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The Federal Trade Commission issued new guidelines on Tuesday to encourage better disclosures in online ads. The rules, intended to protect consumers from confusion, come at a time when so-called “content marketing” and “native advertising” are soaring in popularity.

The FTC announced the rules in a release stating the agency has updated its 2000 guide, “Dotcom Dislosures,” in order to take account of smaller media screens and the rise of social marketing.

The agency emphasized that traditional disclosure rules, which cover media like radio and television, apply to all forms of the online space as well. These longstanding rules prevent marketers from hiding key terms of an offer and require them to reveal if someone has been paid to endorse a product.

The new FTC report contains 22 examples at the end that illustrate how marketers can fall afoul of the rules in the mobile and social media context. Many of these refer to display ads in which a user must zoom or scroll down to see information that reveals, for instance, that a diamond may not weigh as much as the ad says.

The most intriguing examples, however, include one that appears aimed clearly at Twitter marketers. Although the agency does not cite Twitter by name, it refers to “space constrained ads” and includes pictures that appear near-identical to a Twitter feed:

The social media guidelines recommend small space advertisers place the word “Ad” before messages or make other obvious disclosures. Twitter itself has long clearly flagged sponsored posts; in reply to an email, a company spokesperson referred to Twitter’s sponsorship policy.

The guidelines also take aim at bloggers who provide information or reviews in exchange for products or services. In one example, the FTC shows a blog post about house paint in which the writer states at the end that she received a free can of paint. According to the agency, such disclosures must be clear and conspicuous and not tucked away after a series of links or other distractions. The new guidelines may affect companies like Microsoft that have paid bloggers to”astroturf” on their behalf.

More generally, the new rules may also be a caution for advocates of “native advertising.” This type of advertising, in which an ad mimics the format of surrounding content, is hardly new but has become a buzzword in recent months as marketers turn to “sponsored posts” and other forms of branded content in the hopes of attracting more attention.

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It looks like Amazon isn’t the only tech company that’s finding a way to work gay marriage into their product ads.

Last month, an ad for Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite ereader featured a gay couple and made people on the internet argue, as these things tend to do. I guess only straight couples should be able to enjoy ebooks on the beach.

Anyway, it appears that Microsoft is following in Amazon’s footsteps. Their new ad for Outlook leaves no room for speculation concerning the company’s stance on marriage equality. Check it out:

Last month, Microsoft was one of the many tech companies (including Apple, Facebook, and Google) to sign amicus briefs supporting marriage equality. Later this year, the Supreme Court will decide two important cases on the topic – one involving California’s Prop 8 and one involving the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

Microsoft was criticized way in 2005 for contemplating turning a pro-gay rights agenda into a neutral one. Eventually, the company decided to support a Washington gay rights bill.

“After looking at the question from all sides, I’ve concluded that diversity in the workplace is such an important issue for our business that it should be included in our legislative agenda,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “I respect that there will be different viewpoints. But as CEO, I am doing what I believe is right for our company as a whole.”

Since 2005, Washington has been on a path to marriage equality, eventually legalizing gay marriage last year.

In 2010, Google was caught siphoning data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks with its Street View cars. It’s now been almost three years since the practice was first revealed, and Google may have finally tied the last loose string of this affair.

Connecticut Attorney State General George Jepsen announced today that Google has paid out $7 million to settle charges brought against it by the 38 states affected by its Street View Wi-Fi spying. On top of the cash settlement, Google must adhere to a number of agreements:

…engage in a comprehensive employee education program about the privacy or confidentiality of user data; to sponsor a nationwide public service campaign to help educate consumers about securing their wireless networks and protecting personal information; and to continue to secure, and eventually destroy, the data collected and stored by its Street View vehicles nationwide between 2008 and March 2010. Google also collected similar data around the world.

Jepsen hopes that the settlement will hopefully dissuade Google from trying anything like this in the future:

“While the $7 million is significant, the importance of this agreement goes beyond financial terms. Consumers have a reasonable expectation of privacy. This agreement recognizes those rights and ensures that Google will not use similar tactics in the future to collect personal information without permission from unsuspecting consumers.”

The settlement is the latest, and potentially final, chapter in the Wi-Fi spying scandal that hit Google in 2010. The company was fined by the FCC last year to the tune of $25,000 for obstructing an investigation into its Wi-Fi eavesdropping practices, but the Commission ultimately dropped the investigation. Privacy advocates had called for a renewal into the investigation, but that didn’t exactly pan out.

Those same privacy advocates are no doubt pleased then by today’s settlement. They’ll probably argue that the $7 million settlement isn’t nearly enough, but at least the company will finally destroy all the data it collected.

[h/t: The Hill]

TED Talks are available in 97 languages, from Albanian to Vietnamese, thanks to the tireless work of our translators. So far, more than 8,800 volunteers have created the upwards of 34,000 translated talks. To celebrate this huge accomplishment, every week the TED Blog will be bringing you a Q&A with one of our most prolific translators. Today, meet Els De Keyser.

Where do you live and what do you do by day?

I live in Mechelen, Belgium. By day, I work for the Financial Services and Markets Authority, in the department of supervision of the rules of conduct. Basically, we check whether financial institutions act honestly, fairly and professionally in accordance with the best interests of their clients.

What drew you to TED?

I stumbled onto TED in 2010 while preparing my MBA thesis on transparency as a competitive advantage in insurance. (I worked for an insurance company at the time.) Alan Siegel: Let's simplify legal jargon!  As a lawyer with a keen interest in plain language, I found Alan Siegel’s talk “Let’s simplify legal jargon” very inspiring.

What was the first talk you translated and how did you pick it?

I wanted to share Siegel’s talk with my colleagues at work. But that meant I had to overcome the language hurdle. I saw the “Translation” menu on TED.com and I thought, “Why not give it a try and translate it into Dutch?” The fact that the talk was only four minutes long helped too.

What have been your favorite talks to translate? Why?

I have a couple of favorite speakers, like Hans Rosling and Clay Shirky. They really changed my mindset. And they’re funny — I love the challenge of doing justice to their jokes. But the most moving talks, the ones that really stick with me, are often by speakers I would never have heard of if it hadn’t been for TED, Elyn Saks: A tale of mental illness — from the insidelike Elyn Saks’s testimonial on schizophrenia and Alberto Cairo’s “There are no scraps of men.” Last but not least, I like to translate talks I saw live at TED or TEDx events, because working on the translation brings back fond memories of the experience.

Which talk was the most difficult for you to translate and why?

This summer, TED-Ed videos were added to the Open Translation Project. I translated a TED-Ed lesson on the art of metaphors, in which the animation illustrated the English imagery. I couldn’t just use the Dutch equivalent — because it would make the animation meaningless. In 3 or 4 seconds, I had to convey the meaning in Dutch and respect the original English image. This six minutes translation took me much longer than many an 18-minute TED Talk.

What’s a phrase in your language that you wish would catch on globally?

I would propose a word: “pretoogjes,” which refers to the eyes of a chuckling person who is up to mischief. It was the Dutch contribution to the Words Worth Spreading tray designed by Dick Lundgren and presented by the TED Translators at TEDGlobal 2012.

TED translators Dick Lundgren and Els De Keyser with the Words Worth Spreading trays.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an algorithm that aims to make database cloud infrastructure more efficient by pushing more similar workloads onto fewer servers, rather than distributing them as widely as possible.

The premise is surprising, given that many database companies make a point of divvying up the responsibility of processing to keep latency low. But if cloud providers build on and adopt the researchers’ DBSeer algorithm, it could improve cloud database performance.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers run virtual machines on servers. That might not be the most efficient approach for databases, because resources aren’t shared among the applications running on any given server, the researchers argued in a recent paper. It might be better to observe current workloads, predict the needs of future workloads and bring together the different sorts of loads on different servers. Then cloud providers could adjust service-level agreements to promise a certain level of latency rather than charge customers based on the number and size of virtual machines, the researchers noted.

DBSeer might also be of interest to database appliance and server vendors. Teradata is incorporating the algorithm into proprietary software. Meanwhile, one of the MIT researchers, Carlo Curino, now works at Microsoft, and Chinese webscale server vendor Quanta funded the research.

So far, DBSeer, which is available on GitHub, has only been shown to accurately predict workload needs for transactional MySQL databases. More research would be necessary to apply the algorithm to other database management systems.

The change in thinking could make good financial sense. The more hardware in use inside a cloud provider’s data centers, the more expensive it is for customers. If the appliances could work more efficiently, costs could drop.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Johann Helgason.

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I have had my fair share of tablets over the years in both the 7-inch and 10-inch varieties. With each tablet purchase, I discovered that I had a growing list apps of that I couldn’t live without. Over the years that number has increased, and while I could go through each app and its purpose, I narrowed the list down to the ten apps I use almost daily. At the touch of a fingertip they provide access to my friends, social networks, work, and news. Hit the break to see what they are.

10. – DashClock Widget – (Play Store Link) This app is amazing. The kicker is that it only works with Android 4.2 and up. What makes this app so amazing is that I can look at my notifications straight from my lock screen. I can check Google Voice, Falcon Pro, as well as Gmail without unlocking my tablet. What’s even better is that more extensions are being added all the time. If you’re using the Nexus 10 or have a 4.2 ROM installed, than you need to download this app.

09. LilyPad HD – (Play Store Link) LilyPad is a great little social app because it floats over your home screen, which allows you to chat with your friends while using your tablet to do other things. Unlike the beta version this app supports multiple clients. MSN, Facebook, AIM, Yahoo, they’re all there. The free version only supports Google Talk, but a one time purchase of $2.99 makes the rest of them available as well as gets rid of ads. This is a must have if you’re always chatting with friends and family. If you’re worried that it’ll get in the way, you shouldn’t. because it minimizes to almost nothing and is easily accessible through the Notification Bar.

08. Nova Launcher – (Play Store Link) This is probably one of the first apps that I install with each tablet. It takes the stock Android launcher and adds many bells and whistles. It allows for bigger folders, multiple scroll effects, widgets in the dock, and so on. While there are others out there, Nova has proved itself with great performance and customization. The Prime version has more transitions as well as unread counts and swipe gestures. While many would be happy with the standard interface that their tablet gives, this one is my go to for a more stock experience with the added benefits of customization.

07. Google Voice – (Play Store Link) I love this app because not only does it sync my voicemail, but it allows me to send and receive messages from my tablet. It’s a great way to send messages to other friend’s devices in an SMS fashion. Plus if you’re like me and flash different ROMS constantly, it’s a good way of keeping those messages backed up and synced across multiple devices. I know some people who use that solely as the way to communicate foregoing their phone’s SMS app altogether.

06. Drive – (Play Store Link) Given that we here at TalkAndroid use Drive for all our writing needs it’s important to have. What makes it great is just like Google Voice, everything is in the cloud and can be seen across multiple devices. I can create and edit documents, work on spreadsheets as well as work on presentations right from my tablet. Hook up a Bluetooth keyboard and I have a perfect laptop replacement for writing. While it does have its limitations, Google is slowly making strides to improve the overall experience. Here’s hoping that their acquisition of Quickoffice makes the mobile office experience even better.

05. Netflix – (Play Store Link) While I also use Hulu Plus, Netflix can’t be beat for the library it has. Most of the shows that I’ve watched over the years are there. The movie selection could be better, but it’s getting there. The quality isn’t bad, and for the most part, shows and movies stream in HD quality. It’s a perfect way to kill some time while traveling or waiting for a class to start.

04. Chrome – (Play Store Link) While not on par with its desktop counterpart, Chrome for Android has come a long way from our initial review. While I touted it for being a well developed piece of software, it has come a long way. Since our review, it has added tons of features as well as sprouted off a beta version. The speed of the app is still a factor, but I can look past the few extra seconds for the ability to sync across devices. It’s handy for if I’m reading or researching something on my desktop or other device, and I have to leave, I can quickly open the same page on any of my other devices.

03. Kii Keyboard – (Play Store Link) With a plethora of keyboards out there to choose from, it’s hard to distinguish yourself from the pack. With apps like Swiftkey and Swype always in the spotlight, sometimes it’s hard to notice others. Kii Keyboard is such a keyboard. Built upon the Android 4.2 keyboard, it has everything you’d expect. It has next word prediction as well as gesture (Swype) typing. It supports themes like Go Keyboard and offers the ability to split the keyboard for easier thumb typing. I can’t think of a keyboard that I would recommend more.

02. TalkAndroid – (Play Store Link) No this isn’t just a plug for you to get our app but it doesn’t hurt. I came across the app before I started writing for TalkAndroid and I was very impressed. The app was created following Android Design Principles and the quality shows. You can easily navigate through each section and find what you’re looking for. Articles are easy to read and posting comments is a breeze. It’s a great way to keep up with us here at TalkAndroid without the need of a web browser.

01. Tablified – (Play Store Link) I have to say that the number one app to have for any tablet is Tablified. If you’re like me then you have probably been frustrated from time to time with the lack of a dedicated tablet section in the Play Store. While Google has made attempts at correcting this, Tablified takes the process out of the process. If you get any app out of this entire list, this is the one to get. It’s an entire database of Tablet specific apps presented in a very polished manner. So rather than wonder if the app you’re wanting is optimized for your tablet, use Tablified, and know that all you’re getting is apps optimized for the larger screen. The ad free version is on sale right now for $1.99 so if you haven’t yet…. Go get it!

Honorable Mention – Carbon Back Up (Play Store Link) – A recently developed app by Koush, CyanogenMod and ClockworkMod developer, Carbon Back Up is a great way to backup and sync data across multiple devices. I haven’t used it enough to give it a full review but from what I have used of it, I had to mention it. You can backup Messaging (SMS) data, launcher data, as well as data from any app you use. The great aspect for this is that you can sync the data on any of your devices. I tested it out when I switched from the G Note 10.1 to the Nexus 10. It saved my game progress from Simpsons Tapped Out so I was able to continue where I left off on the Nexus 10. This works for root and non-root users alike, and if you’re curious about using it, we have a handy guide for you to look at.

And that’s it. These are the ten tablet apps that I can’t live without and neither should you. There are many other apps out there that I use. but these are the first ten to get downloaded. What about you folks? What are the tablet apps that you can’t live without?

Come comment on this article: The 10 Android Tablet Apps You Shouldn’t Live Without

There is a lot going on right now down in Austin, Texas. This week the city plays host to the popular SXSW Interactive show — an idea that began as a music festival and then added technology to the mix. Today BitTorrent chose the location to remove the private tag from its Live streaming service and let the public play with it for the first time.

The service is a Peer-to-Peer live streaming platform that the company says is “for anyone with mobile video or webcams, for anyone in the moment, on the ground, or on the front lines; for everyone with the need to break news or break it down in real time”.

The BitTorrent Live service started testing in November of 2012 and has been utilized by at least one very popular podcaster I personally know. He told me he had no problems broadcasting a stream of his live show and encountered only minor hiccups during the testing phase.

The company notes that “we’ve demonstrated scaling and improved stability during our invite-only period, and are excited to open our service up to anyone who wants it. Thanks to all our early users for their support”.

The service is still a beta, just of a public nature now, so perhaps you should temper your expectations here, and also have a backup plan just in case. If you want to give it a shot then head over to BitTorent Live to get started.

Photo Credit: Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock

Nuance has released an update of its Dragon Mobile Assistant app which brings new features such as location sharing and hands-free texting. Utilizing your phone’s GPS, users can let friends know where they’re at and set how long they want to share their location. Texting is now safer thanks to reading incoming messages out loud, and allowing users to easily send new text messages by voice. Another new feature connects with your calendar and will notify you before you have a scheduled call which it can then dial the number directly.

Launched back in October, Dragon Mobile Assistant faces stiff competition with Google’s very own Now. You can check out the video below which shows off the app’s latest features:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Play Store Download Link

Come comment on this article: Nuance Dragon Mobile Assistant Adds Location Sharing, Safer Texting

A six-month-old girl who was shot in a Chicago neighborhood on Monday has now died.

The Chicago Fox station is reporting that Jonylah Watkins was shot five times as her father, Jonathan, changed her diaper in the front seat of a minivan. Jonathan was also shot, but is expected to recover from his wounds. The shooting took place in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood.

Though the police told Fox that they are investigating multiple possibilities, they also stated that the shooting had “very strong gang overtones. Jonathan Watkins has more than 30 arrests on record.

“Regardless of who you are or regardless of what your role is as an adult, everybody has a role to play to make sure every child is in a safe city, in a safe neighborhood, and in a safe community on a safe street like other parts of our city,” said Rahm Emanuel, mayor of Chicago.

Chicago News and Weather | FOX 32 News

Chicago News and Weather | FOX 32 News

Smart grid networking company Silver Spring Networks is expected to start trading as soon as Wednesday of this week on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol SSNI, according to the Wall Street Journal, and other media reports. After first filing for an IPO back in the summer of 2011, the smart grid company now plans to sell 3.7 million shares at a price of between $16 and $18 per share, which at the midpoint would raise $63 million for the company.

That’s a pretty modest IPO for the decade-old company, and is less than half of the maximum that Silver Spring originally planned to raise a year and a half ago. If Silver Spring does go public Wednesday morning, expect it to price its shares late in the day on Tuesday. Along with the IPO, longtime investor Foundation Capital also plans to purchase $12 million worth of stock at the IPO price in a private placement.

Silver Spring sells wireless networks and smart meters to utilities that can be used to run power grids more efficiently and offer news types of grid services. The company is increasingly looking to sell software and services, and not just infrastructure, to help it boost its margins.

Silver Spring has a lot of business, and is one of the leaders when it comes to selling smart grid networks to utilities. However the business is inherently slow going (with long sales cycles), and pretty low margin. In 2012, Silver Spring generated $196.74 million in revenue, which was slightly down from its net revenue in 2011 of $237.05 million. The company generated a net loss in 2012 of $89.72 million, which was a smaller loss than its net loss in 2011 of $92.36 million.

Because its sales cycles are so long, its backlog of deals and billings (what it’s billed customers for but hasn’t converted to revenue yet) are more telling of how much momentum the company has. Silver Spring says it had $304.33 million worth of billings in 2012, which was a jump from its $236.13 million worth of billings in 2011. Silver Spring says it has $508.06 million worth of deferred revenue by the end of the 2012.

We’ll keep you updated on potential pricing and the debut of the IPO.

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Today, President Obama stopped by a meeting of his Export Council, a group of business executives and government leaders who advise him on trade and export issues.

“The good news is we are well on our way to meeting a very ambitious goal that we set several years ago to double U.S. exports,” President Obama said. “The question now becomes how do we sustain this momentum?”

Part of that means building on progress that put strong trade deals in place, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which “sets a high bar that ensures that trade is fair and free,” the President said.

“And for those of us who abide by high labor standards and high environmental standards, obviously being able to lock in those kinds of high standards in the fastest-growing region of the world and the most populous region of the world can yield enormous benefits and help to generate billions of dollars in trade and millions of jobs.”

President Obama also discussed expanding trade with Europe through efforts to lock in the EU-U.S trade deal he announced in his State of the Union Address.

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We’ve been keeping up with two budget-level Xperia devices lately; the dual-core, 4.6 inch Xperia SP and the 4.3 inch, 8 megapixel-toting Xperia L. Supposedly, the launch dates for both devices were scheduled for March, but we’re halfway through the month with no word from Sony about either device.

Well, it turns out Sony Mobile Russia is holding a press event on March 18th. There’s no official word about what’s being announced at the event, but we can put two and two together, especially with the rumor mill churning around both of those devices lately. Keep an eye out for any details on the 18th, and we’ll be sure to keep you updated when anything gets announced.

Source: Xperia Blog

Come comment on this article: Sony may unveil two new Xperia devices in Russia on March 18th

Spotify has tacked on a million paid users just a little over three months.

That’s the word from SXSW, where the company has announced that they can now boast 6 million paid subscribers. Back in December, Spotify announced that their paid subscriber total had hit 5 million. In July 2012, it was 4 million. And back in January of 2012, it was 3 million. If you do your math, you’ll notice that it took roughly a year for Spotify to turn 3 million in 5 million, but only 3 months to turn 5 million into 6 million.

Long story short: Spotify is growing faster than it ever has.

It’s not just paid subscriptions that are growing – total users are also up 4 million in the past three months, from 20 to 24 million. Of course, total users counts are great and all, but the big questions is how many unpaid users Spotify can turn into paid users with subscription-only features like mobile play, offline radio, and no advertisements.

Spotify has made a few non-subscriber based headlines in the past few months. Back in December, they made a splash when they acquired the catalog of Metallica, longtime foes of services like Napster. In the past three months, Spotify has landed on a bunch of new devices like TiVo, Roku, and Windows Phone 8.

And they just expanded the beta for their new web player in the U.K. The browser app should be making its way to the U.S. soon.

Two terms kept popping up as I watched a slew of Microsoft executives show off the company’s future at its annual TechForum media gathering last week. One was “machine learning.” The other was “Bing.”

I would have been surprised had I not sat down with Microsoft Technical Fellow Dave Campbell the night before the event to talk big data. After all, I was in Redmond — home of Word, Excel and a, shall we say, misunderstood new operating system — not Silicon Valley, where “machine learning” now rolls off the tongue as easily and often as “startup” or “triathlon.”

However, a single rhetorical question from Campbell resonated pretty loudly and got me in the right frame of mind for what I was about to hear: Who else, he asked, has a top-tier web service business (complete with the hundreds of petabytes of data those services collect) as well as a top-tier enterprise software business?

He could have added to that list a consumer software business, 30 percent of the world’s long-distance calls, a mobile device business, one of the world’s most popular gaming platforms, a large-screen touch-display business, and a motion-sensing device that ties into — and can control — all of them. They all came into play at TechForum, as various company presidents, engineers and now-adviser-to-the-CEO Craig Mundie demonstrated a future where everything is connected and trying to learn what we like and what we’re doing.

Bing is the key to it all (even if it can’t touch Google)

Microsoft’s Bing search engine is at the core of everything the company is trying to do in the field of machine learning and cutting-edge big data. That fact makes it an important part of Microsoft’s future even if it never gets close to Google search in terms of revenue or users. “Its long-term value is just as much as a deep infrastructural element,” Mundie said during a Q&A session kicking off the event.

What he means is that Bing is valuable because the technology developed to power it ultimately stands to make Microsoft a lot more money in other areas. Qi Lu, Microsoft’s Online Services Division president (and an integral part of the maturation of Hadoop inside Yahoo earlier this century), describes Bing’s primary architecture as less of a traditional keyword index and more of an “information fabric.” We’re building a digital society, he explained, so there are digital entities — people, place and things — and Bing must be able to capture the rich spatial, temporal and other relationships among them.

A research project for analyzing viral web content.

Taking that vision company-wide, Microsoft can take in data from Bing, Skype, Xbox Live, Office 365 and other sources and actually be able to store, process and analyze it in a meaningful ways. Internally, this might be for business-intelligence or product-development purposes. Externally, Microsoft might use data to create experiences that span devices and services.

Bing also feeds the pipeline for future enterprise IT products, particularly when it comes to data management. Campbell tells the story of meeting a colleague years after he left the SQL database team and went to work on Bing’s infrastructure. At that point, their worlds were vastly different, but the advent of and hype around big data has converged them once again.

Satya Nadella at Structure 2012
(c) Pinar Ozger

During his presentation, Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business president, said the company now builds internal IT with a design-for-first-party-but-think-of-third-party mentality. As a result, the core of the Windows Azure cloud-computing platform is based on technologies developed to run Bing, as is the Windows Azure storage service. When Microsoft builds a new operating system, he added, it thinks about the project at webscale in terms of what it would take to run Bing using that platform.

And Campbell told me via email after the event that Microsoft is considering how to productize the various graph, NoSQL and other types of databases it uses to power the features within Bing. Ironically, though, its Cosmos and Dryad technologies that serve as the core of Bing are off the table: consumers demanded Hadoop, so that’s what Microsoft is currently pushing for mass storage and large-scale batch processing.

Google, of course, is doing something very similar, albeit with less of a focus on enterprise software as a final destination for its technologies (with the exception of its small suite of cloud services such as Compute Engine, App Engine and BigQuery). Rather, the types of advances in data storage, processing and analysis that Google has made thanks to products such as search and YouTube are finding their way into Project Glass and self-driving cars. Time will tell whose efforts prove wiser in the end.

A little history and prognostication on machine learning

Mundie said machine learning, especially, has been a core part of Microsoft Research’s focus for years. And although there were some initial struggles, including a dearth of good data and machines powerful enough to process it all, the company and the industry as a whole have come a long way. Among the big areas of improvement he cited were real-time speech recognition — Microsoft has done some impressive work in this area, actually — and natural user interaction.

“We’ve talked for a long time in the industry about IT meaning information technology,” Mundie said, “… you might redefine IT to be intelligent technology.”

Eric Rudder, Mundie’s protégé and chief technical strategy officer, elaborated. If you think about all the pictures and other info Microsoft’s devices and services capture, he said, you’ll see a lot of opportunity to learn and build better products. Stepping out of the consumer world, he questioned how one might begin working with a 40-billion-row Excel spreadsheet. Query it, talk to it or somehow use gestures to communicate with it?

Mundie (right) and Skype President Tony Bates (left).

Mundie thinks Microsoft can answer these and other questions — this despite a relative lack of attention compared with Google’s research efforts and a consumer community he says is “jaded” by the omnipresence of high technology. TV makers are copying Kinect, speech will be the most-prevalent user interaction and cameras as inputs are coming soon, he said. And Microsoft’s machine-learning research will let it capitalize or even lead the way on these movements, he added.

As I’ll highlight in a follow-up post, Microsoft showed off a lot of these capabilities to the handful of journalists invited to TechForum. Kinect, Office, Xbox Live — they’re all watching, listening, learning and working together.

It’s part of a greater transition away from “specialized gadgets” that process information and into a world full of generally intelligent devices and services that just let people get stuff done. “The vast majority of humankind,” Mundie said, “doesn’t really care about the computer, per se.”

Have research division, will persevere

In the end, Microsoft Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid expects Microsoft’s heavy investment into general research of the kind his team does will help it get the last laugh over some of its competitors. He wonders whether companies like Apple — which already saved itself once — will be ready to ride the next wave of innovation or the one after that without dedicated general research departments that aren’t necessarily tied to product development. His view is that you can only buy yourself into the next generation so many times.

A project (same as the feature image) called Adaptive Machine Learning for Real-Time Streaming.

It was Microsoft Research, for example, that developed a method for compressing 32-bit code in the early 1990s — something that would prove fortuitous when it came time to ship Windows ’95 and its associated applications despite the fact that most PCs lacked the proper hardware for the 32-bit OS. In terms of establishing the dominance of Office over its peers that had to wait until the hardware caught up, Rashid told a group of reporters during the event, “that was game over.”

“Our industry is littered with companies that aren’t here anymore,” he added.

Touché. Microsoft is the butt of a lot of jokes, but as the tech world shifts toward intelligent devices and alternative mode of human-computer interaction, the company’s research into areas such as big data and machine learning suggest it will still be very much around for some time to come.

To learn a lot more about machine learning and the latest trends in big data technologies, be sure to attend our Structure: Data conference March 20-21 in New York. Speakers will include some of the brightest minds in data from organizations such as EMC, Facebook, Cloudera, Quid and even the CIA.

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The local CBS station in Los Angeles is reporting the bizarre story of a California family that buried the wrong woman after a mortuary mixed up two bodies.

Though the incident echoes a scene from the movie Death at a Funeral, members of the woman’s family were not laughing at the mix-up.

The report states that after complaints were raised at a viewing about the identity of the woman in the coffin, mortuary workers told the family of Darlene Davidson that the woman was, in fact, Davidson. They were convincing enough that the woman was buried as scheduled in a dress of Davidson’s. The family was contacted later and told that their mother’s body had not yet been buried.

A mortuary spokesperson told CBS that the mix-up was a mistake and apologized for the mishap. The Cemetery and Funeral Bureau of the California Department of Consumer Affairs is now investigating the incident.