Microsoft Goes To The Mall With Kinect Features For Wall-Sized Displays

Maybe touch will never be a particularly good match for Microsoft's Windows. Its Kinect sensor, however ' yes, the one mostly used as an attachment for its Xbox 360 game system ' might be another story.

Today, Microsoft announced two new gestures for Kinect for Windows, the PC-specific version of its Kinect interface. Within the new Windows for Kinect 1.7 SDK are two new gestures: the "push" or "click" gesture, and a closed-fist gesture for scrolling and panning a screen. Both could help power interactive wall-sized displays at your doctors' office ' or the mall.

Not An Actual Product ' Yet

Right now, Kinect for Windows is more of a research tool than an actual product. The sensor itself costs $228.99 at Amazon, is designed for closer sensing, and comes with a warning that it must be used as either a development tool or with software that has been designed for it - which, really, none has. But all that's changing.

"We actually think that this will be the biggest advancement [in Kinect for Windows] since the original introduction," said Bob Heddle, who leads the Kinect for Windows team in the Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB) Group at Microsoft. Microsoft calls the new gestures Kinect Interactions.

If the closed-fist gesture sounds familiar, that's because Microsoft demonstrated it at its recent TechFest, where Microsoft's vision for the future was embodied in wall-sized displays. In that environment, touch doesn't work as well as simply interpreting gestures via Kinect, which can "read" a user's gestures and translate them into a familiar user interface.

Windows On Walls

Microsoft sees those wall-sized displays, powered by Kinect for Windows, in three areas: interactive displays in public spaces, health care, and education and training. Some of Microsoft's vision is already a reality: at Bloomingdale's in New York, FaceCake and Microsoft installed "virtual dressing rooms" last year, where shoppers could use Kinect to "try on" a virtual scarf or dress, layered on top of their video "reflection". And there are virtual exercises of a sort, too, with "Just Dance" and similar Kinect-powered games grading players on how well they copy dance moves. 

The next step, Heddle said, was to make those activities more purposeful. Instead of dancing, for example, Kinect could be used as a rehab tool, working with a virtual physical trainer to ensure that users were putting in the required work. Microsoft also hopes to make Kinect an interface for "dirty hands" environments, such as using a PC when it might be covered with grease, for example. (Samsung's Galaxy S4 also allows users to swipe left and right, plus preview content, by simply moving their hand near the screen.)

"But to do that, we need a selection mechanism," Heddle said. "The value is that we can see you, understand the way you're looking, and draw the clothing on you... But to do that, you need to allow the user to choose the clothing, and now there's a 2D UI component."

How It Works

If you think about it, operating a PC-like environment doesn't have to be much different than, say, playing the giant electronic keyboard at FAO Schwarz, as Tom Hanks and a friend did in Big.

To gain control of the display, users raise their hand, identifying themselves to the screen. That hand appears as a wavy circle, a cursor that can be moved across the screen by moving your arm. Users "click" by pushing in toward the screen. (There is apparently no double-click in the Kinect interface.) What the new SDK adds is the closed-fist "scroll" gesture, which essentially works a swipe. Close your fist and move your hand down, and the window moves down. Chop your closed hand down rapidly, and the windows scrolls rapidly, like a flicked page on a smartphone.

According to Heddle, the new Kinect interface presents a familiar, Windows-like environment for interacting with large-screen content. Small-screen content, too. Last year, Microsoft Research quietly unveiled the Kinected Browser ' a set of browser elements that let developers write what are essentially Kinect-aware Web apps. A future with Kinect-equipped PCs won't necessarily need dedicated software or apps.

Kinect Fusion

Microsoft also announced Kinect Fusion, essentially the opposite of a 3D printer. With Fusion, the Kinect sensor functions as a wand, which a user can move around a statue or other object, transforming it into a virtual object using voxels, or pixels that exist in a 3D space. While there's a limit to the number of voxels that can be stored, the detail of the 3D object can be improved by merely moving the Kinect sensor slowly around, allowing it to take more "pictures" of the object, Heddle said.

Essentially, Kinect Fusion would allow users to "scan" their own physical objects, then manipulate them and print them out. It's a different take on the same problem that Autodesk attempted to solve in 2011 with a process that could create 3D models from two-dimensional photos.

In a mall kiosk, a retailer could use Kinect to simply "scan in" a new piece of merchandise, Heddle said.

The Future Of User Interfaces Is... Microsoft?

It's all part of the what Microsoft sees as its future: natural user interfaces, driven by speech and touch and gestures. Touch might not work naturally on the PC, but it adds a degree of public performance to any retailer. Think about a wall-sized display projected onto the wall of a Microsoft store, or Williams-Sonoma, or JC Penney. Who wouldn't stop to watch someone waving at a giant LCD screen, and seeing it react?

There are still problems to solve. By raising one's hand, Kinect knows that a user is trying to use it. But that user has to relinquish control for another user to have a turn. In reality, the first user will probably walk away when they're done; however, other users might want a turn in the meantime, causing a fight for control. And even though Kinect for Windows was designed for Windows 8, it still can't control it, Heddle said.

Nevertheless, Kinect for Windows allows brands to engage with users, and users to engage with brands. A UI that some see as a hassle on the desktop becomes fun in the mall ' and the only content to engage with is the brand that paid for it. You might call that a selling point.

Images: Microsoft, Amazon (Just Dance)

Dropbox Buys Mailbox - Promises To Help It Grow

Things have been going great for Mailbox, the sleek iOS email app that advertises its ability to "put email in its place." Developed by Palo Alto-based startup Orchestra Inc., Mailbox has grown immensely since its February launch - its now delivering more than 60 million emails a day and has taken more than 1.3 million reservations in a unique system that staggers users' access - and builds anticipation. And on Friday, Dropbox bought the company for an undisclosed amount. 

Mailbox attempts to reduce the impending email overload down to nothing. It lifts the inbox above Gmail's 'All Mail' folder and turns it into a productivity center where incoming items lie in wait to be organized. A swipe to the right archives or deletes the message, while  a swipe to the left sets up a time-based reminder or adds the folder to a custom list. That way, everything can be addressed immediately (or at least in one session) and put where it needs to be. Through archiving, conversations deemed finished are still accessible via search. The "archive, search and never delete" email mindset is increasingly popular -Mailbox gives you a clean starting point. 

Mailbox Lives!

"To be clear, Mailbox is not going away," stressed the app team in a blog post this morning. "The product needs to grow fast, and we believe that joining Dropbox is the best way to make that happen."

Though the acquisition sum is unavailable, it should be noted that Orchestra raised $5.3 million in a funding round led by Charles River Ventures in 2011. According to The Wall Street Journal, all 13 employees of Orchestra will join Dropbox. Currently Mailbox works only for iOS and Gmail accounts, but the team is looking to expand that in all directions. 

Dropbox, currently valued at $4 billion by investors, plans to use Mailbox to expand the reach of its services, which already cater to 100 million users, directly into the email optimization sector. But unlike Google's acquisition of email app Sparrow last summer that ended up killing the the app as it acqui-hired the team, Dropbox seems actually interested in the product as well as the team.  'We felt we could help Mailbox reach a much different audience much faster,' Dropbox CEO Drew Houston told the Journal. Houston emphasized that Mailbox wil stay a stand alone app, but Dropbox will also work to integrate it features, such as email attachments. 

Is It Worth The Wait? Absolutely

The beauty of Mailbox, which I've let run rampant on my multiple email accounts this morning, is the idea of "Inbox zero" - a repository for only the things that must be addressed immediately, with an end goal of wiping it to nothing every time you open it. By clearing out that pile of mail - too often used as a To Do list - either to a folder governed by time-based priority reminders or to one's All Mail folder through archiving and labeling, users can optimize their email organization and breathe a much-needed sigh of relief.

At least that's how theory goes. And after my morning tests, I'm starting to believe it could actually work. Mailbox could be one of the very few email optimizers to deliver on the promise of actually making your life easier.

Upending email long been a Holy Grail for both productivity and user interface gurus. Email philosophy has fluctuated constantly since the messaging platform became the mainstream Web-based communication method decades ago. But Mailbox, in only a matter of minutes, begins to fundamentally change how you view your inbox. For me, it immediately started to change my haphazard navigation through all the junk towards a semblance of organization.

Works For Me

I found Mailbox a refreshing upgrade from relying on Gmail's Label feature and my own rather arbitrary system of what needed to stay in front of my eyes at all times. Personally, I spend too much time throwing things in folders and applying labels, cutting my Inbox down but never quite achieving a regimented system where I truly felt in control and capable of easily finding anything at any time. With Mailbox, the difficult decisions are made for you. You just hand yourself over and stop trying so hard. 

It may be premature to consider Mailbox the best thing that ever happened to email, but I did manage to clear my inbox of hundreds of messages in just a few hours. After waiting for nearly three weeks to get access to the app, I was thrilled to achieve my "first zero." 

Though it matters less than core functionality and purpose, the app's design is also exemplary. A clean and simple look matched with an easy-to-use interface make Mailbox a pleasure to use, and its multi-purpose swiping conjures up the aesthetic experience of using the well-received Mac app Clear, which lets you set up prioritized lists and then swipe them away when completed. 

Reviewers seem to agree on Mailbox's promise, as do the long list of potential users still waiting to gain access. 

 

Samsung, Meet Icarus: Galaxy S4 Features Aim High, Risk Melting Waxy Disappointment

You remember Icarus, right? Greek boy with wax wings takes errant flight path, meets watery death. A classic metaphor for reach exceeding your grasp.

Samsung: Meet Icarus

Samsung threw so much at us during the keynote launch of its flagship Galaxy S4 that it's difficult to unpack all of it. 

Samsung is big on naming things. Every new function or feature in the Galaxy S4 comes with a snazzy title and, undoubtedly, a huge marketing campaign for convincing us how remarkable it is. Unfortunately, the Galaxy S4 is not exactly reinventing the smartphone. 

Samsung may need to brace itself for some blowback, given its over-the-top approach. There's something to be said for understatement, as Apple so frequently demonstrates and as Google has done with its Nexus series. Samsung wants to be everything to everybody. It's a fool's errand. Keep trying and ultimately you become the fool.

Home screen for the Galaxy S4

So what are some of these mind-blowing features that you're going to hear so very much about? Let's take a closer look.

(See also: Samsung Galaxy S4 First Impressions: Beautiful But Bloated)

Dual Camera: A feature that allows you to use both the front and back cameras of the Galaxy S4 at the same time. Also allows for Dual Video Call where you can show people what you are looking at during a video call with the front facing camera.

• Takeaway: OK Samsung, you got me here. This is a cool and innovative use of the dual-camera concept... that was introduced a couple of years ago with FaceTime on the iPhone. This basically taking FaceTime and stretching it to the extreme. 

Drama Shot, Sound & Shot And Story Album: Samsung is stretching out its camera functions. Drama shot allows you to see all the action in a photo in one continuous loop while Sound & Shoot allows you to capture the sound and voice happening during the photograph. Story Album organizes your photos by metadata ' time, geo-tag, people etc. specific to that event. 

• Takeaway: None of this is really groundbreaking, as companies like HTC, Apple, BlackBerry and Nokia all have very similar features. Sound & Shoot is creative but, ultimately, probably not terribly useful.

Group Play & Share Music: Allows users to share music, photos, documents and games with people around them (at least those also toting Samsung devices) without a data connection. Share Music allows users to play the same song on multiple phones, basically creating multiple mobile speakers.

• Takeaway: Group Play and Share Music are basically extensions of previous Samsung features that allowed users to share photos with other Samsung users. Samsung has turned this to other types of media and music.

S Translator: Instant translation using voice or text for apps like email, text message and ChatOn (a feature in Dual Video Call that allows you to share your screen).

• Takeaway: Google already has a fairly robust translator in Android. Samsung's own translator will only be a great feature if it cooperates with Google's apps like Gmail, Talk and Voice. If not, it's just another redundant Samsung app.

Smart Pause & Smart Scroll: Pause enables the users to control the screen by where they look. For instance, if you're watching a video, the phone will pause it if you look away. Smart Scroll allows you to scroll up and down emails or a browser without touching the screen.

• Takeaway: We didn't get a lot of hands on time with the Galaxy S4, so it is hard to say if this is cool or annoying. It will definitely be a different type of experience. Hopefully Samsung gives users the option to toggle it on and off.

Air Gesture & Air View: Gesture allows a user to interact with the screen without actually touching the screen. Just hover your finger over the screen and swipe between apps or pages. View lets you preview an app, email or page by hovering your finger over it.

• Takeaway: If you have ever played with the Galaxy Note II and its S Pen, you are well aware of the Air features. Functional and useful at times but perhaps superfluous features.

WatchOn: Allows you to control your various home utilities (TV, DVD player) by turning your Galaxy S4 into a remote.

• Takeaway: So, Samsung basically just put infrared into the Galaxy S4 and turned it into a remote. Just like a universal TV remote. Hey, why the hell not.

Tired Yet?

The primary problem with Samsung's last two flagship smartphones is that it was very easy to get lost in all of the various features that Samsung threw at us. Add in Android apps that do basically the same thing and your phone can start getting confusing very quickly. 

The same principal applies to the Galaxy S4 as to the Galaxy S3 when we reviewed it last year: more is not always better. Sometimes more is just more. Taken individually, each of these functions is fine and good. Some are more impressive than others, but none (outside of Smart Scroll, perhaps) are really groundbreaking. 

More is what Samsung does, and generally speaking, it does more very well. If that's the type of experience you're looking for in a smartphone, you'll probably love the Samsung Galaxy S4. If you want something simpler but still powerful, the HTC One or an iPhone 5 may be the way to go. 

Here You Go: All The Samsung Galaxy S4's Features In One Handy Video

Samsung stuffed a lot of features into its latest Galaxy S4. Enough to pack a Broadway play, apparently. With all the new apps, functions, gestures, camera controls and kittenkaboodles, it's plenty difficult just to figure out what's actually new and exciting about the Galaxy S4. 

There's a good chance that you're never going to use half of these apps. Others may make you throw your smartphone through a window -- say, for instance, if because every time you look away from your phone, the video you were watching stops playing. What is Dual Video Calling anyway? What, exactly, is the deal with all these different camera features?

(See also: Samsung, Meet Icarus: Galaxy S4 Features Aim High, Risk Melting Waxy Disappointment)

Product pages filled with specs and flashy names (WatchON! ChatOn! Smart Scroll! Drama Shot!) for features don't really tell the whole story. Sometimes you just need to see things in action.

Samsung did us a favor and made this four-minute favor overviewing everything new in the Galaxy S4. Check it out below.

What's the most useful new feature of the Galaxy S4? What's the most innane? Let us know in the comments. 

(See also: Samsung Galaxy S4 First Impressions: Beautiful But Bloated [Gallery])

(See also: Samsung Galaxy S4 Revealed: Spectacular Specs & Impressive Features)

How Change.org Puts More Power Into The Hands Of People

If you tuned into the Presidential debates this past Fall you may have caught the one moderated by CNN personality Candy Crowley. Remarkably, it was the first presidential debate moderated by a female in 20 years. Wonder how that dry spell ended? Because of a petition created at Change.org.

Debate organizers were influenced by three Montclair, N.J. high school students, who, inspired by a civics class, were able to sign up more than 180,000 supporters for their online petition.

30 Million Signatures

Major victories like these have drawn more than 30 million people to endorse petitions at Change.org, a figure that's growing at a blistering pace of 2 million each month. Jennifer Dulski, who left Google this past month to become the organization's President and COO, tells me that her biggest priority is making sure Change.org has a fast, stable platform and to make it easier for people to create and sign petitions.

One of the biggest challenges of finding innovative new ways of doing things is monetization, and that's where Change.org shines. The company has in effect become a marketing machine for mostly non-profit organizations. It has also boosted its beneficial standing by becoming a certified B Corp.

Change.org is designed to make creating petitions easy, and features selected petitions on its home page.

Future Changes

The way Change.org works is simple. Anyone can start a petition for free, but qualified organizations can send sponsored petitions to specific Change.org members by paying a premium. 'Every package is custom built for each sponsor,' Dulski says, adding that 'we have people in house who know how to make petitions stronger.'

The future for sponsored Chang.org petitioners seems bright. Dulski promises that the company is 'going to develop a great analytics platform for sponsors, so we're able to better reach the kind of people who are passionate about their causes.'

One recent victory had 200,000 Gatorade consumers using Change.org to demand the removal of the controversial ingredient BVO from its product bottles. Gatorade removed the ingredient, scoring a victory for the 15-year-old Mississippi teenager who started the petition.

International Action

While most of its biggest victories have been in the U.S., Change.org has become a global phenomenon. 'We have staff in 18 countries,' notes Dulski. A perfect example of that global power was the petition calling for Malala Yyousafzai, the Pakistani girl shot for advocating female education, to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. This petition, posted by Tarek Fatah of Toronto, has gained more than 287,000 supporters.

With influence comes power that translates into more galvanizing events - and that, in turn, attracts even more users. Do you have an innovation that could use the gravy train of a complementary business? Can you leverage the Time Compression Ubertrend to create a service that helps consumers save time? I'm ready to file my petition to help America become more innovative.

One Hadoop Distribution To Rule Them All?

The Hadoop market is getting interesting. Last year it was a death match between startups vying to own the heart of the project. Today it's a veritable smorgasbord of big-brand vendors getting involved to ensure they claim a big piece of the Big Data pie. Unlike American youth athletics, not everyone will get to take home a trophy.

Hadoop plays a key role in the burgeoning Big Data market, and represents a $13 billion market by 2017, according to Markets and Markets. (IDC pegs the market much, much lower at $812.8 million in 2016, but its numbers don't seem credible to me as they don't even seem to include Cloudera's sales.) Given that Big Data is hot, and Hadoop's data processing engine sits at its core, there's going to be a lot of money trading hands for Hadoop-related products and services.

Not everyone is going to collect.

SiliconAngle's John Furrier has challenged me on this, arguing that Hadoop is "not a winner take all market." While I, too, can see multiple winners in Hadoop, just as there have been in Linux (e.g., Red Hat dominates license/services revenue, but IBM, HP, and others make arguably more with related hardware, complementary software products, and professional services), markets don't tend toward entropy. They trend toward consolidation.

Today, the Hadoop ecosystem increasingly represents entropy:

• Cloudera, Hortonworks, and MapR remain the early favorites, but with very different approaches. Hortonworks positions itself as the 100% open source player; Cloudera somewhat does the same, but adds in complementary, proprietary bits, mostly around managing Hadoop, to add value to Hadoop (and its top line revenue); and MapR provides a hybrid open source/proprietary Hadoop distribution that swaps out HDFS for its proprietary NFS storage layer.
• EMC Greenplum has been involved with Hadoop for several years, and is set to release a new distribution of Hadoop called Pivotal HD. I've labeled Pivotal HD proprietary, but EMC's Hadoop team has taken issue with this characterization, arguing that PivotalHD is 100% open source, with complementary functionality (like HAWQ) available as add-ons. Point well taken, and I apologize for my misunderstanding. I was wrong, perhaps not surprisingly getting confused by Pivotal HD's product page, which says little about open source. But what seems clear is that customers won't be confused by EMC's value proposition: Hadoop with an advanced SQL query engine to make it easier and more powerful to use.
• Intel just got into the game with its own Hadoop distribution. Basically, you can think of it as Hadoop on (Intel Xeon' processor, Intel SSD, and Intel 10GbE networking.hardware) steroids.
• For those who don't want to run Hadoop within the datacenter, Amazon offers Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR). As of April 2012, EMR was powering over 1 million Hadoop clusters. Presumably this number is much bigger today.
• Many, many others including IBM BigInsights, a range of startups, and more.

Will all of these companies make serious bank on Hadoop? No. Will some of them? Sure.

Ultimately, the winners in Hadoop will be those that invest most heavily in its success, as they will be perceived as the companies best positioned to help would-be customers succeed with Hadoop's complexities. But how they invest is up for discussion. Code to Apache Hadoop? Value-adding extensions?

Success isn't about open source purity, as Gartner's Merv Adrian posits: it's about making customers successful. As we saw with Linux, where Red Hat is both the top contributor to the Linux kernel and the company that harvests the most revenue from distributing Linux, contributing code is a great way to signal to the market that you're a leader and capable of getting code fixes to support customers. Code matters.

But code contributions are not the only way to demonstrate leadership and attract customers. Ultimately, companies that make it easier to get value from Hadoop will win big. There may be more than one such company. Indeed, there almost certainly will be. 

But there won't be 20 of them. Or even 10. Enterprise IT is simply not going to be able to manage a polyglot Hadoop distribution ecosystem. That's not the way markets work. No one wants to be "long tail" vendor, and customers don't want to buy from them, either, as Hugh MacLeod humorously points out on Gaping Void:

Source: GapingVoidArt. Used with permission.

The Hadoop market over the next year is going to be hugely interesting. And bloody.

Image courtesy of Ehab Othman / Shutterstock.

SXSW Wrap Up: Launches, Panels, Buzz & Snark [Infographic]

The SXSW interactive festival in Austin, Texas, is famously sprawling, crowded, hectic and intense. Not surprisingly, that can make it hard to sum up the impact of the entire event in any meaningful way.

But the folks at Mutual Mobile did their best to try in this infographic highlighting attendee tweets covering the best product launches, them most popular panels, the buzziest conversation topics and the snarkiest commentary.

I just wish they'd found a way to leave in the barbecue!

 

 

 

 

Top image of keynote speaker Jennifer Pahlka courtesy SXSW/Mindy Best.