The pop-culture record shows that most artificially intelligent assistants don’t work out too well for their human masters.

There’s the comically co-dependent — and largely unhelpful — duo from Star Wars, C-3PO and R2-D2. And who could forget HAL 9000, the glowing red orb from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with a slightly murderous malfunction?

A start-up called Siri, based in San Jose, Calif., hopes to do a slightly better job by bringing a virtual personal assistant to your pocket — more specifically, to your Apple iPhone.

Various riffs on the virtual personal assistant concept have been around for while. Remember the Milk and Jott are examples of electronic crutches intended to help users be more efficient and complete tasks. And during the dot-com era, there was a great deal of hype about a coming generation of digital “agents” that were supposed to go out and perform various tasks for people on the Web.

But where Siri breaks away from the pack, says Dag Kittlaus, co-founder and chief executive of the company, is that it is “speech recognition with a brain.”

“This is the first version of a computer assistance that understands language, has the ability to delegate tasks and learn,” said Mr. Kittlaus.

First, users speak a command, such as “Find a table for two at 9 p.m. tonight,” “Get 2 tickets to Crazy Heart at 8,” “Send a taxi to my house,” or even “What kid-friendly events are going on in New York this weekend?” Using GPS and speech-recognition technology powered by Nuance, the application translates the spoken command and uses a set of algorithms to search for the answer.

Mr. Kittlaus describes the application as the “mother of mash-ups” because the company has partnered with several companies, including OpenTable, MovieTickets, StubHub, CitySearch and TaxiMagic, to generate results.

Siri is a “do engine rather than a search engine,” said Mr. Kittlaus.

Siri, which was founded in 2007, was incubated in the Stanford Research Institute, as part of a DARPA-funded artificial intelligence project called CALO, or Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes. As a result, Mr. Kittlaus said, Siri will learn more about its user and tailor its results based on preferences over time.

Currently, the application is available free for download.

“This is intended for everyone to help in their menial tasks,” said Mr. Kittlaus, “not just for someone in a corner office.”

To make money, the company says it receives a small fee from any monetary transactions, such as purchasing movie tickets, that are conducted through the Siri application.

Recently, the company closed a $15.5 million Series B round of venture financing, led by Li Ka-Shing, a Chinese billionaire who has also invested in Facebook and the music streaming service Spotify. Previously, the company raised $8.5 million from Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures.

Currently, Siri is only available for the iPhone, but company intends to also offer versions compatible with Android phones and BlackBerries.

The company also hopes to introduce features that will allow users to send requests to Siri via e-mail and instant message.

A week ago, I let ya'll know that the core PHP team had been brought to Facebook's main campus. That team were forced to sign NDA's, and taken to a very quiet, secluded meeting room where some cool new Facebook-backed open source project was described.

Well, I was able to put all the pieces together on this one, finally, and I now understand exactly what is up: Facebook has rewritten the PHP runtime from scratch. This coming Tuesday, they will make a big announcement around this project, and will make it available as open source software. I'm not really sure of any of the details of the project, but I do know that Facebook hired someone two years ago to do this, and I'm relatively sure this was a one-man project during that entire time.

So, why has Facebook rewritten the PHP runtime? Because PHP is obviously too slow for their tastes. A few years ago, I had a coffee meeting with some of the folks from Zend. When they asked what I had been hearing about PHP in the market from my sources, I hemmed and hawed, then told them that I had heard people complaining about how slow PHP was. Now, I don't personally consider PHP slow: it is simply not a language designed for the sorts of workloads that Java and .NET are.

But that still doesn't change the fact that PHP can be a tad pokey on the server. Well, when I said this to the Zend folks, their immediate reaction was similar to that of a gestapo officer looking for a spy: "What? Who said that? Tell us their name!"

Clearly, Zend does not think there is a problem. But Facebook did. Not enough of a problem to support more than one paycheck, but then, considering how many users they have, even a 1 percent performance gain would be a massive help.

This Tuesday, salvation should arrive. I would imagine this new project will push a lot of the weight in the PHP community into Facebook's corner of the world. It will be nice to see what they can do with all that interest, since Yahoo!, in the same position 6 years ago, largely squandered their opportunity to mold PHP into a more robust platform and language. 

UPDATE: After sifting through the comments here and elsewhere, I'm inclined to agree with the folks who are saying that Facebook will be introducing some sort of compiler for PHP. This sounds highly plausible, and fits into what I've heard. Obviously, I don't have absolute specifics. Thanks for the extra info, readers.

CSS Tip: Targeting IE 5.x, 6 and 7 Separately

3 years, 3 months ago

In rare situations it may be necessary to provide different rules, not only to the Internet Explorer family in general, but also to each individual version. We can combine 3 CSS Hacks to achieve this.

Differentiating between IE 6 and below and IE 7

Firstly we can target IE 6 and IE 7 separately using the underscore hack and far less well documented star property hack (commonly mistaken for the star HTML hack).

.box {
   background: #00f; /* all browsers including Mac IE */
   *background: #f00; /* IE 7 and below */
   _background: #f60; /* IE 6 and below */
   padding: 7px;
   color: #fff;
}

How many people do you think are actively tweeting? If you listen to the usual tone of Twitter coverage, you would think it would be dozens of millions.

Actual figure: only between 10 and 15 million people are active on Twitter worldwide.

In perspective, Twitter is valued by its investors at one billion dollars (USD).

The data comes via a report from RJMetrics, a firm that specializes in online numbers keeping. All in all, some 17% of all Twitter accounts tweeted last month out of 75 million total accounts. When you add in the number of spam accounts in existence that always tweet, the percentage of total account being updated by real humans is lower.

Of course, Twitter is still growing. Twitter had 6.2 million new account sign-ups in December, down 20% from its peak level in July 2009. This means that Twitter added in the neighborhood of eight to nine percent of its total accounts in December alone.

On an account level, 25% of Twitter accounts have no followers, and 40% have never sent out a single Tweet. Put in perspective: 30 million Twitter accounts have never been updated. Taken even farther, 80% of all Twitter users have sent out less than ten tweets, say RJMetrics.

Twitter is still growing, but it is hardly as popular as we are led to believe. If you run the numbers on Twitter’s current private market valuation (one billion USD), Twitter is being valued at between $67 and $100 per active user account. If you take the all the accounts on Twitter, including the inactive ones, Twitter is still valued at some $13.33 per account.

Still, even though Twitter is not as large as we  perhaps thought, it is still growing rapidly. Also, Twitter has a fanatical userbase that use the site everywhere they go in all their activities. Twitter users are sometimes poked at for their dedication, but Twitter assuredly finds it endearing. Fanatics continue to recruit friends and are the stickiest of users.

At its current rate of 6 million new accounts monthly, Twitter should reach one hundred million accounts in late April or early May. That will be an achievement that very, very few companies can ever claim to have made.

Tags: twiter 

speed is good in the day time

Its very slow after 22:00 hrs.. will post the speeds at that time as well..