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Microsoft's SkyDrive Adds Bing-Powered OCR Features
At its Build conference earlier this year, Microsoft launched its developer services for Bing, including the Bing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Control. Today, the company announced that it is now using Bing’s OCR tools to extract text from photos uploaded to its SkyDrive cloud storage service.
This, of course, is similar to what companies like Evernote do with images you store on its service and Google, too, uses OCR to make images on Drive searchable. Now that the SkyDrive team has partnered with the Bing team to add OCR to its feature line-up, its users, too, will reap similar benefits. The feature, Microsoft says, will support “most” common picture formats and is now turned on for users whose browser language is set to English, Portuguese, Spanish, French and German. The tool will automatically run on all camera roll photos uploaded to SkyDrive.
The Bing OCR control, it’s worth noting, is currently only available to developers who are working on Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 store apps. It’s not available for developers who want to use it in their web apps, though the team clearly made an exception for the SkyDrive team.
Over the last few months, Microsoft has made quite a few changes to the photo experience on SkyDrive. In May, for example, the company rolled out its timeline-based photo albums and folders. Overall, though, the service’s focus remains more on standard office documents than media files, which makes sense, given its integration with Microsoft’s Office Web Apps.
Nintendo Reveals The Hideous $130 2DS, Will Cut Wii U Price To $299
Nintendo wants to compete with cheap tablets more than ever, just not the way you think. The company will release a new version of the 3DS, the Nintendo 2DS — it has a tablet-esque form factor. As the name suggests, it is a 2D-only handheld console compatible with 3DS and DS games. At $129.99, the 2DS is $50 cheaper than its sibling. The company also announced a $50 price cut for the Wii U on September 20, ahead of the releases of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
While the 3DS is doing well, it’s another story for the Wii U. As of June 30, Nintendo reported 3.61 million sales. As a reminder, in July 2007, 7 months after the release of the Wii, the company was selling 1.8 million consoles each month. Now, Nintendo wants to compete on price to stay relevant.
But the console still lacks games. Many third-party publishers, such as Electronic Arts, Activision and Ubisoft, will only released their games on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The PlayStation 4 will cost $399 and the Xbox One $499.
Nintendo probably thought that launching the Wii U a year before its competitor was the right move to get a head start. But it is hard to convince existing Wii owners that the Wii U isn’t just a tiny upgrade with a tablet-like controller. The name of the console itself doesn’t help. It finally is an HD console from Nintendo, but it’s hard to communicate about the number of pixels on a screen.
With the 2DS, Nintendo finally built a gaming tablet. It could have a certain appeal to parents who are hesitating between a cheap Android tablet and a Nintendo handheld console, but the form factor doesn’t seem very practical for gamers, and especially children with tiny hands.
Available on October 12, the 2DS will retain the same features as the 3DS, except its main feature — the 3D display. It has the same stylus, Wi-Fi and comes with a 4GB SD card. While $130 is cheap, 3DS games are still more expensive than iOS or Android games. But you won’t find Mario on your iPad.
As Nintendo suggests in the 2DS promo video, the new console is “a handheld gaming system from Nintendo like you’ve never seen before.” Everyone can agree that Nintendo is right on this one.
Zite Brings A New Design To Its Personalized News App On Android, Launches On Google Glass
Zite, the “intelligent magazine” that presents readers with news articles based on their personal interests, is releasing a big update to its Android app today. It’s also launching an app for Google Glass.
CEO Mark Johnson stopped by the TechCrunch office to show us the new products. Since you still need an invite to purchase Google Glass, and since it costs $1,500, Johnson admitted that he doesn’t expect Zite to find a huge user base on that platform, at least not right away. Instead, he sees it as an experiment to try to figure out what the news consumption looks like on wearable devices.
“I really see a revolution coming in wearables,” Johnson said. “We want to make sure we understand what users want.”
So the initial app is just a way to browse headlines, but Johnson suggested there could be many new features in the future. For one thing, Zite could add other types of notifications.
The Android update, meanwhile, is the first to include the Zite 2.0 redesign that the company launched on iPhone and iPad late last year (and tweaked in February). In addition to the new design, the updated app includes some Android-specific features, like the ability to add a Zite widget to your homescreen and integration with Samsung’s S-Pen.
Beyond the specific product launches, Zite is also coming up on the two-year anniversary of its acquisition by CNN. During our conversation, I noticed that Johnson continued to refer to his team as a startup, and when I asked about it, he pointed out that he’s the only CEO at CNN.
“It’s really a symbolic move in some ways, but it’s a signal both inside and outside the company that the buck stop here, that I still own what comes out of the company,” Johnson said.
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