IanMikutel

Been a supporter of Pod Hunt since the day it launched, decided to have my podcast (The Better Show) become an official Pod Hunt "Supporter", and spent over an hour last night with it's founder, Mubs, on Skype talking product direction.

I can't stress how critical it is to build better podcast discovery mechanisms for the medium to continue to grow and thrive. Right now, most podcast discovery is self-reinforcing already successful podcasts. This is neither good for podcasters, or listeners. For new podcasts, its extremely hard to grow/learn, and for listeners it limits the ability to show them how broad and diverse the podcasting world is (which is one of its core strengths, there is something for EVERYONE!)

After my call with Mubs, I'm super excited to see where Pod Hunt goes in the future.

Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. Very curious to learn more. Any particular use cases / dashboards that immediately come to mind?

Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. Would <3 to know how you'd want to use Whiteboard in VR...tell me more?

Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. It's actually a completely different stack/app, and has a lot of focus on making the real-time collab, intelligent inking (shape & table recognition) and canvas much richer (sticky notes, alt-text for accessibility, Bing image search with ink, GDPR compliant, multi-touch ruler for straight lines, rainbow/galaxy ink for pure fun during boring meetings...)

Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. Ink to shape and ink to table are two early examples of how we're infusing intelligence into the Whiteboard's canvas. We want to start showing people the power of the pen (or your finger/mouse if you're inking that way!) and how many things you think are difficult to do (e.g. drawing perfect shapes) or multi-step UI things (e.g. inserting a table with X rows and Y columns from a ribbon menu) can be more naturally done by simply drawing them.

This is just the beginning, but you can imagine many more examples going down this road that will unlock a ton more value in the core "ideation" scenario in which Whiteboard lives.

Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. The other thing I'll note is we see a general trend of most information workers jobs in the next few years calling for more creative work, so the need for these type of solutions will continue to grow--even if it doesn't seem vital in your role today, you may be surprised to look back at how your job's day-to-day has changed 5 years from now.

Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. I've heard first-hand stories from some early Whiteboard Preview folks at enterprises that used our product to cut down on travel & accommodation expenses, while maintaining the same level of fidelity/interaction that f2f meetings gave them, when doing things like technical sales meetings.

We're seeing many enterprises starting to see the benefits & the economics just simply make sense with the decreasing cost curves of large panel displays, and the increasing quality of interactive touch/ink panels.

Ian from Microsoft Whiteboard here. We just announced Surface Hub 2, more details (and video) here: https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2018/05/15/meet-surface-hu...

And Craigslist. And ReadMe.io.

Absolutely love these. Bought the physical printed book version last year and keep it on my desk for inspiration whenever I'm working on something and feel like the world is working against me.

Will there be printed versions of this year's book?

Pitch videos from every team & live voting for a 6th Fan Favorite to make the finals going on now at: http://vote.rit48.com

gkoberger and I are 2/5 judges and after visiting with a bunch of the teams throughout the weekend, I'm super pumped to see what they end up with tomorrow!

1. This is really well done, especially since it says it was done in realtime. Nice work!

2. I'd love to see notes like this done for more conferences. I'm not sure if it'd be best as a startup that works with conference organizers, or if tech publications like Engadget, Gizmodo, etc. hired artists to do this, or if conference attendees simply submitted tweeted their favorite quotes with hashtags and it gets compiled into a really nice infographic--but there is something here that I really like and wish there was more of.

Actually you can, just scrobble through it quickly. I just did, worked great.

So who else thinks Richard Branson read this and sees opportunity for Virgin Air?

What about the Facebook comment system?

Overall, it may be very telling that Apple labeled Siri as "Beta" because it could very well be that most of the above could still come true in months and years to come. Apple invested $200 million to purchase Siri, and most, if not all, of the original team from acquisition has stayed at Apple to continue working on the product. Time will tell but I still believe Siri (they still ought to come up with a better name) has a lot of room to grow.

I wrote a post last night (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3069745) analyzing Tom Gruber, Siri's Co-Founder, CTO, and VP of Design, original Siri keynote in 2008.

The post got pretty popular on HN and I had 5 key questions/predictions, feel free to read all the details (and lots of quotes I transcribed straight from Gruber's video) but now I'll summarize my thoughts quickly below:

1. Very few languages for Siri (where's Spanish?)

2. No API announced for developers to add tasks to Siri

3. It's still named...Siri? What happened to Assistant? I guess it is quicker to say in practice...

4. Siri's in BETA? Is this the first time Apple's released a major iPhone feature with a beta sticker?

5. No payments integration with Siri mentioned. Can it buy stuff for me? as Gruber talked about in 2008?

6. No Facebook partnership for social knowledge on Siri, or even iPad app.

Interesting concept, I never even considered Apple offering additional Assistant features as a premium service. Imagine if you paid an additional $4.99 a month through iTunes for a Assistant Pro app that had greater power. Would you pay for that?

Amen brother. Honestly, as I said in the post, I truly believe this could be a new natural user interface. Just as touch interfaces have been all the rage in the tech world since made mainstream in the first iPhone in 2007, Assistant will bring AI to the mainstream in a way that will finally be useful and relevant to most people at most times.

Haha good call, heck lets just call it 4G and call it a day. /buzzword

On desktops, maybe. But on mobile devices, Google is just as slow as your connection.

Imagine if Apple built in some Amazon Silk-like ties between Assistant and iCloud? Or if they do some local caching or if Sprint really does have this exclusively and its on 4G?

I feel like you could have made the same statement about the CRAZY idea of a touchscreen smart phone back in 2007...and then Steve Jobs showed off the iPhone and everyone went...well I guess that does work flawlessly.

Not trying to sound like a fanboy, but simply saying I think Apple's recent track record has proven they're pretty good at releasing products that work flawlessly.

Heck, this could have been the simple reason Siri (now Assistant) was acquired way back in 2008 and is only now coming to light in an iPhone. Jobs may have simply held it back to meet your expectations of him.

Actually Siri is based off arguably more time, research and possibly funding than Google may have thrown at this particular problem.

As I quoted from 9to5mac in my post:

"In 2003, the US Government began the most ambitious Artificial Intelligence program in its history called the “Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes” or CALO program. The name was inspired by the Latin word “calonis”, which means “soldier’s servant”. Funded by DARPA as part of its Personal Assistant that Learns project, the program ran for five years and brought together more than 300 researchers from 25 of the top university and commercial research institutions, with the goal of “building a new generation of cognitive assistants that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.

The program was coordinated through SRI International in Menlo Park, CA. As the program ended in 2007, SRI took the knowledge gained by the CALO and some of its key players and formed Siri."

Keep in mind everything you saw in the demo video was from 2008! That's 3 years ago, decades in tech.

Given the time and resources Apple has undoubtedly provided the team since then, I think we should all be expecting much greater than that demo.

And you could totally see Apple pitching this to AT&T and Verizon and they're going "Crap, people already hate our data caps, and we already hate all the data iPhones use..." and then Sprint's CEO Dan Hesse comes running over to Jobs "Steve! We'd LOVE to handle that! We can do it! I swear, trust me. We have 4G! It's blazing fast...give us a shot...please?" Hands over $20.5 billion dollars...

Source: http://www.bgr.com/2011/10/03/sprint-guarantees-to-buy-over-...

The talk is that they have deeply integrated Wolfram Alpha to automatically pull and handle queries like the one you mentioned.

Source: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/09/30/mockups_demons...

My goal with this post was simply to raise interesting questions based on what the Siri team saw as the future of the product back in 2008, so it could frame all of our discussion and analysis when you watch the keynote with Apple tomorrow.

I think it will be fascinating to see what, if any, of these questions Apple has decided was worth tackling since they acquired the product, and which in the eyes of Jobs, were important and useful enough for the masses.

It's going to be a fun keynote tomorrow.

Thanks for the analysis on my analysis. :)

I can definitely see why you'd think this could go the way of Facetime, but its completely different. Why? Because while Facetime seemed to solve a problem we all wanted solved, in reality its simply not practical to video call someone with a mobile phone a lot of the time. If I'm on the go, walking a city or driving in the suburbs, Facetime is a terrible idea.

Assistant is exactly the opposite. It's almost essential in those situations and extremely practical. I can pretty much see Oprah endorsing this feature alone in her anti-texting-while-driving campaign now.

And YOU get an iPhone Assistant, and YOU get an iPhone Assistant...

Norman Winarsky, the man who put together the original Siri team, was asked what kind of power the Siri AI takes and if it could have delayed the iPhone today on 9to5mac.com, saying:

Norm: I’m not familiar with Apple’s roadmap and any delays but I can say that AI takes a lot of computing power. The Siri software needs to cache data, needs to access a big dataset at wide bandwidth and needs a big processor to crunch all of the numbers. When we originally released Siri for the iPhone 3GS, we had to perform all kinds of optimizations and shortcuts to get it to work efficiently. All I can say is that it will likely run much better on a faster phone. (Source: http://9to5mac.com/2011/10/03/co-founder-of-siri-assistant-i...)

There is a big jump in performance from 3GS to even iPhone 4, let alone iPhone 5 with possible A5 processor (dual core), 1GB RAM, iOS optimization, cloud performance, and network performance--and that's not even considering if the Sprint iPhone 5 exclusive is true which would mean the device runs on a 4G network that would make this type of interaction even more interesting if interacting with the cloud in some way.

I wrote the post, so I should probably answer you. :)

Honestly, after watching the 45 minute presentation, there were a ton of interesting tid bits I transcribed word for word (that's what you see in all the quotes and the video is embedded if you prefer that).

For skimming purposes, I tried to bold the most important bits in the quotes, so it was straight from Siri's Co-Founder, CTO and VP of Design, Tom Gruber's mouth.

Honestly, skimming through the article quickly myself (it took me 3 hours total to write including watching the 45 minute keynote and transcribing the important bits) I can't see how you think it is low on substance, because there is a ton of it in there.

I'm honestly fascinated to see if Apple open's up the Assistant API to 3rd party developers as the Siri team clearly planned to pre-acquisition. In my mind it makes a lot of sense given the new "verb" world Facebook introduced, and I think developers would have a ball with it.