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The demo I saw was limited (Abraham Lincoln), but the model is good. The revenue model is aimed at getting consumers to interact with branded personas: the Geico gecko, for example. Prolific bloggers might also benefit from a personality surrogate. The more words the bot has to work with, presumably, the more lifelike the persona can be. The company will also offer analytics to its customers.

In the TechCrunch ghetto (the “Demo Pit,” where those that didn’t make the cut gather onstage),A Lange and Sohne Watches, there are several interesting companies showing off their products. We’ll be covering a few of them over the course of this conference.

One of these companies is Virsona. It makes “virtual personas” for chat. The idea is that you feed it the written works and online resources of a particular persona, and then its chatbot will respond with the appropriate facts and personality.

I talked a bit with CEO Peter Hodge about his company and what makes it different from the Eliza-like bots we’re familiar with. Hodge said that due to ongoing advancements in natural language processing,replica watches, theory, and computing power, much richer bots are possible than were before.

Virsona pulls chat answers from the corpus of the persona’s work. Clever.

(Credit:
AOL)

Miller’s new job would oversee all online operations including the popular MySpace social-networking site as well as the company’s investment in the also popular Hulu video site, according to a report late Friday on The Wall Street Journal.

In her Boomtown blog on the All Thing Digital Web site, Kara Swisher further explained Friday night that Miller is still bound by a non-compete agreement with Time Warner, which runs out in just a few days. She cited unnamed sources familiar with the situation saying a formal announcement could come Monday or Tuesday, at the latest.

The news was first reported on the Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily blog, as pointed out by Swisher. It was also substantiated by Ross Levinsohn, Miller’s business partner, on his own blog, which was also noted by Swisher.

News Corp. is about to hire former AOL Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Miller to head up the media conglomerate’s digital initiatives, replacing Peter Levinsohn, according several news reports, including two on News Corp.-owned publications.

Levinsohn will move to another job within News Corp. at the film and television studios, according to both news accounts.

Miller made headlines last year when Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes objected to his appointment to Yahoo’s board of directors.

Click 'Automatically after' in PowerPoint's Slide Transition task pane, and set a time for your slides to run automatically.

Add manual slide controls
You can combine automatic slide timings with viewer slide controls to let people decide when to move to the next slide, while also moving them after a set time if they take no action themselves. Start by following the steps above to apply lengthy onscreen time for each slide. Then in PowerPoint 2003, select the presentation’s first slide and choose Slide Show > Action Buttons. Click the Next button, and a plus sign appears on the slide. Click the spot on the slide where you want the button placed, and leave Hyperlink to: Next Slide selected. You can resize the button, or double-click it to view other AutoShape options.

Add slide controls to your presentation in PowerPoint 2007 by selecting the Set Up Slide Show button to open the Set Up Show dialog box.

Once you’ve finished putting your presentation’s slides in order, select one, and in PowerPoint 2003, click Slide Show > Slide Transition to open that task pane. In the Advance slide section of the task pane, check both “On mouse click” and “Automatically after” and enter the time you want the slide to remain visible. While you’ll likely want to test the automatic slide loading to ensure that a slide doesn’t stay on screen too long or disappear too quickly, it’s a good idea to play it safe by clicking Apply to All Slides.

It’s your presentation, and you have every right to control its pace by deciding when to move to the next slide. But there are times when you want to let the presentation run itself, or you may want to allow the person viewing it to decide when to move to the next slide (or maybe even a little of both). You can convert any PowerPoint presentation into a self-running slide show, or add controls that let the viewer go to the next slide, with just a few simple settings.

To set a presentation to run automatically in PowerPoint 2007, open the file, click one of its slides, choose the ribbon’s Animations tab, check Automatically After in the Advance Slide area to the far right, and click Apply to All to the left of that option. Tweak the timing of the slides by clicking the Slide Show tab, choosing From Beginning at the far left, and noting which slides stay visible too long, and which need to stay on screen longer.

Now select the next slide, choose Slide Show > Action Buttons, and add both a Next and Previous button. You can also add a Home and/or End button. (If you customized the appearance of the Next button on the first slide, you can copy and paste it onto the next slides.)

Thursday: a free utility makes it easy to customize your right-click menus.

Ten seconds should be sufficient for most slides; if your slides take longer than that to read, maybe you should be splitting them into multiple slides, or rewriting them. Remember, brevity is the soul.

In PowerPoint 2007, you add slide-control buttons simply by clicking the ribbon’s Slide Show tab, choosing Set Up Slide Show, and selecting Manually under Advance Slides. This adds a control bar in the bottom-left corner of the slides with icons for going to the next slide, returning to the previous slide, annotating the slide, and moving to other slides in the presentation, among other options.

Place slide controls in your PowerPoint 2007 presentation via a single setting in the Set Up Show dialog box.

One nit? I don’t like that CentOS was listed as the top open-source operating system. True, it wasn’t listed in the enterprise category, but CentOS (which is just Red Hat Enterprise Linux without Red Hat’s trademarks) is, in my mind, the worst sort of open source: It sucks money out of the system while giving nothing back. CentOS contributes no innovation to the Linux kernel and instead makes it harder for companies like Red Hat and Novell to invest in research and development.

Alfresco, Content Management
Compiere, Enterprise Resource Planning dotProject, Project Management
Hyperic HQ, Application Monitoring
Intalio BPMS, Business Process Management
JasperReports, Reporting
Liferay Portal, Enterprise Portal
Magento eCommerce, E-Commerce
Pentaho Open BI Suite, Business Intelligence
SugarCRM, Customer Relationship Management

commentary

Other categories include the best open-source productivity applications, best open-source middleware, and other categories. You can see the full details here or a snapshot view of the winners over on OStatic.

Infoworld does an annual review of the best enterprise open-source applications, called the BOSSies, and just announced the 2008 winners. An Infoworld editorial team makes the selections, so this isn’t a matter of open-source projects rallying the troops to vote for their projects (which sometimes has odd results, though often gets things right)

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster insists–despite consensus that his prediction is entirely overeager–that Apple will do so by introducing a 3G version of the
iPhone in the second or third quarter of this year, as well as a lower-price version of the device in the range of $200 to $300 by the beginning of next year.

Sure, the iPhone is a popular device, but quadrupling sales? Digest this prediction with the usual grain of salt.

Yes, that’s more than a bit optimistic. The analyst who originally made that sales prediction for Apple back before the phone was even launched is at it again, though, on Monday explaining how he thinks it could happen.

Munster also predicts that making the iPhone available in new countries will double the market for the device this year and next, and that the addition of new games and features like remote purchases will add up to 45 million.

For Apple to sell 45 million iPhones next year, it would have to quadruple its sales from 2008.

(Credit:
Apple)

Netflix aside, the BD300 is also a pretty solid Blu-ray player, although it lacks some extras like onboard DTS-HD Master Audio decoding and multichannel analog audio outputs. The short story is that the BD300 packs both Blu-ray and Netflix into a single compelling package, but you can find a better standalone Blu-ray player if you don’t care about Netflix.

The LG BD300 is different in this regard, as it’s the first Blu-ray player that is Netflix-Internet-streaming-ready. It allows you to stream content available on Netflix’s “Watch Now” service directly from the player to the TV, which is much more convenient than watching it on your computer.

Even for home theater fans, standalone Blu-ray players can be pretty boring. There are some major differences between the players, such as what Blu-ray Profile they support, but you rarely see any new or standout features.

Read the full review of the LG BD300.

The product does text-to-speech conversion so you don’t need human actors, but it will also lip-synch recorded speech if you want the voices to sound real.

Also coming: A tool to make character models from real photos (see also, BigStage, from CES). How about Xtranormal porn? “It’s only a matter of time,” Nightingale said.

(Click the image for demo videos.)

Xtranormal makes a fun tool for making animated shows with cartoon characters. It could also be a tool for making machinima, if the company manages to license characters from game companies.

In the demo I saw last night, Xtranormal’s Paul Nightingale wrote a simple script, where he wrote a few lines for two characters, added some emotion tags and gestures, and put them in a setting with a prop. He pressed the “render” button and generated a cute little animation. Quality was very good–certainly better than Saturday morning cartoons. The cuts and angles were automatically generated and kept things engaging.

The Web-based version of Xtranormal will have some limitations in regards to the number of characters it will support (two, I think), their actions, and the fact that you have to “render” each animation before you can see it. A downloadable version will allow more characters, more interaction between them, and it allows for a real-time preview of your show.

See also: SceneCaster, which could end up making sets for Xtranormal characters.

This will be a really fun product to play with when it comes out in the second-quarter. A private beta is scheduled for April.

(Credit:
Sony)

Sony STR-DA4400ES ($1,500, August 2008): The crown jewel in the new ES line is a 120 watt model that features six HDMI inputs, 3-zone audio, and HD video output to a second zone. It also will offer picture-in-picture functionality, so you can watch two video sources simultaneously.

Sony has unveiled three new AV receivers in its flagship ES (”elevated standard”) lineup. While the company’s announcement is light on specifics, it looks as if some or all of the models will offer the lossless audio decoding for Blu-ray movies, graphical user interfaces, Sirius and XM satellite radio compatibility, automatic speaker calibration, and upscaling of analog video sources to 1080p HDMI output. Model-by-model details include:

We gave last year’s top ES receiver, the STR-DA5300ES, extremely high marks (though users were less enthusiastic). It looks as if the 2008 models will be at least as full-featured, but competing models–from the sub-$500 Onkyo TX-SR606 to Sony’s own $600 STR-DG920–are offering many of the same key core features (plenty of HDMI inputs, lossless audio decoding, analog-to-HDMI video conversion) for hundreds less. Still, some of those extra bells and whistles–such as picture-in-picture and the impressive XMB graphical interface–may well make it worthwhile for some consumers to splurge.

Sony STR-DA3400ES ($1,000, August 2008): The middle model of the trio improves upon its little brother with a 12-volt trigger, IR repeater, and composite video output to a second zone. Sony’s info isn’t specific, but it appears that this model and its step-up (below) will both feature the more familiar Cross Media Bar-style (XMB) graphical interface similar to that found on the PSP,
PS3, and newer Sony TVs.

Sony STR-DA2400ES ($800, July 2008): The entry-level ES receiver boasts 100 watts per channel, four HDMI inputs, and what Sony calls a “basic icon-driven graphical interface.”

Sony STR-DA4400ES: the flagship receiver in the company's 2008 lineup.

For the first time ever, the federal government has successfully won a jury verdict against someone accused of illegally downloading music, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice.

What is different about Gitarts’ case is that unlike any of the other APC members, he decided against striking a plea agreement and took his case to court.

The Recording Industry Assoc. of America (RIAA), which said it helped develop evidence against APC, applauded the jury verdict.

APC was among the pioneers in music piracy according to the blog TorrentFreak. The group is considered by many to be the first to coordinate pre-release uploading of MP3 files, TorrentFreak reported. Gitarts is accused of participating in the group for nearly a year, the DOJ alleged. The government has convicted 15 APC members so far.

What makes APC members different than average Lime Wire users is the group was sophisticated and specialized in releasing copyright music on the Web, according to the DOJ’s statement. Gitarts operated a server where APC members stored hundreds of thousands of song files, the DOJ alleged.

“For the first time ever, a criminal online music piracy case went to trial, and the jury rendered a swift and unanimous verdict,” said Brad Buckles, executive vice president for the RIAA. “The crimes committed here — as well as the harm to the music community — are severe, and so are the consequences. We congratulate and thank the U.S. Attorney’s office for its work on this case.”

Gitarts faces up to five years in prison, a fine of $250,000 and must make full restitution, according to a statement released by the DOJ.

A jury in Alexandria, Va, found Barry Gitarts, 25, allegedly a member of Internet music piracy group, Apocalypse Production Crew (APC), was found guilty of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement.

(Credit:
Sandia)

But the flake aluminum used here, while creating a flash comparable to looking directly into the sun for 60 milliseconds, causes no permanent damage to vision. In addition, the flake aluminum poses no appreciable burning hazard because it cools to the ambient temperature quickly.

Sandia has licensed the device to Defense Technology Corporation of America, of Casper, Wyo., the second company to try to bring the product to market (PDF). It may be that discerning agencies are holding out for the “Multisensory Grenade,” which promises pepper irritant, indelible paint to mark-up the miscreants, and a stink bomb or teargas feature.

The new device, which works differently, is basically a fuel-air bomb. A gas generator spews out a cloud of aluminum powder that, when ignited, causes a small-scale dust explosion. Think: exploding grain silo. All of this occurs outside the canister, making it safer for all concerned, according to Sandia. Apparently, it also resolves the flammability factor; flash-bangs have been known to ignite flammable materials, as was the case in the Iranian Embassy Siege in London.

Traditional flash-bangs are basically big fire crackers–the “flash powder,” a mixture of aluminum and potassium perchlorate dust, explodes quickly when ignited and produces an intensely bright light along with its huge bang. The body or canister is generally a steel tube with holes positioned to allow the blast and flash to be emitted without producing shrapnel (PDF).

Traditional stun grenade

Sandia National Laboratories, which created the original Mk 141 flash-bang two decades ago, is having a second go at marketing a “fuel air” version of an old SWAT standby that it says is far safer for law enforcement and the military.

It took 20 years, but here it is–again: the new and improved flash-bang grenade.

Stun grenades or flash-bangs–the official nomenclature is “Noise and Flash Diversionary Devices” are non-lethal weapons generally tossed through a window or door by law enforcement to temporarily distract or disorient crooks or crazies in hostage rescue, forced-entry, or crowd-control situations.

Making it more convenient for Google users to work with Zoho applications indicates that Google is open to or supportive of technologies such as OpenID, or that it doesn’t view Zoho as a threat. It’s most likely a bit of both, and overall, it’s good for their mutual users.

Vembu was impressed by Google’s cooperation and willingness to work with a competitor. Zoho and Google Docs are both trying to replace
Microsoft Office. Google has been willing to contribute code, such as OpenSocial, to the larger community.

Zoho users with a Google username and password will be able to log directly into Zoho applications, according to Sridhar Vembu, founder and CEO of AdventNet, parent company of Zoho.

“Users won’t need a separate Zoho account,” he told me at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The Google sign-on integration should be finished within two weeks, he said.