Software : Post-Mayweather vs Pacquiao, Periscope promises to tackle piracy head on

Post-Mayweather vs Pacquiao, Periscope promises to tackle piracy head on
Dropbox iOS app will soon let you create Microsoft Office docs
Good GOG: Steam's latest rival is ready for you to try
Tinder's flimsy defence for burning older users
How Microsoft's machine learning algorithms will make for smarter apps
Google wants to organize your life with Timeful, its fourth to-do list
Apple takes aim at Spotify before Beats Music relaunch
Updated: Free Office 2016 preview is now open to the public

Post-Mayweather vs Pacquiao, Periscope promises to tackle piracy head on

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Over the weekend, the Mayweather-Pacquiao boxing match was billed as the biggest fight of the but thanks to a few hundred Periscopers it has also gone down in history as one of the most pirated events in history.

With this in mind it comes as no surprise that Kayvon Beykpour, Periscope co-founder, was quick to address piracy concerns immediately after stepping onto the TechCrunch Disrupt stage.

"From an operational standpoint we were completely prepared for our partners to reach out to us and request we respect their IP rights," Beykpour explained. "We basically have a team that looks at an email channel and if someone says 'hey this stream is violating our copyright' we take it down."

"We had 66 requests for take down and took down 30 of them all within a matter of minutes, he said. "The ones we didn't take down ended because you can imagine how every stream isn't super long."

Fighting Piracy in a new age

Beyond actively hunting down streams that are showing off copyrighted material, Beykpour said Periscope is committed to working on developing new methods to quash livestreaming piracy.

"It's a new territory," Beykpour quipped. "The proliferation of all these mobile devices and the fact that I can just take out my phone and stream right now, changes the landscape."

Beykpour was also quick to note that "piracy is not a periscope thing, it's an Internet thing." Aside from taking down streams, the Periscope co-founder believes ease of access can solve most problems as iTunes did for music.

"My personal view on this is that no one wants to watch Game of Thrones on a Periscope," he expounded. "Trust me I love Periscope, but it's not the right way to watch an experience that should be had on a TV with a nice sound system."

Android version coming

Looking forward, Beykpour confirmed his team is looking to add new features like a map view to find streams and an Android version is on it's way - without any hard dates of course.

"We spent a year building the iOS app, we can't just snap our fingers and make an Android app appear," he said, continuing to explain the Android app will not be identical to the iOS version.

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Dropbox iOS app will soon let you create Microsoft Office docs

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Dropbox has announced the expansion of its integration with Microsoft Office, soon allowing users to create Office documents within the Dropbox iOS app. This is the next step in a partnership that began last year between the two companies and will reportedly release later this month.

While not much information has been officially disclosed on how the integration will work, it's sensible to assume that files saved to your Dropbox can be accessed via Office Online or other various desktop apps. This new integration will undoubtedly help the partnership begin to compete with Google Drive and Docs.

Dropbox also recently announced that it's adding a comment feature that allows users to drop notes on hosted files, also soon to be available to iOS and web users. While this tool will help move the company forward in the realm of productivity, the most notable addition to Dropbox is the expanding integration with Microsoft Office. It'll be very interesting to see how it changes a landscape that Google unequivocally rules.

Good GOG: Steam's latest rival is ready for you to try

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To the elation of the modern gamer, GOG is opening its DRM-free gaming platform, GOG Galaxy, to beta testing. GOG is known for its litany of classic games and is looking to challenge industry heavyweight Steam by offering community-based gaming, while boasting no DRM on offlined games.

Galaxy is looking to bring people together with features like in-game chat, friend lists, and cross-platform multiplayer on a number of games, allowing you to even cross swords/lightsabers with your hard-headed Steam buddies.

All of these added features, including auto-updating are completely optional. Galaxy even offers the ability to reverse an update that broke your game. "Making it optional is the best motivation for us to make it better," says VP of online technologies, Piotr Karwowski. Galaxy also offers the capability to keep a local (DRM-free, mind you) version of your game as a backup.

GOG's current library houses a collection of over 1,000 games, with expansion on the horizon. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, set to release on May 19th, will be the first step in bumping up the number of blockbuster titles on GOG. Karwowski says, "We're getting ready to release and fully support even more AAA titles in the future."

GOG Galaxy could be Steam's biggest rival, and it's open to beta testing for Mac and PC users here.

Tinder's flimsy defence for burning older users

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At the beginning of March Tinder launched its premium Plus service and to the shock of some older users, the dating app was charging them almost the double the amount of users under 30-years-old or younger.

At day two of TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, Tinder Founder and CEO Sean Rad explained the tiered pricing was intended to "provide a discount for younger users."

First introduced on March 2, Tinder Plus launched in the Untied Kingdom and United States bringing an ad-free experience for those who paid. Tinder Plus also introduced premium features such as undoing your last swipe and Passport, which allows for matching with users around the world.

One of the most controversial elements of Tinder Plus was its tiered pricing. For example, the premium service in the UK comes with the starting price of £3.99 a month for anyone younger than 28 years old and £14.99 monthly for everyone else. Americans, meanwhile, are charged $9.99 if they're under 30 and $19.99 for everyone 30 and over.

The move was largely bemoaned by existing older users, however Rad elaborated that Tinder is still experimenting with it's premium service pricing.

"Our goal is increase the age range and get more users to use Tinder Plus and what this means is offering discounts to different users," Rad said.

Connecting in more ways

Beyond launching a new premium service giving users super powers, Rad explained Tinder is working on improving matches.

"We decided to curve your behavior with right swiping and we focused a lot on improving the quality of matching to help you understand how valuable a match is," Rad said. "What we realized is if we can get our audience to be more thoughtful in who they are liking, it would have a broader ecosystem impact."

Though Tinder is widely used for hook ups and finding matches for a relationship, Rad hopes to expand the uses of the matching application.

"We think more broadly about how we connect people period and there's other ways of doing so," he said. "One of the ways is to double down in what we're doing […] but in the coming year I think you might see different ways of leveraging Tinder to connect with people."

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How Microsoft's machine learning algorithms will make for smarter apps

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Introduction and image analysis

The HowOld Robot doesn't always guess your age correctly when you show it your photograph, but it's certainly caught everyone's attention. And that's just one of the four REST APIs Microsoft Research is making available through Project Oxford.

Ryan Gaglon from Microsoft Research (MSR) explained to TechRadar Pro what the services can actually do – and where developers might recognise them from. "The speech APIs are about [your apps] being able to hear and to speak back. This is the same backend that powers Cortana," he told us.

The service can turn speech into text or synthesise speech from text in a variety of synthetic voices; they cover 17 languages in the initial beta. The recognition works over a Web Socket connection and as you watch, you can see the API figuring out individual words and then going back to turn that into phrases and sentences, complete with punctuation and capital letters.

If what it's trying to recognise is a short phrase that the API isn't certain about – it's very easy to mix up 450 6th Street and 456th Street, for example – it will send back up to five alternatives (and it's up to the developer to decide if it's useful to show those).

Face recognition

The face service is what HowOld Robot is using. "It's about being able to detect, describe and recognise a human face," says Gaglon, "and it does both detection and verification. Detection tells you how many faces there are in a photo and where they are, plus it can give you landmarks on the face – like the tip of the nose or the left and right side of the mouth.

"Then there are the experimental features, like predicting the age and gender. Verification says if you have two photos and there's a face in both photos, what is the likelihood it belongs to the same individual? Then there's grouping – given a collection of photos, which sets have the same people in."

Some of the face recognition services are the same as the ones used by Kinect.

The vision APIs include a wide mix of tools "to help describe the content within an image," Gaglon explains. "You can manipulate and work with images, recognise words in a photo. It can scale and crop photos more intelligently, so you can have it crop a photo in different dimensions but keep the most important content of the photo in the frame."

That would come in handy for automatically resizing images so they work on a phone or tablet screen as well as on a larger desktop screen – in action, it looks very like the way Microsoft's Sway authoring service picks which part of a photo to show.

Image analysis

"The image analysing service helps you describe an image; whether it's clipart or not, whether it's a colour photo or not, whether it's adult content or not." The vision services can also categorise images, stating whether you're looking at a building or a flower or someone swimming – if a picture shows buildings or streets, the service will say the most likely category is a cityscape. "That's some of the same technology that's used in the OneDrive photo tagging," says Gaglon, noting that many of the vision APIs are services Bing uses for image search.

Getting that to work involves some ground-breaking machine learning research. "One of the things the vision APIs make use of is whole image categorisation, and MSR recently published some results where the team was the first to surpass human image recognition performance on the Imagenet benchmark," he mentions.

LUIS

You can sign up for and start using those three aforementioned services today, but the fourth, LUIS – Language Understanding Intelligent Services – is in private preview. LUIS takes short phrases, like things people type into a search engine, and tells you what they're really asking – so it's not just matching words, it's trying to actually understand them. "If the text snippet is 'tell me news about flight delays', LUIS comes back and says 'the topic is flight delays and the intent is find news'," Gaglon explains.

The breakthrough here is that instead of being an expert in natural language processing and building a model of all the phrases people could use to ask for news on specific topics, developers can use LUIS as a model building service. "Building a model is easy if you only need to label a bunch of instances by hand, but what about when you start getting hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of utterances?"

LUIS active learning

LUIS has some readymade models for date and time, numbers, temperatures, distances and an encyclopaedia of common places and things; those come from Bing. It also does 'active learning', creating a list of the phrases that you can most improve the service with via labelling.

Generally it's less automatic than the other APIs – what LUIS gives you is an interactive labelling environment where you can quickly label short snippets of text, to create a system that can learn from a few phrases that you've labelled to handle a lot more commands. It only takes a few examples to create a system that can understand the intent behind questions users are typing in, which could be a way to create much smarter search tools and personal assistants.

Why free?

Why is Microsoft making its machine learning services available for free like this? What you're getting here is a beta (or a private preview) of services Microsoft will probably offer in pay-for products later on (perhaps as part of its existing Azure Machine Learning service).

LUIS perf analysis

Getting developers to use Microsoft machine learning will help raise the profile of Redmond's other machine learning tools. "A lot of these services are machine learning models from research and investments we've made that have been used in Microsoft apps," explains Gaglon. "Now we're interested in exposing them to the developer community, to build on top of what the community comes up with."

It's also useful for Microsoft to collect more samples to try out its machine learning on (although unless there's a way to indicate which results were right and which were off target, it won't improve the algorithms much). The Cortana team is particularly keen to get voice samples for a much wider range of queries than the most common searches, and in a wider range of accents

At this point, Gaglon says, Microsoft is mostly talking to developers on the MSDN forums. "We're evaluating how to have a feedback loop from developers. We want to know what's working and what's not."

How machine learning and image recognition could revolutionise search

Google wants to organize your life with Timeful, its fourth to-do list

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Pretty soon we'll need a list to keep track of all of Google's to-do list apps now that added Timeful, Inc. to its already bursting ranks.

Timeful is supposed understand your schedule, habits and needs, according to search engine company, and work across Inbox, Calendar and other Google software.

"You can tell Timeful you want to exercise three times a week or that you need to call the bank by next Tuesday," said the search engine company.

"Their system will make sure you get it done based on an understanding of both your schedule and your priorities."

The Timeful app will remain available for Android and iOS as the team works to integrate its time management technology more broadly into Google's app suite.

What's different with Timeful

timeful app

Timeful is the fourth to-do list platform being pushed by Google, but it's supposed to be different in that it wants to understand your day. Everything else from Google is rather static.

Google Tasks is still part of Gmail and, stealthy, one of the best to-do list organizers out there. Google Reminders can be added via Search, Calendar of Inbox, but has no central hub.

Google Keep launched two years ago as a notetaking app with to-do list functionality. It's a more colorful Evernote clone with limited functionality.

Will this new app tie them altogether with machine learning or will it become just another option within Google's increasingly splintered ecosystem? Timeful will tell.

Apple takes aim at Spotify before Beats Music relaunch

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Apple is using its weight in the music industry to push major record labels into pressuring streaming services like Spotify to abandon their free streaming deals, The Verge reports. This move would slim the competition for Apple's anticipated relaunch of the Beats Music service, but has reportedly garnered the scrutiny of the United States Department of Justice. The DOJ has already begun interviewing several important music officials, the report said.

Spotify is the largest subscription music streaming service, with over 60 million subscribers. However, only 15 million of those pay up each month, making Apple's upcoming competitive streaming service even more to dangerous to Spotify. That is, if the record labels don't renew their licenses for free music.

Apple has also, according to the report, offered to pay YouTube's music licensing fee to Universal Music Group if the label stops putting its songs on the site. Because of Apple's slow entry into the arena of music streaming, it appears to be trying to clear the field before its grand entrance. One unnamed music industry source said, "All the way up to Tim Cook, these guys are cutthroat."

With download numbers consistently falling because of companies like Spotify, it makes sense that Apple would want to throw its hat in the ring. While Cupertino has been behind the times on subscription-based music, it may succeed in choking off Spotify's free music, which was meant to be a gateway to paid subscription. Instead, free streaming has been a thorn in the sides of labels and Taylor Swift alike.

Via CNET

Updated: Free Office 2016 preview is now open to the public

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If you wanted to try out Office 2016 before buying it, now is your chance.

Office 2016 on the PC has been locked away from the public as a Consumer Technical Preview since February, but now Microsoft has finally released a Public Preview version of its productivity suite. The new version Microsoft's productivity suite is available as a free download for anyone who visits the Office 2016 Preview site.

Unlike the previous Technical Preview, you won't have to sign any long, complicated non-disclosure agreements to use the software either.

Built for the cloud

The Office 2016 suite brings new and more colorful versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Along with the new looks, these applications have been built from the ground up to work with Microsoft's cloud data service, OneDrive.

On top of this, these smart application will learn more about the user as they are working to be even more productive. Outlook for instance has a new "Clutter" feature, which uses machine learning to analyze your email patterns to sort out your unimportant and spam emails into a separate folder.

Microsoft has also introduced the "Tell Me" search tool that allows users to quickly look up commands in Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Lastly, users can expect the Bing-powered Insights feature to help them find information from the web without having to leave the file or switch to a web browser.

Update: Office 2016 will also bring with it real-time Word doc co-authoring, according to The Verge. The functionality will come to Word first, but will extend to PowerPoint and Excel later on, according the site.

Users had the ability to co-author a Word document on the web, but will soon be able to do it via the desktop Office 2016 app. Look for the functionality to arrive in early summer.

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Tuesday, May 5, 2015