IT Trends Milwaukee

Google Announces Recipe View

Want a chicken recipe that calls for paprika, takes 30 minutes to prepare and only has 200 calories per serving? No problem. Google has introduced a new way to make it easier for people to find recipes with a new feature called Recipe View.  Launched today, Recipe View allows users access to a huge array of recipes from across the web, just by searching for keywords based around ingredients, style of food or special occasions.

Recipe View allows users to narrow their search results to show only recipes, and it displays ratings, ingredients and pictures on the search results page. Once the results are returned you can filter out different ingredients, cook times and even calorie counts to find the perfect meal for you and yours…and me if you invite me over. Users can also search for or more open-ended topics like holidays, events or a favorite chef.



Recipe View is built on Rich Snippet markup technology. Any recipe publisher can add markup to their website’s content and be part of Recipe View. Recipe View is rolling out now in the U.S. and in Japan. Google is promising to roll out Recipe View in more countries in the future but they’re waiting to see how many people will use this feature as most serious cooks will have cookbooks or particular websites they use anyway.

Now that I gave you all the tools, when can I come over for dinner?

Apple iPad 2 Event Next Week

After countless rumors and speculation, it looks as if the next generation of the iPad will finally be revealed next week.  Apple’s iPad 2 is rolling off assembly lines and could be on store shelves within a few months, according to the latest rumor courtesy of Wall Street Journal and “people familiar with the matter.”

Apple could unveil the iPad 2 as soon as March 2 – around the same time of year that Apple took the wraps off the original iPad. This news comes courtesy of Kara Swisher at the Wall Street Journal, who cites several anonymous sources familiar with the iPad 2 roll-out.  According to her sources, the Wednesday date in a little more than a week is firm and will take place in San Francisco, the scene of many such Apple events.

"Analysts expect the iPad 2 to be thinner than its predecessor and feature an improved display," Swisher writes on the All Things Digital blog, "as well as front-facing camera and Facetime video chat support. And some reports suggest it will be powered by one of Qualcomm’s multimode chips and will run on both GSM and CDMA-based networks around the world."

Since the date for Apple’s event has been confirmed, there is already speculation on whether Apple CEO Steve Jobs will be in attendance or not. He is currently on leave to deal with ongoing health issues, but he has been spotting around Silicon Valley at various places in the past few weeks. In addition, Jobs along with other technology moguls such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg, had dinner with President Obama at a high-profile technology-moguls dinner last week.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on things, of course. As soon as we find more information we’ll let you know. For now, let the speculation begin as we try to figure out exactly what features will end up inside of the successor to the most successful tablet on the market.

Of course, nothing is official until Apple says so, but expect the media frenzy to begin next week!

Final Jeopardy: What Is The Humans Were No Match

Did anybody really think the humans were going to beat IBM’s Supercomputer, Watson, in a battle of wits? I sure didn’t. No matter how smart the famously previous Jeopardy! Champions Brad Rutter or Ken Jennings thought they were, they were no match for the smarts of a cluster of hard drives, processors and the occasional wrong answer of IBMS latest creation. With a strong third day of playing and a staggering bid on Final Jeopardy, Wednesday night’s game ended with Watson raking in a whopping $77,147. Runners up Jennings ($24,000 total) and Brad Rutter ($21,600) were clearly outmatched.

For crushing its human rivals, Watson won a total prize of $1 million, which IBM has said will go to the charities World Vision and World Community Grid. Jennings and Rutter each got $300,000 and $200,000 respectively, half of which each said they would be donating to charities.

Rounds 1 and 2 in Jeopardy‘s Man vs. Machine stunt delivered the show’s biggest rating in years. Monday’s episode had an 8.7 household rating, while Tuesday’s numbers climbed to a 9.5. That’s the best Jeopardy! performance in nearly six years.

Now that the competition is over, I can’t help but wonder if Watson might have had an unfair advantage. While the other contestants must listen to host Alex Trebek read the clues, in their entirety, Watson had them electronically sent, starting the thought process a step ahead of the human competitors. Also, Watson did not have to perform the manual action of clicking a button to ring in. Could a human really click a button faster than a machine can electronically ring in? I wonder if any measures were taken to level that playing field. Nevertheless, Watson’s ability to verbalize a correct response from natural human wording and compete in the natural flow of a human game show is more than impressive, it was absolutely amazing.

Man vs. IBM Supercomputer on Jeopardy! Round 1

Remember back in 1997 when IBM's chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue famously beat then world champion Garry Kasparov in a highly publicized match? The event was symbolic in that it showed that computers could outsmart humans at a game once considered too intellectually challenging for a machine to master. Even so, chess is a game with well-defined rules and limits. Fast forward 14 years and the wait is over. After months of hype, last night it was Man versus Machine on Jeopardy!, as IBM’s “Watson” supercomputer took on the greatest champions in the game show’s history, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Watson -- named for IBM founder Thomas J. Watson --  is not just a souped up desktop PC. Instead, it’s powerful array of computers running on IBM’s POWER7 processors provide the lightning-quick response time and growing parade of trivial information. IBM has revealed that the Artificial Intelligence program is housed in a cluster of 90 IBM Power 750 servers, occupying 10 racks, which is the part of the machine you see on the show. There are 2,880 POWER7 processor cores in all — spread across 3.5 GHz POWER7 octo-core CPUs — and 16TB of RAM. Whoa, slow down, what does that mean? In this language we call English...this is one HUGE, super-fast computer.  

So what happened in round 1 of the Man versus Machine Challenge? At the end of the first round, Rutter and Watson stand tied at $5,000 while Jennings trails with just $2,000. An early success for the machine, though not a perfect performance. In simulation games, Watson has mopped the floor with many winning Jeopardy contestants and a number of journalists. Round two is tonight at 6pm on CBS with the finale being on Wednesday.

So who will win? IBM is clearly very confident about its prospects. The Watson team has a wealth of information about Rutter and Jennings and how they play the game, and can fine-tune the supercomputer to best take advantage of their tendencies. Cheating? Maybe…we’ll just have to wait and find out who’s smarter.

HP Announces the TouchPad Tablet

HP has officially announced the HP TouchPad, the heavily-anticipated webOS tablet at a media event today in San Francisco. Ever since HP purchased Palm, we’ve been waiting to see what the company had in store for the popular operating system.  Well, it’s finally a reality, it’s here and it looks like it could be a contender to Apple’s iPad.

The tablet features a 9.7 inch, 1024 x 768 pixel display and weighs about 1.6 pounds. A WiFi-only version is due out this summer, with 3G and 4G versions set to follow.  Measuring about a  half an inch thick, the TouchPad has a 1.3MP camera and supports video calls. It has stereo speakers, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, a dual core 1.2 GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and 16GB or 32GB of storage. There’s a gyroscope, accelerometer and compass. The tablet will have a 6300mAh battery.

Basically, the TouchPad is what you would get if you took a Palm Pre, blew it up, gave it a higher resolution display, and took away the keyboard. It’s pretty clearly HP’s answer to the Apple iPad: but aside from the dual core processor and webOS 3.0 operating system, it really doesn’t seem all that different from the iPad. While webOS supports Adobe Flash and has better support for multitasking, the OS hasn’t exactly won over the masses in the smartphone space the way iOS has.

Probably the biggest selling point for the tablet right now is how it integrates with webOS on a smartphone. If you have a webOS phone and a TouchPad tablet, you just login with your account information and all of your data will be made available on both devices — much the same way as you can login to multiple Android devices using your Google account info.

But the TouchPad will also let you do things like send and receive text messages or even make phone calls by connecting wirelessly to a webOS phone. The devices work together in other ways too. For instance, you can open a web site on your phone and tap it against the tablet to open the same web site on the Touchpad.

HP also unveiled two new phones today, the HP Veer and the HP Pre3. The Pre3 is the next generation of the Palm Pre, and features a 3.6 inch, 480 x 800 pixel display, a 1.4 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 8×55 CPU, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a 5MP camera with a flash and a front-facing camera for video calls. It supports 802.11b/g/n WiFi, HSPA+ and EVDO, and will be available this summer with 8G or 16GB of storage.

The HP Veer is a much smaller smartphone which HP describes as being the size of a credit card. It has a 2.6 inch, 320 x 400 pixel screen, an 800 MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 7230 processor and support for Adobe Flash, HSPA+, 802.11b/g WiFi, and Bluetooth 2.1. It can also be used as a mobile hotspot to share your mobile broadband connection with a laptop or other device.

Facebook's Instant Personalization & Your Privacy

Facebook’s “instant personalization” feature went live yesterday for most members. This feature promises to tear down the walls even further between its social network and the wider Web. When this feature is turned on, sites like Pandora, Bing, and Docs.com can access your profile to adjust what their websites offer. For example, Pandora will recommend music to you based on bands or music that you’ve Liked on Facebook. The data they access is the same data that you’ve made available to “Everyone” and that can include Likes… as well as items you may not want spread about, like your birthday.

While most of the information that gets accessed from Facebook is harmless, the bigger problem is that many Facebook members have no idea that this feature is live AND turned on by default. This has raised some serious privacy concerns amongst the Facebook’s 500 million+ members who don’t like the idea of Facebook handing out their data to just anyone. At this point, only a few websites can access this feature, but it’s likely that the number will grow.

How To Turn It Off

If you’re of the mindset that you’d rather pick and choose who gets to see your information, you might consider turning this feature off for certain websites or for all of them.

1. Log into Facebook. In the top right hand corner, click Account, and then Privacy Settings.
2. Under the heading Apps and websites, select Edit your settings.
3. Under the heading Instant personalization, select Edit settings. You may see a popup called ‘Understanding instant personalization’. Just hit Close.
4. At the very bottom of the page, simply untick the box labeled Enable instant personalization on partner websites. This will instantly turn off partner websites accessing your data.

If, however, the option is greyed out but still ticked, this means that Facebook has not yet activated instant personalization just yet. It takes time. Check back in a few hours, or the next day.


Some users of Facebook may not care at all about the information being passed out, and instead see the new functionality of the partner sites as a huge boon to productivity and, well… personalization. What do you think? Is instant personalization a Like or a Dislike? Let us know!