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<title>Haaze.com / PolpravHalf / All</title>
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<pubDate>Sat, 18 Dec 2010 08:10:47 +0000</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[Report: Intel-McAfee deal could drag out in EU]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=report-intel-mcafee-deal-could-drag-out-in-eu</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=report-intel-mcafee-deal-could-drag-out-in-eu</comments>
<pubDate>Sat, 18 Dec 2010 08:10:47 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>PolpravHalf</dc:creator>
<category>Business &amp; Finance</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=report-intel-mcafee-deal-could-drag-out-in-eu</guid>
<description><![CDATA[European antitrust regulators have privately expressed concern over Intel's buyout of security-software maker McAfee, according to a report, a development that could slow the completion of the chipmaker's biggest-ever acquisition.Citing unnamed sources, as well as a questionnaire reportedly being circulated by European Union investigators, The Wall Street Journal said a preliminary review of the deal has raised concern about Intel's plan to engineer security features directly into its chips.Regulators have reportedly been asking rival security-software companies about the possibility of Intel giving McAfee products exclusive or special access to some chip features, thus enabling the products to run more effectively than competitors' offerings.The concerns could lead to a lengthier study of the deal's implications, the Journal said, adding that the EU has until January 12 to issue a judgment on the acquisition or launch the more-extended review. In mid-October, the Journal reported, Intel said the deal could wrap up as early as the end of this year or in the first quarter. Now, however, the chipmaker is speaking of the first half of 2011 as its time frame.Intel announced the $7.68 billion buyout in August, saying that with the advent of more and more Internet-connected technologies, security had become as important a consideration in computing as connectivity and energy-efficient performance. The company says McAfee's core technology could help it address the issue.&quot;Hardware-enhanced security will lead to breakthroughs in effectively countering the increasingly sophisticated threats of today and tomorrow,&quot; Intel Senior Vice President Renee James said in a statement at the time.The EU and Intel have had their differences before. In May of last year, the European Commission slapped the chipmaker with a $1.45 billion fine for violating antitrust legislation, after complaints from Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices led to an investigation. Intel said the Commission's findings were erroneous and appealed the fine.Neither Intel, McAfee, nor the European Commission had any comment for the Journal on this latest report.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[eBay Posted Record $13M In Gross Mobile Sales Yesterday' Up 165&nbsp'Percent]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=ebay-posted-record-13m-in-gross-mobile-sales-yesterday-up-165nbsppercent</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=ebay-posted-record-13m-in-gross-mobile-sales-yesterday-up-165nbsppercent</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>PolpravHalf</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=ebay-posted-record-13m-in-gross-mobile-sales-yesterday-up-165nbsppercent</guid>
<description><![CDATA[eBay is setting records in terms of mobile sales this holiday season, announcing that yesterday was the marketplace&amp;'s biggest shopping day ever via mobile phones in terms of gross merchandise value (also known as GMV, the total sales dollar value for merchandise sold through eBay). eBay mobile GMV grew by 127 percent to $5 million in the U.S. and 165 percent globally to $13 million on Sunday, Dec. 12 from the same Sunday last year.In the U.S., eBay mobile GMV was up 38 percent on what eBay is now referring to as a4AMobile Sunday,a4 compared to sales on Cyber Monday this year. In terms of which products performed the best in terms of volume of sales, clothing and accessories topped the list followed by Cars &amp;amp' Trucks and Jewelry &amp;amp' Accessories. The top five U.S. states by sales volume including California, Pennsylvania, Florida, Indiana, and Ohio. At the peak of yesterday&amp;'s shopping frenzy in the U.S. on the marketplace (1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. EST), eBay saw more than 9,500 transactions per hour.Of course, eBay has been making a big push to launch and promote its new mobile offerings in time for the holiday season. And as more consumers look to their mobile phones as a way to search and shop for products, eBay is gaining more traffic to its apps. eBaya4a4s primary iPhone app has seen over 13 million downloads, and its suite of apps have been downloaded 30 million times. It&amp;'s good news for eBay that sales have continued to increase from Cyber Monday and Black Friday, which tend to be peak days for many retailers. The e-commerce giant adjusted its forecasts for the year following the Thanksgiving holiday, stating that it will see over $1.5 billion in mobile sales through its marketplace.  CrunchBase InformationeBayInformation provided by CrunchBase<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[Chumby Industries launches a web discovery app on Android devices]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=chumby-industries-launches-a-web-discovery-app-on-android-devices</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=chumby-industries-launches-a-web-discovery-app-on-android-devices</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>PolpravHalf</dc:creator>
<category>Technology</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=chumby-industries-launches-a-web-discovery-app-on-android-devices</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Chumby Industries is launching its mobile browsing and discovery app on Android devices today. The app is a portal to a bunch of apps that you can view on web-connected picture frames or clock radios. The aim is to get the app on all of the newfangled gadgets such as tablets, car entertainment systems, TVs, and other household gadgets.That means more and more ordinary household gadgets will be connected to the web and will offer all kinds of information.The app is available on the Android Market for $4.99 and represents the San Diego company&amp;'s attempt to focus on software rather than hardware. The Android launch is one of a number of deals coming up where Chumby&amp;'s software runs on a variety of hardware platforms. The goal is to get Chumby&amp;'s software in front of a lot more eyeballs, said the company&amp;'s chief executive Derrick Oien (pictured).Chumby gadgets include the Sony Dash, an internet-enabled alarm clock that lets you wake up to music from music sites such as Pandora. The Chumby software runs on top of Linux and lets users personalize it to their own tastes. You can use it to passively browse slide shows, photo sharing sites, tweets, status updates, stock quotes, video clips, webcams, horoscopes and more. There are 1,500 Flash-based applications running on Chumby in 30 different categories. Developers can create third-party apps that run within the Chumby app.Chumby brought in Oien four months ago as part of a plan to make a comeback. A year ago, the Sony Dash (pictured right, top) debuted with Chumby software, and the company also partnered with Best Buy to launch a line of Insignia-branded connected products, including the Infocast Internet Media Display (pictured right, bottom), which is a photo frame that comes in two sizes. Oien also showed Chumby running on a Dell Streak Android device. But the devices haven&amp;'t sold that well.By the end of this year, Oien expects about 100,000 Chumby devices to be in consumers&amp;' hands. The goal for the next year is more ambitious, with a target of 1 million devices. Chumby was founded in 2005 and has raised $26.5 million to date. Investors include Avalon Ventures, JK&amp;amp'B Capital, Masthead Venture Partners, Marvell, and O&amp;'Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures. Chumby&amp;'s founders included Andrew &amp;''bunnie&amp;'' Huang, a hacker who became famous for circumventing the security of the original Xbox, and Ken Steele. Huang is the company&amp;'s head of engineering. Chumby has 30 employees.The company raised $3 million in convertible debt in September, and Oien said he will decide soon whether to raise more money.Next Story: Tango brings its cross-platform video chat app to the iPod Touch Previous Story: LG launches Optimux 2X with Android, world&amp;'s first dual-core smartphonePrintEmailTwitterFacebookGoogle BuzzLinkedIn      DiggStumbleUponRedditDeliciousGoogleMore&amp;8230'          Tags: ChumbyCompanies: Chumby IndustriesPeople: Derrick Oien          Tags: ChumbyCompanies: Chumby IndustriesPeople: Derrick OienDean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.VentureBeat has new weekly email newsletters.  Stay on top of the news, and don't miss a beat.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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<title><![CDATA[IBM researcher explains what Watson gets right and wrong (video)]]></title>
<link>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=ibm-researcher-explains-what-watson-gets-right-and-wrong-video</link>
<comments>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=ibm-researcher-explains-what-watson-gets-right-and-wrong-video</comments>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Nov -001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>PolpravHalf</dc:creator>
<category>Latest News</category>
<guid>http://www.haaze.com/story.php?title=ibm-researcher-explains-what-watson-gets-right-and-wrong-video</guid>
<description><![CDATA[IBM is basking in the glow of the victory of its Watson supercomputer over the Jeopardy TV show&amp;'s best human players.But watching the supercomputer answer questions during the three nights of the Jeopardy shows was puzzling to a lot of viewers, who could see how awesome Watson could be at some questions and how terrible it was at others. John Prager, one of the 25 researchers who worked on Watson&amp;'s programming, was at IBM&amp;'s event last night during the airing of the final Jeopardy match and he explained both how Watson worked. The explanations give us insight into the nature of human intelligence compared to machine intelligence, one of the oldest technological problems known to computer scientists.Prager said it&amp;'s instructive to compare DeepBlue, IBM&amp;'s supercomputer that beat chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, to Watson, which played Jeopardy. Chess is the &amp;''iconic representation of human intelligence,&amp;'' Prager said, while Jeopardy is more like the &amp;''iconic representation of what it means to be human.&amp;'' There is very little crossover between the algorithms used to play chess and those used for Jeopardy. That&amp;'s because Jeopardy represents a big &amp;''natural language understanding&amp;'' problem.For humans, understanding language is easy. But that&amp;'s the tough part for Watson. Questions like &amp;''where was Einstein born&amp;'' are easy for Watson if there is a precise answer in its database. If there isn&amp;'t an exact match, the computer would have to infer from various snippets of data that suggest the answer. For instance, if the database says that &amp;''Jack Welch ran GE like an artist,&amp;'' the computer might think that Welch was an artist, rather than the former chief executive of General Electric.Jeopardy has a broad range of topics, opening up the whole of human knowledge for the computer to try to understand. That also makes the artificial intelligence problem tough. Watson needs precision and it has to supply the top answer, in contrast to Google&amp;'s search engine which can supply a range of answers. In Jeopardy, if you get a wrong answer, you&amp;'re penalized points.Watson also needs speed, since it&amp;'s playing against fast human players. The 2,880 IBM Power750 cores (or computing brains) helps, as does the 15 terabytes of memory it has. The IBM researchers started four years ago and they found that their computers was extremely poor at getting Jeopardy questions right. The programming is in Java and C++. IBM also tapped a fan site that had typed in all of the previous Jeopardy questions and answers over the history of the game show.&amp;''We had a long way to go,&amp;'' Prager said.There are a lot of components to what it came up with, including a &amp;''question analysis&amp;'' system that starts working just as a question comes in. That part is like a search engine.&amp;nbsp' It comes up with a couple of hundred possible answers that it wants to process further. Then it runs 100 to 200 algorithms to look for different features among the answers. A machine language algorithm then sorts which are the most important solutions. Then it calculates a confidence level for the rankings and only gives a ranking if it is above a certain threshold.In the category of U.S. Cities on Tuesday night, Watson gave the lousy answer &amp;''Toronto&amp;'' in response to a question. That was because it didn&amp;'t put much weight on the category in terms of putting boundaries around its possible answers. There are actual cities named Toronto in the U.S., and the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team plays in the American League. These facts may have thrown Watson off, to comic effect. Watson put a lot of question marks after its answer, which means its confidence level was low and was only answering because it was forced to answer.It also said &amp;''1920s&amp;'' in response to a question about when Oreo cookies were introduced. That was just after human opponent Ken Jennnings was told he was wrong when he said &amp;''20s&amp;'' on the same question. That was because IBM&amp;'s researchers chose to simplify Watson&amp;'s programming by making the computer &amp;''deaf&amp;'' to the responses of other players. In many sparring games, the likelihood of that circumstance was very low, Prager said.&amp;''It was sheer bad luck that happened,&amp;'' Prager said.Host Alex Trebek noted last night that Watson made random bets for dollar amounts when it had Final Jeopardy or Daily Double gambles to make. Prager said Watson determined it didn&amp;'t need to bet everything on Tuesday night in order to win. And by statistical analysis of the category, it predicted it wouldn&amp;'t do well on short categories or certain topics. So then it knew it had to bet small amounts sometimes. The researcher who programmed that part thought that betting &amp;''zero&amp;'' would be boring and that a random amount would by funny.Watson wasn&amp;'t connected to the Internet, but IBM took a lot of library-like sources and fed them into Watson&amp;'s database. That was all done ahead of time. When a program runs live, the code and data is fed into Watson&amp;'s memory. Then processors kick in and fetch the best answers. A lot of the data is duplicated and most of the data was updated to within a few weeks of the show&amp;'s filming.IBM trained Watson in 55 sparring games against former Jeopardy winners. Watson won 71 percent of the time. That was the more scientific result compared to the championship matches. Prager said the experience of watching Watson was like a parent watching a child perform in a school play, where you hope the child doesn&amp;'t flub his or her lines.&amp;''The trained eye can predict whether Watson will get the answer right when the question comes up,&amp;'' Prager said. &amp;''Watson struggles what they&amp;'re really asking for, and if the language is really clear. Jeopardy is an entertainment show and the question is often worded to inform or entertain.&amp;''Burn Lewis, another IBM researcher, said that Watson actually had to press a buzzer to answer questions in the show. The questions are visible to the human players so it &amp;''hits their retinas about the same time it hits Watson&amp;'s chips,&amp;'' Prager said. It could do so within six milliseconds, faster than most humans can react. Lewis said that the humans who beat Watson on the buzzer were really gambling, or predicting they could answer a question upon hearing the last word.Watson generally jumped around a lot on categories because it was looking for Daily Doubles, which offer the chance to get the most points from a question, and there is usually a pattern to where contestants can find those Daily Doubles, Prager said.IBM thinks that Watson&amp;'s innovations can be used in things such as automated customer support.IBM has put up a blog post that delves into Watsona4a4s Final Jeopardy trouble. There&amp;'s also a lot more on the subject of Watson in Stephen Baker&amp;'s new book, Final Jeopardy: Man vs Machine and the Quest to Know Everything. You can check out a preview match between Watson, Jennings and Rutter (where the humans were also destroyed). Also, check out the video of Prager&amp;'s talk below. The video is dark because it was shot in a dark comedy club without much lighting, so I apologize for that. But you can hear Prager&amp;'s explanations fine.Next Story: On the GreenBeat: Abengoa to build bioethanol plant' Solar demand stronger than expected this quarter Previous Story: Can Redbox and Amazon take on Netflixa4a4s streaming video servicePrintEmailTwitterFacebookGoogle BuzzLinkedIn      DiggStumbleUponRedditDeliciousGoogleMore&amp;8230'          Tags: Jeopardy, WatsonCompanies: IBMPeople: John Prager          Tags: Jeopardy, WatsonCompanies: IBMPeople: John PragerDean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat. Have news to share Launching a startup Email: tips@venturebeat.comVentureBeat has new weekly email newsletters.  Stay on top of the news, and don't miss a beat.<br/><br/>0 Vote(s) ]]></description>
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