Posts tagged Guess
Next, Digital Mall Kiosks Will Look at You, Guess Your Age, Show You Clothes
Jan 12th
One of the most influential retail technologies of the last quarter-century has been digital signage – the use of video to show crisp, bright full-motion advertising, more recently incorporating multitouch interaction. At the National Retail Federation Conference in New York City next week, Microsoft will present a full demonstration of use cases for its Kinect for Windows motion capture system – which uses the technology that first premiered for Xbox 360 – in tailoring live ads directed to shoppers as they walk past window displays and items for sale.
Software being developed for Windows Embedded POSReady 7 will be shown ascertaining live data about the people they scan – including their estimated gender, height, weight, ethnicity, and age – and produce live ads tailored and targeted directly to the estimated demographic. And as the technology’s product manager told ReadWriteWeb today, business intelligence and analytics functions networked to those systems will enable advertising managers to literally change and create campaigns for those live shoppers on-the-fly.
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“Imagine you’re in a mall and you’re walking by various stores,” begins Windows Embedded director of product management John Doyle. “But in one of the stores, you see a digital sign integrated into the front window of the store. It’s showing content about what’s in the store and it attracts your interest. As you walk towards the digital sign, it recognizes you because it’s using Kinect. We have integrated Microsoft Kinect with the digital sign, and it recognizes the individual.”
On the back end of this operation is software co-developed with consumer engagement services provider Razorfish, that utilizes to estimate your personal characteristics using the data gleaned from the Kinect-gathered image. This software, as Microsoft will show at NRF, should make a disarmingly accurate estimate of your age.
“Automatically, the digital sign – because of its ability to connect to the back end and process that information – can immediately change the content that is being viewed on the digital sign,” continues Doyle. This way, a store billboard truly can market to youngsters, first by ascertaining that there are youngsters standing in front of it.
Perhaps a high-end department store on the order of Nordstrom, Doyle suggested, could tailor suggestions for such things as outdoor gear, dresses, and accessories based on the real-time data that the Kinect camera gleans from the shopper staring at its digital sign. It might not even be out of the question for software to estimate the shopper’s tastes in fashion based upon what she’s wearing at the time.
Video of Microsoft’s CES 2012 demonstration of a shopper trying on clothes without changing her own. Posted to YouTube by shopping services provider Retrevo.com.
At CES 2012 this week, Microsoft showed select customers the portion of next week’s NRF demonstration that features the virtual clothes-changing program. Here, a shopper sees herself in digital outfits that are superimposed on the camera image of herself, which is shown in reverse in order to simulate a mirror. The shopper may make gestures to interact with “charms” (as Microsoft now calls function icons, beginning with Windows 
along the top that change the function of the program.
At this point, the functionality is a little crude. Actually, it’s a bit like dressing up a member of The Sims. Simulated clothes, while three-dimensional, are stiff and appear self-illuminated, which may not necessarily lend itself to the most flattering presentation. But you can see where Microsoft is going with this. You can imagine a more evolved form of this prototype using a physics engine to approximate the weight and the shimmer of the fabric, as well as apply the same lighting characteristics as are used in the room, so that dresses don’t look like they’re being held up with garden wire.
If you were wondering how Microsoft would leverage the shopper’s personal copy of Windows or Windows Phone into the mix, here it comes: If the user has a Windows Phone, the Windows Embedded kiosk may be able to send snapshots and other data about the interaction to that phone. Conceivably – although Doyle acknowledges there are already multiple privacy issues involved – the kiosk could glean more information about the shopper via near-field communication.
A lot of this assumes that the kiosk software gets it right. Can the software really guess your age, for instance? If a human being guessed the shopper’s gender wrong, it would probably lead to a no-sale. Doyle responded that the display software might not have to make the right call all the time. It only applies its estimate during the attraction phase, when it’s trying to get the shopper to come closer. You don’t blame a store today for showing you signage featuring kids clothes even though you’re not a kid.
As these kiosks interact with customers nationwide, Microsoft’s Doyle projects a setup where data gleaned from those interactions may be mined in real time by business intelligence software on the back end. Franchise managers could ascertain which items are hot and which are not. And in cases where kiosks are previewing items that are still being sewn in the factories, those managers could make inventory decisions at that point about how many to order. Real-time interest data could be mapped and compared according to a franchise’s various regions and coverage zones.
Doyle admits this setup could give shoppers in California and elsewhere on the West Coast a certain advantage. Live ad campaigns could be deployed first on the East Coast, and tailored for maximum attractiveness and efficiency as the sun passes over the Central and Mountain time zones. “In a single slice of a day, you could optimize that business intelligence, from East Coast to West Coast, very, very quickly,” he remarks.
Though Microsoft’s CES demo involved ordinary HDTV displays, the NRF demo could utilize a new display concept from technology partner Intel, announced just yesterday, featuring a 7-foot, 6-inch-tall multitouch glass screen.
The NRF Expo will be held at the Javits Center in New York beginning next Monday, January 16. Microsoft will be distributing its display over booths 1337, 1334, 1239, 1238, and 983.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Guess What? iPhone Users Make Up Only 10% Of Mobile Subscribers
Dec 2nd
What’s an Android user to do about this not-so-shocking fact? Rejoice?
A new report from ComScore tries to make it look like 10% of iPhone users is a huge marketshare when, really, it’s not. For the three month period ending October 2011, reports showed that 234 million Americans ages 13-and-older used mobile devices. Apple has bumped its way up to number four, trailing behind Samsung, LG and Motorola. It did pass up RIM.
What might actually be more significant than the amount of mobile subscribers achieved by Apple is that of the five brands listed in this report, Apple is the only one that has actually gained more subscribers over the past three months alone. And just to be clear, this data was collected before the launch of the iPhone4S.
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To be precise, Apple owns only 10.8% of mobile subscribers, while Samsung has 25.5%, LG has 20.6%. Motorola clocks in above Appel at 13.6%, while RIM lags behind just a bit with only 6.6% of mobile subscribers.
As of October 2011, 90 million people in the United States owned smartphones. Google tops that list, too, with a total of 46.3% of mobile subscribers. Apple comes in second with 28.1% of mobile subscribers.
It’s a good thing both ComScore and I both included iPhone in the headline. After all, who cares about Google’s mobile market share, really…
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Guess What’s Showing Up In The Facebook News Ticker
Nov 22nd
Today Facebook began rolling out its newest update: Sponsored stories will begin appearing in the news ticker, that annoying, never-ending additional noise contributor located in the upper-righthand corner of your Facebook homepage.
Dropping sponsored stories into the news ticker was the next logical move for Facebook. But users weren’t happy about the news ticker launch in the first place. It received a ton of complaints; teens, for one, called it a stalker tool. Now the news ticker is more akin to a spammer tool.
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The big secret here is that sponsored stories already appear in the news feed. Facebook surfaces them based on a user’s page likes, page posts, page post likes, check-ins, app shares, apps used, games played and domain stories. There is no way to opt-out of them completely, but you can click on the little “X” in the upper right-hand corner of those stories if you want to hide them. We reached out to a Facebook spokesperson who confirmed that sponsored stories would work the same in the news ticker: “The X on Sponsored Stories in ticker behaves much like the X on Sponsored Stories or other ads elsewhere on the site. You can hide the individual story, or all stories from that Page or App.”
Before the official news ticker rollout, sponsored stories were only showing up on the canvas pages of apps, or the pages that appear when users are playing a game or using an app.
Are you peeved about sponsored stories in your news ticker? Tell us how you feel in the comments below.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Microsoft Launches Tool For Checking Browser Security (Guess Who Ranks Best)
Oct 11th
Microsoft launched a website today designed to give users a detailed look at how secure their browser is. The site, called Your Browser Matters, automatically detects the visitor’s browser and returns a browser security score on a scale of four points.
Not suprisingly, Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer 9 gets a perfect score. The latest stable releases of Firefox and Chrome, however, each score 2.5 and 2 points, respectively. Other browsers like Safari are not able to be analyzed by the site, which returns a message saying “We can’t give you a score for your browser.” Presumably, the domain yourbrowsermattersunlessyoureamacuser.com was too long to be marketable.
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Chrome loses points for failing to clearly identifying risky downloads, not automatically blocking insecure content from HTTPS pages and failure to mitigate certain types of attacks.
Google’s Matt Cutts took to Google Plus today to defend his employer’s Web browser. “It’s the same ‘Look, we have more checkboxes filled in’ type of marketing that was more common in the boxed software era,” Cutts said, adding that Chrome indeed does have the ability to block insecure content on secure pages.
The latest version of Firefox fares even worse, racking up a mere two points.
Microsoft’s new site is primarily intended to encourage users of older versions of Internet Explorer to upgrade. The bane of the existence of Web developers everywhere, Internet Explorer 6, only gets one point. To its credit, Microsoft has gone to great lengths to ensure that the next version of its browser is both secure and compliant with Web standards.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Guess How Long it Takes to Fix Google Maps: It’s Faster Than You Might Think
Oct 6th
Google Maps is an incredible technology. Built by acquired startups and licensed commercial data, it’s refined, repaired and extended by thousands of everyday people around the world using Google’s Map Maker editing service. Just today a big batch of new citizen contributed roads and landmarks went live in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
But what about when there’s a mistake? Let’s say that an address or landmark is wrong on Google Maps and someone, somewhere uses Google Map Maker to fix it. How long does it take to show up in Google Maps – and how long does it take to populate out into all the embedded Google Maps around the world that are powered by the Google Maps API, the most popular API in the world. According to the company this week, it now takes as little as fifteen minutes. Even a market leader like Google Maps has to stay on its toes because there’s a whole lot of competition trying to win the hearts of developers who use maps in apps.
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The Google Geo Developers blog announced a number of new changes to the geo API this week including faster response time pushing changes from Map Maker through to the Google Maps API. “For many countries, including the U.S.A., this means that corrections made with MapMaker can reach the Maps API within 15 minutes,” says Thor Mitchell, Product Manager of the Google Maps API.
Impressive. They say that the web is like a living ecosystem. So too it seems are the web’s leading maps of the offline world – from beginning to end, from the user mapping app through all the API powered maps around the web.
Right: An 800 year old map of the Belgian village of aalbeke. Note, this one is not in real time so that giant man-eating fish may not be in the same place in the water anymore.
There’s enough competition in the map data space, even though Google is clearly dominant in the developer community, that near real-time edits just make sense. Developers choose every time they embed a map from options that include Google, Bing, Mapquest, OpenStreetMap and new entrants like ESRI’s lightweight new Canvas Maps and the forthcoming super-cool looking startup CartoDB.
Maps have got to stay fast these days to compete.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
ClickEquations Take Guess Work Out of Testing PPC Ad Copy
Apr 14th
Testing ad copy is essential to the efficient running of a paid search campaign. Poor ad copy is the difference between trust and recognition of your brand in an extremely competitive marketplace which, if you learn the hard way, will have ultimately cost you hundreds of dollars in lost opportunities. By contrast, fantastic ad copy saves you money, increases the visibility and delivery of your ads and gives you a continual edge on your competitors. However, testing 5 different sets of ad copy over hundreds, if not thousands, of keyword variations becomes not only time consuming but unintuitive.
Step in, ClickEquations Text Ad Zoom. A new feature designed to help marketers sort ‘the wheat from the chaff’ in PPC ad copy testing. Where the typical paid search interface will compare ad copy by clickthrough or conversion rate, but leaves the user to determine if the overall delivery of the ad constituted a fair test or not; ClickEquations Text Ad Zoom will tell you whether the ad test is statistically significant or not.
Click to read the rest of this post…
View full post on Search Engine Watch Blog
