AMB Album

Google has released a new version of Google Goggles with an exciting new feature: translation.

According to the company’s blog, the new feature will be able to read five different, Latin-based languages and translate to many more, all using a smartphone’s camera.

Sponsor

The new version of Google Goggles will help translate text from English, French, Italian, German and Spanish into many more languages, and will be able to read many more, including non-Latin-based langauges such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic, in the future.

Using Google Goggles for this feature is a simple process, as described on Google’s blog:

• Point your phone at a word or phrase. Use the region of interest button to draw a box around specific words

• Press the shutter button
• If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate
• Press the translate button to select the source and destination languages.

Google has announced several advancements involving translation over recent months, including automated captioning for YouTube videos, auto-translation for websites in Chrome and even software it is developing to provide real-time voice translation over mobile phones.

Each of these technologies involves technologies which will help in creating a cohesive augmented reality experience in the future, translating the world we hear and see around us into data, which can then be worked with in other ways. And even at the core, test translation is not perfect, so Google is dealing with an immense problem. As it writes in its blog, “computer vision is a hard problem. [...] The Google Goggles team is working on solving the technical challenges required to make computers see. We hope you are as excited as we are about the possibilities of visual search.”

Google Goggles version 1.1 is currently only available for devices running Android 1.6 and higher and is available from the Android Marketplace.

Discuss

ReadWriteWeb

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the federal government will step in and begin regulating broadband lines under rules adopted decades ago designed for traditional phone networks.

The move will go a long way in enforcing a “net neutrality”, which is meant to insure that all content is delivered equally, regardless of its source or type.

Sponsor

According to the article, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski is expected to outline plans today for how the FCC and the federal government will regulate broadband lines. The decision comes after a ruling early last month by a federal appeals court, which said that the FCC had overstepped its bounds in a 2008 matter involving ComCast. The decision said that the FCC had acted outside of its legal authority when it found that ComCast had “significantly impeded consumers’ ability to access the content and use the applications of their choice.”

According to the Journal, the FCC “has maintained a mostly hands-off approach to Internet regulation” for the past decade or so, likely in response to warnings by cable and telecommunications executives that federal regulations would lead these companies to “cut billions of capital expenditures for their networks, slash jobs and go to court to fight the rules.”

Many fear that, without net neutrality rules, ISPs and communications companies will begin charging more for faster access to websites. While customers already pay on a scale according to bandwidth, speed is not capped according to payment on the other end of the equation. That is, if I can download at 1 Mbps, I should be able to get that speed whether I am going to the MTV website or the website for a local business, as long as the servers they are hosted on can provide that speed as well. It should not be up to the communications companies to determine how quickly that content is served up according to how much they might pay.

According to Mike McCurry, former press secretary to President Bill Clinton and co-chair of the Arts + Labs Coaltion, the issue is not cut and dry.

“The question is how heavy a hand will the regulatory touch be,” he said. “We don’t know yet, so the devil is in the details. The network operators have to be able to treat some traffic on the Internet different than other traffic–most people agree that web video is different than an email to grandma. You have to discriminate in some fashion.”

It’s likely that the courts will agree and we’ll be hearing about this decision for some time to come.

Discuss

ReadWriteWeb

Google has released a new version of Google Goggles with an exciting new feature: translation.

According to the company’s blog, the new feature will be able to read five different, Latin-based languages and translate to many more, all using a smartphone’s camera.

Sponsor

The new version of Google Goggles will help translate text from English, French, Italian, German and Spanish into many more languages, and will be able to read many more, including non-Latin-based langauges such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic, in the future.

Using Google Goggles for this feature is a simple process, as described on Google’s blog:

• Point your phone at a word or phrase. Use the region of interest button to draw a box around specific words

• Press the shutter button
• If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate
• Press the translate button to select the source and destination languages.

Google has announced several advancements involving translation over recent months, including automated captioning for YouTube videos, auto-translation for websites in Chrome and even software it is developing to provide real-time voice translation over mobile phones.

Each of these technologies involves technologies which will help in creating a cohesive augmented reality experience in the future, translating the world we hear and see around us into data, which can then be worked with in other ways. And even at the core, test translation is not perfect, so Google is dealing with an immense problem. As it writes in its blog, “computer vision is a hard problem. [...] The Google Goggles team is working on solving the technical challenges required to make computers see. We hope you are as excited as we are about the possibilities of visual search.”

Google Goggles version 1.1 is currently only available for devices running Android 1.6 and higher and is available from the Android Marketplace.

Discuss

ReadWriteWeb

Want to pay for purchases by waving your iPhone in front of a payment terminal at checkout? That will soon be a reality thanks to a new partnership between Visa Inc. and DeviceFidelity, which has teamed up to launch a mobile payment technology for iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS devices.

The news comes by way of a leaked press release that temporarily appeared on MarketWatch, but has since been taken down. Several versions remain on the Web, however, thanks to Google’s cache.

Sponsor

payWave for iPhone

According to the release, the new Apple-certifed technology combines a protective iPhone case with a secure memory card that will host Visa’s contactless payment application, Visa payWave.

PayWave, introduced in September 2007, allows cardholders to wave their card in front of terminals in order to pay for purchases at point-of-sale. The technology is similar to MasterCard’s PayPass solution, which rolled out to select markets in 2005.

Visa’s contactless technology already works at over 32,000 retailers from top brands, notes the company’s corporate website, and the list is “rapidly growing,” it says.

The iPhone-enabled payWave technology, too, will be made available at thousands of merchants, claims the release, including fast food restaurants, retail stores, in taxis, during sporting events (such as baseball games) and even at vending machines that have contactless payment terminals.

Beyond iPhone: Works on Any Phone with a Memory Card Slot

What’s even better about this news is that the mobile payment technology won’t be limited to iPhones. It will also work with “a majority of smart phones that have a slot for a memory card,” which means that owners of other popular smartphones won’t necessarily be out of luck. To use Visa’s technology on non-iPhones, users can insert the card into their phone’s memory slot to transform their phones into mobile payment devices.

Visa already released a similar technology in Malaysia and Japan. Last year, for example, the company teamed up with Nokia and Maybank, a leading financial institution in Malaysia, to offer Visa payWave on mobile devices. But at the time, the company claimed that several barriers to U.S. adoption still remained, many of which had to due with the limited adoption of NFC-enabled devices and terminals here in the U.S. (NFC, or near field communications, is a wireless communication technology that enables data exchanges between devices. The technology is popular overseas in Europe and Asia, but has yet to catch on with any real gusto in North America. PayWave uses NFC for mobile transactions.)

Apparently, Visa has found a workaround for the lack of NFC phones by embedding the computer chip needed into specially designed iPhone cases instead.

Is it Secure?

Considering that people often lose their mobile phones, the application has been designed so that it can be password-protected and uses “advanced security technology,” says the release, to uniquely identify each transaction. If a phone was lost or stolen, the phone’s owner would simply call their provider who could then immediately deactivate the account, the same as with lost or stolen credit cards.

The leaked release was accompanied by videos demonstrating the new technology, but sadly those are now unavailable.

Discuss

ReadWriteWeb

Tomorrow we’re running our second unconference event, the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit. It’s on right after the Web 2.0 Expo and we’re once again holding it at the beautiful Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Our last unconference was on the Real-Time Web and we got a lot of great feedback about the format and high quality of discussion. We’re hoping for more of the same this Friday! Also yours truly will be presenting a keynote presentation about the state of Mobile.

Yesterday we ran a contest giving away 5 tickets to the event, thanks to the generosity of our sponsors: CallFire, WorldMate, Alcatel-Lucent, Ipevo and MyCityWay. Here are the winners:

Sponsor

@garrettdodge
@tedm1
@marcuswandell
@mattstaggs
@alanxing

For those of you who missed out on a free ticket to the Mobile Summit, we encourage you to register now. The event is on tomorrow in Mountain View.

Here’s further information about the RWW Mobile Summit:

As with our first event, the Real-Time Web Summit last October, the Mobile Summit will be in the “unconference” format. Laura Fittion, founder of oneforty.com, had these thoughts about ReadWriteWeb’s last summit:

“There were a lot of investors there and it was a great dialogue between startups and investors. The unconference format was great because it got away from the bogus who-is in the real-time Web, and made it who-wants-to-be. You didn’t have to be big and influential to get your ideas across – if it was a good idea then it got heard. It wasn’t just Twitter, it was many things real time, defined pretty expansively.”

The Mobile Summit will be facilitated by Kaliya Hamlin, who in our opinion is the best in the business at this style of event.

Mobile was one of our top five trends last year and continues to undergo explosive growth, so our aim with this event is to help you navigate the opportunities. Get ready to explore, think and create the future of mobile! Because it will be you – the attendees – who ultimately set the agenda.

We will have two main tracks at this Summit, Development and Business. Here’s a sample of some of the topics we’ll explore in both of these tracks:

• Geo-location services – what can you do using location as a platform?
• Commerce & Marketing – as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel?
• Content, Publishing & Recommendations – the technologies and best practices.
• Mobile Social Networking – how to tap into communities on mobile devices.
• Internet of Things – the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data.
• Augmented Reality – the technology and business applications of AR.
• Native App vs. Browser Based – Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

A big thank-you to our sponsors CallFire, WorldMate, Alcatel-Lucent, plus our two newest sponsors:

IPEVO: Tools for the connected world

IPEVO is the online source for smart and well-designed products that works with your computers, smart-phones and the Internet. We make new experiences for today’s connected lifestyle accessible and affordable by designing and selecting products that best reflect the most current Internet behaviors and emergent technologies.

MyCityWay

My City Way is a One-Stop mobile apps platform for everything needed to live, work, play and visit in any city. Real-time, user-profile driven and experience-oriented, My City Way would be available in over 40 cities across the world on iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry and the web.

If you’re a company in the mobile Internet market, you may be interested in becoming a sponsor for this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information about sponsor packages.

We hope to see you tomorrow, May 7!

Discuss

ReadWriteWeb