Verizon Wireless today launched a foreign language applications for Get It Now-enabled wireless phones, allowing travelers to brush up on their Spanish, French, Japanese, or German.
Customers can access Merriam-Webster Spanish-English Dictionary (pdf) from SkyZone Entertainment to search for more than 100,000 translations and 80,000 entry words and phrases in both languages. It costs $3.49 monthly.
Consumers spotting someone on the street speaking Japanese, German or one of 20 different foreign languages can use a Living Language program from Vocel. Living Language provides words and phrases with audio pronunciation of all words. VOCEL’s push technology also sends targeted advertising to mobile phones - users supply their profile.
With Living Language, students choose how many questions they receive each day, what topics to cover and when class starts and ends. The mobile Living Language teacher will also send reminders and flashcards to the phone’s screen, ensuring that the final report card will show off straight A’s. Living Language costs $3.99 for monthly access or $9.49 for unlimited use.
With Spanish Anywhere from AppAbove, more than 1,200 common phrases can be translated from Spanish-to-English and vise versa, using Get It Now-enabled phones. Spanish Anywhere quickly provides a clear and easy way for both native Spanish and English speakers to access more than 5,500 words and also features a verb conjugator with more than 1,000 Spanish and English verbs. Spanish Anywhere costs $2.99 for monthly access or $9.99 for unlimited use.
Get It Now applications vary by type of handset and airtime charges apply when browsing, downloading and using certain applications.
Verizon Wireless will use Telemessage’s SMS product to convert typed text messages into audio messages that play to a recipient’s landline phone. To send the messages, wireless customers would just dial in the recipient’s phone number.
Feedelix has released a carrier independent TXT and mobile Instant Messaging solution for global use.
The application described as a “SMS with no boundaries” has number of advantages which include:
- language localization
- carrier independence
- no character limitations
- flat $2.99 unlimited monthly rate for messaging
- mobile to mobile/pc to mobile/mobile to pc functionalities
- message broadcasting
The open architecture allows users to download FeedelSMS on any handset across any system (GSM, CDMA) and across a multitude of wireless carriers around the world.
Korea has developed its own android capable of facial expressions on its humanoid face (above), the second such machine to be developed after one from Japan. Her name, Ever-1, combines the first human name found in the Bible, Eve, with the “r” in robot.
Two MIT scientists are suing Jeeves, the retiring butler from Ask.com. According to artificial intelligence researchers Patrick Winston and Boris Katz, their natural-language searches such as “What city is nicknamed `The Big Apple?’ ” or “Where can I find MP3 players?” START, the world’s first Web-based question answering system, has been on-line and continuously operating since December, 1993.
The Nokia Research Center Cambridge (NRCC) is a cross-disciplinary research organization whose charter is to bring new ideas into Nokia products. NRCC consists of approximately 20 Nokia researchers, investigating all aspects of mobile phones, from computer and network architecture to user interfaces. The team is led by Jamey Hicks, NRCC’s Director.
The Nokia-MIT Collaboration builds on past cooperation with MIT, including W3C, Project Oxygen, Things That Think, and the Communications Futures Program. One of the goals of the collaboration is to increase the level of interaction between Nokia and MIT researchers compared to previous initiatives. For this reason, NRCC has been situated close to MIT CSAIL with spare offices for external researchers.
There are currently 6 joint projects within the collaboration, involving nearly 60 faculty, students, and research staff from MIT CSAIL. The MIT and NRCC research leads are noted below:
- Synth-Model: Synthesizable Modeling of Mobile Phones to Facilitate Architectural Studies of Performance and Energy-Efficiency - (MIT: Arvind, Krste Asanovic, Anantha Chandrakasan, and NRCC: Gopal Raghavan)
- MyNet/UIA: Secure, peer to peer, personal overlay networks - (MIT: Robert Morris, Frans Kaashoek, and NRCC: Franklin Reynolds)
- SWAPMe: Semantic Web Application Platform for Mobile Ecosystems - (MIT: Tim Berners-Lee, Daniel Jackson, David Karger, and Daniel Weitzner and NRCC: Ora Lassila )
- Compose: Intelligent Composition of Heterogeneous Services: Integrating Web Services and Mobile Devices - (MIT: Mike Ernst, and NRCC: Raimondas Lencevicius)
- NLA: Natural Language-Based Architecture for Connecting Mobile Devices to Active Resources - (MIT: Larry Rudolph, Boris Katz, and NRCC: Alex Ran)
- Simone: Spoken Interaction for Mobile Networked Ecosystems - (MIT: Jim Glass, and NRCC: Mark Adler)
