one retailer. The ancillary revenue streams like ringtones are in decline, and the new possibilities like Nokia’s Comes With Music haven’t panned out yet either.

To be fair, Bronikowski then offers a qualifying, semihopeful note. Which he needs to do, as he’s still working with the music labels–now as the head of Yahoo’s (YHOO) small music unit.

And I occasionally talk to someone in the recorded music business who still thinks the labels can pull it off–maybe Spotify will really work or maybe Apple’s (AAPL) cloud strategy will help boost sales. Etc.

You never know! They could be right. Sony (SNE) even reported an uptick in sales last quarter. But after a decade-long slump, it is getting awfully difficult to find a bona fide optimist.

Such a glum post, so early in the morning! Time to liven it up, per request. Thanks to Tristan Mahr.

The conglomerate’s music division doesn’t represent much more than a footnote in its overall financial picture, but in the last quarter, it was at least a positive footnote. Sales were up two percent–seven percent if you cancel out currency fluctuations–and operating profit was up 8.2 percent.

Hard to argue that this uptick will be sustainable, though. Sony (SNE) says the boost came from a couple individual success stories that will be hard to repeat, for obvious reasons: People bought lots of copies of the soundtrack to “This Is It,” the Michael Jackson concert movie, as well as the debut album from cultural oddity/viral video favorite Susan Boyle.

Looking for more traditional music business news? I can oblige: Music industry types tell me they’re freaked out that physical sales could take another steep tumble this year if retailers like Wal-Mart (WMT) and Best Buy (BBY) shrink the tiny amount of floorspace they devote to CDs yet again. And they’re also worried that digital sales are finally flattening out.

Less than two days after pulling books published by Macmillan in a dispute over e-book pricing, Amazon has conceded.

The world’s dominant e-commerce company says it has agreed to Macmillan’s demands to sell its e-books at a higher price–and in doing so, has made a tacit admission that e-book prices will rise across the board.

That’s because most of the industry’s big players have embraced a similar plan, advanced by Apple (AAPL) to support its iPad launch, to sell e-books for $12.99 and $14.99 instead of the $9.99 Amazon (AMZN) had been pushing.

In an extraordinary statement published on Amazon’s site, the retailer says that it “will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.”

No word yet from the other big publishers that have sided with Apple in the e-book pricing war–Pearson’s Penguin Group, News Corp.’s (NWS) HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group and CBS’s (CBS) Simon & Schuster. But keep in mind Steve Jobs’s all-knowing pronouncement about Amazon and Apple e-books: “The prices will be the same.”

Also bear in mind that publishers will actually make less money with the Apple pricing plan. Under the old plan, they sold books to Amazon for around $15 wholesale, and Amazon took a loss in order to retail them for $9.99. Under the new plan, the publishers will get closer to $10 per book.

But the publishers are so freaked out by the parable of the music labels, in which Apple replaced $15 CDs with $1 songs, that they are willing to take the hit in order to maintain some control of their digital pricing.

Odd as this sounds, there’s logic to it, since e-book sales will be small for some time and publishers think that this strategy will help keep the prices up when buyers really do embrace digital.

(Aside: The notion that digital pricing should be dirt cheap simply because it doesn’t cost publishers–or music labels, or Hollywood studios, or whatever–very much to distribute bits, is facile. If you don’t believe me, try ordering a vegetarian entree the next time you go out to dinner, and then tell your waiter you refuse to pay full price because you know that vegetables cost much less than meat. It may be dumb for publishers to try to keep digital prices high, but it’s equally stupid to demand that they lower them on principle.)

It will be interesting to see what Kindle buyers make of the impending price hike, particularly since so many of them are price-conscious consumers who prefer to pay nothing at all for their books.

UPDATE: That was quick: Amazon has conceded to MacMillan’s demands.

Amazon (AMZN) sells most e-books for $9.99 or less, and Apple (AAPL) plans to sell e-books for 30 percent to 50 percent more. How long can this disparity last? It won’t, Apple CEO Steve Jobs told Walt Mossberg on Wednesday: “The prices will be the same.”

The implication of that comment is clear: Jobs believes publishers will use Apple’s e-book store as leverage to force Amazon’s prices up.

As I noted earlier, this is an inversion of Apple’s relationship with the big music labels, whereby it demanded that those companies sell their songs as $1 singles instead of $15 CDs–and helped accelerate the industry’s demise along the way.

In that scenario, the labels had no option but to play along, because Apple controlled the digital music market. Here, Amazon has the clear lead in digital books, having sold “millions” of Kindles, but the market is still nascent, so the retailer’s lead alone isn’t enough.

But Amazon does own the market for physical books sold on the Web, so pulling those off its virtual shelves is powerful leverage indeed.

Next step: Keep an eye on books from the other four publishers Apple touted during Wednesday’s iPad launch: Pearson’s Penguin Group, News Corp.’s (NWS) HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group and CBS’s (CBS) Simon & Schuster.

All of them are selling their wares through Amazon for the time being. Wonder how long that will last.

Below, Kara Swisher’s video of Mossberg’s chat with Jobs following the iPad debut, in which the two men discuss the brewing book war.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100130/the-apple-amazon-book-war-heats-up-and-claims-macmillan-as-a-casualty/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100127/the-music-industrys-cautionary-itunes-tale-resonates-with-publishers-and-apple/ http://allthingsd.com/20100127/the-music-industrys-cautionary-itunes-tale-resonates-with-publishers-and-apple/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:41:25 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=15559 Look who has learned one of the most important lessons of the music industry’s love-hate relationship with iTunes: Apple.

The music labels love iTunes because it gave them a new revenue stream while CD sales withered away. And the music labels hate iTunes because it helped CD sales wither away by giving consumers the chance to replace $15 discs with $1 songs.

But now, as Apple prepares to launch e-book sales along with its new tablet, the company seems to be taking a different tack. It’s letting book publishers push their digital pricing up instead of down.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple (AAPL) was still haggling with publishers Tuesday night, but says the gist of Apple’s offer is this: Publishers can set their e-book prices at $12.99 or $14.99, well above the $9.99-or-less price point Amazon (AMZN) is pushing.

Apple’s terms would actually generate less money per sale for publishers than Amazon currently does, but publishers are so worried about digital cannibalization that they seem willing to take a hit in order to protect their paper-and-ink products. WSJ:

In adopting the Apple model, the balance of power would shift at least partly back to publishers, which regain control of pricing. In setting higher prices, they could provide a level playing field for all e-book retailers. The potential for publishers is that the device may generate greater volume for e-book sales.

But note that Apple isn’t offering publishers complete control of their pricing as it does with developers on its App Store. And while Apple is giving publishers more latitude, it is being more aggressive than ever with the TV business, reportedly by pushing the networks to cut prices for their shows.

The other big caveat is that if Apple does want to sell e-books for 30 percent to 50 percent more than Amazon, those e-books are going to have to be pretty special. Simply adding a dash of color and some graphics won’t cut it–these things will really need to be “enhanced” to justify the premium. Figuring out how to do that while keeping margins intact is a whole other story.

Plenty of time to hear about that later, though. For now, let’s see what Steve Jobs has to show us today.

Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski will be reporting live from the Yerba Buena Center starting at 1 pm ET; head over to his liveblog to catch the action in real time.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100127/the-music-industrys-cautionary-itunes-tale-resonates-with-publishers-and-apple/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100112/in-search-of-images-worth-1000-results/ http://allthingsd.com/20100112/in-search-of-images-worth-1000-results/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:47:38 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1003 If you’ve ever visualized something in your head but couldn’t think of its name, you might appreciate a new method of online discovery: visual search.

Screenshot of Google Image Swirl

This week, I tested forms of visual search from two companies that hold some serious clout when it comes to hunting around online–Google and Microsoft. Although Google has become our go-to site for looking anything up on the Internet, its searches are dense with text. Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which was introduced last spring, is marketed as a Google alternative that aims to return more useful query data on the first results page.

Both companies know there are times when text, alone, just won’t do. Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT) have long offered options for searching the Images section of almost any search term to find a visual representation of it. But now the companies are allowing visually minded users to scour through images to more efficiently pinpoint the picture or information they want. These new visual searches are a bit different. And they also differ from one another.

Users can use Google’s Image Swirl search to sift through some 200,000 queries of images. And Microsoft offers Bing Visual Search as a way of performing searches on images that are tagged with useful data. Google Image Swirl still requires you to input text search terms, but Bing Visual Search lets you select images the whole time, without typing search terms. The ability to search using images alone is also being explored, and a number of mobile apps make this possible, which I’ll briefly talk about in a bit.

Google’s Image Swirl, http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com/, is currently categorized by the company as a Google Labs project, meaning that it’s in an experimental stage. It lets users search for images in certain categories that, according to computer vision algorithms, look like they would fit into the search results. Unlike Google queries using the “Images” section, Image Swirl sorts results into several stacks of images, with the most relevant results on the top of each stack. This makes for less image repetition in results, compared with regular image searches.

These stacks of images come in handy in cases where one word has two meanings, so users can select the one that represents what they’re searching for. Image Swirl also can be used to discover images of a place or thing that you didn’t originally associate with the search term.

By clicking on the top image in a stack, users can see a diagram of the main image positioned in a center circle and related images connected by lines that resemble bicycle spokes. Selecting one image pulls it to the center of the circle and repositions its surrounding photos. A search for “Robert Downey, Jr.” displayed several stacks—each topped with different images of him. There was a stack of pictures of him dressed as different movie characters, one of him at movie premieres, and a stack of his mug-shot arrest photos.

Hometown Search

Presumably because it’s an experiment, Image Swirl doesn’t cover a lot of topics. I typed “Allentown, PA,” the name of my hometown, into the Image Swirl search box and received a message that said my query wasn’t included in the demo.

Since computer vision algorithms can make mistakes, Image Swirl can pull up images that aren’t relevant to the intended search. My search for “George Washington Bridge” pulled up photos of the bridge at different times of the day from different angles, divided into stacks. But one photo was of a Marvel Comics character named G.W. Bridge. Another was of bikes on pavement, a photo from a Web site for “Bike Month NYC” that mentioned the bridge.

While Google’s Image Swirl works well as an image search engine, Bing Visual Search is a collection of 48 galleries of photos and is designed to be a data search engine by associating each image with specific data.

For example, a search for “Famous Directors” is sorted alphabetically. Each image displays data about the person it represents when you hover over it with a cursor. Steven Spielberg’s image text tells me he’s 63 years old, directed 26 films and won two Oscars, and that his highest grossing film was “Jurassic Park,” at $919.7 million. A list on the left side provides categories with which I can narrow the search results. In the case of the “Famous Directors” gallery, these categories include gender, country of origin, and what genre he or she is best known for directing.

Some of the Visual Search galleries include digital cameras, dog breeds, world leaders, top iPhone apps and yoga poses. Each has its own detailed description and left-side subcategories that can be selected for narrowing down the results. But these Bing Visual Search categories represent images only from sources that have teamed up with Bing, like Fox Sports, Billboard and the American Film Institute. Google searches a larger pool of data from Google Images, which crawls the entire Web.

The Bing Visual Search results have all been pre-sorted and tagged to associate with a search term. Bing Visual Search is especially helpful with product searches, since each image has a good deal of information associated with it, including price, product reviews and brand. Some items can even be purchased directly from these links.

After searching with either Google Image Swirl or Bing Visual Search, the final click on an item often takes users to a more text-based Web page, where people can dig deeper into the details of the searched item, like a plain, text search. But first seeing an image could help to narrow the field—or expand a search to include something else that wasn’t originally intended.

Augmented Reality

For people looking to take visual search quite literally (without typing any text at all), mobile devices with built-in cameras can let people point and search in a different way from either Image Swirl or Visual Search.Thanks to the integration of augmented reality (AR)—a way of matching real-world photos with computer-generated images—into mobile apps, users can aim their device at something and the image can then be used to identify the subject, as well as details about it.

Screenshot of Bing Visual Search

I tried three apps on Google’s Nexus One mobile device and Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone: Google Goggles, SnapTell and Layar. SnapTell retrieved much search data about two books I captured in photos.

Google Goggles is a visual-search application that works on phones running Google’s Android operating system. With Goggles, people could take photos of the outside of a restaurant and learn its name, menu or read customer reviews. Likewise, snapping a photo of a piece of art will return details like its title and artist, as well as a Web link to more information. Google says Goggles will be coming to other mobile platforms in the future.

This technology brings up a potential privacy issue: Could you some day take a photo of someone and then search for information on that person?

A Google spokesperson says this app has the ability to use facial recognition with Goggles, but hasn’t launched this feature because it hasn’t been built into an app that would provide real value for users. The spokesperson also cites “some important transparency and consumer-choice issues we need to think through.”

A Walk With the Beatles

SnapTell (http://snaptell.com/apps) is another app that uses AR on Android devices as well as Apple’s iPhone. It allows you to snap a photo of a book, CD, videogame or DVD, and get information about it. Layar (http://layar.com) is an app that lets people point their Android devices at locations to get more information. You could see an on-screen visual of a completed structure by pointing the camera at a construction site, or look at a representation of the Beatles on Abbey Road by pointing your phone at the famous crosswalk.

If you’re a visual thinker and you work well by seeing illustrations of the things for which you search, Bing Virtual Search or Google Image Swirl might help. Or consider using an app with your mobile device that takes advantage of AR technology if you want fast information about something while you’re on the go. As all of these products improve, they’ll include more categories and images to aid online explorations.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg. Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100112/in-search-of-images-worth-1000-results/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091021/susan-boyle-album-tops-amazon-pre-orders/ http://allthingsd.com/20091021/susan-boyle-album-tops-amazon-pre-orders/#comments Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:30:45 +0000 Andrew LaVallee http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=16884 A month ahead of its release, Susan Boyle’s album has more advance orders on Amazon.com (AMZN) than any CD in the retailer’s history, it said.

The Sony (SNE) album, titled “I Dreamed a Dream,” goes on sale on Nov. 23. Ms. Boyle sang the song by the same name on “Britain’s Got Talent,” and the video of her unexpectedly strong performance made her a world-wide phenomenon after it landed on video-sharing sites like YouTube.

Amazon announced the pre-order milestone Wednesday, noting that her advance sales have exceeded those for such stars as Norah Jones, U2, Bruce Springsteen and Coldplay. It also created a “store” for Ms. Boyle that includes her breakthrough clip in addition to a link to buy the $10 album.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091021/susan-boyle-album-tops-amazon-pre-orders/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091013/safeguard-a-pcs-contents-in-an-upgrade/ http://allthingsd.com/20091013/safeguard-a-pcs-contents-in-an-upgrade/#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 22:16:03 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/20091013/safeguard-a-pcs-contents-in-an-upgrade/ Windows 7, Microsoft Corp.’s new operating system due out next week, is giving the company a lot to be happy about. By early reports, it’s fast, easy on the eyes and fixes most of the problems that plagued its predecessor, Vista. But while Microsoft (MSFT) employees are doing the dance of joy, some consumers are confused and scared about the prospect of upgrading their computers to Windows 7.

The upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7 is particularly daunting because it requires first wiping the computer’s hard disk to perform what’s called a “custom” or “clean” install. This clears out the old operating system—as well as all of your programs, files and settings. To save personal files, XP users must back them up first, typically on an external hard disk, then transfer them back. Programs, however, will be lost altogether, so users must re-install these using their original CDs or installation files, and then also re-install all the program updates they’ve accumulated over the years.

People upgrading to Windows 7 from Vista may have it easier. In some common cases, they can upgrade to Windows 7 “in place,” which means they can save programs, files and settings right where they were. But since Vista was such a dud, many Windows users still use XP.

This week, I tested a program that tries to make the upgrade to Windows 7 just as easy for XP users as it is for some Vista users. I tested Laplink Software Inc.’s PCmover Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant (http://bit.ly/JeafI), a $15 program that saves programs, files and settings on the computer in a place that won’t be affected by the installation of Windows. This eliminates the hassle of using an external hard disk or re-installing programs. The company uses the analogy of a moving van to load up your computer’s information, storing it locally until it can be unloaded again on the same PC with a new operating system.

I tested this program using an Acer Aspire One netbook running Windows XP. It took me two hours from start to finish, a three-part process of installing the Upgrade Assistant, installing Windows 7, and then re-installing the PCmover program. I followed instructions and the process of upgrading was really quite easy, showing me the programs and files (photos, videos and documents) I had on my old operating system.

Afterward, I did have to dig around on my computer a little bit to make some adjustments, like fixing Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes music program so it opened in Windows 7. And I found it a little annoying that, throughout the process, the Upgrade Assistant tried to get me to buy more software programs, like RegistryBooster and DiskImage, by saying the programs would better prepare my old PC for the switch.

Laplink’s $15 PCmover Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant helps smooth the way for some XP users to upgrade to Windows 7.

The Upgrade Assistant also works with PCs running Vista. Microsoft offers an in-place upgrade option from Vista to 7, but this mainly works for people transferring from an identical version of Vista to an identical version of 7, like Windows Vista 32-bit Home Premium to Windows 7 32-bit Home Premium.

This program won’t magically fix every upgrade issue you face. If you bought your computer many years ago, it may not be able to run Windows 7 at all, because the hardware may be insufficient.

Another problem is that most netbooks and some laptops don’t come with built-in disk drives, making it a challenge to install Windows 7, since it comes on a DVD. I had to call around town to find a Radio Shack selling an external DVD disk drive that plugged into my Acer netbook via a USB cord.

Some security software programs, like that from McAfee Inc. (MFE) and Symantec Corp.’s (SYMC) Norton Antivirus, may not transfer over to Windows 7, though you should be able to manually install them after the migration.

When first installing the Upgrade Assistant, you can choose to do a full migration (files, settings and programs); just move files and settings; move files only; or perform a custom migration. You also can specify which user accounts to include or exclude and you can opt to exclude certain types of files, like temporary files.

After the PCmover program assessed the contents of my PC, it explained that it was packing my content into a “moving van”—a file for holding the content—and offered to break the moving van’s content into smaller parts for people who have storage limitations while transferring.

It’s a little nerve-wracking to think about transferring your computer’s entire contents over without being able to see where the files are going. At least on an external hard disk, you feel like the files are stored on something tangible and accessible—even if some step in the migration goes terribly wrong and the laptop never starts again, however unlikely.

After installing Windows 7 and then re-installing the PCmover program, I was finished. The next time I turned on the PC, a program called StartUp immediately started to run. This appeared to show me a list of programs that automatically ran on my old operating system but which PCmover disabled from running automatically on Windows 7. A quick step allowed programs that I selected to automatically run again.

One thing to note as you upgrade from Windows XP is that your PC may not be equipped to deliver the full Windows 7 experience. Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Beta, Microsoft’s own tool, analyzes what will and won’t work properly when the newest version of Windows installs. The Upgrade Advisor warned me that Windows Aero, the name used for some of the gorgeous visuals in Windows 7, wasn’t capable of working with my netbook’s graphics adapter. Sure enough, Aero’s ability to show tiny, pop-up previews of programs that are running in your taskbar as you hover over them didn’t work. Instead, the names of the files and programs appeared in text-only preview panes.

The downloadable version of the Upgrade Assistant is now $15 for one license to use on one PC—a special pre-release price before Windows 7 is available Oct. 22. After that, the downloadable version will cost $20 from Laplink.com for one license to use on one PC. If you would rather not download this program, it also will be available for purchase in retail stores by the end of October. Of course, you also will have to buy a copy of Windows 7; the version most consumers will want is called Home Premium and it costs $120 as an upgrade.

If you are considering Windows 7 and you are currently using Windows XP on a relatively new PC, a simpler and better-organized migration process is worth the nominal price of Laplink’s PCmover Windows 7 Upgrade Assistant.

Edited by Walter. S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

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