Sony offers slick new SmartWatch software

Sony's high-tech timepiece offering, the Sony SmartWatch, isn't exactly known for smooth performance. The company's new software update, however, promises to offer a slicker interface and six new watch faces, and to address any lingering stability issues.

Other improvements that Sony touts include a more streamlined way to sift through the approximately 200 SmartWatch apps available for download, previews of notifications and alerts, and better battery level integration.

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Want to experience the new Sony SmartWatch enhancements yourself? Check the Google Play app store for the update or your SmartWatch itself for a relevant heads-up. Hopefully I'll be able to get my hands back on the device as well and report back soon with my assessment.

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CCleaner making its way to Android with one-click cleaning

Piriform, a company who specializes in PC optimization software, took to its blog to announce that CCleaner will be coming to Android soon. A release date and pricing were not given, but we would assume CCleaner would be free like its PC-counterpart.
CCleaner has a wild amount of success in the world of PCs. Whether it be Windows or Mac, the tool is very well known for getting rid of unwanted temporary files, cache and cookies that build up over time often taking gigabytes of precious space.
There are a lot of apps on the Play Store that do the same thing CCleaner does. We’ll have to wait and see what CCleaner for Android has to differentiate itself from other similar apps in the Play Store. At the very least, it will be nice to have a notable tool available in the Play Store for those still using anything below Android 4.0.
Android 4.0 comes with a built-in cache cleaning tool, which is why devices running that or higher don’t need to use an app that does the same thing. CCleaner will still, inevitably, be very popular among Gingerbread users considering that Gingerbread is still dominant on many smartphones.
We’ll let you know when Piriform announces a release date for the app.

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Zynga: Oh, sure we copy other people's games

There are those who adore playing Zynga's online games.

What else are they going to do? Work? Live? Love? Naked handstands in public?

Yet somehow the fascination of managing your own farm for fun has never seemed entirely entertaining to me. It's always felt like a social carbuncle.

Zynga VP Dan Porter, however, managed to entertain Wednesday night at a panel discussion in New York.

As Quartz so helpfully reports, he offered this rather beautiful nugget of joy: "Zynga is often accused of copying games, which is mostly true."

Porter was clear to explain what he believes are his company's strengths: "What Zynga is really good at is managing a game as a live service."

Perhaps this refreshing confidence was bolstered by the recent news that Zynga and Electronic Arts had tired of suing each other.

But there's something rather charming about this attack of what appears to be sheer honesty.

As Picasso, Steve Jobs, and so many others attested, stealing is part of art, part of business and, sadly, even part of love.

Indeed, when you put art, love, and business together you get a potent mixture which requires a certain vision, consistency, and efficiency to make it successful.

If they'd ever been to Google+, that is.Anyone looking at Facebook's redesigned News Feed yesterday would surely have immediately seen the inspiration of the pages at Google+.

But is Google+ so very original? Is the idea of pictures being big so very original?

Apple has always enjoyed pointing out that every last element of every last Apple product, store and, who knows, office floor is entirely original -- as long as you're looking at it through the eyes of Apple's management and lawyers.

The more technology advances, however, the easier it seems to be to copy -- piecemeal or wholesale -- someone else's work.

That doesn't necessarily make it right.

It does, however, make it blissfully uplifting when someone actually admits they're doing it.

I invite you to participate in my new online gaming company, which will be launching in a couple of weeks' time.

It's got games such as FarmValley, CityValley, and Words With People You Don't Even Have To Like.

My company is called Zonga.

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Engineers troubleshoot Curiosity computer glitch

Space radiation may be to blame for corrupted memory used by the Curiosity Mars rover's flight computer, resulting in software glitches that interrupted the flow of science data Wednesday and prompting ground controllers to switch over to a back-up computer Thursday, NASA officials said.
Engineers are reviewing telemetry and diagnostic tests using ground systems to figure out what went wrong and how to restore the original computer system to normal operation.
"We were in a state where the software was partially working and partially not, and we wanted to switch from that state to a pristine version of the software running on a pristine set of hardware," Curiosity Project Manager Richard Cook told CBS News late Thursday. "The easiest way to do that is to essentially swap sides...and start up with the redundant (computer)."


Curiosity is equipped with twin flight computers, known as A and B, and either one is capable of carrying out the rover's mission. The B-side computer was used during the cruise from Earth to Mars while the A-side computer has been running the show since before landing last August.
The switch from the A-side computer to the B-side processor took place around 5:30 p.m. EDT (GMT-5) Thursday, putting the nuclear-powered rover into a low-activity state known as "safe mode." Over the next few days, engineers will tie the B-side computer into the rover's myriad systems and systematically restore normal operation.
The computer problem is the first glitch of any significance since Curiosity's landing last August in Gale Crater.
"I think we'll get back to routine operations," Cook said. "It is a good humbling experience, however, in the sense that this thing is a very complicated vehicle. ... It does not take very much for things to not go as well as you want. And we've got to be conscious of that all the time."
The problem came to light Wednesday morning on Mars when flight controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., noticed what appeared to be memory corruption in the computer's solid-state memory system. The flight software was not recording new data or playing back data already recorded. Instead, it was only sending back real-time telemetry.
Later in the day, during a communications session using NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, telemetry from Curiosity indicated the corrupted memory was still present. In addition, Cook said, flight controllers saw the computer had not completed several pre-planned activities.
At that point, the computer was expected to put itself to sleep for an hour or so and then to wake up for a communications session with NASA's Odyssey orbiter.
"It was after that second overflight that we got some more information saying, 'hey, the memory is still corrupted and oh by the way, I didn't go to sleep when I was supposed to, I stayed awake,'" Cook said.
The next communications session came late Wednesday night Earth time, between 10:30 p.m. and midnight at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The rover's computer was still awake and engineers decided to switch over to the B-side system.
Cook said the memory in question is "hardened" to resist upsets caused by cosmic rays or high-energy particles from the sun. But it is possible an energetic particle hit in a particularly sensitive area -- the directory that tells the computer where data is stored.
"In general, there are lots of layers of protection, the memory is self correcting and the software is supposed to be tolerant to it," Cook said. "But what we are theorizing happened is that we got what's called a double bit error, where you get an uncorrectable memory error in a particularly sensitive place, which is where the directory for the whole memory was sitting.
"So you essentially lost knowledge of where everything was. Again, software is supposed to be tolerant of that. ... But it looks like there was potentially a problem where software kind of got into a confused state where parts of the software were working fine but other parts of software were kind of waiting on the memory to do something...and the hardware was confused as to where things were."
Cook said the odds of a cosmic ray or solar particle causing a problem like that were remote, but similar events have happened before.
"It's a little bit like a phone book full of addresses and instead of the cosmic ray hitting some random person's phone number, it hits the table of contents," he said. "It's a very low probability event but it certainly can happen."
If that theory is correct, powering the A-side computer back up should clear the problem. But engineers plan to take their time, carrying out a detailed analysis before attempting a reset.
"We can operate on the B side just as well as we can operate on the A side," Cook said. "So for the next week or so, we're going to spend time getting things going again running on the B side.
"We're going to eventually want to turn on the A side. If it is a memory corruption thing, it should clear it up with a power cycle. At that point, the software rebuilds the table of contents and starts from scratch."
Curiosity landed in Gale Crater on August 6. The $2.5 billion mission is devoted to searching for signs of past or present habitability and for evidence of organic compounds like those necessary for life as it is known on Earth.
The mission is intended to last for at least two years and possibly longer, depending on funding and the health of the spacecraft.

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Google Launches Zopfli To Compress Data More Densely And Make Web Pages Load Faster

Google just launched Zopfli, a new open source compression algorithm that can compress web content about three to eight percent more densely (PDF) than the standard zlib library. Because Zopfli is compatible with the decompression algorithms that are already part of all modern web browser. Using Google’s new algorithm and library on a server could lead to faster data transmission speeds and lower web page latencies, which would ultimately make the web a little bit faster.
The new algorithm, which Zurich-based Google engineer Lode Vandevenne created as a 20% project, is an implementation of the Deflate algorithms – the same algorithm that’s also used for the ZIP and gzip file formats and PNG image format. Zopfli’s output is compatible with zlib, but uses a different and more effective algorithm to compress data.
As Vandevenne writes in the announcement today, “the exhaustive method is based on iterating entropy modeling and a shortest path search algorithm to find a low bit cost path through the graph of all possible deflate representations.”
There is, however, a price that needs to be paid for this: it takes significantly longer to compress files with Zopfli (decompression times are virtually the same, though). Indeed, as Vandevenne notes, “due to the amount of CPU time required — 2 to 3 orders of magnitude more than zlib at maximum quality — Zopfli is best suited for applications where data is compressed once and sent over a network many times, for example, static content for the web.”

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Survey: Most Developers Now Prefer HTML5 For Cross-Platform Development

According to a new survey commissioned by Telerik’s Kendo UI, the majority of developers now prefer to work with HTML5 instead of native apps for their cross-platform development. Half of the 5,000 developers surveyed in the company’s 2013 Global Developer Surveyalso said that they developed apps using HTML5 in 2012 and 90% of them plan to do so in 2013. Only 15% of developers said they would prefer to use a native-only approach.

The idea behind the survey, Kendo UI’s VP of the company’s HTML5 web and mobile division Todd Anglin told me last week, was to understand how developers are working with HTML5 and what kinds of apps they are developing.

The company, however, also looked at the larger HTML5 ecosystem and found, for example, that most developers said they were interested in developing for Windows 8 (66%) – something Microsoft will likely be happy to hear – and ChromeOS (47%), but weren’t all that interested in Blackberry 10 (13%) and Tizen (8%). It’s worth noting that this preference doesn’t always result in actual products getting shipped. Many of these developers are probably working for larger corporations that don’t give them the flexibility to develop in the languages they would like to.

Kendo UI surveyed about 5,000 developers from around the world for this survey over the course of January 2013. Most of the developers worked for small and medium businesses (51%) , 29% worked for startups and 20% for enterprises. Given that these developers were likely already interested in HTML5 before they took the survey, chances are the results are somewhat biased toward HTML5.

Interestingly, the developers surveyed by Kendo UI also said that Blackberry and iOS are the most difficult platforms to develop for. Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 ranked as the easiest with Android falling in the middle. As Anglin noted, the reason for this could be the fact that developers can use HTML5 to write apps for the Windows platforms, but also that Microsoft provides a very robust set of tools for its developer ecosystem.

As for the kinds of HTML5 apps developers are working on, the survey found a clear emphasis on productivity apps (54%) and utilities (38%). Entertainment, lifestyle, travel apps and games ranked at the bottom of the list.

Given these results, it’s no surprise that most developers also told the researchers that they thought the most important modern web technologies right now include forms and validation, databases and flexible layouts (grids, flexbox, etc.)

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Microsoft Launches IE10 For Windows 7, Starts Auto-Upgrading IE9 Users And Launches New Ad Campagin

This sure took a while, but Microsoft just announced that Internet Explorer 10 is now finally available for all Windows 7 users worldwide. Previously, the release version of IE10 was only available on Windows 8, though the company did launch a preview version for Windows 7 users last November. Starting today, Microsoft will make the release version of IE10 available for download to all Windows 7 users. It will also start auto-updating its over 700 million IE9 users and those currently using the preview release.

Those currently using the pre-release version will be the first to see the auto-update prompts and the rest of Microsoft’s Windows 7 users will see the notification over the next few weeks and months as Microsoft rolls the new version out to all of its customers. Microsoft plans to watch for any issues with the upgrade and adjust the speed at which it rolls out IE10 accordingly.

As Ryan Gavin, Microsoft’s General Manager of Internet Explorer, told me last week, he does not see any reasons why an Internet Explorer user would choose not to upgrade to IE10 (thanks to the Windows 8 release, it is probably the best-tested version of IE, he argued).

According to Microsoft, IE10 is at least 20% faster than IE9 when it comes toreal-world performance. IE10, Gavin also noted, will ship with “Do Not Track” turned on by default and offer users more privacy and security features than IE9.

Overall, the Windows 7 version doesn’t differ much from the Windows 8 release. It features the same design, as well as the same JavaScript and layout engines and introduces features like hardware accelerated SVG and HTML4 constructs and to Windows 7.

For developers, IE 10 also offers a “60% increase in supported modern web standards.” Some of the new standards supported in IE10 include CSS3 Transitions and Animations, better support for responsive page layouts (CSS3 grid, positioned floats, etc.), HTML5 Forms, Web Sockets, HTML5 drag and drop and pointer events for touch-enabled web apps.

NEW IE AD CAMPAIGN PUTS FOCUS ON TOUCH

One feature Microsoft is stressing in this release in the fact that IE10 is touch-enabled. To highlight this – despite the fact that there really aren’t that many Windows 7 devices with touch-enabled screens on the market – Microsoft is launching a new ad campaign that focuses solely on touch. In addition, Microsoft is launching ExploreTouch.ie today, an HTML5-based site based on the ad and the Blake Lewis track featured in the campaign. The site was developed by Fantasy Interactive with support from Clarity Consulting and the IE team. As usual, Microsoft also offers a behind the scene look at the new site that offers code samples and a more in-depth look at how ExploreTouch.ie came to be.

Here is what the new ads will look like:

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Spotify Inks Its First In-Car Deal, Will Stream Music To Ford Via SYNC AppLink 

Smartphones have long been an important distribution platform for music streaming service Spotify, and today it is taking that to the next level of mobility: today it is announcing a deal with Ford to provide in-car streaming music services, via Ford’s new SYNC AppLink service in Europe and North America. The deal will initially cover one car model, the EcoSport.

This is Spotify’s first in-car deal, but it’s not Ford’s: the company also works with Pandora in the U.S., a key competitive battleground between the two companies and others for consumers willing to pay and interested in listening to streaming music services compared to older media like CDs and radio, and downloads from iTunes.

It looks like Ford may be taking a more regional approach to their in-car services: it is also announcing Europe-only partnerships with Kaliki Audio Newsstand, the Glympse social location sharing app, and Aha audio entertainment channels for its European service. It’s aiming for the service to go into to 3.5 million cars by Europe. 

In the rush to make Mobile World Congress more and more relevant — even as some companies scale back their presence, or choose other venues for their big product launches — the GSMA has been bringing in increasing numbers of other players into the fold beyond its traditional base of handset makers and carriers. That has included car companies like Ford and General Motors, as well as apps/content companies like Spotify.

Although services like AppLink are still in their infancy, signing up brands like Spotify are important for raising consumer interest. Spotify in December 2012 announced 5 million paying subscribers, with 1 million of them in the U.S., and 20 million users overall including non-paying users.

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Bloomberg, Top Tech Investors Plan Virtual March For Immigration

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a handful of Silicon Valley’s top technology investors are planning a nation-wide social media campaign to pressure congress to pass immigration reform. The so-called “virtual march” will attempt to galvanize thousands of netizens to email, tweet, and facebook their leaders to come up with a solution that solves the industry’s looming skills shortage.

“Usually in Washington when you try to push an issue, people knock on senators and congressmens doors, they hire paid lobbyists,” says Jonathan Feinblatt, policy advisor to Bloomberg, “but what we’re doing is actually using the tools of the technology trade–email, and facebook, and social networking–too actually raise the voice of the innovators in this country.”

To be sure, both Republicans and Democrats are bound together in a rare bi-partisan lovefest over the need for more high-skilled immigrants. They differ in how low-skilled and undocumented workers should be let into the country, and have been unable to separate low-skilled and high-skilled reform into different bills.

There’s no guarantee that congress will find a compromise. As recently as last week, Senator John McCain got heckled at an angry town hall for attempting to persuade Arizona residents to accept a more lenient policy towards undocumented workers. Feinblatt argues that an overwhelming social media protest the consequences for failing to pass a bill will be greater than passing a relatively unpopular bill.

Sometime in the spring, Bloomberg will join investors, such as SV Angel’s Ron Conway, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, and 500 Startups’ Dave McClure, in galvanizing their own communities for a massive online march. Readers can learn more about the campaign athttp://www.marchforinnovation.com/

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Get lost in a stunning 320-gigapixel image of London

How well do you know the landmarks of London? Get up close and personal with a stunning 320-gigapixel image of the city captured atop the BT Tower.

Snapped by panorama experts 360Cities, the epic photography endeavor required the use of four Canon 7D dSLR cameras outfitted with some heavy-duty equipment.

Each camera used an EF 400mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens, Extender EF 2x III teleconverter, and a Rodeon VR Head ST robotic panorama head. After shooting 48,640 individual pictures over the course of three days (shortly after the 2012 Olympics), 360Cities spent the next several months assembling and stitching together the final gargantuan image.

To access the larger-than-life 360-degree panorama of London, simply click here or use the embedded panorama above. You can easily spot many familiars such as The Shard, London Eye, and Tower Bridge once you get moving.

You'll quickly notice that it's easy to clearly see nearly anything (or anyone) located many miles from the BT Tower. You almost feel like Big Brother after five minutes of looking. Pro tip: for maximum zoom, keep hitting the plus zoom button. Even if the slider bar indicates you've gone all the way you can actually go farther.

If printed out on paper, the 320-gigapixel super shot would stretch out 323 feet wide and stand 77 feet tall -- nearly the same size as Buckingham Palace. I wonder how much that frame would cost.

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Wikipedia expects to offer SMS-based access within months

Wikipedia has long been pushing for access to its communal knowledge among those who can't afford the latest technology, going so far as to strike deals with carriers to deliver free mobile web viewing. It's set to expand that reach to those for whom any advanced cellphone is out of the question. In part through the help of a Knight News Challenge grant and South Africa's Praekelt Foundation, the non-profit's Wikipedia Zero effort will offer its content through SMS and USSD messages in the next few months. Curious users will just have to send a text message to get an article in response, with no web required at all. It's a big step forward for democratizing online information for those who may not even have access to a smartphone, although we're curious as to how it will handle large articles; we can only imagine the volume of messages when trying to look up the known universe.

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Mozilla, AT&T And Ericsson Team Up To Demo Seamless Web-To-Mobile WebRTC Integration At MWC

What if your browser could know when you are getting a call on your mobile phone? Earlier this month, Google and Mozilla demonstrated how their browsers’ WebRTC implementations could interoperate. Today, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Mozilla is going a step further. The organization has teamed up with AT&T and Ericsson to show a proof-of-concept called WebPhone that demonstrates how its Firefox browser can use Mozilla’s Social API, AT&T’s API Platform and Ericsson’s Web Communication Gateway to let Firefox users sync with a user’s existing phone number and provide calling services without the need to install any plugins or special apps.

WebPhone, which isn’t currently available to the public, demonstrates how users can receive calls and text on their desktop. The system was built on top of WebRTC, the developing standard that allows for in-browser file transfers and real-time video, audio and text chats without plugins. According to Mozilla, this demo shows “how consumers can easily take and receive video calls from their mobile phones or desktop browser using WebRTC or share their web experiences with friends or family who might be on a desktop PC or mobile phone across the other side of the world.”
The demo shows how users can start a call from their Firefox browser. Using the operators’ APIs, the web application in the browser gets access to the user’s contacts on the phone and could eventually allow them to, for example, start calls on their mobile device and then transfer them to their desktop once they get home and receive calls right through their browser.“We believe there is value for operators bundling mobile and fixed broadband offerings with browsers, and Firefox will be the first browser to give them this opportunity,” Magnus Furustam, Vice President Product Area Core and IMS, Business Unit Networks at Ericsson said in a statement today. “The open source project with Mozilla means operators can contribute resources to the project and in a new way, jointly collaborating with other innovators to shape the future of web communications.”We will likely hear quite a bit more about WebRTC as this year’s Mobile World Congress gets underway. The standard is now stable enough that developers can feel relatively confident that most browser vendors will support it in their stable release versions relatively soon (with the exception of Microsoft, which is backing a different version of the standard). Like all standards, the different browser developers are obviously implementing the standard in different ways, but now that there is some degree of interoperability between the different vendors (and third-party solutions like TokBox that ensure this actually works), we will probably see quite a few more developers jump on this bandwagon and launch WebRTC-based applications.

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Google preparing a music streaming service, Pandora and Spotify should be worried

Google owns YouTube, the largest video streaming site in the world by a huge margin, and Play Music, the service that lets users download songs from a catalog of over 13 million of tracks. It makes perfect sense for the tech giant to move into the music streaming business, and, according to the Financial Times, that is precisely what Google is doing.

The move will put Google in competition with established music streaming services like Pandora and Spotify. When Apple was rumored to weigh in an entry in the sector, Pandora’s stock tanked, so I am wondering how the markets will react at the news of Google getting into streaming. Larry Page’s company has a reputation of offering free or cheap services, which would put even more pressure on a competitive and notoriously difficult industry.

As The Next Web notes, Google already announced plans to roll out paid subscriptions on YouTube. From there, the move to paid music subscriptions is logical and quite reasonable to envisage. Google certainly possesses the infrastructure required for the venture.

Also, Google’s Music Match service is similar to a streaming app, albeit without the paid subscription. With Music Match, Google scans the users’ drives for music, which it then proceeds to match with cloud-stored versions. Users of the service (limited to the US and some European countries) can then listen to up to 20,000 tracks directly from the cloud, from any Internet connected device.

My bet is Google will integrate the new streaming service into its current Google Music offering. As for when the new service is expected to launch, we have no information, but Google I/O would certainly make a great launch venue.

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With $2M From Zynga Co-founder & More, Sokikom Wants To Use Social, MMO Gaming To Help Kids Learn Math

Sokikom, a new startup that wants to help K-12 teachers motivate students to learn using games, is announcing today that it has raised $2 million in seed funding, half of which comes in the form of a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (a research branch within the U.S. Department of Education) and the other half comes in the form of angel funding from former Intel Chairman and CEO Dr. Craig Barrett and Zynga co-founder Steve Schoettler, among others.

Up until now, the startup has flown under the radar, spending part of that time in beta, and its products have been in the hands of teachers for almost a year now, testing and iterating. But Sokikom is now ready to “officially” pull back the curtain on its online learning tool, which uses game mechanics to help teachers motivate their youngest students to improve their math skills and performance within the Common Core.
Sokikom’s game world is divided into different regions on a map, where each region focuses on a specific math domain. Teachers can give students autonomy or direct students to the particular area they want them to practice. Each domain comes with its own diagnostic assessment, which are a series of questions that start at the most basic level for kindergarten or first graders and progressively become more difficult as the student becomes more proficient. If the system senses that students aren’t understanding a particular topic, it stops the questions and sends students to the appropriate game level to continue practicing.
The idea is to personalize the learning process for students, while making it enjoyable, and, of course, more engaging by putting it into a more familiar interface. “You can have content that is personalized at the perfect level for students,” Sokikom co-founder Snehal Patel says, “but if they aren’t motivated, they aren’t going to care and they’re not going to learn.” So, the team designed the game to be adaptive and self-paced, so that questions gradually get more difficult, while using visual math manipualtives to solve problems and, if they get stuck, allowing them to receive hints or view animated instructional videos specific to the area with which they’re struggling.
For teachers, Sokikom provides realtime mastery reports that show them data on how students are performing compared to their class and grade level, how much time they’re spending answering questions, if they’re able to get the correct answer after making a mistake and where they’re struggling.

To do that, Sokikom has created a math program that is built around a “game world,” like those one finds in massively multiplayer online and MMORPG games — contextually, it might help to think of Sokikom like Moshi Monsters and the original version of MinoMonsters, but for math.

The other cool part about Sokikom, which sets it apart from other cool animated, learning games like MindSnacks is that it’s a MMO, allowing an entire class of students to play the same math game in realtime, where half of the class on the Red Team, and the other is on the Blue Team, for example. The teams can play a game for three minutes, in which the one with the highest cumulative score wins. Patel says that, beyond being fun for students, it actually has utility in terms of improving the learning experience.

MMOs are, by nature, social, so rather than the typical classroom scenario where the more advanced students can actually help other students get up to speed, the idea is to create an experience where students help each other learn math naturally to help lead their teams to victory. In addition, the fact of the matter is that math can be a little dry (sometimes an all out Snooze Fest), and it’s tough to get young students excited about it and motivated to study its core concepts. But Sokikom has found in classroom tests that students care more about how they perform in game settings because they feel that they can be active contributors to the success of the team. That means higher motivation, thanks to serving the bitter Math pill with a more sugary coating.

The other piece of Sokikom’s equation, which teachers (and users) can set up separately from its math program (read: Game world) or use in combination, is its classroom management tool. Tackling the same problem as startups like ClassDojo, Sokikom helps teachers try to get rowdy classrooms under control by, simply put, reinforcing positive, in-class behavior. When students aren’t acting a-fool, the service allows them to earn “class cash” that they can spend on virtual rewards in its game world.

It’s an interesting approach, and one that Patel says teachers are appreciating because it means they don’t have to buy actual prizes for students — and, rather than just accumulating points with no rewards — it works symbiotically with the game world, enabling them to turn good behavior into level-ups and virtual rewards, like personalizing the avatar for their characters. And if Moshi Monsters has taught us anything, it’s that kids love being able to personalize virtual characters and pets — the simple equation that led Moshi Monsters to add 15 million users in four months.

Lastly, teachers get access to automatic behavior tracking in reports, which Sokikom serves in context with its learning report data, which Patel believes adds more value (and less pain) for teachers by serving both in one.

Houston, we have a Math problem. What’s more Math is a universal language, the rules apply everywhere. And it also helps that Sokikom’s team consists of former math teachers and tutors, so there’s that. But, naturally, the team believes that its models have broad potential applications, so Math is likely just the first step. With any luck, computer science will be next.

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GOOGLE ADDS SPEECH RECOGNITION API TO LATEST VERSION OF CHROME

Google (GOOG) has officially taken the training wheels off the Web Speech application programming interface it first launched as part of a Chrome beta release last month. Google announced on Thursday that the latest version of Chrome now includes the Web Speech API that it says will help developers “integrate speech recognition capabilities into their web apps” so that users can use their voices for functions traditionally covered by mouse and keyboard, such as composing email. Google’s efforts to give Chrome web apps more speech recognition capabilities come after some developers late last year started a new Chromium project dedicated to bringing the voice-enabled Google Now personal assistant to the Chrome browser.

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