Yearly Archives: 2009

Google Puts Bar Codes On Favorites

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These barcodes are not those Google was celebrating back in October.  That marked the 57th anniversary of the first patent on the bar code.


Its inventors were Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver, who filed the patent in October 1949, which was granted in October 1952. The original patent suggested encoding data in circles (a bulls eye pattern), so that it could be scanned in any direction.

Now Google has moved on to squaring that circle and is offering stickers bearing Google’s logo and a QR code.  QR stands for Quick Response.

What could be easier.  Your phone must be able to scan a QR code with its camera, either with an application that you download or via software that’s already installed on your phone.

When you see a QR code, you can then use your phone’s application to scan it. If you’re scanning a QR code on one of the window decals that Google has sent to thousands of U.S. businesses, you’ll quickly be taken to that business’ mobile Place Page on Google.

This is a way in which Google is promoting its local business listings in storefronts around the U.S. with QR codes.

favorite barcode

Stickers have been distributed to 100,000 of the most popular businesses in Google’s Local Business Center database.  Starting this week consumers will be able to use code-scanning applications on modern phones to look up the Google listing for a particular restaurant, store, or dry cleaner. The stickers will be prominently displayed in store windows of participating businesses, and represent a shot across the bow of companies like Yelp which offer similar branded services.

As Bill Slawski points out there is one question that needs to be asked.  Why would Google rely upon stickers for a system like this instead of using something like Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) information, or cell phone triangulation, or some other method that would avoid the need to use your phone’s camera to take an actual picture?

According to a Google patent just filed, GPS systems have some limitations, such as:

  • Subscription to a GPS navigation system may be expensive, and difficult to use
  • GPS Functionality requires unobstructed skyward views, which may not be possible in some places, like metropolitan areas with skyscrapers
  • Privacy concerns with GPS may keep some people from using a device that permits precise tracking of their location without their consent

Barcodes stickers are not limited to just the windows of businesses.  They could also be located on the pavement of parking lots or on signs associated with those lots, near the entrance to an office building, on a traffic light pole, at or near the base of a monument, or in many other places. … and of course they can be of any size.  It’s all just another way that mobile world is becoming so very much easier.

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Mobile Device Screen Resolution – here’s looking at you

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As might have been expected, mobile device screens keep getting smaller even though desktop monitor screens get bigger.  That paradox is one that is difficult to avoid.  Mobile devices are becoming ever more popular and must be highly transportable.  That gives you two problems

  • The keyboard
  • The screen

The keyboard is an easy one to resolve since voice control can provide an ideal input method.  Indeed smart phones are designed to handle voices so what could be better.

The screen is an entirely different problem.  It might appear that mobile web pages must be small.  However desktop screens show what the user really wants.  Much more information and much more interactivity with a higher content of a whole variety of multimedia experiences.

What could be the answer?  Perhaps the words of that Peter Gabriel song may give a clue, In Your Eyes.

If you consider that difficult to believe, consider the words of an informed spectator of the digital world.  Robert X. Cringely suggests that the solution is Pictures in Our Heads.  He too sees a huge growth for mobile devices since the purchasing cycle is rapid and new technology comes along very fast.  Reluctantly he accepts the voice control approach to inputting data as we struggle with an ever diminishing keyboard.

Where he opens up a whole new way of thinking is when it comes to that mobile screen.

We’re at the point right now where primitive single-pixel displays can be built into contact lenses.  They act as user interfaces for experimental devices like automatic insulin pumps.  This already exists.  A patch of carbon nanotubes on your arm continuously monitor blood glucose levels, driving a pump that keeps your insulin supply right where it should be.  Any problem with the pump or the levels is shown by a red dot that appears in your field of view courtesy of that contact lens.  The data connection between pump and eyeball is wireless. The power to run that display is wireless too, since the contact lens display scavenges RF energy out of the air to run, courtesy of that mobile phone on your belt and that WiFi access point on the ceiling.

While that display is a single pixel today, we can pretty easily predict at what point it could be the equivalent of HDTV.  Except I don’t expect we’ll ever get there.

Shortly we will communicate with our devices, I predict, through our thoughts.  By 2029 (and probably a lot sooner) we’ll think our input and see pictures in our heads.

In other words, we avoid the need for mechanical devices between our neural circuits and our smart devices.  Both ways communication will occur directly from your brain waves to the Internet via wireless transmissions.  Only twenty years to get there but perhaps that is a very feasible scenario.

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Hospitals Lead In Speech Recognition Infrastructures

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If you consider all the fields of human activities where speech recognition technology might be used, the hospital environment would seem to offer the most beneficial uses.  Just think of some of the benefits:

  • Reducing cross-infection by using keyboards
  • Hands-free operation allowing the physician to minister to the patient
  • Reduction in errors in record keeping for patients
  • Improved quality of patient care
  • Reduced cost

Not surprisingly, it does not seem inappropriate to say that Every hospital will have speech recognition infrastructure.

A big influence on that will be Nuance  It is among the world’s most influential software companies with 4.5 billion users – half the world’s population. It specialises in data input and information capture by text or speech – improving communication between man and machine. Following its recent acquisitions Nuance have now embarked on their mission across the European healthcare systems.

The Nuance vision of how speech recognition will be used in five years’ time is that it will change the way health services are delivered in a major way:

In five or ten years, all hospitals will use electronic patient record systems. These will become more structured so we can get statistical information from them easily. At the moment, we can’t, because the data is sitting on paper and is virtually unusable.

Speech recognition will continue to be a major help to doctors filling in these structured reports.  We are already researching ‘talk forms’ – doctors talk in free narrative and the form fills in automatically.  We also have to move towards using decision support systems to give immediate feedback to doctors when they make a mistake – at the point of dictation.  Whether that happens over an iPod, a PDA or a mobile phone, it won’t matter – we will be there because in the future, every hospital will have speech recognition infrastructure.

Just check out the technology being used the next time you enter a hospital environment.  You may be surprised what you hear.

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Dipping into videos with Google’s GAUDI

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Manas Ganguly highlighted the way in which Google Audio Indexing (short form GAUDI) is encouraging media democratization. That process was started by YouTube but Google video search can now allow a user to search for a particular reference in a speech.

Google Audio Indexing (Gaudi) is a new technology that allows users to better search and watch videos from various YouTube channels. It uses speech technology to find spoken words inside videos and lets the user jump to the right portion of the video where these words are spoken. Google Audio Indexing thus makes it easier for people to find and consume spoken content from videos on the Web.

The official announcement suggested we would be seeing continuing innovation. For more detailed information on GAUDI, check out the FAQ for this technology.

Google for some time has had Google Elections Video Search gadget which is wholly US centric information. It was very instrumental in pulling together information on the views, actions and platforms of the two presidential candidates. Google Audio and the Google Elections Video Search gadget use the exact same underlying technology.

Google Audio Indexing uses speech technology to transform spoken words into text and leverages the Google indexing technology to return the best results to the user. The returned videos are ranked based — among other things — on the spoken content, the metadata, the freshness. The gadget periodically crawls the YouTube political channels for new content. As soon as a new video is uploaded to YouTube, it is processed by the system and made available in the GAUDI index for people to search.

Google Audio Indexing searches only those videos uploaded on the YouTube political channels at the present time. That is a very limited scope currently, but it will surely not be long before Google extends the use over the whole YouTube Gamut.

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A Real Google Phone

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An item on The Street reports that Google Plans Its Own Android Phone.

In what is likely to be seen as disruptive to the wireless status quo, Google is working with a smartphone manufacturer to have a Google-branded phone available this year through retailers and not through telcos, according to Northeast Securities analyst Ashok Kumar, who has talked to Google’s design partners about the plan.

This move would fulfill Google’s pledge to bring a new generation of open-standard mobile Internet devices to consumers. Traditional carriers keep tight controls over the features and applications that are allowed on phones. On the other hand, Google will presumably offer a device that lets users determine the functions.

This could be a low cost ‘terminal’ giving access to a whole cloud-computing environment supported by the major players such as Google. That would certainly seem to be the Google strategy.

If talk of the Google phone plan is true, the entrance of a unlocked, low-cost, Web-friendly touchscreen device will probably undercut other Android phone efforts by players like Motorola, Samsung and Dell. Motorola’s entire turnaround strategy is based on the Android operating system. The company is expected to announce a ultra-thin Droid phone at Verizon next month.

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