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my new ‘Social TV’ experience

Posted by Riaz Ahmed May 25th, 2011

It’s smart and social…

So, over the (Royal) Easter break not only did I treat myself to lots of chocolate Easter eggs and even a Royal Wedding street party (thanks mum!), I went out and bought myself a new TV. Well it turns out that not only does my new Samsung D7000 produce crystal clear HD/3D output it’s also very smart and social…

Ok so it doesn’t suggest the next big IPO to invest in or go out and watch the football with me, but with a huge array of very cool and useful Internet-enabled features, my new Samsung TV, has not only made my viewing experience a whole lot more enriched but I think Samsung are on a journey that will make them stand out from not only the competition like Sony, but rival Internet TV services such as those provided by Google and Apple.

Connectivity and Streaming

With built-in Wi-Fi and a very easy set up process I was up and running within a few minutes. The first thing the TV did when it connected to my broadband Wi-Fi was to start updating itself…after the TV came on it instantly discovered my laptop which had ‘media share’ software installed. Media share software e.g. Windows Media Center, allows sharing of music, video and image files stored on your laptop to externally connected devices. This meant without further configuring or cabling I could view almost any media file from my laptop over Wi-Fi. Because the TV could support many different and newer media formats (MPEG4, Xvid, DivX, MKV, MP3, WMA, JPEG) none of my media files needed converting. Ok ok so lots of modern TV sets have this already so nothing new there, but wait it gets better…

Samsung Smart TV Hub (click for a larger image)

The ‘Hub’ Button

While unpacking the remote control, I noticed a button called hub, upon pressing it I was taken to the Samsung Smart TV Hub which is a portal to all the Samsung TV apps and features. Because I enjoy tweeting I immediately went to try out the TV Twitter app. But before I could load the app, I was taken to the ‘Register Services’ screen. This screen allowed me to create a single Samsung TV login account that would store my credentials for social networking TV services that were available such as: Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google Talk, etc

Tweet tweet... the Samsung Smart TV Twitter App (click for a larger image)

Social TV…tweet and watch!

Once I finished registering and logging into the Twitter service, I immediately found myself immersed into the world of Twitter on my TV where I could start viewing tweets, replying to tweets and almost anything that a Twitter app for my laptop or phone could do. What I really liked about the experience was that I was able to switch from using the full-sized app to a real-time social interactive tv view to allow what Samsung calls a ‘Social TV’ experience. Whenever I wanted the ‘Social TV’ experience all I had to do was press the social button on the remote control and have instant access to my social networking services. What would be really cool would be integration with Windows Live Messenger 2011…but with Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Skype it will be interesting to see what will happen in this space…

Samsung Smart TV Social TV (click for a larger image)

Samsung TV Apps Store

The Samsung Smart TV Twitter app was very slick and I wanted to discover more….so the next TV app I tried out was the BBC iPlayer app, again this was also impressive and I was able to start watching BBC content with very few presses on my remote. The BBC iPlayer HD content was particularly impressive and the programme search worked well and fast. Oh and I would like to point out that I only have a 4MB broadband connection at home and all the streaming worked well with very few judders! Likewise while trying out the YouTube TV app I was very impressed how it worked so seamlessly well with the TV and made good use of the remote control buttons to navigate through the app. I wanted to see what other apps I could download for the TV so I went back to the Smart Hub and navigated to the Samsung apps widget. This took me to the very impressive Samsung Apps Store where I could search and download a variety of cool apps for the TV. I think the UK Samsung app store has about a 100 apps so far, with newer apps always popping up, like the recent Explore 3D App

Samsung Smart TV App Store (click for a larger image)

Two million Five million downloaded TV apps

In a January 2011 press release, Samsung stated that two million apps had been downloaded from the Samsung TV app store. The press release went on to say:

“Samsung reached the 2 million mark within a year of the launch of Samsung Apps and the number of apps downloaded has doubled since November, when it reached one million downloads.”

“After reaching one million downloads, consumers have downloaded an average of 100,000 applications every five days.”

The full press release can be found here

Update: as this article goes live, Samsung are reporting that they have passed 5 million app downloads

A TV SDK* for the developer community

Back in September last year, Samsung ran a competition for developers to build the best looking and most innovative Samsung TV app. The winners shared a pot of 500,000 euros and the voting public got a chance to win a new Samsung TV. These types of initiatives always encourage more and more developers to develop for your platform and now Samsung claim they have over 400 TV apps available in over 120 countries.

After a little bit of digging around, I found that to develop a Samsung Smart TV app, you need skills in JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Developing a Samsung TV Widget seemed quite straightforward; Liam Green-Hughes has a great write up on developing a “Hello World” app on his blog.

* SDK: software development kit

Full Internet browsing with Flash but not HTML5 yet!

Another very cool feature on my Samsung TV is that it has a built-in fully functional web browser. The browser is based on an adaptive version of Google Chrome. The browsing experience is quite good and the experience is enhanced even more so by a built-in pointer in the remote control which acts like a mouse. The menu items in browser are easily accessible by the remote control buttons and the browsers ability to play flash content was a very welcome feature. The only drawback was the browser’s inability to play HTML5 content, but I have read that HTML5 will be fully supported and available in the coming months.

Samsung Smart TV Web Browser (click for a larger image)

Search

A very useful and well thought-out feature of the TV is search. The search function can be accessed directly from the remote control or from the Smart Hub. When I searched for ‘Arsenal’, the search app started searching for all Arsenal related content from Facebook, YouTube, Websites, Samsung TV apps and even my own media library that was stored on my laptop.

Samsung Smart TV Universal Search (click for a larger image)

(credit for picture with Iron Man 2 search: http://www.samsung.com/us/article/the-wonder-of-samsung-smart-tvs)

A Google TV/Apple TV Killer?

Absolutely yes! If Samsung keep investing in TV app development and roll out feature-rich updates with new Internet based widgets, apps and services to the Smart Hub, I think Samsung television owners won’t need to purchase Apple TV or Google TV products. Last week, Samsung UK announced a deal with Channel Five about rolling out a Five on Demand app. These are exactly the type of deals Samsung will need to do to get consumers choosing Samsung over other rivals. The more content providers that sign up with Samsung the more appealing these sets will become to consumers.

Whilst talking about rivals, Sony, will be launching their Internet TV sets in June/July this year. They are offering Internet based features similar to that of Samsung but have one big advantage……..Sony can provide a huge amount of Sony owned content like Hollywood blockbusters and a massive music catalogue. Currently this is available through the Qriocity TV service but I can see this expanding and becoming very feature rich. The only drawback is that the new Sony HX TV’s are much more expensive than Samsung’s identical sets.

So yes, it is smart and social

Ok so it doesn’t suggest the next big IPO to invest in (smart) or go out and watch the football with me (social) but with an array of top notch Internet enabled features, services and lots of TV apps in development, surely Samsung are on a winner and this is certainly the year of the Internet TV — with social being at the heart of Samsung’s offering.

Thanks for reading!

Riaz Ahmed is the Head of Microsoft Development at LBi and can be found here @TheRealRiaz and here LinkedIn

Tags: apple, Apple TV, Facebook, Google, Google TV, Internet TV, Microsoft, samsung, Samsung Smart TV, Skype, social, social networks, Social TV, Streaming, Technology, Windows Live Messenger

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Weekly Social Media Update

Posted by rebcla May 10th, 2011

Microsoft, not Facebook make unexpected purchase of Skype

Today Microsoft have announced that they will be buying Skype for an astonishing value of up to $8.5 billion dollars, after rumors that Facebook and Google were in talks with Skype. In case you didn’t know, Skype is the market leader in internet calling with around 670 million registered users, although they have a worryingly low conversion rate.  Only about 6% of its users actually pay for the service. This deal will add Skype to the Windows Live network, and give more opportunities for brands to place ads.

Ben & Jerry’s donates your spare Twitter characters in honour of World Fair Trade Day on May 14

The iconic ice-cream brand, Ben & Jerry’s have launched a great campaign on Twitter with this cool application that squeezes your tweet. It makes sure all your unused characters go to good use in spreading awareness of World Fair Trade Day this Saturday. The shorter your tweet the more support for #FairTrade! Fair Tweet here

YouTube Movies

Google has confirmed plans to extend its YouTube Movies service. YouTube has partnered with Universal, Sony Pictures and Warner Bros to offer full-length feature films. Piracy concerns are rumored to have stopped Paramount, 20^th Century Fox and Walt Disney signing up as rental partners. You can see the full announcement on the YouTube blog here

The deal means that US viewers will get to choose from 3,000 films to rent from around $2.99 per film.  The film rental deal is crucial for YouTube.  Currently the average user spends around 15 minutes a day on the site, although YouTube wants to be the chosen destination for all types of quality video content. This announcement will challenge the likes of Netflix and iTunes.

Tags: Ben & Jerry's, Facebook, Fair trade, Fair Tweet, Microsoft, movies, Skype, Social Media, YouTube

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Search engines still struggling with Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)

Posted by Ian Macfarlane September 6th, 2010

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are now a reality and in use by websites right now. Unfortunately, it seems that the search engines are still playing catch-up.

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Introduction

Note: If you are unable to view the Arabic and Cyrillic letters in this page you may need to install the required fonts.

Now that the first Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) have gone live and have had some time to get established, it seems like a good time to revisit the finding of my previous article on IDNs “Can search engines handle Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)?”

IDNs went live initially for three countries, all using the Arabic alphabet: Egypt (مصر); Saudi Arabia (السعودية); and the United Arab Emirates (امارات). Russia’s new IDN (рф) went live a little later, adding the Cyrillic alphabet to the mix, and additional IDNs have been created for other countries and alphabets. For this article I’ll take a look at how search engines handle these four IDNs.

IDN site search

To get an idea of how extensively the search engines have indexed sites on these new IDNs I’m going to use the “site:” operator. Although this operator is primarily used for finding pages on a particular website, e.g. [site:lbi.co.uk] it can also work all the way up to the TLD level, e.g. [site:uk].

Searching Google for [site:مصر], [site: السعودية], [site:امارات] and [site:рф] returns results from the IDNs  for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Russia as expected. Whilst the new IDN for Saudi Arabia only had 14 pages indexed when checked, the other IDNs all feature thousands of results.

Screenshot of a search for [site:рф] in Google:

Trying the same searches in Bing, however, does not return any results:

It appears that the site: operator does not work with these new IDNs in Bing (searching for other domains, e.g. [site:com], works as expected).

IDNs in search results?

The next area tested is whether the search engines will return these domains in their search results. To test this I picked out some random web pages on the new Egyptian IDN and tried searching for their title tags in both Google and Bing.

Searching both Google and Bing for the title of one web page, [مراكز التميز في البحث والتطوير - وزارة الإتصالات], brought up a number of web pages. The results from Google and Bing both contained a result from an IDN:

Google snippet featuring an IDN:

Bing snippet featuring an IDN:

More IDN bugs

Earlier I described how Bing’s site: operator does not yet work with IDNs. However, Google also has a number of IDN woes. Searching for [site:مصر] (the new IDN for Egypt) brings up the site سجل.مصر – however, clicking on the “Show more results from سجل.مصر” link in Google appears to be listing sites on domains other than سجل.مصر. Additionally, the “Show all results” link is percent encoded rather than listing the site name in the Arabic font.

In my previous look at how search engines handled IDNs I had found that Google’s links to “Translate this page” and “Cached” were broken for IDNs. Today it appears that Google has fixed the translation links – however, the cache links still do not appear to function.

Conclusion

The situation is much the same as it was back in February. The search engines can index websites which use IDNs – however, all of the major search engines still have bugs with their IDN support.

Given that the number of IDNs is set to grow and the number of websites using IDNs is likely to vastly increase in the near future, it’s vital that the search engines iron out the bugs in their IDN support. After all, if a search engine can’t handle websites from a particular properly, people might decide to switch to a search engine that can.

Tags: domains, Google, international, keywords, language, Microsoft, research, search, SEO

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London Guathon DDD Event

Posted by Bahareh Boostani August 18th, 2010

Last Friday I had the good fortune (as well as good friends who did the booking for me) to attend London Guathon DDD event. This was a free community event hosted by Microsoft to reveal their latest technology roadmaps and strategies. Within the geek community these event tickets are  as prized as the golden ones within Wonka  Bars with all 240 places being filled in less than 20min.

Despite being late due to the Runaway tube train  and the Northern line being closed I managed to get to the Odeon in Covent Garden just on time (OK, I was 15 minutes late, but the session started 15 minutes after I arrived).

ScottGu in London Guathon DDD

Scott Guthrie opened up the event with an introduction to the sessions of the day. These sessions spanned four different aspects of Microsoft’s new technologies:

1. VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4
2. ASP.NET MVC 2
3. Windows Phone 7 Development
4. Web Development Futures: ASP.NET MVC 3, SQL CE and IIS Express

What was cool?

First session had many tips and tricks from Scott ‘Gu’ including some which are guaranteed to make the geeks squeal with delight.
The second session was the real meat in the sandwich for those who care about content and the way it is presented. For the past 10 years, ASP.Net was a great platform in terms of development productivity and for building enterprise applications. But its weakness was in the poor quality front-end code it generated; something that LBi interface developers and SEO consultants constantly complained about. However, Microsoft’s new ASP.NET MVC will be a game changer in this part (there are useful packages in IIS 7 to help on the SEO side.)

And yes, Windows Phone 7 will be released around October in UK. Microsoft intends to send a strong statement of intent to the smart phones market. Mike Ormond’s slides on the day can be found here.

And finally, In the last session on Web futures Scott Gu announced new technologies including IIS Express, MVC3, code-first Entity Framework, Razor (the new view engine for ASP.NET) that is going to be released soon by Microsoft. Then he discussed the common themes of these new developments which are to keep the existing technologies working better and cleaner and to enable extensibility and customization.

Revolutionary… No, but Microsoft are moving in the right direction whilst correcting some of the legacy issues of .Net. Who knows one day we may be able to have more than one form again…

Microsoft continue to pick up many of the good ideas that have been implemented in other languages for a little while and we’re starting to see some real productivity improvements as a consequence. However Microsoft remains a big beast and how these developments relate to the Sharepoints and Silverlights of the world remains to be seen. Refinement rather than reinvention is definitely order of the day for Microsoft and for that they should be commended.

Tags: ASP.NET, IIS, Microsoft, mobile, mvc, Technology, UK, VS2010, Web design, WP7

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