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Computers Can See You -- If You Have a Mug Shot

Carl Bialik — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 11:30:22 +0000

When rioters wreaked havoc on some U.K. cities last month, police deployed facial-recognition technology to try to identify some of the participants. But many experts say the software isn’t yet good enough to be of much use in interpreting grainy security footage, despite a recent study that suggested facial-recognition software is highly accurate in controlled settings.

Facial-recognition software is controversial. When Facebook Inc. began using the technology to automatically suggest tags for people in photos on the social-networking site, some users were outraged at what they viewed as a potential invasion of privacy. Some also worried about the potential for misidentifying people, especially in photos where subjects aren’t facing the camera head-on.

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A Digital "Magazine" With One Subscriber

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 05:05:42 +0000

Each morning, the President of the United States gets briefed on the day’s news by some of the smartest advisers around. The rest of us aren’t so lucky. We have to sift through newspapers, magazines and websites to find out what’s going on around us. Now, thanks to a free iPad app called Zite, the news-gathering process may get a lot easier for those of us who aren’t leaders of the free world.

[ See post to watch video ]

Zite, by a Vancouver company of the same name, crawls over half a million Web domains to find specific reading material that would be of interest to you, according to your social network and/or online reading behavior. It evaluates this potential content by tracking signals (like tweets, comments, tags and sharing) from stories that indicate a certain level of social interest and momentum in the story. The result is a personalized magazine that gets more accurately targeted toward its reader the more it’s used.

Wednesday, Zite launched in Apple’s App Store, and for the past week I’ve been testing an early version of it. As someone who is regularly overwhelmed by information overload, just on technology news alone, I found Zite to be a huge help. I realized every time I grabbed my iPad, I anxiously checked this app to see what new content it gathered for me. And I found myself reading stories from sources I don’t usually read.

Zite joins the ranks of other personalized digital magazines, like Silicon Valley-based Flipboard, which came out last July. Flipboard differs in that it takes data from your Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as other topics or people you can manually choose to set up, and builds a personalized digital magazine with this content.

Zite isn’t just a mirror of your social-networking account. It figures out what you consider interesting according to your Twitter or Google Reader accounts, then fills your magazine with stories about similar topics.

It also tracks and learns from user behavior as people open stories (or don’t), so if users just read a story on Zite, its personalization still works. With each story a user reads, he or she can opt to indicate they like a story, want to see more of one or all of the individual topics covered in that story, or want to see more from the source of that story. Zite then makes suggestions according to that knowledge. So your Zite magazine will never be exactly like mine.

By now, you’re probably wondering what Zite does with this knowledge about your reading preferences. Zite CEO Ali Davar says the company won’t sell user data to third parties, but may use it internally on an anonymous basis for advertising purposes. The company will share aggregate data with publishers (like number of clicks on a story), for ad-placement purposes, but this won’t include a user’s individual data.

Flipboard is more polished than Zite, including images that take up the entire iPad screen and clever animations that mimic real pages turning. Zite’s animations are limited to more straightforward gestures like swiping from right to left to turn to a new page of content, though there is a cool animation on Zite’s home screen that swings several images from stories onto the magazine’s first page. Both Zite and Flipboard pull text and images from sources, but Flipboard usually just displays a portion of a story on its digital magazine pages with the original website on which content was found displayed below it.

Above, ‘Top Stories’ compiles stories Zite thinks a user wants to read. Top, a Customize option lets users add favorite sections.

Zite displays entire stories on its own formatted reading-mode pages, though some stories, like one I read from the New York Times, appeared in the article’s original Web-page format. Mr. Davar said this is because roughly 3% to 5% of articles are tagged in a way that doesn’t allow for reformatting in Zite.

There are currently no ads in Zite, but Mr. Davar said the company will begin to put ads from publishers in the reading-mode pages of the magazine in a few months. He said the site may have ads that aren’t from publishers, but publishers have control regarding ads that appear on their content.

Setting up Zite was a cinch. I entered my Twitter username (not the password) and Zite took a minute to churn and grab content that interested me, setting up sections of my magazine according to topics I follow in Twitter. I didn’t enter my Google Reader account. Users who don’t have Twitter or Google Reader accounts can skip those steps and still use Zite by selecting sections of the magazine that interest them.

Upon opening Zite, a section called “Top Stories” appears first. This is a compilation of the stories Zite thinks I’ll find most interesting, and its content refreshes about every 30 minutes depending how often I use Zite.

My auto-generated magazine had a list of topics including Gadgets, Mobile, iPhone, Google, Mac, Social Media and Technology. I tapped a Customize icon to pick some additional sections for my magazine. I could choose from over 2,000 topics ranging from Wedding Photography to Gardening, from Wine & Mixology to Celebrity Gossip & Industry Rumors. A search box lets users look for even more topics, like “Martha Stewart,” which I added to my Zite. Topics can’t be manually added.

I ran into a couple bugs while using my early version of Zite, which Mr. Davar said are being fixed. A Mashable.com article crashed the app four times in a row when I tried to read it. And though videos from major providers like YouTube and Vimeo are watchable in Zite, I had trouble playing a video that used HTML-5 playback.

For now, Zite is limited to Apple’s iPad, just like Flipboard. Mr. Davar said he plans to get Zite on other tablets by this summer and on mobile devices and Web browsers before the end of this year.

If you’d like a smarter way to handle information overload, Zite can do the dirty work of amassing relevant content for you. It’s designed to get more personalized over time and I certainly plan to keep using it to see what it uncovers for me.

Watch a video with Katherine Boehret on Zite at WSJ.com/PersonalTech. Email her at katie.boehret@wsj.com.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Topsy Hands Out Real-Time Search Widgets

Liz Gannes — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 16:00:52 +0000

Real-time search engine Topsy today is launching customizable widgets for publishers to display topical tweets.

The company’s “social modules” dynamically populate with fresh content on any topic.

So, for instance, a news organization could automatically input the tags associated with its articles into a module, and on each page it would show relevant tweets about similar topics (and not just lame redundant retweets of the article itself, like you often see).

Or a site could show a live-updating widget that displays its most tweeted articles that day. Publisher IDG is already using the modules on some of its sites.

Anyone can create a self-service module, and Topsy will offer premium features such as analytics and revenue-shared advertising. Content within the modules is automatically filtered for profanity and language preference.

You might ask why Topsy and its random blog widgets are important. For one thing, Topsy is among the few independent players remaining in real-time search, with OneRiot pivoting to focus on ads, and Ellerdale acquired by Flipboard. Twitter does have its own search service, but it stores only a week of tweets at a time.

Topsy organizes its index of eight billion tweets using social signals, such as figuring out which accounts on Twitter are influential and which tweeted links are important, something Google and Bing are only starting to do. That’s a change from the dominant PageRank mindset, where a parent domain carries a certain weight without differentiation for all the different people who have accounts on it, from influential authorities to spammers.

And while it’s true that few Web pages need any more widgets than they already have, prominent tech publishers like Business Insider and TechCrunch use Twitter sidebar widgets from PostUp (formerly TweetUp) that show a rotation of promoted accounts. A more timely and dynamic alternative like Topsy Social Modules might be more useful.

A New Type of Tracking: Akamai's "Pixel-Free" Technology

Julia Angwin — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 08:00:24 +0000

Akamai Technologies Inc., the large Web infrastructure provider, is promoting a new tracking technique it calls “pixel-free” technology.

Pixels are bits of software that tracking companies install on Web pages to monitor user behavior. These pixels, also known as “beacons” and “tags,” can install cookies–or small tracking files–on a user’s machine, or they can simply send information about a user’s behavior to a tracking company.

However, tracking has become so pervasive that some Web publishers are increasingly worried that the pixels on their pages are slowing down the performance of their site. Several companies have cropped up to help companies manage all the pixels on their pages.

Akamai’s solution to the pixel problem is unique. Akamai’s core business is to store copies of popular websites and applications on its computer servers around the world and speed delivery of this information.

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Saving Web Articles

Walt Mossberg — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 23:09:13 +0000

What program would you recommend for saving Web articles such as yours and which also provides for filing them by classifications such as technology, taxes, health, investments, etc.

There are a number of programs that will let you quickly and easily save links to Web pages you want to save or read later.

One is called Instapaper. Another, which I have recommended in the past, is Evernote. The latter allows you to categorize Web links or any other notes with tags, or to store them in different notebooks that you could label and organize for different topics. Using these tags and/or notebooks, you can quickly find all saved links to Web pages on different topics.

I always am wary of installing any Microsoft program on my Mac because of viruses. I have, however, been thinking of getting the new Office 2011 for Mac that you reviewed because I have not been happy with the iWork program from Apple. Should I have these virus concerns?

Microsoft’s Office for Mac is a purely native Mac program and doesn’t involve running the Windows operating system, which is the platform on which nearly all viruses operate. So, when it comes to the danger of viruses, Office for the Mac is like any other Mac program—highly unlikely to expose you to viruses.

The one exception is that, years ago, there was a rash of viruses that spread through the use of macros, or automated features, in certain Office files. These could theoretically still plague you, but Microsoft long ago took steps to snuff out most of these, and you can choose to disable macros in any documents you open.

Several times a year, a group of my friends rents a house in England or France. None of the houses has Wi-Fi. What is the cheapest and easiest way to access the Internet on our computers?

Assuming the houses also lack wired Internet connections, I’d investigate cellular data connections, either via cellular modems for each individual computer, or devices like the MiFi, which create a Wi-Fi network for multiple computers using the cellular data network. I cannot say whether this would be a “cheap” method, as it would likely vary depending on which carrier you used.

So Many Trackers, So Little Time

WSJ Staff — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 18:00:21 +0000

A Wall Street Journal study found an average of 64 tracking tools on the top 50 websites. In fact, there are so many of these files out there that a new company is winning business by helping sites keep track of the trackers.

TagMan, a start-up with offices in New York and London, gives website owners the ability to manage “tags” on their sites and was developed specifically to deal with the problem of having too many tags. Tags, also known as pixels and beacons, are bits of code that sit on a Web page and can collect data about a user’s browsing behavior.

Jon Baron, a co-founder of TagMan, says all this code can be a pain for website owners to insert. “You’ve got to pay some tech guy to go copy and paste all these different pieces of code for every single page,” he said. “The code might be different on each page. So you’ve got to feel for the people on the tech team who have to do this.”

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Facebook Facial-Recognition Tagger Goes Live

Andrew LaVallee — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:47:26 +0000

Face.com is opening its photo-tagging system, based on facial-recognition technology, to Facebook members Wednesday.

Photo Tagger, which launched to a limited group of users in July, scans a user’s photo albums on the social-networking site, then lets him tag faces it identifies. It groups multiple shots of each person, making it easy to tag large albums, and users can also adjust or remove incorrectly tagged pictures.

Once a member has been identified, the app prompts him or her to approve the tag–a crucial privacy step, since he or she may not want to be labeled in a photo. It also works with a member’s current photo-privacy settings on Facebook.

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Ford and Microsoft Team Up to Promote the New Taurus

Jeff Bennett — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:15:44 +0000

Ford Motor Co. (F) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) are teaming up to market the auto maker’s redesigned Taurus sedan.

Ford and Microsoft first teamed up a few years ago to launch the Sync telematics system, which enables drivers to hook Bluetooth entertainment and communications devices into the car. Now, Ford is using a technology from Microsoft–known as tags–in its print advertising materials in order to give potential car buyers a more interactive introduction to the car.

Looking very much like a bar code found on most consumer products, the black and white tags are integrated into the design of an ad and can be photographed by anyone carrying a camera-equipped smart phone, such as Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iPhone, or Research In Motion Ltd.’s (RIMM) Blackberry. Once the image has been downloaded, it then links a consumer to a company-designed website.

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A Search Engine With a Real Eye for Videos

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:52:03 +0000

Web video has transformed the way the Internet is used, but finding the exact clip you want can be incredibly hard. And it’s no wonder, considering that sites like YouTube conduct their hunts by looking at a clip’s “contextual metadata” — tags, video title and description — and thus can often be misled by false information. For example, a homemade video about cooking might be inaccurately tagged with a popular search word like “Obama” so as to get more traction.

At the top of a VideoSurf results page for ‘Mad Men,’ users can search for clips featuring specific characters.

This week I tested VideoSurf.com, a site that claims to be the first to search videos by “seeing” images that appear in these videos. The company says its technology can analyze a clip’s visual content, as well as its metadata — especially when searching for people. VideoSurf has analyzed and categorized more than 12 billion visual moments on the Web to understand who the most important characters and scenes are in a video, and it uses this knowledge to sort clips according to relevancy.

Search results on VideoSurf spread out videos in a filmstrip-like format, distinguishing one scene from the next. Users can choose an option to show only faces, which helps if you’re looking for a specific person in a long video or movie. And when looking at videos from certain sources, you can select a scene from the filmstrip and jump ahead to that scene rather than sit through the entire clip.

When it works, VideoSurf is one of those technologies that make you wonder why someone didn’t think of it sooner. The site aggregates content from about 60 sources, including YouTube, CNN Video, Hulu, ESPN and Comedy Central, and a sorting tool weeds out unwanted results like the irksome slideshows that are labeled as videos. VideoSurf can find videos on all kinds of subjects, but it really shines when it finds well-known people.

But VideoSurf has some rough edges and doesn’t always work as it should. In its defense, the site is still in its public beta, or trial, stage, and plans to be full-blown by early next year. Right now, one of its best features, the ability to jump ahead to specific scenes, works with video from only a handful of sources including YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion and Google (GOOG) Video. Videos from Hulu.com confusingly allow jumping ahead only from certain screens.

Additionally, I came across a couple of videos that were no longer available, though they were listed in search results. And a customizable VideoSurf home page for users with accounts on the site saves searches but not specific clips; VideoSurf plans to fix this next week by adding a favorites page where users can store and share favorite videos with others.

Still, I really grew to like VideoSurf’s clear way of displaying content that would be otherwise buried within videos. Rather than trying to guess a video’s contents by looking at a single representative image, VideoSurf’s filmstrip views showed me exactly what I’d be watching. In many cases, I viewed a video I might not have otherwise watched because its filmstrip showed shots of scenes that looked interesting.

On the left-hand side of the search-results page, VideoSurf users can narrow results according to Content Type, Categories and Video Sources to see just what they’re looking for — or, often more important, what they’re not looking for. Content Type, for example, includes slideshows, Web series, full television episodes and full movies; a search can include only videos in a particular category (say, slideshows) or exclude that category altogether by unmarking the box beside it.

Most search-results pages include tiled still images at the top representing the characters in the videos. By selecting one of these characters, users can refine search results to show only videos with that character. For example, I typed the title of a favorite television show, “Brothers and Sisters,” into the search box and saw the names and images of seven actors on the show at the top of the screen. I selected Sally Field and was redirected to results of videos featuring only the mother she plays on the show.

I used VideoSurf to search for Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” music video, and then changed the date parameters to find only videos posted this week. This retrieved a Saturday Night Live skit in which the pop singer spoofs her own video with help from three men in tights — including Justin Timberlake. While the SNL skit ran, a list of related videos appeared in a column on the right, including clips of J.T.’s past SNL skits.

Occasionally, annotations appear on videos, but these come from the source — not VideoSurf. If overlaid text appears on YouTube videos, it can be turned off using an icon in the bottom right of the YouTube screen. Video-sharing sites that use introductory pages such as pre-rolls before each video will still show those pages.

VideoSurf makes it easy to send specific clips of videos to friends. I did so by selecting a Share option and adjusting slide bars to trim the clip to start and end at scenes I preferred. Clips shared with friends via email are sent with the VideoSurf filmstrip, giving others the ability to also know what the video will include so that they, too, can discern whether or not they want to watch it.

Clips can be shared on social-networking sites like del.icio.us, MySpace and Facebook, though VideoSurf’s helpful filmstrip didn’t show up on these sites like it did in emails.

I also tested an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser called Greasemonkey that works with VideoSurf. When installed, this displays VideoSurf’s helpful filmstrip beneath search results from Google Video, YouTube, Yahoo (YHOO) or CBS.com (CBS). Once installed, filmstrips illustrating important scenes appear along with the normal text results for videos, and some of the filmstrips enable jumping ahead to specific scenes. This somewhat techie Greasemonkey extension can save people the extra step of making a separate visit to VideoSurf.com to watch a specific clip.

VideoSurf uses smart technology that can save people the aggravation of watching videos that aren’t what they appear to be. Since so much Web content now includes videos, a visual search tool that can better assess videos like VideoSurf is a good idea. When this site improves its now-flaky ability to jump ahead to specific scenes in videos, it will be even more valuable.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com