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Huawei announced a P series of smartphones at MWC, and we’re starting to see some of those models show up across the globe. The latest model, code named the P6-U06, has recently been certified in China, and the profile shots show an extremely thin device, coming in at just 6.2mm. Aside from dimensions, we know it’s packing a quad-core processor, 2 GB of RAM, an 8 megapixel rear camera and a strange 5 megapixel front-facing camera. It also has GSM/WCDMA radios, so it’s definitely going to launch in Asian markets, but there’s no word on if it’ll come to other shores.

source: NowhereElse

via: Engadget

Come comment on this article: Huawei Ascend P6 shows up in Chinese certification with a 6.2mm body

Despite increased competition from Samsung, Amazon and other rivals, Apple’s iPad is still America’s favorite tablet according to J.D. Power and Associates’ most recent survey. The organization released Volume 1 of its 2013 U.S. Tablet Satisfaction Study on Monday and found that the iPad still ranks highest in customer satisfaction among all tablets, albeit by a narrowing margin. J.D.Powers’ latest survey polled 1,857 consumers in the U.S. and found that Apple’s iPad scored 836 out of a possible 1,000 points. Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet line scored 829 and Samsung’s tablets retained their No. 3 position with 822 points. A graph that illustrating the results of the survey follows below.

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ClickTale said it raised $17 million in a Series B round led by Amadeus Capital Partners and joined by Goldrock Capital and Viola Credit. The money will go toward product development and global expansion.

PRESS RELEASE

In-Page Analytics Innovator ClickTale Secures $17M Growth Round

Investment will Fund Product Development and Company Expansion

Tel Aviv, April 30th, 2013 − ClickTale, the innovator of In-Page Analytics, today announced that European technology investor Amadeus Capital Partners has led a $17m Series B growth stage investment in the company.  Other investors include Goldrock Capital and Viola Credit, Israel’s leading venture lending fund. The investment proceeds will fund product development and accelerate global growth.

While traditional web analytics track only page-to-page navigation, ClickTale records and analyzes the True-to-Life User Experience™ inside the page helping businesses achieve their online goals such as converting more site visitors into buyers or increasing engagement with site content.  ClickTale’s premier product, ClickTale® Core, provides anonymous playback of user browsing sessions, aggregated heatmaps of in-page activity, as well as tools to increase form completion and optimize conversions.

Most companies recognize the importance of the user experience, but few have visibility into their users’ website activities.  A recent Baymard Institute review revealed that a full 67% of shopping carts are abandoned prior to checkout.  Since ClickTale provides full visibility by capturing the entire browsing session including every mouse move, click, hover and scroll, online marketing and ecommerce managers can finally discover and understand why customers abandon shopping carts, what errors they experience, and where poor user experience frustrates them.

While working with some of the world’s leading websites, ClickTale has created the Online Optimization Cycle™ to help them maximize the speed and effectiveness of site improvements. The Online Optimization Cycle is a best practice that combines traditional web analytics and A/B testing with ClickTale’s In-Page Analytics to iteratively improve the user experience resulting in better conversion rates, increased revenues and higher ROI from existing marketing activities.

“We are excited to have Amadeus and Goldrock join ClickTale as we continue to create more value for our customers by helping them achieve online success,” said Dr. Tal Schwartz, CEO and co-founder of ClickTale. “The support of our founding investor, YL Ventures, has been a major factor in our success to date.  This investment will enable us to broaden our product offerings, invest in R&D and expand our operations globally.”

Founded in 2006, ClickTale has more than 80,000 clients, including some of the world’s largest websites such as T-Mobile, CBS, and Lenovo.

About ClickTale
ClickTale is the leader in Customer Experience Analytics, the next advance in web analytics, optimizing usability and maximizing conversion rates of any website. Its patented Customer Experience Visualization™ technology allows companies to see their customers’ true-to-life online experience at all levels of detail, from aggregated views to playable videos of users’ browsing sessions. Unlike traditional analytics platforms that assess page-to-page navigation, ClickTale reveals the customer experience inside the page. ClickTale Core™, an enterprise-class SaaS solution, is fast to deploy and provides immediate ROI. Serving over 80,000 customers worldwide including many Fortune 500 companies, ClickTale is the fastest growing company in its space. For more information, please visit www.clicktale.com

About Amadeus
Amadeus Capital Partners is one of Europe’s leading technology investors. Since its inception in 1997, the firm has raised over £500m for investment and backed more than 85 companies in communications technology, cleantech, medtech, software, digital media and e-commerce. Major businesses built by Amadeus include CSR (LSE:CSR), the leading producer of single chip bluetooth radios for short range connections, Solexa, the developer of next generation genetic analysis systems, merged into Illumina (ILMN) to create the world-leader in gene-sequencing technology and Transmode (ST:TRMO), an optical networking solutions business. For more information, please visit www.amadeuscapital.com

About Goldrock Capital
Goldrock Capital has been investing in Israel innovation since 1998. Goldrock’s heritage goes back to the early 1980s with the founding of The Sage Group (LSE: SAGE) by the late David Goldman. Born out of a single family office, today Goldrock manages institutional funds for the Goldman family and others to invest in growth stage businesses leveraging Israeli technology to expand internationally.
For more information, please visit www.goldrockcap.com

About Viola Credit (formerly Plenus)
Viola Credit, founded in 2000, is Israel’s leading lending fund. Viola Credit offers equity based loans to growing companies in the technology, industrial & service sectors. Led by a team of credit, banking, operational, and technology experts, Viola Credit is poised to provide companies with tailor-made flexible financing solutions designed to meet their specific needs.
With over $320m under management, Viola Credit has completed over 100 lending transactions and has seen over 20 exits to date. Among portfolio companies are mythings, cVidya, Clarizen and Matomy.  For more information, please visit www.violacredit.com

About YL Ventures
YL Ventures is a global venture capital firm that was founded to address the changing venture capital financing landscape. The firm invests in high technology start-up companies, with particular focus on the Israeli market. The fund combines its capital with deep engineering and market expertise, thereby facilitating a highly efficient model for technological innovation. For more information, please visit www.YLVentures.com

The post ClickTale Raises $17M From Amadeus, Goldrock & Viola appeared first on peHUB.

The value of investments held by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System rose to $261.7 billion as of Friday, putting it above its previous high in 2007 before the financial crises and recession sent it tumbling, Reuters reported.

(Reuters) – The value of investments held by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System rose to $261.7 billion as of Friday, putting it above its previous high in 2007 before the financial crises and recession sent it tumbling.

The assets sank to a recession low value of $164.9 billion in February 2009 from a record of $260.5 billion in October 2007, said Joe DeAnda, a spokesman for the fund, which is best known as Calpers.

DeAnda attributed the recovery primarily to Calpers’ stock portfolio. The fund has about half of its money in stocks. But “just about everything has improved,” DeAnda said.

Since 2009, officials at Calpers, the biggest U.S. public pension fund have been working to put its finances on stronger footing, including by adopting a more conservative annual return target of 7.5 percent last year, down from a previous and longstanding 7.75 percent.

Lowering the rate has the effect of requiring public agencies, including local governments, using Calpers to manage pension accounts to increase payments to it.

Additionally, the fund’s board earlier this month approved accounting changes that will require state agencies, cities and counties to pay rate increases to Calpers of up 50 percent.

The new policy will phase in increases. While they may strain government employer’s finances, they will fully fund Calpers’ obligations in 30 years.

Calpers is about 70 percent funded. The retirement system estimates its unfunded liability was about $100 billion at the end of June 2012.

The post Calpers Investments Surpass Prior Record High appeared first on peHUB.

A 14-year old girl was forced into pregnancy by her adoptive mom after the woman was told she couldn’t adopt any more children.

The woman was desperate for another baby and hatched a plan to inseminate her daughter with syringes and donor sperm she procured online. The girl says she went along with the plan because she thought it would make her mother love her.

The woman, an American transplant in the U.K., has been given a 5-year prison sentence for child cruelty after a successful pregnancy yielded a baby boy born in 2011, when the daughter was just 17. The children were put into foster care after a hospital employee overheard the mother admonishing her daughter about breastfeeding because she didn’t want the baby to become attached to her.

wtf is wrong with people? Mother in UK forced 14-year-old to get pregnant – news.yahoo.com/mother-uk-forc…

— Jacob F. Thuecks (@jfthuecks) April 29, 2013

Mother in UK forced 14-year-old to get pregnant news.msn.com/world/mother-i…WTF? The evil mom is american…poor girl

— Melissa(@_PhxRising_) April 29, 2013

Extreme Networks announces a new CEO, and Violin Memory expands its engineering team.

New Extreme Networks CEO.  Extreme Networks announced that it has appointed Charles W. Berger as its President and Chief Executive Officer, as well as elected him to the Board of Directors, effective immediately.  Mr. Berger will be replacing Oscar Rodriguez who has resigned, effective today, from his position and has resigned from the Board of Directors of Extreme Networks.  Previously Mr. Berger was at ParAccel, and has over 30 years of experience in the technology sector. Prior to ParAccel, Berger served as the CEO of DVDPlay, Nuance Communications, Vicinity Corporation, AdForce, and Radius. ”I am honored and delighted to join Extreme Networks, a premier technology company,” said Berger. “I look forward to working with our dedicated employees to continue to introduce innovative products, change the dynamics of the switching market with our SDN capabilities and serve our customers globally.  There is a lot to do and I am excited to get started.”

Violin Memory adds executives from Intel and GridIron.  Violin Memory announced Stephen Dalton as vice president of software and Herb Schneider as vice president of hardware. Dalton joins Violin from Intel, where he served as GM of Intel’s Datacenter flash (NVM) Software organization. Schneider was the co-founder of GridIron, which was recently acquired by Violin Memory. Dalton and Schneider will be responsible for driving the next wave of innovation based on the Violin 6000 flash Memory Array. “Our vision is to make in-memory computing possible for all enterprises,” said Don Basile, CEO of Violin Memory. “Dalton and Schneider both bring significant storage experience from the hardware and software side to help deliver on this promise and aggressively add to our current technology portfolio and talent pool.”

Denise Richards was spotted running errands recently looking decidedly thinner than usual, and rumors are now floating around online that she’s developed an eating disorder.

Richards was snapped by photographers as she picked up her daughters from gymnastics in a sleeveless top which showed off her slender arms, and skinny jeans that showcased her thin frame. And while Hollywood’s obsession with thin actresses has reached an unhealthy peak in recent years, Richards says she doesn’t workout in order to get “skinny”.

“When I exercise I never say I work out to stay thin — I always use the words healthy and strong,” Richards said. “I don’t obsess about wearing makeup when I leave the house or looking a certain way. I often look frumpy in paparazzi shots because I may just throw myself together going to the park and soccer games.”

The media has faced a wave of backlash in recent months over an emphasis on female bodies–Ashley Judd wrote a particularly strong essay for The Daily Beast regarding rumors that she’d had plastic surgery–but the truth is, gossip magazines are just one part of the problem. These days, anyone with an opinion can have a very public voice via Twitter, Facebook, or any number of social media sites. And when the issue is about a woman being too thin, it can be just as hurtful as talk about a woman being too soft.

But Richards says she lives a healthy lifestyle because she has young daughters to set an example for.

“I don’t know why lately I’ve been getting so much flack for it… I have a very healthy lifestyle and I’m busy. I have a daughter who’s almost 2 that I carry all the time. She’s just under 30 pounds. What bothers me is I have three daughters, and I’m such an advocate for health and fitness… in moderation. We eat ice cream all the time.”

The latest Kantar smartphone report had many interesting tidbits about Windows Phone and iOS market share trends, but perhaps the biggest bombshell was buried in the section about U.S. mobile carriers. T-Mobile’s share of U.S. smartphone sales has collapsed to 9.5% from 12.7% in just a year. At the same time, Sprint’s share has climbed to 12.3% from 11.0% over the same time period. This means that in 1Q 2012, T-Mobile still held a narrow lead over Sprint when it came to smartphone sales in America; by 1Q 2013, Sprint had surged to lead T-Mobile by nearly three points.

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The Bugatti 100P is a streamlined organic flying manta ray with counter-rotating propellers and two screaming supercharged straight eights. It’s half flying machine, half H.P. dream. Bugatti only made one and sadly, it never flew the skies in anger. Now, however, a group of intrepid engineers are bringing it back to life in the form of a meticulous, full-size reproduction.

Ettore Bugatti built the 100P to compete in the 1939 Deutsch de la Meurthe Cup Race. This was the hay day of aviation, when winged monsters like the Gee Bee tore the skies asunder in pursuit of ultimate speed. Usually in the presence of an audience. It was by all accounts, incredible.

The 100P, like all of Bugatti’s creations, was wildly innovative. Its design was stunning, with forward-swept wings, a Y-shaped empennage (tail section) and an almost totally transparent cockpit. Its mechanicals were equally marvelous, featuring two Bugatti 50P supercharged straight eight engines mounted behind the pilot. Twin drive shafts ran from each engine (spinning in opposite directions) to turn the dual propellers up front. Special radiators were mounted in the fuselage with air intakes at the leading edge of the stabilizers. Each engine was good for 450 horsepower.

The 100P was a stupendous aeronautical achievement and would likely have set speed records in the skies over Europe. Then the Nazis marched on Paris. The plane was put in storage during the war. After the war, it was rescued and restored, but not flown. It eventually ended up in the hands of the Experimental Aircraft Association, which displays the plane at the Air Venture Museum in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Bugatti and experimental aircraft enthusiasts have long dreamed of seeing the 100P soar. That’s why businessman Scotty Wilson started a project to recreate the plane almost 30 years ago. Remarkably, he and his team are nearly finished with the reproduction. They need just $50,000 to finish. And they’ve turned to Kickstarter for help. Head on over to the project page to give them some love. The 100P is probably the most beautiful flying machine ever devised and it deserves to, well, fly.

Major League Baseball is now streaming two games per day live on YouTube, for free – but most of our readers likely won’t be able to tune in: MLB’s live streams will be restricted to users outside of the US, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

However, the league will also add highlight clips from in-season games two days after they air on TV, and those highlights will be available to everyone. Also available on MLB’s revamped YouTube channel: Thousands of archive clips from MLB.com’s “Baseball’s Best Moments.”

Of course, MLB has been streaming in-season games to U.S. viewers who are willing to pay for some time: MLB TV’s premium package currently costs around $130 per year. However, even that likely won’t get you the games you really want to watch: In-market games of your local team are blacked out and only air on TV.

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Andrew Guida has joined Macquarie Capital as a Managing Director focused on Bank & Thrift and Specialty Finance within the Financial Institutions Group. He will be based in New York. Guida joins from FBR & Co., where he was an MD in FIG.

PRESS RELEASE
Macquarie Group (“Macquarie”) (ASX: MQG; ADR: MQBKY) today announced that Andrew Guida has joined Macquarie Capital as a Managing Director focused on Bank & Thrift and Specialty Finance within the Financial Institutions Group (FIG), based in the firm’s New York office.

Mr. Guida has more than 20 years of experience in investment banking, having advised a broad range of financial institution clients. He joins from FBR & Co., where he was a Managing Director in their Financial Institutions Group focused on M&A, advisory and capital raising primarily for small and mid-cap Bank Thrift. Prior to FBR, he was based in London as an Executive Director with Morgan Stanley.

“We are delighted to welcome Andrew to Macquarie. His specialized experience with financial institution clients, in addition to a global perspective gained from his experience in Europe, are well suited to our FIG franchise. His focus on depository and specialty finance will help strengthen the capabilities we bring to clients, particularly in light of our active domestic and cross-border deal flow,” said John Roddy, Senior Managing Director and Macquarie’s US Head of FIG.

Mr. Guida holds an MBA from Cornell University and a BA from Washington & Lee University.

About Macquarie

Macquarie Group (Macquarie) is a global provider of banking, financial, advisory, investment and funds management services. Macquarie’s main business focus is making returns by providing a diversified range of services to clients. Founded in 1969, Macquarie operates in more than 70 office locations in 28 countries and employs more than 13,400 people. Assets under management total approximately $353 billion at September 30, 2012. For more information, visit www.macquarie.com.

Macquarie Capital provides advisory, capital raising and principal investing to corporate, financial sponsor and government clients involved in M&A, debt and equity fund raising, corporate restructuring, project finance and Public Private Partnerships. In the US, Macquarie Capital has continued to expand its client offerings, creating deep specialist sector expertise through targeted acquisitions and key hires, and building a comprehensive advisory and capital markets platform.

For more information, visit www.macquarie.com/us and www.macquarie.com/blueprint.

The post Guida Joins Macquarie appeared first on peHUB.

To compensate for the boring tablet Samsung unveiled on Monday morning, details surrounding a handful of more exciting Samsung slates have emerged in a new leak. SamMobile has a solid track record when reporting news of upcoming Samsung devices, and the blog reports on Monday that four new tablets are coming this year from the South Korea-based electronics giant. Among them are the Galaxy Tab 8.0, the Galaxy Tab 11 and the co-branded Nexus 11, which will seemingly be Google’s flagship tablet for 2013.

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Honestly, gadget marketing doesn’t get much better than this. Brilliant isn’t strong enough to describe how fabulous and memorable is the new spot for Nokia Lumia 920. I showed the commercial to my wife, twice, and she laughed to tears both times — and giggled for half an hour later.

If you watch nothing else today, make this video the one and only. I’m a sucker for good marketing, and this commercial works well on so many levels — wedding setting, fanboyism and brilliant physical comedy — I dare not dissect them and ruin the fun.

Nokia deserves to sell more Lumias for this Microsoft commercial, which deserves lots of airtime. Let’s see if this ditty goes viral on YouTube. Now I need to snuff out which advertising analysts track what commercials DVR users choose not to skip. Because this is one to watch. Over and over.

Here’s some more Jelly news for you, and no, it’s not any additional info on what the hell it is. It’s more team news.

According to Jelly founder and CEO, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, the company has just hired employee #1: UI designer and engineer Austin Sarner. Sarner, who got his start building Mac OS apps, worked on the Push Pop Press publishing platform that won a Apple Design Award in 2011.

Here’s Biz Stone’s welcome letter:

Jelly is thrilled to announce our official employee #1, Austin Sarner. Austin was instrumental in developing Push Pop Press, the Apple Design Award winning multi-touch user interface and publishing platform. Austin has been busy building rich software user interfaces for the past eight years.

Austin got his start creating popular shareware applications for Mac OS such as AppZapper and Disco, and spent some time working in Amsterdam with the Dutch Software company Sofa. Pushing the envelope in software design brought Austin some success in this field and helped him discover his true passion.

Clarity for Austin came in the form of understanding that software development is an effective path towards facilitating large scale positive change. Following its sale to Facebook, Austin parted ways with Push Pop Press in search of an opportunity to collaborate with like-minded individuals on something new.

We were lucky to have met Austin via a recommendation from Loren Brichter, a very highly regarded iOS developer. When someone like Loren highlights talent, we take it seriously. In Austin, Jelly has found not only a gifted engineer with an eye for interaction design, but an individual who shares our world positive philosophy.

Although this is technically employee #1, Jelly has also made some additions to the executive team. Biz Stone revealed ex-Twitter employee Ben Finkel as co-founder and Chief Technology Officer last week, and a few days later we heard that Jelly has poached Twitter Music head Kevin Thau to be the company’s COO. Although Biz Stone has yet to confirm that one.

All we really know about Jelly at this point is that it will be a mobile-focused free service of some kind.

“News of Jelly emerged unexpectedly early so I’ll wait a bit to share more about the team. In the meantime, I’ll say this. Jelly will be for everybody, it will be developed first and foremost for mobile devices, and it will be free. But, it won’t be ready for a while,” said Stone, when announcing the startup.

With this hire, it looks like they’re starting to consider what the user experience on the app will look and feel like.

I’ve long been a fan of Orange Amps, the pricey-but-excellent-sounding tube amplifiers. Recently, IK Multimedia released Amplitube Orange: it costs $99, and individual amps are also available in IK Multimedia’s in-app Custom Shop Store, but with AmpliTube running natively on OS X, you can record with them in GarageBand via a plug in. Now, given that most of these amps retail between $800 and $2,100, it’s asking a bit much to presume a $99 amp package will sound at all close. But I took them for a spin anyway.

First, a word about my needs

Here’s a little bit about how I make music these days: most of my guitar playing is spent practicing, or doing some light recording. While I’m not in a formal band, I jam with a few regular folks. My live rig, so to speak, is a small Egnator Tweaker tube head, a Mesa cab, and my pedal board with the usual overdrive, distortion, wah and delay pedals. For the most part, I’m a classic rock/blues guy, but one band I jam with is more fusion-oriented.

I mention this because until I started playing with other musicians, I was perfectly content to use AmpliTube as my practice and demo recording setup. I didn’t really care that the sounds I’d put in a demo reel couldn’t be replicated on my live rig. Now that I might be required to reproduce my sounds live, I’ve had to take a little care that the demo can’t be played live. That means I now split my practice time more like 50/50 between my physical and software amps.

Recording, however, is a different story. For that I’m 100 percent digital. I do not mic my amp. For the most part, it’s to eliminate unwanted noise that tends to happen when recording in a non-soundproof environment. Call me crazy, but my neighbor’s chainsaw is not a proper complementary instrument.

AmpliTube Orange amps to the rescue

Orange amps are pretty much straight-ahead rock-n-roll amps. I’ve played through quite a few of them, and were it not for the immense price tag, I’d own one or more. Thankfully, now I can get something close to that great sound in an amp model.

The AmpliTube Orange suite contains the following amps: AD-30TC, AD-200, OR-50, OR 120, RockerVerb 50, ThunderVerb 200, Dual Terror and Tiny Terror. Sadly, the Dark Terror series is missing. I spent the most amount my review time with the Dual Terror and the RockerVerb and ThunderVerb models.

Man, I loved them.

In the middle of my blues/classic rock style is a love of roots rock. So, I love me some reverb. While nothing in my mind beats an old-fashioned spring reverb, I was quite happy with the sounds I got from the two ‘Verb amps. The ThunderVerb had a nice, deep tone while the RockerVerb had a lot of pop. I didn’t try adding any effects, wanting to keep the tones as pure as possible for testing, but the RockerVerb would sound excellent with a little slap-back echo.

What’s great about this combination is I can get a rock and roll sound that’s not all that hard to reproduce with my live rig. Some of the other AmpliTube amps I enjoy are modeled after high-gain amps my little rig isn’t equipped for.  I feel a lot more comfortable recording a groove to send out to my mates with the Orange amps.

The Dual Terror is an amp with a Fat Channel and  Tiny Terror channel. I found it gave me a slightly heavier tone, similar to the tone Jimmy Page got on the Led Zeppelin live CD, Celebration Day. I’m pretty particular about my distortion sound. I like my distortion dirty and with big man parts; not the over-processed ’80s hair metal distortion. With the Dual Terror on Fat, I got a nice heavy distortion sound perfect for my heavier rhythm needs.

For lead tones, I still found I needed to add an overdrive pedal to give it a little more boost. I like a ton of sustain on my lead tone, and I wasn’t able to get that solely with the Orange amps. As always, your needs may be different and you might get a lead tone you love without adding any in-app pedals.

Post-gig report

I’m very happy with the AmpliTube Orange amp package. The entire $99 package also includes nine Orange cabinet simulators. While I could tell a difference between the different cabs, I’m still not completely sold on the idea of cabinet simulators. I still like to judge my cabs on how they move air. Yes, I know it’s a little bit weird I’m on-board with amp simulators, but not cabinet simulators. I’m just weird that way. Therefore, if you aren’t sold on the cabinets themselves, you can just buy the amps you want via the Custom Shop store. IK Multimedia also has a generous demo period. You can demo each amp for two days before the demo times out.

While I don’t think the models are a substitute for a real Orange amp, I think for most guitarists doing home recording they are a good alternative to the stock AmpliTube amps. It’s so easy to record in GarageBand with these amps, there’s no shortage of good sounds you can record with in the comfort of your own home.

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Since Facebook debuted its Graph Search function in January, the social network has given access to a small percentage of users — millions, while Facebook had 1.06 billion monthly active users at the end of 2012. The feature aggregates people, places and things based on user input and quickly provides interesting and sometimes surprising content. That only happens thanks to nifty natural-language processing work that goes on behind the scenes. And it only works with English — for now. Engineers are trying to figure out how to make the product available in other languages.

In an article set to be posted to Facebook’s engineering blog on Monday, research scientist Maxime Boucher and Xiao Li, engineering manager on the natural-language team in Graph Search, provide detailed information on the ways in which Graph Search calls on natural-language processing to guess what users want.

• Graph Search breaks down search strings into multiple components that serve as commands with which the system can query the database. For instance, “my friends who live in San Francisco” would be run like this: pulling up the user, grabbing that person’s list of friends, calling on the filter for people who currently live in a place, and filtering out only those friends who have San Francisco in that field. Graph Search considers that search query “intersect(friends(me), residents(12345)).” And if that’s exactly what the user had in mind, that query gets converted into language for the Unicorn search engine to chew on.Search terms sometimes include words Graph Search has no use for. At other times, words for guiding queries are missing. And users might plug in terms in the wrong order. Say a user types in “friends San Francisco.” Graph Search might offer “my friends who live in San Francisco” as a good option. If it sees “San Francisco friends,” it could respond with “my friends who live in San Francisco,” which is more in accord with the correct sequence for a query.
• Graph Search analyzes words users enter to look for possible entities that users are referring to in the database, across more than 20 entity categories, such as cities, employers and schools. Using statistics for the entity categories, the tool identifies sequences of words that could be more applicable for certain entities than others. If “san” precedes “francisco,” the user likely is referring to a city, not a person.
• The system recognizes slang, nicknames for places, misspellings, the many ways of expressing particular types of data and other peculiarities that users type into the search box and swaps out each of those for terms that actually exist in the database. That means, for example, that subject-verb agreement isn’t necessary for the system to serve up query options that might lead to what users want to see. And words such as “besties” get interpreted as “friends.”

  Graph Search is visible on one of the most popular social networks in the world and therefore needs to be satisfying for its users. As Boucher and Li write, “The challenge for the team was to make sure that any reasonable user input produces plausible suggestions using Graph Search. To achieve that goal, the team leveraged a number of linguistic resources for conducting lexical analysis on an input query before matching it against terminal rules in the grammar.”

Graph Search still has a long to-do list for engineers to address. One of the biggest challenges is to construct and deploy a language-agnostic Graph Search system, so Facebook users all over the world will be able to do what English speakers can do with the tool. It will be difficult to produce a tool that can adjust for unusual spellings, handle incorrect grammar and otherwise optimize search strings entered in any language. “In Russian, there’s so many inflections around words and a lot of language-specific things we haven’t encountered in English,” Li told me in an interview on Friday. Engineers are now looking at different ways to make the tool available for other languages, Li said. One option? A whole lot of drop-down menus.

While there is still work to do in letting more people try Graph Search, it’s clear that the simple interface for navigating hundreds of millions of objects required engineers to produce a bunch of systems and models. It’s no Google, Siri or DataPop, but, because it contains elements tailored to the data set at hand and common use cases, and because it’s getting better over time, Graph Search is worth keeping an eye on.

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All Hands on Deck

Reporters: Do you want to accompany field crews as they tag yellow perch on Lake Erie during the week of April 29^th? Please contact Holly Muir at 734-214-9318 or [email protected].

Sandusky, Ohio – With help from local anglers and fishermen, the U.S. Geological Survey and Ohio Department of Natural Resources will kick-start a five-year collaborative fish-tagging effort this week to better understand movement of yellow perch across Lake Erie.

Biologists are tagging adult yellow perch with tiny devices called Passive Integrated Transponders, or PIT tags, to track fish migration, and are asking for assistance from anglers and commercial fishermen to make fish available for scanning. Throughout the spring, summer, and fall fishing seasons, the USGS and ODNR biologists will frequent recreational access points, such as boat ramps and fish-cleaning stations, in order to interview anglers and scan fish. Commercial fishermen will be contacted based on the real-time information they provide to the ODNR catch reporting system.

“We are excited to be working with the ODNR to enhance scientific information on fish movement patterns,” said Dr. Richard Kraus, chief of the USGS Lake Erie Biological Station. “Our Canadian partners in the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources are also tagging yellow perch with PIT tags, so there will be mutual benefits for both countries with the potential to detect north-south movements.”

PIT tags are a miniaturized version of the electronic toll-collection technology used on turnpikes. Each tag is about the size of a grain of rice and is uniquely coded per specific fish. It is placed in an inedible portion of the fish, so it does not affect the ability of the fish to be eaten. The scanning process only takes several seconds per cooler or 100-pound fish box, which hold 300-400 fish each.  The angler interviews, or creel surveys, are critical to collecting data because it is impossible to tell if a fish is tagged without scanning it.

Tagging will occur from the ODNR’s 43-foot Research Vessel Grandon with other small agency vessels assisting the Grandon during the effort. 

“The ODNR is pleased to be pursuing this collaborative research project with USGS, the Lake Erie Committee agencies, and stakeholder groups,” said Jeff Tyson, ODNR, administrator for the Division of Wildlife Lake Erie Program. “Movement patterns of yellow perch have been identified as an information gap by resource management agencies and stakeholder groups, and this research will help the Lake Erie Committee agencies responsibly manage the valuable Lake Erie yellow perch resources.”

This work is funded through the Federal Aid in Sport Fish Restoration Act and administered through the ODNR, Division of Wildlife. The Sport Fish Restoration Program was created to restore and better manage fishery resources with funds originating from excise taxes on fishing equipment, motorboat, and small engine fuels.

Microsoft has launched two new features for Bing Webmaster Tools: a new malware tool and geo-targeting.

If Bing detects that a site is serving malware (either willingly or unwillingly) it will send a notification to the webmaster in Bing Webmaster Tools, as well as alert users before they actually visit the site.

“The new Malware tool provides information about the malware we detected on the site,” Bing says in a blog post. “Previously some of this information was encompassed in the Crawl Information tool, but with the new Malware tool you not only get access to more details that help you understand the nature of the issue, it also allows webmasters to submit and track a malware re-evaluation request once they have cleaned their site.”

When a webmaster submits a request, they can immediately track the status and progress right inside the malware tool.

With geo-targeting, webmasters can provide Bing with info about the intended audience of their site or of a section of their site.

“Whereas other Webmaster Tools let you geo-target sites only at the site level, Bing Geo-Targeting provides you with a more flexibility: multinational sites do not need to verify each section they want to geo-target separately,” says Bing. “Instead, Bing allows you to define a country affinity for your entire website or for sections of your website from within a single view and from within a single site account.”

Geo-targeting can be done at the domain level, the subdomain level, the directory level or the page level. Geo-targeting input will be used as one of many signals Bing uses when determining when and where to show your pages to users.

BT may be (perhaps surprisingly) the third-biggest infrastructure-as-a-service provider in the world, but it clearly isn’t satisfied. On Monday, the British telecoms giant made a push into major new territories by announcing the upcoming launch of BT Cloud Compute in China, India, Germany, Mexico and Argentina.

The corporate-focused service has already been up and running for a while in the U.S., U.K., Spain, Brazil, Colombia, France, Italy, Singapore, Hong Kong, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, which is how it got to that number-three spot.

BT Cloud Compute has been built in-house at the company’s Adastral Park R&D center, in collaboration with the likes of Cisco and Citrix. The service runs out of 45 data centers around the world, which is handy when dealing with various countries’ compliance requirements.

BT is particularly keen on talking up its resiliency and 99.95 percent “expected” service level, as well as the fact that customers can run their services across both BT’s public cloud facilities and their own private clouds and in-house infrastructure.

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When Watch Dogs premiered at E3 last year, it quickly became one of the most talked-about new IPs at the conference. Its open-world Grand Theft Auto-style gameplay combined with the player ability to manipulate a city’s technological infrastructure and spy on passers-by excited everyone who is getting a bit tired of the Assassin’s Creed series.

Today, Ubisoft announced through a trailer that Watch Dogs will be released on November 19 (November 22 in Europe) for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and Wii U. The trailer also teases a bit of the story behind the cool gameplay. Players will take on the role of Aiden Pearce, who has been wronged by the powers that be and vows to get revenge by using the city against them.

In addition to the trailer, Ubisoft also revealed several different special and collector’s edition versions of the game that will be available for pre-order in Europe.

The Dedsec Edition, seen below, comes with a figurine of Aiden, as well as an artbook, soundtrack, badges, AR cards, and a map. Dedsec also includes three downloadable single player missions, which Ubisoft claims will add an hour of game time. Other additions include the Vigilante Edition, the Uplay-exclusive Exclusive Edition, and the Game-exclusive Special Edition. The Vigilante Edition comes with a replica Aiden cap and mask, while the Exclusive and Special editions come with some of the digital content found in the Vigilante and Dedsec editions.