John Connor

D7 Tech Demo: Siri

Oliver J. Chiang in D7 on May 28, 2009 at 12:00 pm PT

Many would-be augurs have been trying to pinpoint the moment the artificial intelligence overlord known as Skynet gets its start: Some may one day point to the launch of Siri. Siri is a virtual personal assistant, for your iPhone or computer, with a pedigree: It originated at the Stanford Research Institute and was spun out as an AI project financed by DARPA. Now, as an alternative to search, Siri is supposed to carry out tasks like finding your next outgoing flight or ordering a pizza by crawling the Web and conversing with the user, processing requests, responding and learning from the interaction. It will do this via a combination of technologies, including speech recognition, natural language processing and semantic Web search.

Here Comes the Summer Movie Geektravaganza: Trek to Demons to Bots to Cyborgs to Potter!

Kara Swisher in News on May 4, 2009 at 12:34 pm PT

With bootleg copies ripped on the Internet or not and with an $87 million opening weekend for “X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” it looks like the nerdiest summer movie season ever is off the races. Hollywood, caught in the digital maelstrom, certainly is fine and dandy making bank by co-opting all the techie themes, gadgets and special effects, with a slate of movies over the next months that are like catnip to geeks of all kinds. Including BoomTown, for example, which plans to fork over a lot of dough to pay for all the techtastic entertainment that those old media moguls can dish out before they collapse.