Samsung Electronics is reportedly in talks with Nuance, the voice recognition company whose tech helped power Siri, about a possible acquisition, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The Burlington, Mass.-based company is one of the biggest providers of voice-powered technology, available on desktop computers, mobile phones, TVs, and even GPS devices.
Samsung already uses Nuance's voice and language recognition technologies in a number of its own devices, including phones, TVs and tablets, but Nuance last September said it would also power Samsung's new set of wearable devices.
In an interview for ReadWrite a few months ago, Nuance CMO Peter Mahoney said the company has been working on the capabilities of its virtual assistants to “communicate with humans more fluidly.”
“Dialogue is really important,” Mahoney said. “In the original systems that came out, it operated like a search engine. You say something and something comes back, but it may or may not be the right thing. But that's not how humans work. Humans disambiguate. We clarify.”
Nuance is working on improving its personal assistants to better approximate human behavior, which means pushing its own systems to store more data and consider more contextual information before making decisions. Mahoney also said Nuance is pushing its personal assistants to learn relationships, classifications and genres — and even remember previous conversations — to serve as more proactive recommendation engines.
“A human who is thoughtful understands your needs, wants and desires—he or she understands you and can contextualize that,” Mahoney said. “One of the things you talk about is having all the information. The more online information and the more great services out there that exist, the more we'll be able to connect our intelligent systems that can understand everything that's going on.”
In addition to its software, Nuance also offers a treasure trove of valuable voice-related patents, some of which were picked up from acquisitions. For example, Nuance owns patents for IBM's speech technology and the popular predictive text technology known as T9.
Nuance, which lists Carl Icahn as its biggest shareholder with 19% of the company, also serves several other large customers including Nintendo, Panasonic and car manufacturer Daimler AG. Before The Wall Street Journal's report broke, Nuance had a market capitalization of roughly $5.5 billion.
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Iraq has shut down Internet service in five of its 19 provinces, according to Mashable.
In a letter sent to the country's internet service providers, Iraq's Ministry of Communications asked to "shut down the Internet totally" in five of the country's provinces that have slipped from the control of Baghdad to either the extremist militant organization ISIS or the Kurds, including Saleh El Din, Kirkuk, Ninawa, Diyalah, and Anbar, as well as 11 other areas of the country. The Iraqi government also ordered to reinstate last week's internet ban on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Skype, and Tango and Instagram will additionally be blocked.
A translation of the letter was published by Mohamad Najem, the advocacy and policy director of the Social Media Exchange, a Lebanon-based organization encouraging Internet freedom in the Middle East.
The shutdown comes just after last week's social media blackout in the country, which aimed to stop insurgent group ISIS from plotting and spreading propaganda. With sights set on the capital city of Baghdad, the Sunni militant group ISIS has terrorized the country, taking over the second largest city in Iraq, reportedly looting the equivalent of over $420 million from the central bank, and seizing American-made Iraqi military equipment.
SEE ALSO: Iraq Just Blocked Twitter, Google, YouTube And Facebook To Stop The ISIS From Plotting
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A group of HP employees were just busted for running a website that threw insults at HP competitor Splunk, according to documents from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
Splunk became the poster child for big data tech companies in 2012 when it became the first big data startup to go public. Investors were so hot for the stock on the first day of trading that it was halted for a while.
One of HP's units, its Enterprise Security Division, sells a product called "ArcSight" that competes with Splunk.
A handful of employees at that division got the idea to operate a website called "splunkfail.com," along with a Twitter handle (@splunkfail) and a YouTube account (“Splunk F”), according to documents of complaint filed with WIPO by Splunk's lawyers.
They then proceeded to post a stream of insults to the sites like these, according to the complaint:
“Just invented a splunk sandwhich [sic], take two pieces of bread and a bunch of soggy logs with no security and put them together.” #splunkfail” (March 26, 2014 @splunkfail).
“Splunk is a security company #AprilFoolsDay.” (April 1, 2014 @splunkfail).
Some of the tweets and posts comments were in such poor taste we won't repeat them in full here. Others went so far as to accuse Splunk of “pissing off a lot of customers lately.”
Naturally, Splunk got wind and its lawyers complained to HP's Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer Ashley Watson. An investigation found that four HP employees and/or HP contractors were involved, the WIPO documents say.
HP promptly did the right thing and put the kibosh on it all.
Splunkfail.com was quickly and voluntarily taken down, the tweets deleted, and so on. HP's lawyers also implied that these employees had gone rogue, noting that the company didn't own the site and couldn't be held responsible for it.
The website owners also dutifully turned the domain name over to Splunk just as WIPO ruled that the owners of the website had no right to use Splunk's name in that way anyway.
Moral of the story: badly executed guerrilla warfare is still alive and well in the enterprise tech market. We thought it might have died when Microsoft pulled the plug on its Scroogled campaign, but alas, not so.
HP declined further comment.
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What's better than watching Walter White mix meth and scheme his sinister schemes? Watching Walter White mix meth and scheme his sinister schemes in Ultra HD, that's what. And now you can, because Netflix is streaming Breaking Bad in 4K starting right now.
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Town officials of Oyster Bay, N.Y., likely aren't scoring points with transparency advocates after clamping down on how the town's information is released through social networks. But legal experts believe the more cautious approach is a good one for many local governments.
The Long Island town revised its information technology policy to prohibit employees from communicating official documents through social media applications without prior authorization, according to Newsday. Although the move may slow interaction between residents and the town, Chuck Thompson, general counsel and executive director of the International Municipal Lawyers Association, felt the decision might help address one of the biggest issues local governments are currently struggling with -- disclosure requirements.
For example, if a local government has a bond issue outstanding and sends information out in a way that might get to one investor before another, Thompson believes the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission may view that as a violation. That's just one concern in a litany of other privacy laws and limitations a municipality may be subject to on both the state and federal levels.
“There is good reason for a local government to control release of its information,” Thompson said. “Not so much to restrict the dissemination of the information, but to insure that it is disseminated properly.”
Sheila Gladstone, principal with the Lloyd Gosselink Rochelle & Townsend, P.C. law firm in Austin, Texas, agreed. She told Government Technology that there have been concerns with her clients where information was sent out so quickly without enough thought and care, and city leaders were held responsible in the public view for messages they didn't approve.
Newsday reported that Oyster Bay's revised IT policy could penalize employees who don't follow dissemination procedures with suspension of computer system use or possibly legal action. Deputy Town Supervisor Leonard Genova told the paper that further revisions to the policy language will be done to clarify that residents attempting to communicate with town officials through electronic means are not subject to the policy.
Messages left with Oyster Bay officials to comment on the policy changes were not returned.
Gladstone noted that in the “old days,” documents and other data were carefully vetted before they were released to the public. And while local government employees might communicate unauthorized statements on the phone, that doesn't have the same impact as transmitting data to thousands of people at the touch of a button.
In situations where cities have a public information officer, -- For more information read the original article here.
A few weeks ago, children of the '80s and '90s got a blast from the past when a campaign to resurrect "Reading Rainbow" launched on Kickstarter. The project aims to inspire a love for reading in children by bringing the old TV show into the modern age. A mobile app and desktop version are both in the works.
The Kickstarter project, led by former "Reading Rainbow" host LeVar Burton, absolutely exploded, reaching its goal of $1 million within just 11 hours of its launching. It has now raised more than $3.8 million from more than 81,000 backers, making it one of the most-funded Kickstarter projects of all time with 16 days left to go.
Burton has since adjusted the goal to $5 million, which he hopes will help even more kids access the new "Reading Rainbow" materials.
But what exactly is "Reading Rainbow," and why are people so excited that it's coming back? The show was the third-longest running children's show in PBS history, and it was filled with educational fun and adventure that kids across America enjoyed.
"Reading Rainbow" premiered on June 6, 1983. In the first episode, "Tight Times," host LeVar Burton shows a friend how a library is a great place to have fun on the cheap.
Burton hosted and produced the show until it went off the air in 2006. Burton had previously found fame in his role as Geordi La Forge in "Star Trek: The Next Generation."
He also starred as Kunta Kinte on the '70s TV series "Roots."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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