1. NEW YORK (AP) — Imagine
using your phone to snap a photo
of the cool pair of sunglasses
your friend is wearing and in-
stantly receiving a slew of infor-
mation about the shades along
with a link to order them.
It’s a great idea — but it
doesn’t quite work.
Though many companies are
trying to make “visual search” a
reality, this seemingly simple no-
tion remains elusive.
Take Amazon, which made vi-
sual search a key feature in its
new Fire smartphone. The e-
commerce company says the fea-
ture, known as Firefly, can recog-
nize 100 million items. It’s simi-
lar to a Flow feature Amazon has
on its apps for other phones.
So far, Firefly can reliably
make out labels of products such
as Altoids or Celestial Season-
ings tea. That makes it easy to
buy items such as groceries on-
line.
But try it on a checkered shirt
or anything without sharp cor-
ners, and no such luck.
“It works really well when we
can match an image to the prod-
uct catalog,” says Mike Torres,
an Amazon executive who works
on the Fire’s software. “Where
things are rounded or don’t have
(visual markers) to latch on to,
like a black shoe, it’s a little
harder to do image recognition.”
Visual search is important to
retailers because it makes mobile
shopping a snap — literally.
It’s much easier to take a pic-
ture than to type in a description
of something you want. Shop-
ping on cellphones and tablets is
still a small part of retail sales,
but it’s growing quickly. That
makes it important to simplify
the process as much as possible
— especially as people look to
visual sites such as Instagram
and Pinterest as inspiration for
purchases.
“Retailers are trying to get the
user experience simple enough
so people are willing to buy on
their phones, not just use it as a
research tool,” eMarketer analyst
Yory Wurmser said.
Mobile software that scans
codes, such as QR codes and
UPC symbols, are fairly com-
mon. Creating apps that consis-
tently recognize images and ob-
jects has been more challenging.
Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulp-
uru believes it could take at least
three more years.
Since 2009, Google’s Goggles
app for Android has succeeded in
picking up logos and landmarks.
But Google says on its website
that the app is “not so good” at
identifying cars, furniture and
clothes in photos.
What’s holding visual search
back?
The technology works by ana-
lyzing visual characteristics, or
points, such as color, shape and
texture. Amazon’s Firefly, for ex-
ample, identifies a few hundred
points to identify a book and up
to 1,000 for paintings. U.K.
startup Cortexica uses 800 to
1,500 points to create a virtual
fingerprint for the image. It
then scans its database of
about 4 million images for a
match.
Without easily identifiable
markers, non-labeled objects
are difficult to identify.
Lighting conditions, photo
quality, distance, angles
and other factors can
throw the technology
off. Visual search
works best when
there is a clearly de-
fined image on a
white background.
Some retailers
are finding success
with visual search by
keeping the selection
of searchable products
limited.
Target’s new “In a
Snap” app works only
with items from its Room Es-
sentials furniture, bedding and
decor line. And it works only
when snapping a product image
in a magazine ad, not when you
see the actual product on a shelf.
When a shopper scans the ad,
items pop up for the shopper to
add to a shopping cart.
Heels.com, an online shoe re-
tailer, keeps visual search limited
to shoes. Shoppers upload pic-
tures or send links of shoes and
are offered similar pairs for sale
on the company’s website.
“People shop through images
nowadays,” Heels.com CEO Eric
McCoy says. “We want to give
them the exact shoe, or some-
thing similar.”
So, the race is on to perfect
the technology that will create
smartphone apps that easily rec-
ognize objects in a real-world en-
vironment.
Cortexica’s founders spent
seven years on academic research
before
forming
the company in
2009. Since then, it
has been trying to mold
the technology work more like
the human brain when it comes
to identifying objects.
“Someday you’ll be taking a
picture of a whole person, and it
will identify the different things
they’re wearing and offer recom-
mendations,” says Iain Mc-
Cready, CEO of Cortexica.
“That’s really challenging techni-
cally, but that’s what people tell
me they really want to do.”
The U.K. company was hired
by eBay to develop an app that
recognizes cars from behind and
matches them with similar cars
available on eBay.
Next, eBay asked Cortexica to
develop a similar app for fashion.
The outcome was Find Similar,
which analyzes a clothing item’s
color, texture and shapes to find
similar items available for sale.
Find Similar is now being used
by startup app Style Thief and
other Cortexica clients.
Superfish, a startup in Palo
Alto, California, counts 12 peo-
ple with doctorate degrees on its
staff and has 10 patents for visual
search technology. Its technology
can be found at PetMatch, an
app that matches photos of
pets with local pets avail-
able for adoption.
Superfish CEO Adi
Pinhas believes it will be
normal in two or three
years to use your
smartphone to search
for things visually.
“Your camera will
be as smart as the
rest of your smart-
phone,” he says.
Once that hap-
pens, Forrester’s
Mulpuru says, it
will “unleash a
whole new type
of e-com-
merce.”
A closer look at cell phones:
Gimmick or game changing?
“Someday you’ll be taking a
picture of a whole person, and it
will identify the different things
they’re wearing and offer
recommendations.”“pLOS ANGELES (AP) — Former New
York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is joining a
video game company’s legal fight against
disgraced Panamanian dictator Manuel
Noriega, who is suing Activision over his
inclusion in one of its popular “Call of
Duty” games.
Activision Blizzard Inc. announced Mon-
day that Giuliani and his firm will ask a Los
Angeles judge to dismiss Noriega’s lawsuit,
which claims his likeness was used without
permission in 2012’s”Call of Duty: Black
Ops II.”
Giuiliani told The Associated Press he
took the case because he doesn’t want the
imprisoned Noriega to profit from his crimes,
which include convictions for murder, drug
trafficking and money laundering. Also,
Giuiliani said that if the lawsuit is upheld, it
could give historical figures and their heirs
veto power over
their depiction in
books, television,
movies and video
games.
Noriega sued
Activision in
July, claiming
the company de-
picted him as a
“kidnapper, mur-
derer and enemy
of the state.”
“I am outraged
that he is seeking
millions and mil-
lions of dollars
that he can take
down to a Pana-
manian prison from a great American com-
pany,” Giuliani said Monday.
“Noriega going after ‘Call of Duty,’ you
should think of it as Osama bin Laden’s
family going after ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’” he
said.
The lawsuit contends Noriega’s inclusion
in the game increased Activision’s profits
from “Black Ops II.” The game earned more
than $1 billion in sales within 15 days of its
release. Noreiga’s attorney William T. Gibbs
declined to comment on Giuliani’s state-
ments.
In addition to leading New York City’s
government for two terms — including dur-
ing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — Giuliani
is a former U.S. attorney and ran for the
Republican presidential nomination in 2008.
In private practice, Giuliani worked as a
First Amendment lawyer, representing ma-
jor news outlets such as the Wall Street Jour-
nal and the financial magazine Barron’s.
“This is an area of the law that brings me
back to my youth,” Giuliani said.
Activision said in a release announcing
Giuliani’s involvement in the case that the
company plans to argue the game’s depic-
tion of Noriega is covered by free speech
provisions.
The company noted its games have fea-
tured historical figures such as President
John F. Kennedy and Fidel Castro.
The story line for “Black Ops II” in-
volved the waning years of the Cold War in
the 1980s, with Noriega aiding the game’s
key villain. The ex-dictator appears in less
than 1 percent of the game and was not
featured in any of its marketing, Giuliani
said.
Giuliani to help
fight Noriega’s
video game
legal battle
AP
This image provided by Activision
Blizzard Inc. shows Manuel Noriega as
depicted in the 2012 game, “Call of
Duty: Black Ops II.”
Microsoft unveils line of mid-range
phones for the budget conscious
BERLIN (AP) — Microsoft
will seek to draw more people to
its Internet-based services with
two new mid-range smartphones.
The devices unveiled Thurs-
day are under the Lumia brand
Microsoft bought from Nokia.
They run the latest version of
Windows Phone 8 and feature
Cortana, a Siri-like voice assis-
tant available to help with direc-
tions, calendar appointments and
messages. Many of those interac-
tions will steer users to Microsoft
services such as Bing search and
OneDrive storage.
Chris Weber, Microsoft’s vice
president for mobile devices sales,
said consumers should feel com-
fortable about storing their personal
pictures on OneDrive, despite re-
cent hacks exposing celebrities’pri-
vate pictures stored on services
such as Apple Inc.’s iCloud.
“I think we have to amplify
the message around security re-
garding these cloud services,”
Weber told reporters.
To this end, Microsoft is also
giving users more control over
the kind of information — friends,
diaries, home address — that the
Cortana voice assistant will have
access to, he said.
Microsoft bought Nokia’s
phone business in April as it
seeks to boost Microsoft’s Win-
dows Phone system, which has
had little traction compared with
Apple’s iPhones and Google’s
Android system. Microsoft CEO
Satya Nadella has made mobile
phones and Internet-based ser-
vices priorities for the company
as its traditional businesses —
Windows and Office software in-
stalled on desktops — slow down
or decline.
Microsoft’s new Lumia 730
and 830 phones won’t have all
the technical advances found in
Microsoft’s pricier flagship, the
Lumia 930 phone, which is
known as the Lumia Icon in the
United States. The 730’s rear
camera takes 6.7 megapixel shots,
while the 830 is 10 megapixels.
By contrast, the 930 phone is at
20 megapixels, one of the highest
in a smartphone.
The 830 has a 5-inch screen
and will cost about 330 euros
($435) before tax, compared with
440 euros for the Samsung Gal-
axy S5 and 515 euros for the iP-
hone 5.
The 4.7-inch 730 will cost 199
euros. It will have 3G connectiv-
ity and slots for two SIM cards,
an important feature in emerging
markets where wireless plans
vary widely such that users switch
services often to get the best
deals.A 4G version will be known
as the 735 and will cost 219 eu-
ros.
Microsoft, which bought
Skype three years ago, is also
throwing in three months of free
international voice calls with ev-
ery new purchase.
The new phones will start
shipping in September, though
not necessarily right away in all
markets. Typically, Lumia
phones make it to the U.S. under
different model numbers.
Among other new releases un-
veiled at the show:
Chinese firm Huawei is fo-
cusing on battery life with its
Ascend Mate7 smartphone,
which as 6-inch screen and a
massive 4100 mAh battery.
Shao Yang, head of Huawei’s
marketing department, said even
heavy users would get two days’
work out of a full battery
charge.
The Mate7 sports a finger-
print sensor on the back that can
be used to unlock the phone. But
while Samsung and Apple have
already done this in their latest
flagship phones, Huawei lets us-
ers associate each of up to five
fingers with a different function.
This can be used to show some-
thing to a friend but hide private
photos, for example.
Taiwanese phone manufac-
turer HTC unveiled a mid-tier
Desire phone.
The Desire 820 has an 8-mega-
pixel front-facing camera for the
increasingly important selfie
function; and a 5.5-inch screen
to show off the videos recorded
with the 13-megapixel back cam-
era.
“I think we
have to amplify
the message
around security
regarding these
cloud services.”
— Chris Weber,
Microsoft vice president
for mobile devices sales
Companies look to increase visual
searching to encompass shopping
DC nominee looking
to other cities for
technology ideas
WASHINGTON (AP) — The District of
Columbia’s Democratic mayoral nominee
says she’s been meeting with mayors from
around North America as she develops
ideas to improve the city’s technology cli-
mate.
Muriel Bowser delivered the keynote
address Monday at a conference on tech-
nology in government. She says she’s met
recently with the mayors of Houston; Aus-
tin, Texas; and Montreal, Canada. She says
she admires former mayor Thomas Menino
of Boston, who poured resources into the
South Boston waterfront to turn it into an
innovation hub. She also cited former New
York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s
work establishing a technology campus on
Roosevelt Island.
As the Democratic nominee, Bowser is
favored to win the general election in the
heavily Democratic nation’s capital. Her
challengers include independents David
Catania and Carol Schwartz.
Noriega
14 – THE DERRICK. / The News-Herald Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014