Monday, January 25, 2010

rumors after my own heart

HuffPo

What does Apple CEO Steve Jobs think about Apple's rumored Apple Tablet device?

According to TechCrunch's sources, Steve Jobs has said, in reference to the forthcoming Tablet, "This will be the most important thing I've ever done."

But just how credible is Jobs' alleged statement?

TechCrunch notes,

We haven't heard this first hand, but we've heard it multiple times second and third hand from completely independent sources. Senior Apple execs and friends of Jobs are telling people that he's about as excited about the upcoming Apple Tablet as he's ever been. Coming from the man who has created so much, that's saying something.

In September 2009, the Industry Standardreported that Jobs had made the Tablet his "personal project:"

I should say the "presumably" forthcoming Apple tablet, which sources inside Apple say is getting their maximum leader's personal and special attention. Jobs apparently sees the device as too important to have a less-than-exciting launch, so it will miss the holidays and launch in 2010.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Google Image Swirl

Google released a new Google Labs experiment related to image search: Google Image Swirl. The service "organizes image search results based on their visual and semantic similarities and presents them in an intuitive exploratory interface."

Google Image Swirl clusters the top image search results for more than 200,000 queries and it lets you explore the clusters and the relation between images.

"Once you find the group of images you're interested in, you can click on the thumbnail and a cluster of images will "swirl" into view. You can then further explore additional sub-groups within any cluster. Image Swirl expands on technologies developed for Similar Images and Picasa Face Recognition to discern how images should be grouped together and build hierarchies out of these groups. Each thumbnail on the initial results page represents an algorithmically-determined representative group of images with similar appearance and meaning. These aren't just the most relevant images — they are the most relevant groups of images," explains Google.

Try queries like: jaguar, flowers, van Gogh and keep in mind that this is an early demo, so not all the queries will return results.