Innovation Focus: Gizmoz

These are animated, talking, 3D images that can be embedded on any website. When compared to what Sitepal and others are doing on the avatar side of things, or Snapvine in the voice recording space, it really shines.

Creating a Gizmoz takes about a minute and requires a single photo of the subject. Gizmoz renders a 3D image of the photo. Users then customize it by adding hair, body, accessories, clothes, etc., and can also distort the face in a number of ways. When you add your voice, via a microphone or by typing in text that is converted to audio. the avatar adds facial expressions, eye blinks, breathing and lip syncs to the voice. Here’s an example using my photo:

The key uses for the product will be to create a welcome clip like the one above, or to create a welcome “voicemail” service where people visiting your site can leave audio messages (like Snapvine).

Gizmoz is built on the Flash platform; however, like Flektor, which was recently acquired by MySpace, all of the code was developed in-house by CEO Eyal Gever and his team over the last four years. That will make it an even more attractive acquisition target for MySpace and others.

Mobile TV

The number of global mobile broadcast TV subscribers will grow from 4.4 million today to an estimated 155.6 million by the end of 2012, according to new report by independent market analyst Datamonitor. That’s a compounded annual growth rate of 66.2%. The Asia-Pacific region is expected to have 76.3 million subscribers by then, Europe an estimated 42.7 million subscribers and the U.S. a subscriber base of 35.6 million. However lack of interoperability and fragmentation of content-bearing technologies may slow mass-adoption.

Interview: Steve Jobs

Walt Mossberg conducts an interview with Steve Jobs at the All Things Digital conference. The following are important updates from the event’s website:

- Walt to Jobs: When you changed your name to Apple Inc., people wondered if Apple was exiting the personal computer business. Is it? Jobs says no and stresses Apple’s commitment to the PC business, touts Apple’s forthcoming Leopard operating system.

- Jobs says Apple is on track to ship iPhone in late June as planned.
Walt: Like the last day of June?
Jobs: (Laughs) Yeah, probably.

- Walt asks why there isn’t a physical keyboard on the iPhone, when RIM and Palm have shown there’s a real demand for them? “Was there no one in Cupertino who thought that was a good idea?” Jobs’s answer: “No. Once you learn to trust the keyboard, it’s a better keyboard. I’ll bet you dinner that you’ll love it.”

- Why is Apple successful in the music-player business? Jobs: It’s because Japanese consumer electronics could produce elegant software. And that’s why Apple enjoys the success it does with the iPod. If you look at handsets, the situation is similar. Manufacturers have the hardware down, but they just can’t seem to get the software right. The iPhone is great software wrapped in wonderful hardware, and its software is five years ahead of anything else out there.

- Jobs says iPhone runs “real OS X, real Safari, real desktop email.”
If that’s true, could other OS X applications run on the iPhone? Jobs says no. They’re not designed to.

- “The other thing you can do is buy TV shows.” Jobs pulls up a clip from “The Office.” He says sending stuff from your computer to the Apple TV isn’t the main deal here. “Wouldn’t it be great if you could see YouTube on your TV?”

Apple will be offering a free software upgrade come June that will allow Apple TV users to view YouTube videos on their televisions. Jobs demos the feature with a clip from “America’s Got Talent.”

Walt asks what sort of video resolution we are talking about here. Does Apple do anything to YouTube clips to optimize them for television? I guess not. Jobs says, “You get what you get.”

Is the iPhone’s platform closed? And if it is, will it be open to developers in the future? Jobs says it’s a security issue, but Apple is working to find a way to allow developers to build applications for it. Jobs says he doesn’t want the iPhone to be “one of those phones that crashes a few times a day.” He adds: “We would like to solve this problem and if you could just be a little more patient with us, we’ll do it.”

Google Streetview

Google has will be announcing a new 360 streetside view for Google maps at Where 2.0 today, says O’Reily Radar. The 360 views are a better version of Amazon’s A9 static panoramas. Google’s views let users virtually stand in the middle of any street, able to look in a full circle around the location, giving a better feel of the place you’ll be going. It will reportedly be available in Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and San Francisco.

The imaging used in the new feature was collected by a company called Immersive Media, whose vans throughout these cities to collect the photos. You can see a demo here.

traveling up 6th ave. (nyc)

The light was perfect that day.

Design Focus: Iseey Miyake Watch

Even though this watch doesn’t have MSN or tell you when someone’s calling, we’re still in love. Why? Because we love minimalist watches.

Instead of having two hands radiating from the center, this Issey Miyake OVO watch has two dials on the outside. The only way this could get any more minimalist is if the entire face was black and only lit up the time if you tilted the watch toward your face.

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