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IDG Contributor Network: It’s all about the search: AppDirect ponies up and acquires Xendo

One thing you can say about AppDirect, the company that powers a number of the biggest application marketplaces on the Web: Its timing is pretty impeccable.

AppDirect smartly (or luckily, depending on your perspective of the company’s prescience) raised a truckload of cash over the past few years and, rather than blowing it all on frivolous things, has seemed to follow a careful strategy. That strategy sees it grow strongly, but appropriately, both through expansion of its own footprint and through acquisitions.

A few weeks ago while in Europe I managed to get myself invited to sit in on an AppDirect customer day in which some big European customers spent time talking with the company, but more importantly each other, about the issues in standing up and managing customer-facing application marketplace. While the stuff I heard was in-confidence, and I probably shouldn’t divulge which companies were present, suffice it to say that AppDirect seems to be asking all the right questions, and listening intently to what its customers ask for.

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Microsoft pact makes Baidu the Edge browser’s default search engine in China

Screen Shot 2015-09-23 at 6.58.05 PM
Microsoft has announced a new partnership with Baidu, the hugely popular Chinese search engine. In China, Baidu.com will be the default home page and search engine for the new Microsoft Edge browser. Additionally, Baidu will deliver Universal Windows Applications for search, video, cloud and maps for Windows 10. The company plans to deliver a customized experience for Baidu’s more than 600 million users, featuring local browsing and search. Microsoft will make it easy for customers to upgrade to the official Windows 10 via a Baidu “Windows 10 Express” distribution channel. Microsoft isn’t abandoning Bing in China in its support for Baidu. According to Yusuf…

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Peloton’s on-demand spin class app now lets you bookmark and filter search results

peloton ipad app update
Last year, when I reviewed Peloton, a new indoor cycling bike system with on-demand lessons from a live studio, I came to the conclusion that the bike itself could be too expensive for most people. Since then, the company has released an iPad app for users to ride along using their own bikes, and today an update will make it even easier to find the rides you want whenever you want it. The latest version of the Peloton app now allows users to bookmark rides they like, whether it’s one they’ve taken before that they enjoyed or from an instructor…

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Google says its voice search system is now more accurate, especially in noisy places

Google voice search on the web.

If you’ve noticed Google doing a better job of understanding what you say using speech recognition on your smartphone lately, you’re not crazy. Google’s voice search has indeed become more accurate, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, the tech company announced today.

“Today, we’re happy to announce we built even better neural network acoustic models using Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and sequence discriminative training techniques,” Google Speech Team members Haşim Sak, Andrew Senior, Kanishka Rao, Françoise Beaufays and Johan Schalkwyk wrote in a blog post today. “These models are a special extension of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that are more accurate, especially in noisy environments, and they are blazingly fast!”

The new models are working in the Google app for iOS and Android, as well as dictation on Android, which works inside of some third-party apps, the team members wrote.

From VentureBeat

Location, location, location — Not using geolocation to reach your mobile customers? Your competitors are. Find out what you’re missing.

Google has reported improvements in voice search not once but twice this year. Clearly the company has been investing in the underlying technology. RNNs are one increasingly popular approach to doing deep learning, a type of artificial intelligence, and Google is widely thought to have a deep bench in deep learning.

But Apple and Microsoft, among others, have also been working to improve their voice recognition capabilities. Meanwhile, Facebook is also doing more in the area, having acquired a speech recognition company, Wit.ai, some months ago.

Speech could become more important as an input to searching the Web in the years to come. Baidu’s Andrew Ng, who is known for his work on the so-called Google Brain, last year predicted that within five years “50 percent of queries will be on speech or images.”

“In addition to requiring much lower computational resources, the new models are more accurate, robust to noise, and faster to respond to voice search queries — so give it a try, and happy (voice) searching!” wrote Sak, Senior, Rao, Beaufays, and Schalkwyk.

Read the full blog post for more detail on how the team managed to get the new performance gains.

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