QR - Quick Response Codes

...Leveraging social media and technology for marketing...

I just reprinted my business card and put a QR (Quick Response) code on it for my personal website. At a Silicon Valley networking event a few weeks ago, during the obligatory biz card exchange ritual, someone asked me what it was and another person commented that they are all the rage on biz cards now.

I first started noticing QR codes in the wild on some food item labels I was buying from the
local grocery store -they were so tiny, less than a half inch square and even smaller, one could hardly notice them. Now I am used to seeing them in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and maybe, if I recall correctly, the Economist. I also recall very careful written instructions in the advert on what to do with it :) ah - a way to bridge the printed media world with the digital.

Quick Response or QR codes are beginning to appear in major print publications, on storefronts and buildings, on posters attached to kiosks and bus stops, on food item labels and clothing tags. Much of this is due to the proliferation of smart phones, apps that can read QR codes and act upon them and people who recognize and use them. In print, businesses are using them to send people to web sites, their social media site, or directly to specific apps.

It is said that in 2009 Google has sent thousands of decals free to US businesses with instructions on how to create QR Codes, place them store fronts to enable them to be found on the the Place Page on Google where people find reviews, find an offer, place a star for future reference or create a favorite place for others to see on Google Maps. – all on their mobile phones. But I can't remember ever seeing one.

I went to Kaywa, one of several online sites to generate my web site's QR code. These sites can create a QR code for a URL, text, phone number or SMS(and give you both the image and the permalink for the QR code and apps that can read them are easily found in your phone's app store. Then using an app on my iphone, I tested it by reading it from my laptop display and from my paper biz card. It worked! But it did take a while for the the app to acknowledge "I got it." Maybe too long for me to make use of it while I am out in the wild. But I am looking forward to innovative and creative ways of using them in the future.

...As one German-speaking person proclaimed “QR-Code - 2011 - Jahr des 2D Barcode Marketing”...

Knowledge Discovery: Questions & Answers, Clues & Response

Question and Answer startups are popping up all over Silicon Valley and one in particular, Quora, has been getting a lot of press recently and Quora enthusiasts abound. There is a great deal of community building and knowledge discovery that can happen with Q&A sites of high quality and Quora is one of them. As Quora builds in collections of Q&As and expands its topics, it should appeal to a more general audience rather than the "tech-heavy" persona it now presents.

But one Q&A, actually Clues and Response, that I am looking forward to is the IBM Watson challenge, an official Jeopardy tournament competition with Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, those famous Jeopardy champions playing against IBM's supercomputer Watson. A brief article, Building Watson: an Overview of the DeepQA Project (AAAI-Fall 2010) can easily be found online.

IBM says that Watson is an application of advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation and reasoning, and machine learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering. Watson took three years of intense R&D with a core team of 20 or so people.

At its core, Watson is built on IBM's DeepQA technology for hypothesis generation, massive evidence gathering, analysis, and scoring. Watson is a workload optimized system designed for complex analytics, made possible by integrating massively parallel POWER7 processors and the IBM DeepQA software to answer Jeopardy! questions in under three seconds.

Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers (plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes in 10 racks) with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM. Each Power 750 server uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight core processor, with four threads per core. The POWER7 processor's massively parallel processing capability is an ideal match for Watsons IBM DeepQA software which is embarrassingly parallel (that is a workload that executes multiple threads in parallel).

While primarily an IBM effort, the development team includes faculty and students from Carnegie Mellon University, University of Massachusetts, University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute, University of Texas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Trento, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

If you are even more curious about this topic,do what I did and download the eBook from Amazon "Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything" and the final chapter will be downloaded to your Kindle after the Jeopardy matches are concluded. Or, if you want to wait until after the outcome of the match is known, you can wait for the print version to arrive at your local bookseller.

Shades of the chess match Deep Blue vs. Garry Kasparov in a former era, the Jeopardy episodes will be aired on TV from February 14–16, 2011.

Question answering technologies have a business purpose, they can help support professionals healthcare, customer service and support, business intelligence, knowledge discovery and the like.

Disclosure: I'm a Jeopardy fan - and I'm looking for a good Jeopardy game for my game console - the ones that are out there are insipid. Does anyone have a recommendation?

Mobile-to-Mobile Photo Sharing.

... consumers take, enhance, share and view photos on mobile phones...

A new wave of startups are focused on “mobile first, web second ”photo sharing with social networking hooks. Capitalizing on improvements in mobile phone camera technology with the ability to enhance images with filters and then share them instantly from one’s mobile phone are popularizing these new generation mobile photo sharing services. They also provide the ability to add geo-location or other tags and allow for recipients to add comments or “likes”.

Picplz with over 100K registered users ( and $5 million in a Series A November 2010) allows users to upload photos, apply photo-editing filters, attach locations and then share photos with friends on Facebook, Foursquare or Twitter and is platform agnostic.

Instagram (with over 1 million downloads in little over 2 months) works in a similar way – as an iPhone app for photo sharing, users can add filters and then shares them with sites like Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, and Facebook.

Path’s approach to photo sharing it to keep it limited to a small, pre-defined group of friends. Path is also experimenting with sharing 10 second videos as well.

These apps typically allow one to follow their  Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter friends.

Monetizing data collections of things, people, locations that its users find interesting will be an interesting challenge.

Dazzling Dual Core Mobile Devices

...High-performance, new-generation smart phones and tablets will enter the market in 2011...

The next generation of smart phones and tablets will be powered by dual core processing units (each one running at 1 GHz). This will enable multitasking services and allow multiple apps to run at the same time. When optimized for dual core, existing apps will perform faster.

Supporting higher resolution screens, and appealing to consumer interest in HD video, the devices will capture and playback 1080p. An HDMI port can pipe and mirror the video to a larger screen and Wi-Fi Direct, the standard for device-to-device Wi-Fi connectivity without a network, can enable the device to stream HD video to other, larger screens.

The new devices, some with dual graphics processing cores will allow for impressive graphics-intensive games and, riding the consumer wave for 3D viewing experience, many will support complex 3D rendering engines for more realistic gaming. When combined with an auto-stereoscopic display, the viewer will have a complete 3D experience without the need for special glasses.

The new generation of smart phones and tablets will influence other product categories and markets. As they come to market, the current generation of Androids and iPhones will become less expensive and available to a new base of consumers.

High-performance smart phones and tablets are being positioned to become a new market segment.

3D-enabled smartphones will account for almost half (45 per cent) of all 3D-enabled mobile device shipments by 2012 according to research firm InStat.

Consumers may have to wait 6-12 months for some existing apps to be optimized for these devices and for compelling new apps to appear.

A Single URL for Everything Video - Vid.ly

...well someone had to get the ball moving and ease things up for mobile devices...

Encoding.com is a large commercial video encoding service provider and just launched a private beta of Vid.ly, a universal video URL service. With Vid.ly, pre-transcoded videos are available in popular web and mobile formats . When a user requests a video, Vid.ly detects the kind of device and serves the correct and optimized video.

Vid.ly simplifies preparation and delivery of video to all mobile devices (smart phones, feature phones, tablets) and browsers which has been a constant challenge to video content providers. Content providers can share the provided short URL via SMS, Facebook, Twitter, or other social media sites and embed the vid.ly-provided HTML5 code into their video (browsers support different HTML5 video formats such as H.264, WEBM, Ogg, and, oh, of course, there is Flash as well).

Kindle Singles

...novellas, short stories, essays, school lessons, long form journalism for mobile devices...

Kindle Singles range between 5,000 to 30,000 words (about 10-20 e-pages) with a price range of $.99 to $2.99. With some Singles, Amazon is working directly with the author (providing the opportunity to sidestep traditional publishers, giving both Amazon and the authors a larger share of the revenue pie).

Something between and full-length book and a long magazine article, it is the ideal size for reading material for small capacity devices such as smart phones that could download the Single directly to the device.

Instapaper, Read-it-Later (which I use) and similar services have demonstrated an audience (and devices) for this type of content, the 99 cents emulates the success of the iTunes price point thus more conducive to impulse buying (well, for me it is); authors and publishers can “chunk” digital content easily and inexpensively. All is well.

Bling Nation Gets Friendly

...mobile payments connecting users to merchants using social media...well, this is the year of mobile payment systems..

Startup Bling Nation, a close partner of Paypal, is set to roll out its payment system in the U.S. sometime this year. Bling Nation’s method is to pair RFID-enabled stickers with a back-end system that charges purchases to credit cards (via PayPal) and sends text-message receipts to cellphones. This requires that the mobile phone have a Bling Tag affixed to it and that the user have a Paypal account which can then link to a major debit or credit card account.

While the current current system relies on business owners obtaining BlingTags and distributing them to customers, (which Bling Nation distribute freely to the merchants), Bling Nation is negotiating with handset manufacturers to incorporate the technology into the handset (and perhaps a Facebook phone if you’re into rumors?).

Bling Nation’s biggest online alliance is Facebook which will enable Facebook to observe the location and spending habits of Bling Nation users and takes the credit/debit card company out of the loop. As Facebook fans, Bling Nation users will be enticed to do many friendly things.