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Hound – Taking On Google Now, Siri and Cortana

6/28/2015

There are times when, out of the blue, a new product hits the market and blows all of the competition away. That appears to be the case with the new app called Hound. This is a digital assistant application written by the makers of the music discovery app SoundHound.

Typhone.nl, a Dutch testing organization, conducted tests between the various voice assistant features on multiple platforms. The tests put Hound up against more established players like Siri, Google Now and Cortana. So how did Hound fare against all the competition? Extremely well.

It seems that one of the strong suits of Hound is its ability to recognize users who have a heavy accent. It is also able to follow up on previous enquiries made by the user, as opposed to the other apps where a followup query is usually treated as a new search, meaning that depending on how you phrase it, they won’t be able to catch onto the context of your query.

Several sources say that the company has had the app in development for years and it shows. Hound takes the other three digital assistants to the woodshed and just beats them up! There are two YouTube videos listed at the end of this article. Be sure to visit each so you can see what Hound can really do. Here are some of the questions Hound can answer with lightening speed:

“How many days are there between the day after tomorrow and three days before the second Thursday of November 2022?”
“What is the population of the capital of the country in which the Space Needle is located?”
“What is the capital and population for Japan and China and their areas in square miles and square kilometers, and also tell me how many people live in India, and what is the area code for Germany, France and Italy?”
“Show me Asian restaurants excluding Chinese and Japanese?”

The app doesn’t just answer complex questions. You can have it book a hotel inside of a specific price range with a given number of stars in its rating that has a gym, free wi-fi and is not a bed and breakfast.

The demos on YouTube point to a product that is close to release. But the app is currently in an invite-only beta and the company hasn’t commented on any release date.

YouTube Videos:

Functionality Overview
Speed Demo

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Microsoft Surface Hub

6/21/2015

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For years Cisco, Citrix and Polycom have long dominated the enterprise conferencing and collaboration market. Now, with its new Surface Hub digital whiteboard display, Microsoft is making a major move into that space.

Surface Hub was developed from technology Microsoft acquired in the 2012 buyout of Perceptive Pixel. Back in January, Microsoft outlined some of the Surface Hub features. Last week, they announced a 55-inch version to be used in smaller “huddle spaces” with a retail price of $7,000 and an 84-inch version meant to be used in conference rooms that accommodate 7-10 people selling for $20,000.

Essentially the Surface Hub is a Windows 10 computer with a huge touch display. The company maintains that the unit can replace typical conference room collaboration tools such as a speaker phone, video conference system and projector normally purchased and installed separately. The Surface Hub also does videoconferencing in addition to in-person collaboration. “You can compare it to Cisco telepresence or HP telepresence, which is more expensive,” says J.P. Gownder, an analyst at Forrester Research. “It’s fairly inexpensive, because you’re solving that problem on some level, as well as the collaboration piece.

”The Surface Hub will come bundled with several Microsoft applications. According to the company, the platform includes support for Skype for Video for teleconferencing, and OneNote will, of course, be available so users can take notes on the screen. Microsoft Office will also come bundled.

The Surface Hub will run all current Windows-compatible apps and Microsoft has said that customers will be able to develop custom applications for the device. Look for the application-development aspect of Surface Hub to win over some hard-to-sell customers.

“I’ve been working on product development around productivity since 1993," says Mike Angiulo, who, as Microsoft's corporate VP for hardware. “If I think about what’s changed in terms of individuals doing work, your ability to create and communicate has gone up exponentially, with PCs and mobility and phones. But the conference rooms are exactly the same as they were when I started. They’re like time capsules. There’s a projector, there’s a whiteboard, there’s a conference phone.”

With the Surface Hub's collaborative tools, Microsoft is making an ambitious attempt to move those time capsules into the present day. Which is not anything like a guarantee that it will be successful. In 2002, for instance, the company launched Tablet PCs and said it expected them to displace conventional laptops within a half decade; they didn't. And its first foray into multi-touch computing—2007's original Surface, which built a computer into a table for use in retail environments—didn't go anywhere.

Still, no matter how the market responds to the Surface Hub, the fact that Microsoft is behind it raises the stakes far beyond anything attempted in the past.

Surface Hubs will be manufactured in Microsoft's Wilsonville, Oregon factory.

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Batteriser Boosts Batteries 800%

6/14/2015

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A small, steel-and-silicon sleeve designed to slip over standard alkaline batteries promises to let those disposable cells run up to eight times longer.

While you may be skeptical of the claim, the company says that the Batteriser is a miniaturized version of a boost converter that raises the output voltage of a power source at the expense of current. A normal AA or C cell is designed to deliver a steady 1.5 volts, but as the power is depleated the voltage will drop. Once it slips below 1.35 or even 1.4 volts, it effectively becomes useless to many devices. The battery’s chemistry is still loaded with juice, but the circuitry in many gadgets (especially more sophisticated ones, like Bluetooth keyboards and bathroom scales) considers the battery dead.

This is where Batteriser comes in. It’s essentially a voltage booster that sucks every last drop of useable energy from ostensibly spent batteries. So, instead of using just 20 percent of all the power hidden inside of the battery, Batteriser makes effective use of the remaining 80 percent.

Voltage boosters are nothing new, but Batteriser scales down the technology to the point where it can fit inside a stainless steel sleeve less than 0.1 mm thick.

The Batteriser slips on a normal AAA, AA, C, or D battery without making it too bulky to fit in your various devices. It can be used over and over. The company insists it’s safe to touch and is chemical-free. You can bring it in your carry-on bag or luggage, since it doesn’t violate any TSA rules.

The company, on its website, states that its results have been independently verified by the physics department of San Jose State University. The unit will sell for $10 for a pack of 4 and should go on sale this fall.

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Google and Apple Update The Mobile Payments Market

6/7/2015

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Mobile payments have been around for a long time, but it wasn’t until Apple announced Apple Pay in October of 2014 that the market started to heat up. According to Forrester Research, mobile payments are growing quickly. The research firm predicts they will balloon to $142 billion by 2019 in the United States, almost tripling from $52 billion in 2014.

Google held its I/O Conference for developers last week and announced two new initiatives. First was Android Pay, which is essentially a digital payments system that consumers can use to buy things online or in stores from retailers and others who also use the service. It works almost identically to Apple Pay, Apple’s mobile payments product and functions both in online and offline transactions.

As with Apple Pay, Google will let customers verify their identity using their fingerprint, a technique that will be built into the next version of Android. And Android will copy Apple Pay’s approach to security by offering tokenization to provide merchants with a customer’s payment information without having to hand over their actual credit card number.

The second initiative is called Google Wallet. This is not the Google Wallet of old, though. It is a new peer-to-peer payments system rivaling the PayPal Venmo service. Google Wallet is a way for customers to quickly and easily transfer money to each other’s debit or bank accounts.

Apple is preparing to announce details about enhancements to Apple Pay at its worldwide developers conference later this month. Those include a rewards program for the mobile wallet service.

With more consumers willing to make purchases using smartphones, companies are rushing to take the lead in the market, spurring eBay’s PayPal to heavily market a suite of mobile apps, while start-ups like Square and Stripe expand their payments processing software to small and midsize businesses.

“[Apple and Google] want to be as disruptive to payments as Amazon has been to retail,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, a retail and payments analyst for Forrester Research. “By being early they can shape the customer experience and expectations.”

“Apple Pay has given it a really big shot in the arm, but even that is nascent,” Jan Dawson, an independent technology analyst for Jackdaw Research said. That leaves plenty of room for another company, like Google, to grab a slice of the market, he said.

Another potential headache for Google is Samsung, the world’s largest handset maker and the top seller of Android devices. The South Korean manufacturer acquired LoopPay, another mobile wallet competitor, this year. That offering could divide Samsung smartphone users who may have to choose between Google’s wallet and Samsung’s LoopPay product.

Now all Google, Apple and PayPal have to do is persuade consumers that these new payment methods are better than paying the same way they have always done — smartphone-free.

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Rick Richardson, CPA, CITP, CGMA

Rick is the editor of the weekly newsletter, Technology This Week. You can subscribe to it by visiting the website.

Rick is also the Managing Partner of Richardson Media & Technologies, LLC. Prior to forming his current company, he had a 28-year career in technology with Ernst & Young, the last twelve years of which he served as National Director of Technology.

Mr. Richardson has been named to the "Technology 100"- the annual honors list of the 100 key achievers in technology in America. He has also been honored by the American Institute of CPAs with two Lifetime Achievement awards and a Special Career Recognition Award for his contributions to the profession in the field of technology.

In 2012, Rick was inducted into the Accounting Hall of Fame by CPA Practice Advisor Magazine. He has also been named to the 100 most influential individuals in the accounting profession in America by Accounting Today magazine.

In 2017, Rick was inducted as a Marquis Who’s Who Lifetime Achiever, a registry of professionals who have excelled in their fields for many years and achieved greatness in their industry.

He is a sought after speaker around the world, providing his annual forecast of future technology trends to thousands of business executives, professionals, community leaders, educators and students.

Hound – Taking On Google Now, Siri and Cortana

Microsoft Surface Hub

Batteriser Boosts Batteries 800%

Google and Apple Update The Mobile Payments Market

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