Posted by Kieran on July 23, 2009 under Misc | 
Lots of negative press today for Spinvox mainly coming from the BBC and Moconews. This strikes me a little odd, as whilst I have always felt that if Spinvox’s voice recognition software was half as good as the claims made about it, they would not be dealing with mobile carriers and consumers and only charging £5 a month for the service, when the medical and legal professions would pay vast sums for this service and not need to be “sold” the product, as they already know the problem exists.
The fact that it has come as a shock to people, must only be people who have never used the service as it was always plainly apparent that Spinvox were using the mechanical turk to achieve a lot of their message transactions. This makes me laugh much like the uproar a few years ago when it was “revealed” that the dictionary corner on Countdown were getting assistance from other people in the studio team! I am fairly sure Goldman Sachs and Spinvoxes other investors would have been able to do simple calculations as to whether the amount of people needed to transcribe the messages to text was above the break even point and therefore the business could scale.
For all the bad press it has received today, the simple fact is that they had an innovative service people were willing to pay for – unlike Twitter, Facebook etc which are struggling to find meaningful revenue streams from their user base. They have however misled the press and potential customers as to the power of their D2 technology and maybe this is why people feel their expectations have been betrayed.
Posted by Kieran on July 21, 2009 under Uncategorized |
Yahoo release their earnings report for the quarter and it shows how wildly different the same set of numbers can be interpreted, depending on your prespective
The New York times leads with Yahoo’s profit rose nearly 8% whilst TechCrunch leads with Yahoo’s revenues Drop 13%
Posted by Kieran on under Mobile, iPhone |
24.07.09 Update James Parton of 02 Litmus has responded over at mobile industry review, thanks James for addressing peoples concerns!
O2 Litmus yesterday launched what looks at first glance like a great opportunity to engage the developer community
O2 Litmus competition
However once you read the terms and conditions for the competition, you come across this absolute gem
Your app(s) must be free to iPhone customers and your Apple iPhone Developer Program Portal account must have at least 95 device slots available for registering O2 iPhone App Showdown judge devices. You will be able to retain 5 registered device slots for yourself.
Excluding the time that it would take submitting the 95 UUIDs to the Apple iPhone Developer Program Portal, this simply is not practical with the way the program is currently setup, whereby you are only allowed to register 100 devices in any given year. For probably not the only developer frustrated by this already, view the blog of James Thomson-> running out of adhoc profiles. Understandably Apple are doing this to stop people bypassing distribution of presumably rejected or ineligible applications outside of the app store and therefore protecting the wider community.
However assuming you have 95 available slots, for a reasonable set of test devices in a year most people are probably going to have the following at a minimum
iPod touch at 3.0
iPod 2g at 3.0
iPod 3g at 3.0
iPod 3gs at 3.0
If you factored in having one of those devices as well at 2.0(or making the assumption that in the next 12 months Apple may release another device) you have reached 5 devices
Of course in practice most people that are developing for the iPhone on a contract basis have also added client devices so that the client can view the application on their own device before it is submitted to the app store
Do O2 Litmus really require entrants to hold back 95 device slots or is there another way in which people can distribute adhoc to the judges, maybe O2 Litmus could issue a certificate with a very short expiry
Hopefully this issue gets resolved as otherwise it looks like a good promotion
Posted by Kieran on July 14, 2009 under J2ME |
For anyone else scratching their head as to what Strings are currently set as defaults, in the LWUIT framework, here is the complete list of things that need replacing if you do not use the inbuilt language tool
select
menu
cancel
ok
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Posted by Kieran on under Android, J2ME, Mobile, iPhone |
Presentation slides from OpenMIC held in Bristol 2009
Posted by Kieran on under Android, J2ME, Mobile, iPhone |
Presentation slides from OpenMIC held in Bath 2009