Mobile Groove

Voice — speech recognition and natural language understanding — are poised to transform our daily lives and disrupt all industries — not just mobile. Thanks to companies like Nuance Communications — which is also the speech-recognition engine behind Siri, the virtual personal assistant on the Apple iPhone — we are rapidly moving toward a voice-enabled future. We catch up today with Vlad Sejnoha, Nuance Chief Technology Officer, to get an inside track on the topics he will address at M…

Where is the BIG money in mobile? Why the disconnect between the time we spend on mobile and the amount of money brands spend to reach us on our personal devices? Questions around mobile monetization come fast and hard — and the answers are never easy.

Facebook — the leader in the combined power of mobile and social ­— has seen its stock price plunge, a development that has brought even more urgency to the discussion. The timing couldn’t be better for industry authority and analyst Mary Me…

Is voice the new battlefield as companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nuance) jockey for position to control the voice interface and our personal search and assistance experiences? Roberto Pieraccini, industry veteran and author of new book The Voice in the Machine, looks and the evolution of voice in computing and communications and maps out the future of mobile voice and beyond.

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If you watch Kubrick’s 1968 classic movie “2001 A Space Odyssey” today, you will certainly notice that ma…

Evolution, not revolution. That is what I witnessed first-hand as I walked around South By Southwest (SXSW) , the festival and conference hailed as a breeding ground for new ideas and creative technologies.

In 2010, the Next Big Thing was location-based social networking, a mobile-megatrend CNN reminds us was led by the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla. Last year it was all about group messaging services such as GroupMe or Beluga. And this year the excitement is all about “ambient location” and “social discovery” — a new category of interaction that brings together all the GPS-enabled mobile apps that run in the background on our devices and alert us when like-minded people are nearby.

At m-pulse we wrap up a month dedicated to mobile voice technology and transformation with a look at Nuance, a company aggressively leveraging its long heritage in speech recognition to enable a range of new experiences and – ultimately – a new voice search experience (and ecosystem). Our guest is Kenn Harper, Nuance Mobile Director of Product Management.

In other segments we discuss some new numbers from Xyologic, a company tracking app downloads to provide us a more European perspective on the rise of Android and the increasing importance of local content and context. And this time my co-host Rob Woodbridge raises his goblet of rock to an innovation (and a mad genius) that redefines what we mean by ‘awesome.’ (Words alone don’t do it justice, so you’ll have to tune into m-pulse and check out the video teaser Rob has inserted into this week’s vodcast.)

Should we brace ourselves for a new battle as companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nuance) jockey for position to control the voice interface and our personal search/assistance experience? We continue our look at the opportunities and competition around mobile voice with Roberto Pieraccini, industry veteran and author of The Voice in the Machine.

In other segments we discuss the wider issue of personal privacy, following the news that social app Path has been uploading user data to its servers without our consent. Rob Woodbridge recounts a checklist of things to consider when building privacy into your minimum viable product. And we both find a perfect fit with a brilliant presentation— whose time has come (again) — from Jonathan MacDonald, a thought-leader and entrepreneur in digital media perhaps best known for his passionate views on the 3Ps (Permission: people will decide what brand messages they interact with; Privacy: people will decide where their data is collected and how it is used; and Preference: people will decide what content they find relevant). More about that further down in this post.