News At Seven Brilliant, and Probably Useless

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1. Lits
   

   December 27th, 2006 at 1:14 am

   Is anybody here playing Half-Life 2?
   The characters are from these game, maybe using Garry’s Mod, a mod that allows to play freely with characters and the environment. Nice but nothing new. Maybe useless.
   See at http://www.garrysmod.com/. Real cost, less than 10 bucks.
   Computerized voice, not difficult to do it either.

2. RBA
   

   December 27th, 2006 at 1:23 am

   Hmm, to have that type of poll “I think News At Seven is..” at the end of Techcrunch articles may not be a bad idea.

   I usually find them annoying in blogs where you’re voting for the quality of the article itself, but to vote about profiled sites may actually be a good way for lazy people to give some quick feedback. It was a bit slow processing my selection though…

3. Doeboy
   

   December 27th, 2006 at 1:27 am

   Seems there are a ton of posts from Michael these days and none from Natali anymore. I wonder if she got demoted since people were complaining a lot or if she just went on holiday vacation.

4. gman
   

   December 27th, 2006 at 1:28 am

   Just fyi but you do know the PS3 launched in Japan with a free Avatar based news service? You turn on your PS3, launch the Toro Station

   Here’s a video of it in action

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtYeq2vk6V0

   Every morning there is new news (real news like the weather for example)

5. Michael Arrington
   

   December 27th, 2006 at 1:29 am

   RBA - stop reading this blog, and get to work redesigning your site. I still see that horrific logo.

6. Alaska Miller
   

   December 27th, 2006 at 1:40 am

   It’s like Rocketboom without the cuteness.

7. Pramit Singh
   

   December 27th, 2006 at 3:22 am

   This is an old piece of news. I read it on some other blog way back in October.

8. Mikal
   

   December 27th, 2006 at 3:28 am

   I think the idea is cool. I am interested to know how automated this technology is. If I could get a “news at seven” customized to my preferences/interests (A la spotback) I would use it quite a bit (especially if it provided me links to the articles.
   Far from perfect, but not far from useful.

9. Michael Vu
   

   December 27th, 2006 at 3:47 am

   When Google came out with their News portal with automated news aggregation, it got somewhat of a stir.

   Here’s a slightlity different implementation of the same concept, except with a 3D, virtual worldish presentation. You’re right, it may be useless in its present form, but don’t discount the strong possibility that it might lead to a variety of more focused applications. Such as sports news, product reviews, food reviews, movies, etc.

   The quality of the visual presentation and how realistic the text-to speech functionality is, will probably be its main limiting factor.

10. desik
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 3:53 am

    Having ’smarter’ customisable avatars go fetch , sort and relate more complex data in very simple and efficient way to preference isnt such a bad idea. The news format sucks though, one off novelty value.

11. VJ
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 5:20 am

    All:

    Books, covers, all that jazz. This requires a little more reading before you jump to conclusions. The video and avatars are really just PR frosting. What’s interesting and research-worthy is what’s happening under the covers to automatically process news. They have built an extremely sophisticated system for ingesting news, detecting topics, finding related news items, etc. It incorporates everything from “similarity detection” to highly sophisticated entity detection and extraction from ClearForest.

    Yes, they overdid it a bit on the UI - but how many people are willing to wade through academic papers to understand what they are up to. I’m all for dinging useless technical advances - but would suggest you do your research in the future.

    VJ

12. Xavier
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 6:09 am

    This is the future. Make this thing work with user customizable RSS feeds and voilà…. personal news channel.

13. Adrian Keys
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 6:27 am

    I do agree that this could transition into something very meaningful like a cheap an easy way for publishers to have their own news channels. But also think about educational sites, cooking sites, documentaries….the possiblities are endless.

14. David Garcia
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 7:14 am

    I agree with Adrian, avatar presented news aggregation might not be the most useful concept. I’d like to see this technology used in other contexts such as researching a specific topic and then having the avatar explain it as a tutor might.

15. Daniel
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 7:33 am

    Michael, check out their list of papers:
    http://infolab.northwestern.edu/papers.asp

    News at Seven looks like a demo project for testing several research areas together, so it seems unfair to judge it based on its marketability alone.

16. Marko
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 7:55 am

    Whenever I see these nice innovative sites, it mostly comes down to: a great technology, but no content. The same here. It almost never is about the techology, it almost always is about the content. And these guys do not have content.

    For a good news operation you need footage, images, reporters, stringers, analysts and lots of editors. And if you have an operation of dozens or even hundreds of people, why would it be hard to have one of those people present the news?

    There might be one exception: if you want your visitors to have the latest of the latest news. It is impossible for a presenter to re-present every update of a text that an editor writes.

    And for automated processes like Google: they already have big problems with small images, so bigger images or even video footage will cost them billions.

    Further, the internet is a non-linear medium. make a newscast on the Net is linear and old-fashioned thinking.

17. BlogReader
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 8:10 am

    Saw a demo of this at a mobile talk about 1.5-2 years ago. Think it was in use in India, they scanned in a celebrity and had him/her do voice overs for news and horoscopes and people would pay a monthly fee to watch it. Thought it was a neat idea then.

18. Christopher
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 8:28 am

    I could come to appreciate this if it aggregated news feeds from my Google News alerts and then sent them as voice content to a mobile device that I could listen to later. My problem with the avatar is the clumsy technology.

    How about a system were news readers, and by that I mean actual people, are paid to record the news and then vetted through a system wherein listeners vote to get worthier items to the top of the chain. Payment could come through the sort of system currently used by Revver. Talent moves to the top and miscreants move to the bottom.

19. Beth
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 9:02 am

    When you said it might be useful for the deaf except that the visual aspects are so integral, I’m assuming you meant it might be useful for the blind, since the deaf can see the visuals. However, it’s pretty useless for the deaf since they can’t hear what’s being said. I would think captions would be fairly easy to add, since they already have to have text for the automated voice to read. The three major players (Windows, Real, QuickTime) all have the ability to display synchronized captions. And since Federal grant projects and University web sites both need to consider accessibility by law, I hope to see that integrated in the near future.

20. Perry
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 10:06 am

    The irony that the totally automated news casting system takes a break for the holidays is delicious.

21. daniel
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 10:13 am

    The news is unwatchable, the technology is fascinating.

    Maybe one day we can have computer generated news events….or even elections. Wait, did that already.

22. Fashion Industry Ceo
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 10:32 am

    I think its a waste of tax dollars!..its rather boring too me

23. Michael Arrington
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 10:38 am

    Beth - yeah, i meant what you said.

    And me too! I can’t wait until the government starts requiring everybody to do everything.

24. Spud
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 10:43 am

    I have just watched a show. The technology to produce it is cool but the actual show itself is kind of boring. Maybe they have plans to enhance it.

25. Xavier
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 11:52 am

    This will be a hit because people are tired of reading on the screen. We want integrated audio, images and video. And the random element is good, after all most people just random surf (stumble upon, digg, youtube) most all the time.

26. Patricia
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 12:33 pm

    The sexiest, coolest, slickest technology in the world is worth nothing if nobody uses it. I don’t really see why anybody would use this.

    I guess it’s worth the things everybody learned along the way.

27. anonymouse
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 1:29 pm

    #26: “I guess it’s worth the things everybody learned along the way”

    welcome to academia
    novel? yes. useful? maybe. business opp? possibly. will it get a paper published in some journal? probably.

28. Daniel
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 1:42 pm

    Virtual News

    Low-cost, free software and platform simplicity fueled success of blogging as free-for-all form of publishing. The next logical step would be free-for-all online broadcasting. However, the entrance barriers to online newscasts are still high for individual or small business - you still need an audio, camera operator, director, editor and anchor to run your home based CNN. Replace anchor by animated character with lip synchronization, add text-to-speech conversion module, pack it all into simple and friendly interface with media scheduling - you have your own studio. While mechanical speech and rather primitive animation characters are still a long way to compete with real TV anchor, the cost advantage is disruptive.
    I did my homework and come up with surprisingly scarce results. While text-to-speech applications (like Talkr.com powering podcast of this post) are fairly common, software applications for creating conversational characters are still rare. The most advanced is Oddcast.com, jealously guarding its platform, all Oddcast applications are run from Oddcast’s API. Mediasemantics.com and Reallusion.com offer affordable software packages allowing to create conversational characters.
    Some small outfit of Northwestern University funded by grant of National Science Foundation, Newsatseveven.com, is publishing daily clip of animated automated news via Yotube.com. Maybe they will be remembered as pioneers of virtual broadcasting but they are are still a far cry from digestable newscast.

29. Christopher Sisk
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 3:43 pm

    Remember when Microsoft said its little “Agents” were going to do all this back in 1995? They were supposed to talk to us too. Read our morning emails. Schedule to-do items.

    If I had a nicely animated 3d bot on my desktop that would do all that, including reading personalized news (rss feeds, images, videos), I would pay a subscription fee.

30. Matt
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 3:52 pm

    What would make this cool is if it could do an automatic “daily show” version of the news it found. Then there would be an audience. You could even adjust your personal preferences for the level of humor- from intellectual snottiness to juvenile/frat house humor. Ahh, someday….

31. Jeff
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 4:12 pm

    I’m kinda surprised at the amount of outrage present in this post regarding the public nature of this project’s funding. I hardly consider this the biggest waste of tax dollars, even if it is one. There’s plenty of potential in this kind of product, and the angry tone throughout the post is uncharacteristic.

32. LLopes
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 5:10 pm

    This is the gravest shortsightedness I’ve ever seen at Techcrunch. News at Seven is the announce of great things to come; personal, programmable information channels.

33. John C
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 5:14 pm

    “I’d say this would be useful for blind people….”

    and just how the hell do blind people navigate the Internet, let alone wind up on this website.

34. Peter
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 6:18 pm

    the government is spending a couple hundred million dollars day on its various wars, and we’re talkin about some tiny tech project at a uni? ‘my tax dollars’? inane.

    http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/n.....319902.htm

35. Steve
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 8:09 pm

    The advantage of this technology is not that it can create a newscast of the day’s top stories that people will prefer to standard news. It won’t.

    The advantage would be the possibility to make completely customized reports about incredibly specific subjects. For instance, I could create a daily highlight show covering only players on my fantasy basketball team (12 otherwise unconnected players), or a daily news report covering only the companies in my stock portfolio.

    It shouldn’t be thought of as a technology to replace live news - or anything you could currently get “live.” It could be a technology to give you something so specific that nobody else cares about it but you - as an alternative to aggregating it yourself.

36. Tim
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 8:12 pm

    I don’t know what the underlying technology looks like, but if it’s modular so that the newsgathering part creates some sort of XML (Atom, maybe?) and one can hook up many different kinds of presentation tools, that would be really useful.

37. Robert
    

    December 27th, 2006 at 11:36 pm

    The grant was $268K for “A scalable model of believable performance agents: Using case-based planning in the control of information access and application”

    http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch.....er=0535231

    I… just… hope… they…. can… find… a… better…. text… to… speech… engine….

38. desik
    

    December 28th, 2006 at 6:27 am

    VJ …maybe the ‘News at Seven ‘Poser-like show fails to effectively demonstrate the true potential of the underlying technology. I dont see pointing this out as ignorant or entirely negative.

    In his review Mike describes the News at Seven technology as Brilliant but simply questions the product in its current form.

39. andre taliercio
    

    December 28th, 2006 at 7:12 am

    Worked on the same type of project in 2000, I can tell you that if everything is computer generated then this is a great piece of technology. And there is market for it, including advertising.

40. Roy
    

    December 28th, 2006 at 8:22 am

    Those who do not remember Ananova (http://www.ananova.com/) are condemned to recreate her, with simulated green-screen backdrops.

41. David Mackey
    

    December 29th, 2006 at 6:04 pm

    I think its interesting, but I wouldn’t ever use it.

42. Nir
    

    January 1st, 2007 at 12:01 pm

    Not so fair, IMHO… Most sites covered here every day easily fall under the same “probably useless” category (”definitely useless”, even), and this one at least has some real technology behind it, unlike most of them. I’ve seen far worse uses of taxpayer dollars, too.

    (No, I don’t know anyone involved with “News at Seven” or NorthWestern )