A játékok Google-ja?

Egy játékgyártó lesz az Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, Twitter után a közösségi web következő nagy dobása?

Orientation for new employees of Zynga, the fast-growing maker of Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, can be a heady affair given the company’s outsize ambitions – all of which are embodied in Mark Pincus, Zynga’s founder. „I thought, it’s 2007, and this can’t be all that the Internet is meant to be,” he said. There has to be more than „a garage sale, a bookstore, a search engine and a portal,” he added in a good-natured putdown of the Web giants eBay, Amazon, Google and Yahoo. He said the opportunity to build an online entertainment empire was „like search before Google came along.” The Zynga Game Network is the hottest start-up to emerge from Silicon Valley since Twitter and, before that, Facebook. Unlike Twitter, which has meager revenue, Zynga is on a path to pocket $835 million in revenue this year. While Facebook needed four and a half years to reach 100 million users, Zynga crossed that mark after just two and a half years. Zynga’s empire is made up of cartoonish online games that even Mr. Pincus acknowledges are goofy. And most striking, given its financial success, is the fact that the games are free to everyone. Zynga makes money, by and large, only when a small fraction of its users pay real money for make-believe „virtual” goods that let them move up in the games or to give their friends gifts. For instance, in FarmVille, its most popular game, players tend to virtual farms, planting and harvesting crops, and turning little plots of land into ever more sophisticated or idyllic cyberfarms. Good farmers – those who don’t let crops wither – earn virtual currency they can use for things like more seed or farm animals and equipment. But players can also buy those goods with credit cards, PayPal accounts or Facebook’s new payment system, called Credits. A pink tractor, a FarmVille favorite, costs about $3.50, and fuel to power it is 60 cents. A Breton horse can be had for $4.40, and four chickens for $5.60. The sums are small, but add up quickly when multiplied by millions of users: Zynga says it has been profitable since shortly after its founding. At a recent gathering of media and technology moguls, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the C.E.O. of DreamWorks Animation, was asked what he would do if he were to start his career over. „I said I would like to be Mark Pincus,” he recalled in an interview. „He has nailed the next killer app, the next compelling thing that’s going to happen” in media.

IT3 komment: A Facebookról ismert FarmVille és Mafia Wars után júniusban megjelent az online játékpiacot nem egész három éven belül meghódító Zynga harmadik tömegterméke, a FrontierVille. A piacvezető céggel az iparág óriásai közül egyedül az Electronic Arts tartja a lépést, de ők is csak tisztes távolból. Pedig ezek a játékok egyszerűek, grafikájukban nincs semmi különleges, kifinomultnak a legnagyobb jóindulattal sem nevezhetők. A siker főként azzal magyarázható, hogy felismerték a közösségi hálózatokban rejlő szórakoztató potenciált (és a szórakoztatás hiányát), illetve a „hosszú farok” elvét alkalmazva és korábbi példákból tanulva, rájöttek, miként tehetnek szert komoly profitra virtuális javak eladásából.

Forrás: www.nytimes.com

Bulizó robotok

A kaliforniai Willow Garage a világ robotikai kutatásainak egyik fellegvára, fejlesztéseik betekintést engednek a szakterület jövőjébe.

Touted as the first graduation party of its kind, Willow Garage in Menlo Park gave a big sendoff to 11 robots worth more than $4 million. With the song "Mr. Roboto" blaring in the background, the PR2s (Personal Robot 2) shook their bots in front of hundreds of attendees, who later got to touch -- and, in some instances, dance -- with the robots, which have a mobile base and arms that can react to being pushed or pulled. The PR2s will be shipped off to mostly academic institutions around the world, including the University of Tokyo and the University of Freiburg in Germany. Locally, Stanford University and UC Berkeley are recipients of the robots. The program is part of Willow Garage's effort to "get robots out of factories and into the real world," said Steve Cousins, president and CEO of Willow Garage. By "real world," Cousins means homes or other environments where personal robotics can assist in everyday life, such as folding laundry or helping seniors lift heavy objects. Each PR2 comes pre-installed with Willow Garage's free and open-source software platform, ROS. By providing the PR2s to these institutions for free for two years, Willow Garage hopes to accelerate robotics research and development. As a condition of the program, participants will share their research so the robotics community may build on it. Cousins said the startup may sell some robots later this year (Willow Garage also has the Texai telepresence robot), but generating revenues isn't the immediate focus. Rather, the emphasis is on seeding the robotics industry now with the hope of "catching some of the long-term exponential growth," Cousins said. As for when we might see any explosive growth in this industry, Eric Berger, co-director of the personal robotics program, said it's often been said that it's 10 years off. He said he's sticking with that.

IT3 komment: A robotok a gyári alkalmazások mellett a hétköznapok egyre több területén jelennek meg a következő tíz évben. A „személyi robot” kifejezés nem véletlenül rímel a „személyi számítógép”-re… Ezt a jövőképet igyekszik valóra váltani a Willow Garage, amely érdekes együttműködési modellben gondolkodik: nyílt forráskódú fejlesztőplatformjukon több felsőoktatási intézmény besegít, miközben az intézmények két évre ingyen megkapják a robotokat.

Forrás: www.sfgate.com

Felismerés minden szinten

Amerikai kutatók biológiai modellen, az agyon alapuló „többszörös” felismerő-rendszert fejlesztenek.

Software systems could one day analyze everything from blurry war-zone footage to the subtle sarcasm in a written paragraph, thanks to two unassuming scientists who are inspired by biology to make revolutionary strides in intelligent computing. Yann LeCun and Rob Fergus, both computer science professors at New York University, are the brains behind “Deep Learning,” a program sponsored by Darpa. The idea, ultimately, is to develop code that can teach itself to spot objects in a picture, actions in a video, or voices in a crowd. Existing software programs rely heavily on human assistance to identify objects. A user extracts key feature sets, like edge statistics and then feeds the data into a running algorithm, which uses the feature sets to recognize the visual input. LeCun said, “There’s some sort of learning algorithm within the brain. We just don’t know what it is.” But the algorithmic talents of the mind, along with its ability to identify visual data by abstraction, will be the key components of the NYU team’s new system. Right now, an algorithm recognizes objects in one of two ways. In one, it is shown some representative examples of what, say, a horse looks like. Then the code tries to match any new creature to the ur-stallion. (That’s called “supervised” learning.) In the other way, the software is shown lots and lots of horses, and it builds its own model of what a horse is supposed to resemble. (That’s “unsupervised” learning.) What LeCun and Fergus are trying to do is make code that can get it right on a first, unsupervised example — using layer after layer of code to abstract the essential attributes of an object. And this is only the beginning. Darpa also wants a system that can spot activities, like running, jumping or getting out of a car. The final version will operate unsupervised, by being programmed to hold itself accountable for errors — and then auto-correct them at each algorithmic layer. It should also be able to apply the layered algorithmic technique to text. Right now, computer systems can parse sentences to categorize them as positive or negative, based on how often different words appear in the text. By applying layers of analysis, the Deep Learning machine will — LeCun and Fergus hope — spot sarcasm and irony too.

IT3 komment: A használatban és fejlesztési stádiumban lévő felismerő-rendszerek általában egy területen tevékenykednek: kép, hang/beszéd, szöveg stb. A DARPA által szponzorált „Mély tanulás” program keretében két kutató önmagától tanuló különleges képfelismerő algoritmuson dolgozik, amit a későbbiekben hangok, szöveg stb. azonosítását is elvégezné. Olyan szinten, hogy például mondatokat pozitív és negatív tartalmuk alapján különböztetne meg egymástól. A tervek szerint „Mély tanulás” komplex felismerő rendszerként működik majd.

Forrás: www.wired.com