In case you haven’t been following along, here’s a quick rundown of what’s expected today:

Lytro, founded by Ren Ng in 2006, is an outgrowth of his Stanford University PhD research into what is called “light field photography.”

Without getting too technical, a light field camera captures light all throughout the scene in front of the lens, as opposed to the cameras consumers are used to, which bring a particular thing into focus first.

The result is an image that can be focused after it is taken, and, Lytro claims, a camera that is faster from power-up to capture, and has exceptional performance in low light, even without a flash.

Lytro claims it has spent the last five years and nearly $50 million from several of Silicon Valley’s heaviest-weight VC firms working to pack all that technology into a camera small enough to compete with the myriad point-and-shoots currently available.

Join us as we see for the first time if Lytro has gotten the picture.

View the slideshow

Liveblog:

11:17 am: They’ve let us into the event. No action yet, just a bunch of tech reporters tweeting away.

11:32 am: We’re underway. CEO and founder of Lytro Ren Ng is coming up now.

11:33 am: Lytro grew out of Ng’s Stanford PhD work in light field imaging.

11:33 am: Ng starts with some stats on digital cameras.

He says that at the end of the day, both film and regular digital cameras record the same data — a flat image.

11:34 am: “The light field is all the light traveling in all directions at every point in space,” says Ng.

11:35 am: Still on the tech, Ng says his focus at Stanford was on miniaturizing the camera technology. At the time, the only light field cameras were huge arrays of cameras in labs.

11:37 am: We’re on the history of his research now — Ng says the first camera he built was a one-off medium format camera.

11:39 am: The important takeaway here is that this camera is as much about the computer science behind it as it is about the optics and the hardware.

11:41 am: Ng moves on to the features of this technology for the user.

11:42 am: 1. Shoot first, focus after. 2. Ability for third parties to interact with the picture after it is put online.

11:43 am: Ng shows what appears to be a screenshot of his Facebook page, with a Lytro interactive image embedded.

11:44 am: Ng says that all Lytro images can also be viewed in an “immersive 3-D.”

11:45 am: Now we get to see the camera. It’s called the “Lytro.”

11:45 am: 8x optical zoom, with an f 2.0 aperture.

11:47 am: It’s an 11 “megaray” camera — which means it captures 11 million rays of light, says Ng.

11:49 am: It’s a metal rectangular tube, maybe 4 inches long. The lens is at one end and the small touch screen at the other. It’s unlike any camera design I’ve ever seen.

11:50 am: Ng says another benefit of the camera is how fast it turns on.

11:51 am: The camera doesn’t need to focus before it shoots, so time from activation to capture seems pretty instant.

11:52 am: Now he’s going to take a picture of the room — we’re being posed, no joke.

11:52 am: They will come in 3 colors — redish, blueish and grayish.

11:53 am: Ng is plugging in the camera, showcasing the software that comes with it. The camera uses micro USB.

11:54 am: Liveblogging solo here, but there are a few pictures I’m putting up on twitter (@withdrake).

11:55 am: Software seems to be pretty snappy. All the pictures are square format.

11:56 am: Ng says you can refocus the image on the camera, in the computer software, or on the web, wherever you embed the image.

He says you can post to Facebook from inside the Lytro computer software.

11:58 am: Ng just posted something to Facebook from the software. Facebook friends can zoom and refocus the image right in Facebook.

11:59 am: The camera will come in 8GB and 16GB versions.

11:59 am: 8GB version can capture 350 light field images.

12:00 pm: Ng says that the camera will ship in early 2012.

12:01 pm: Now he’s dancing around price.

12:02 pm: It will be $399 for the 8GB version.

We’re wrapped up. Moving on to the demo station. … See gallery of pictures above.

That’s according to the Forrester research shop, which attaches the following qualifiers to its prediction:

1. Amazon would need to price the tablet below $300.
2. It would need to not screw up its supply chain.

As far as number two goes: Yep, sure. Good idea. That said, we should note that Amazon has had supply issues with its own hardware in the past, and that getting it right is hard for most companies, even those that produce hardware full time. Not a coincidence that the new guy running Apple has a particular knack for this stuff.

And as far as price goes — yes, cheaper things often sell better than expensive things. That’s the big lesson everyone took away from HP’s TouchPad fire sale, right? And it would make a lot of sense for Amazon to do what every other would-be iPad killer has not done, and compete with Apple by starting at a sub-iPad price.

But note that in Amazon’s lone entry into hardware to date, it has behaved like nearly every consumer electronics company does — start at a relatively high price point, then move down over time, while demand goes up. Remember that the Kindle, which now starts out at $114, was originally priced at $399 in 2007.

That doesn’t mean that Bezos won’t go low this time — just that it’s not a given. (Also, no need to listen when I crystal-ball-gaze on this stuff — I severely underestimated the Kindle’s impact four years ago.)

Speaking of advice — my favorite part of the Forrester report is when researcher Sarah Rotman Epps tells Amazon that the best way to break free of the pack of unsuccessful Android tablets is to not tell consumers that it is selling them an Android tablet. Right or wrong, it speaks volumes about Google’s struggles in the tablet war to date:

While some may view a partnership with Google as an asset, we see it as a challenge. Product strategists that we’ve spoken with at OEMs have voiced frustration about the limits of Android — its lack of polish, the terrible shopping experience in the Android Market, the rules that Google has set for Honeycomb use that limit differentiation, and the fragmentation of earlier versions of the OS. Only 9% of consumers considering buying a tablet actively prefer an Android tablet — compared with 16% who prefer iOS and 46% who prefer Windows. Barnes & Noble has chosen to emphasize its own brand and user experience on the Nook Color rather than emphasize the Google or Android brands, even though the Nook is built on Android. Amazon may not wish to go that far on the curation spectrum, but it does need to differentiate its flavor of Android from all the rest, and that may come from emphasizing the Amazon experience over the Google one.

It was part of a long-term strategy at IBM to build out its business in services, and it has really paid off. In 2010, 57 percent of IBM’s $100 billion in revenue was derived from services. And the profit margins aren’t bad, either. One business segment, Global Business Services, reported 2010 profits of nearly 29 percent; the other, Global Technology Services, reported margins just shy of 35 percent. The move has since made IBM the envy of the IT services industry, and as IBM’s most recent quarterly results show, the services business is growing, too.

IT is complicated and costly, and when you’re in the business of building something or shipping stuff around the world or doing pretty much anything that’s not IT itself, there’s a certain amount of economic sense in hiring someone to run your IT for you and take some of the burden off your books.

In that nine years, IBM has learned a thing or two about services. It has 15,000 patents around the delivery of services and software, and has since coined the phrase “services as a science.” You can’t treat something as a science unless you’re dedicated to researching it. And today IBM announced that it is throwing its considerable research muscle behind services: It has opened a new research lab devoted to services only.

Dubbed the Services Innovation Lab, or SIL, it will boast 200 technology experts from around IBM. Their brief will be simple: Push the expansion of cutting-edge computing processes like real-time analytics and software automation more deeply into IBM’s service offerings.

Scott Hopkins, IBM’s general manager for global technology services sales, told me that other companies in the IT services business try to grow by squeezing costs by moving assets or the workforce into less expensive locations. “Some try to do the same thing with a little for a little less cost. Others squeeze and cut the labor base,” he told me. “That’s basically how the industry operates. We’re coming to our clients with our base of experience from research and with our ability to leverage our software, and give them a service that changes their business model. It’s not just taking over their mess for less.”

The lab’s director will be Mahmoud Naghshineh, an IBM vice president who joined the company in 1988. He says that IBMers have been doing this research in the course of IBM’s normal services business for more than 20 years. “What we’re trying to do with this research lab is take it up a notch,” Naghshineh told me. “The idea is to really help our business and our clients by accelerating growth in the services area.”

For example: Cloud computing. Clearly, businesses are looking seriously at ways that cloud computing can reduce operational costs but also efficiently add new computing resources to the available mix. “But when we talk to our enterprise customers, there’s huge complexity involved in moving the computing workloads to the cloud. There’s diverse infrastructure, there are concerns about security, and it all has to be reliable,” Naghshineh told me. One of the major research topics at the new lab will be finding ways to make that transition easier.

Another classic problem in IT outsourcing is planning for service outages, or what I like to call expensive, unwanted surprises. Traditionally, Hopkins says, the primary focus on the problem is on how to get systems recovered and running normally after an outage. “The focus has been on how you react.” IBM put the problem to a team of mathematicians. They captured real-time operational data from numerous data centers in order to come up with a way to predict an outage and head it off before it happens. “I can now go to a client and say that if we don’t do certain maintenance jobs, we’re going to have an outage,” he says.

The lab will operate out of IBM’s worldwide network of research labs, including New York, California, China, Israel, Japan, Switzerland and Brazil. Aside from cloud computing, its initial focus will be on analytics, the automated delivery of services and helping companies adapt to mobile technologies.

The project, called “Deep Shot,” shows how one might zap a page on a map, complete with links, just by taking a picture of it. But instead of getting just a picture of the screen, the phone is also getting the code needed to go to that place on the map. It works by taking advantage of widely used Web technology known as a uniform resource identifier, or URI. Programs use URIs to email links or embed code and Deep Shot transmits that URI to the cellphone camera. The project requires a small bit of code on both the phone and the computer.

The benefit, though, is not constantly having to email links when one wants to download a map or other information to a mobile device.

MIT graduate student Tsung-Hsiang Chang developed Deep Shot last summer, while an intern at Google, which owns the rights to the technology. Chang and Google’s Yang Li presented the technology in May at a computer-human interaction conference.

In theory, the software technique could be used to send data among different programs as well, but that would require Google to open up the technology and it is not yet clear what its plans are, MIT said.

Deep Shot is the latest in a series of efforts that recognize the cellphone camera as not just a means of taking pictures, but rather a sophisticated input mechanism capable of scanning bar codes and recognizing objects.

For some folks, Deep Shot may stir memories of a technology Timex built into a line of watches in the mid-90s — DataLink, a wireless, optical data transfer developed in partenership with Microsoft. Users would build a contact database on the computer, and then point the wristwatch’s imaging sensor at the screen while the data was transferred through a series of bar code-like flashing lines.

Here’s a look at Deep Shot in action.

The sheer number of things we take for granted in modern life that hail in one way or another from IBM is astonishing. The credit card you probably used to buy coffee this morning bears a magnetic strip that was developed by IBM. So was the bar code that’s stamped on practically every tangible product you buy. The memory and hard drive in your computer evolved from technology developed at IBM, as did digital computing itself. For a quick rundown that will blow your mind, watch the video that Kara Swisher posted here in February.

Obviously, an anniversary like this presents an opportunity for many things. One is the basic PR impulse of a corporation like IBM to assert its importance and impact and get people talking about it. So be it. But it’s also a chance to reflect honestly on the impact that technology has played in pushing human society ahead, and to understand how, in an industry that’s traditionally thought of as being populated by young companies run by young people, IBM has so effectively stood the test of time.

I talked recently with Bernie Meyerson, IBM Fellow and vice president of innovation, whose research years ago into a material called Silicon Germanium has a lot to do with why you can find a Wi-Fi network nearly everywhere today. We talked at length about the trajectory that IBM’s research has followed and about the unique mix of research and business acumen that has helped make Big Blue what it is today.

AllThingsD: Bernie, there certainly aren’t many IT companies that can say they’re 100 years old. The company has had its hands in so many things that just permeate modern life. How do you explain it all?

Meyerson: Most people don’t even know that many of the things they take for granted evolved out of work that IBM had done. We’re notoriously bad at explaining the level of progress that has been achieved in human terms. But to understand the distance you’ve traveled is mind-numbing. Here’s a good example. If you’ve ever seen one of those big cruise ships, think about this for a minute. We invented the first disk drives around 1955 or 1956. And the disk drive basically at that time was this monstrous thing using paint from a shipyard to make the memory part of the disk drive. It’s kind of a strange story, but it worked. In any case, if all we did was invent something and then walked away from it, then the amount of storage you have in a laptop today would weigh 250,000 tons. What’s typical data storage today would be the equivalent of two of those big cruise ships. When you put it in terms of gigabytes it loses all meaning. When you think of cruise ships it makes sense.

Well, thanks for not walking away from that one. Storage is one measure of technical progress but so is processing, which is essentially our ability to get things done and how fast. Do you have an equally colorful metaphor to illustrate progress there?

We moved to digital computing in the mid 1950s. It’s hard to compare what we were shipping then to the best machine we’re shipping today, which does about a petaflop, about 10 to the fifteenth power floating point operations. I’m about six feet tall. How tall would I be if I simply grew in height at the same rate that computers have grown in capability? If I had, I would today be looking down and seeing the moon whack me in the ankles, roughly. If you put numbers on it, it gets lost. It’s very easy to forget how far we’ve come, and very dangerous, too.

Why dangerous?

If you forget how far you’ve come, you don’t realize the importance of the tremendous investments required to go further. To continue the metaphor, if I’ve already grown so tall that the moon is whacking my ankles, don’t underestimate how hard it’s going to be to grow even further because I’ve already grown an unimaginable amount. The trouble is there are a lot of other folks at a lot of other companies who walk away. They don’t comprehend somehow the investment required to stay at it, or worse, they don’t value it. And it’s disconcerting to me as a scientist and technologist when there isn’t a focus on the drive necessary to keep things going. To some extent there’s a part of our culture at IBM that says you just keep driving, you keep innovating. And furthermore, you understand intuitively that the further you go, the harder it gets. The first step? Piece of cake. Further is not trivial. By the 47th step you’re walking straight up a cliff and it gets very difficult. If you don’t keep in mind the lessons of the past you’re doomed to repeat the same errors.

So how does IBM deal with that? Other companies have shorter horizons in their research. IBM does a lot more basic research that may or may not lead down a productive path. How does IBM manage that consciousness of what has come before versus the need for a shorter-term payoff?

It’s an excellent question and it basically comes down to culture. You don’t just create an organization that comprehends this overnight. This is basically the result of 67 years of learning. So when you look at IBM and particularly our research division, which does astounding things, we have a culture of making what we call big bets. These are things that are incredibly aggressive in terms of the targeted outcome. But they’re bets. Key word: Bet. You win or you lose. The bet aspect pertains precisely to your question, which is how do you focus on getting it done, and getting to closure, even if it’s a longer-term effort. The danger tends to be that if you do things that are really disconnected, and which don’t have a logical outcome, they can linger for a decade or two without any real progress. If you take a long view — a view that is nonetheless grounded in reality — the question comes down to how do we do it? It comes from this long, long-standing culture. Some things come to fruition quickly, others take forever. The question is having the right mix. That’s the element we’ve mastered. You have to have a diversity of projects under way. You can’t make all your bets on something five or 10 years out, but similarly you can’t place them all on something this quarter. Over the years, we’ve basically developed structures that ensure we have that diversity, and it has served us very well.

What’s a recent big bet that’s paid off?

Data and analytics. We felt that the use of IT to deal with big data — vast data sets that no human has a chance of dealing with — that sort of needle-in-a-haystack item is really something you can address with IT because of the computing horsepower that’s now available. In 10 years we’ve invested $60 billion in R&D and $14 billion acquiring 25 companies tied to analytics. And we’ve done some astonishing things in terms of accessing big data. One good example was Watson. That capability of dealing with big data has had some profound impacts near-term and it will have tremendous societal impacts over the long term.

We hear a lot about big data and analytics these days and I think it’s one of those abstract buzzwords that makes people roll their eyes. Can you give me a concrete example of analytics in action?

We worked with a hospital in Toronto treating premature infants. They have underdeveloped immune systems so when they become ill, they don’t really respond. They don’t have all the usual warning signs the way healthy infants do, so it’s hard to tell. By the time you know they’re sick, they’re so infected they usually die. The problem is this: How does a nurse working in the intensive care unit spot these infections early enough to treat the child so they don’t die? We asked: What if you took all the data coming off a child in the ICU — their heart rate, their blood gas measurements, brain activity, breathing activity and so on. This data flows out at a rate of tens of thousands of readings a second. If you compound all these into a database and then watch that child, every once in a while one of these children will get one of these infections and die. What you do then is you work back through all the cases like that to see if there is an early warning sign that you’re missing. All the other parameters for that child are normal right up until the moment they’re terribly sick. It turned out there was a warning sign, and it turned out to be that very early, a certain normal fluctuation in the heartbeat went away. Their heartbeats were more stable, but even so it was within the sweet spot so it wasn’t generating any alarms. That turned out to be one of the warning signs. Now they’re able to see 24 hours out or more when one of these children is getting ill before the best trained ICU nurse could ever spot it. It makes the difference between these children living and dying.

That’s a winning bet. What about the losing ones? What happens when the big bet turns out to be wrong? How do you manage that?

One of the things we do at IBM is that when we make a big bet, we practice the art of parallelism. You have two or three things that work in parallel and you measure against an absolute standard. The reason you do this is that you have to at some point choose a frontup and a backup plan. You never get it right every time so you have to have a Plan B. Which we’ve done with a lot of success. We had a case where we were developing a new material to use as an insulator on chips. The preliminary data showed that one we were using, lets call it Material A, was promising. But we also continued to work on another one we’ll call Material B. After nine months, A just wasn’t cutting it and B turned out to be the winner. And of course we had lost some of the investment, and we punted on A. This friend of mine with one of the trade journals came in to see me. He’s a good guy, but he came in and wanted to have a little fun at my expense about this. He asked how we were going to explain that we worked on A for nine months and it didn’t work. I thought about it for a moment and I looked at him and said, “Show me someone who has never failed and I will show you someone who will never lead.” You have to be willing to hang by your fingertips with the understanding that every once in a while you’re going to lose your grip. But you similarly have to make sure that somewhere you have a net so that the fall doesn’t wipe you out. It’s a very tough balance. It’s not that we avoid failure. Quite the opposite. We do hard stuff. I could list many many programs we’ve had to shut down because they weren’t cutting it. Most companies that have cataclysmic failures simply don’t know when to punt.

It turns out there’s a lot of work going on at HP that’s taking place with the cloud–and the new strategy in mind. I recently caught up with Prith Banerjee, HP’s Senior Vice President for Research and director of HP Labs. We talked about how the research going on in the labs fits with the new strategy, or as Banerjee would put it, how the work in the labs is actually driving the corporate strategy. He also talks about some of the moves HP is planning to make in the cloud in the coming months.

NewEnterprise: Prith, When Léo made his presentation, everyone focused on his comments around the cloud, but the expectation coming in had been that his comments would focus primarily on software. He really touched on both, but the cloud was the bit that everyone remembers. At a high level, what do his comments mean for you at HP Labs?

Banerjee: HP’s strategy is around seamless, secure, context-aware experiences. It’s around cloud and connectivity. And again software is the glue that brings them all together. What we believe we are going to bring to our customers is a seamless view of the world and a seamless way of accessing information. The driving problem that we are trying to solve is around the explosion of information both in the consumer world and in the enterprise world. And what HP wants to bring to the table is a way to help customers seamlessly migrate from the consumer world to the enterprise world and back and forth, and in a secure manner. First of all, connectivity over the cloud, while being secure all the time.

And what’s new at HP Labs since Léo has been on the job?

We have eight teams at HP labs, and in their own way each is working on different aspects of things that Léo talked about. Print and content delivery, that’s around the document ecosystem, if you look at mobile and immersive experiences, it’s directly tied to the future of connectivity and the connected world. Our work on cloud security is clearly tied to Leo’s strategy around cloud. Look at information analytics, that’s the software that’s going to take all the information and drive better insights. Work on intelligent infrastructure and networking will be the foundational layer of the cloud as people try to reach out to the cloud, both as consumers and enterprises we have to have robust, scalable high performance infrastructure. On services Leo talked about solutions for various vertical fields, financial, health care, transportation and so on. So that’s the grand context. So HP Lab’s strategy has been forward-looking. Our role has been to provide guidance three to five to 10 years into the future. And we’re delighted to be in a position of driving the company’s strategy. It’s not like we’re following the company’s strategy. The company’s strategy is just well-aligned with the kinds of things that we were doing at HP Labs to begin with.

Let’s talk about some of the specific things you see coming out of HP Labs three and five and 10 years out.

We are particularly excited about some near-term work. Leo talked about the cloud, and when we talk about the cloud, there’s the public cloud. Shane Robison [HP's executive VP and chief strategy and technology officer] and Léo talked about HP coming into the public cloud arena. There’s some core intellectual property that HP Labs has developed that is core to the strategy. When you come out with a public cloud effort you need to have some foundational things like storage as a service. The key technology there came out of our key-value storage technology at HP Labs. That’s a scalable, reliable, low-cost way of providing tremendous amounts of storage to our customers. That should come out within a few months. That will be the first thing that comes out. Immediately following that there will be a compute-as-a-service play. And that is based on the Cirious platform work that is going on in our cloud and security lab. It’s a compute-as-a-service play that we call internally cells-as-a-service. These are virtual compute cells and memory cells and networking, sort of virtualizations, which allow people to create these multi-tenant applications that are incredibly secure so that there’s no way for one customer to impact the application of another customer on the cloud. You should see that in the hands of customers in the next six to eight months. Longer-term we are moving up the stack. We have significant work going on at the higher level around platform-as-a-service. We have IP built in the Intelligent Infrastructure Lab to provide future Web application developers a platform which will be highly scalable, available and secure. On top of that will be services we provide on the cloud. That’s where the services lab comes in. We have hired a new person, Jamie Erbes, to lead that effort. Jamie and her team are trying to develop a set of cloud services aimed at verticals like health care and transportation and financials. We’re coming up with some very unique IP in these solution areas. And our delivery mechanism will be over the cloud. As you create the interesting applications you need some deep analytics to see how you can improve services to customers.

These sound like things that we’ll see in fairly short order. What are some of the longer-term things you’re working on?

Our networking and intelligent infrastructure labs are working on some very novel ways of building out future networks for enterprises that will be for a cloud setting. And there’s the work on the data centers and servers of the future. The future server architectures will be the foundation of the cloud in the future. Those will come out in a little longer time frame. The server architecture work will come out maybe two to five years in the future.

So we still haven’t talked much about software yet. Where does software fit in all this?

We’ve created a new information analytics lab. It’s led by Laura Hill, who came from Sun Labs. What they’re trying to do is look at all the structured and unstructured data. About 80 to 90 percent of it is going to be unstructured. The key is tying it together with the structured data and do really deep analytics on that. The work that is going there is being leveraged with a new company that we acquired, called Vertica. It’s now sitting as an incubator within Shane’s organization [Office of Strategy and Technology]. And so Vertica and the information and analytics lab are working very closely together on some of the future analytics opportunities for both consumers and enterprises.

Having seen some of the troubles that have taken place at Amazon recently, in your view and HP’s view what does the cloud need?

I don’t want to comment specifically on anything taking place at another company. But when we started our work on scalable storage, there were three goals toward that project. One was tremendous scale. We defined that as hundreds or thousands of petabytes, even exabytes of information. That’s a tremendous amount of information that you want to store, not in one data center or even two but in hundreds of data centers. And the reason we wanted to do it that way was to address some of the issues that Amazon has faced. Amazon currently has about six data centers around the world. We are trying to design something for a hundred around the world. The second reason is availability. We want to design a system that is 99.999 percent available. Whatever happens you should always be able to access your data. That is a core tenet to doing these things. And the third is low cost. The world knows how to do two of these things simultaneously but not three. You can do large scale and high availability, but it will cost you a ton of money. The world also knows how to do large scale, low cost, but it fails all the time. The world does not yet know how to do large scale, highly available storage at low cost. And that is a key bit of IP that was created at HP Labs. It’s based on erasure coding, which is a coding technique that’s been around for many years. The innovation is how we applied it in a system-level setting using software, using these low-cost disks that we get from the hardware world. And that innovation allows us to have high availability at low cost. Once HP has this kind of public cloud storage, we think we’ll have a service that is very resilient.

The other fundamental concern in the cloud is around security. What can HP offer on the cloud security front?

One of our labs is devoted just to cloud security. We have two things cooking related to cloud security. One thread is security analytics. When you have a large complex enterprise and IT organization, often CIOs have no clue how secure they are. They think they’re secure. They patch their systems regularly and they hope to God they are secure. But the security threats keep changing, and so there’s a constant battle for resources. Currently at a very frivolous level, the strategy of many CIOs is to keep adding security until you run out of budget. There’s either a cap on dollars, or people or time. Somehow you have to cap the number of security dollars. We’ve done some deep research on determining how secure you really are. We came up with a demonstration this year called G-Cloud or Government Cloud. We will provide a dashboard regarding how secure your cloud infrastructure is as the world around you is trying to create new threats. The other thread that is going is around trusted virtualization that is highly relevant to what Leo talked about. What we are doing is to provide this seamless view from the consumer view to the enterprise view. Well, what does that mean? Today you can talk to large organizations like HP, and our CIO will not allow random devices on the system. It has to be an HP-approved device. And here there are these young people trying to bring these gadgets like the iPhone and the CIOs will not let you do that. However in the consumer world, people love the touch interfaces you get on those devices. But you can’t use the same device in the enterprise world. The technology we’ve come up with is trusted virtualization. We provide a consumer view and an enterprise view. And these two worlds will not clash. We keep them completely secure, and running on the same device. It will run on either a Web OS device or on a Windows PC. It will provide a completely bulletproof consumer and enterprise experience.

Within this sphere there are basically two kinds of research: Quantitative and qualitative. The first is basically numbers: How many people between the ages of 25 and 65 say they like to put non-dairy creamer in their coffee? You get this from large-scale surveys of consumers, usually done by phone or online.

The second is more subjective: Why do you, as a college-educated female under 40 who lives in the Midwest, like this or that non-dairy creamer and how do you feel about it? This is a little trickier to get. Ad agencies and research companies spend $7 billion a year rounding up focus groups and asking roomfuls of consumers a bunch of questions and paying them for their time. In truth, the practice hasn’t changed all that much from the days portrayed in “Mad Men.” Well, maybe a little. But if you’re looking for a part of the advertising ecosystem that’s ripe for disruption, this looks like it.

Enter GutCheck, a curious little Denver-based start-up that I encountered last week. Why go to the time and effort of assembling a bunch of consumers in a room to say things they may or may not actually believe, all at a cost of thousands of dollars, when the power of the Internet gives you the means to reach them directly in the unguarded comfort of their own homes for 40 bucks a head for every half hour? Its faster than a focus group–you get results right away versus waiting for weeks–cheaper, and the results are arguably better.

I had breakfast with CEO Matt Warta last week, and he demonstrated the product for me. It’s a cloud-based service where subscribers, usually ad agencies, search out pre-screened people who fit a given profile. Since we were having breakfast and he asked me to come up with a question to ask a consumer, naturally my thoughts turned to the cup of coffee I had just ordered but didn’t yet have. Quickly sorting through a database of five million potential interview candidates in about two minutes, he found a college-educated woman online and conducted what amounted to a brief chat session about non-dairy coffee creamers.

She got a small incentive for her time, Gutcheck would have gotten $40, and Warta, had he been an ad exec with a client making non-dairy coffee creamers, would have come away with some anecdotal data to help inform the thinking behind a forthcoming ad campaign. (He does bear a bit of a resemblance to Roger Sterling, though minus the cigarette.)

Yesterday GutCheck announced a subscription version of the service aimed at larger agencies. Rather than pay on a per-interview basis, as has been the practice so far, agencies can pay for an annual subscription on a per-user basis. Warta said that when compared with traditional research methods, it’s still “freakishly affordable.” The new offering lets teams at ad agencies pick and choose who they want to interview, what factors they want to focus on and so on.

Warta, a former venture capitalist himself, raised $2 million in funding from Highway 12 Ventures, a Boise, Idaho-based venture capital fund. GutCheck also won a $1 million prize at the DEMO conference last month (not cash, ironically, but that much worth of free advertising). Not bad for a shop with five employees.

A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app.

The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the action, which you can read all about below.

Zite bills itself as a “personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.”

Not smart enough, it seems, to avoid copyright complaints from the content creators the app sucks in.

“The Zite application is plainly unlawful,” said the letter to Zite CEO Ali Davar, noting all kinds of copyright violations.

In a phone interview with BoomTown this afternoon, Davar said Zite would comply with the letter by shifting the content from its “reading” mode to a Web one, which points to publisher sites.

“It’s a bummer that they did this, but we expected it,” he said.

In a comment he posted below, Davar also wrote:

“Zite’s goal is to work with publishers, not to be antagonistic. The few publishers that have contacted us regarding the reading mode view we have complied with their requests and simply switched over to web view. We’re talking to publishers right now to find a win-win for them monetarily and to at the same time preserve the great user experience.”

For now, it’s lose-lose, and the letter is a dramatic shot across the bow of all the many news readers now hitting the market in the wake of the popularity of the Apple iPad tablet.

The social media-focused Flipboard and the news-oriented Pulse are two others, both of which have claimed they are working with publishers.

But Pulse wrangled with the New York Times over misuse of its RSS feeds and copyright issues, which has since been settled.

Zite showed up earlier this month, a product of a machine-learning technology start-up called Worio, which is based in Vancouver, Canada.

The aggregator of personalized content, which has $4 million in angel funding, gets its cues from a user’s interests.

Zite’s technology originated at research at the University of British Columbia several years ago.

In an interview with NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes a few weeks ago, Davar seemed sanguine about publishers.

Wrote Gannes:

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Flipboard itself is likely to add more personalization features; the company bought real-time social discovery technology from Ellerdale and has yet to implement much of it.

Vancouver-based Zite is well-funded, with $4 million from angels and Canadian grants, but it doesn’t have business relationships with publishers. The app lays out pictures and articles, stripping out everything else, including ads. Davar said he doubted this would be a problem. “It would be shortsighted for publishers to think of Zite as us versus them,” he said.

Short-sighted maybe, but legally lethal definitely, as you can see by this cease-and-desist letter, as well as a video from Zite on how its app works:

Letter to Zite _03 30 11_ –

Zite: Personalized Magazine for iPad from zite.com on Vimeo.

(Full disclosure: New Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

Nokia spends about five times as much on mobile R&D as Apple. In fact, Nokia has nearly as many engineers working on its smartphone software platforms as Apple does for its entire product line. Says Dediu, “Symbian alone may cost twice as much to develop than the iPhone (including the hardware).”

A shocking metric, if correct. And a pretty dismal return on investment–unless there’s another version of Symbian in the pipeline that will best iOS.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Not Seeing Much Return on That Massive R&D Spend, Are You, Nokia?
• Nokia: Big and Slow

Hamstrung by institutional inefficiencies and the complexity of its legacy platforms, Nokia is spending a lot of money to gain traction in markets in which its handset lineup is clearly uncompetitive, and with little success. Instead it’s suffering steeper share losses at the high end of the market and margin erosion across its entire portfolio. And it’s spending about 4 times as much on R&D as Apple, which has recast the smartphone space from its own vision.

As Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu observes, Nokia’s business appears to be melting like an ice cube. “At this stage, we believe that even a good success of Symbian^3 would barely stabilize the business,” he says. “A real comeback will need much more effort … and a lot more time, unlikely to happen in the next couple of years, in our view.”

So what can be done? Though some observers argue Nokia should scrap Symbian, Ferragu says that’s impossible given the number of assets the company has that depend on it. The company can’t really make a big move to Android, either. That would undermine its current service strategy and alienate partners, European carriers looking for an alternative to iOS and Android, and Nokia’s developer community.

What it should do, he says, is redouble its efforts on MeeGo and make it a viable competitor to Android and iOS in markets like North America, while continuing to push Symbian to the rest of the world. And then it should integrate the two through QT, its cross-platform application and UI framework. Says Ferragu, “By migrating all UI developments of Symbian on QT, the company can generate significant cost savings, progressively drive the platform towards a single UI between MeeGo and Symbian and a single development environment for applications.”

What’s left to do after that?

Hope for the best.

As CEO Stephen Elop said during the company’s last earnings call, “Nokia must compete on ecosystem to ecosystem basis. In addition to great device experiences we must build, catalyse or join a competitive ecosystem. And the ecosystem approach we select must be comprehensive and cover a wide range of utilities and services that customers expect today and anticipate in the future.”

“Whatever the strategy is we outline on Feb. 11, we very clearly ensuring that it will give us the opportunity to reopen markets such as the U.S. and some others, where we have not recently been present.”

The restoration of communications comes a day after President Hosni Mubarak announced that he would not seek another term as president in the forthcoming September election. Though that seems not to have satisfied the protesters who are eager that he step down right away.

Messages on @Speak2Tweet, the Twitter account created by Google and Twitter, have grown to 1,197 overnight, though with the Internet returning to normal that may stop.

The Internet may be returning to something resembling normal, but it’s clear that Egypt itself has quite a ways to go. I heard again this morning from my friend Abdalla in Cairo via text message. He wrote:

I am close to Tahrir Square. Pro-Mubarak rallies are taking place. They are not huge crowds but many of them are complete thugs. Thank goodness I got out of there with my camera in one piece. I am seeking refuge in a hotel lobby for now. I talked to a video journalist here who had his camera spray painted by someone in the crowd. Today is going to be a really ugly day :(

The company has confirmed the appointments of Scott Prevost to the position of VP of product management on search and Dennis DeCoste to the position of director of research, where he will manage such technical topics as data mining and machine learning.

Prevost will start immediately. DeCoste is a couple of weeks into his new job.

The two hires will focus on delivering changes to the e-commerce site’s homegrown search engine, by better matching items in its inventory based on a consumer’s search terms or interests.

The company is now working on the next-generation of search, according to the company’s research labs, which lists both “search” and “machine learning” as two of its top priorities. Recently, eBay rolled out the ability to sort by “Best Match,” and will soon be launching other versions on eBay.com. “Through great strides we’ve made in applying machine learning to our search engine, search results will continue to become more relevant with each use,” says a labs post.

Previously, Prevost was the principal development manager at Bing, where he led a team of developers who were responsible for a bringing a variety of Bing features to market, including complex stuff like adding “captions and summaries to search results, reference answers and query processing using natural language techniques,” according to Prevost’s LinkedIn profile. Before that, he served as the general manger and director of product for Powerset, which Microsoft acquired in 2008.

Before joining eBay, DeCoste was a research scientist at Facebook, where he worked to improve a number of products, including ad matching, search ranking, link recommendation and spam detection. Prior to that, he was a principal scientist at Microsoft and a director of research at Yahoo Research, according to his profile on LinkedIn.

We also reported exclusively today that eBay’s PayPal subsidiary has hired Sarah Brody, formerly at Apple, to lead Global Design.

With tablets running the Google mobile OS beginning to proliferate now, those days of Apple’s easy dominace of the market are winding down. Shipments of Android devices in the quarter, for example, leapt to 2.1 million units from about 100,000. “Apple’s volumes will continue to go up, but market share will inevitably go down,” Strategy Analytics’ director Neil Mawston told Bloomberg . “Even at $500 retail, based on some of the research we’ve done, that’s probably two or three times more than what most mass market consumers are expecting to pay….If you were to ask me in two years time will Apple have less than 50 percent of the global tablet market, I think that’s a certainty.”

Perhaps. Depends on how the competition shakes out, I suppose. And just how high Apple raises the bar for its rivals with the iPad 2.

UPDATE: It also depends on the manner in which the competition reports sales numbers. To wit, it turns out that those 2 million Galaxy Tabs Samsung sold were actually sold into the channel and not necessarily to consumers, suggesting that this spike in Android growth may not be quite what it seems.

One of the priorities of the research is what Intel calls “visual computing,” which will harness Intel’s latest Core chips, which combine the traditional microprocessor and a 3-D graphics processor that until recently had generally been a separate chip. The research will be focused on applications for both consumers and professionals.

A video showing some of that research in action is below. It shows how millions of vacation photos of Rome are being used to build an incredibly realistic 3-D model of some of its most popular tourist sites.