Triplesourced

You'd like to think that the king of the Internet could handle a little thing like Wi-Fi and electricity but we have been without wireless for most of the morning and power has been and on and off! Not the best piece of PR when you have assembled hundreds of journalists from across Europe to listen to how great you are...

I am over in Paris for Google's first ever charm offensive for the European press - it had a similar event last year in the US and is trying the model over here - but at the moment it more offensive than charm.

CEO Eric Schmidt is showing up later so let's hope they have got the power working properly by then cos I am betting he won't take a comms collapse as well as VP of search Marissa Mayer who soldiered on despite water coming through the ceiling and a complete power collapse half-way through her talk.

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The Economist's latest tech quarterly makes for some interesting reading – especially a myth-busting piece about how we actually interact with communications technology. Although technology means that we have the infrastructure to work anywhere, anytime – it doesn't actually follow that people will actually do it. The technology for video-calls exists but so far it's had little to no uptake at all. And the same goes for the "hyper mobility myth" according to Stefana Broadbent, the academic cited in the Economist piece:

"…Ms Broadbent found that there is not, in fact, much appetite for working while on the move. Indeed, she calls this “the hypermobility myth”. After studying workers who spend more than half their time out of the office—salesmen, consultants, pilots, journalists and photographers—she found that they generally stick to communications while on the move, gathering information that they then work on when they get back to their desks. Hotel rooms and airports are, she says, “not seen as an appropriate environment for substantive work” and are mainly used for e-mail."

You might have thought that the concept of a machine that can emote was pure science fiction. Not so – emotionally cognisant technology is right here, right now it seems. And who do we have to thank for this amazing breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence, MIT, NASA, Google? No, the company that has smashed through pre-conceived notions of the limits of AI is…Trend Micro!

A PR missive pinged through to ZDNet UK this morning summarising the security company's OfficeScan™ 8.0 technology reads thus:

“Just like our emotional intelligence sends us warning signals when we’re faced with a situation where the outcome is likely to be negative for the second time running, this security technology now combines near-genius algorithms with the basic emotional intelligence of the human brain”

Wow – I hope someone has forwarded this to the Nobel Foundation.

I have to admit that I only listened up to the bit where you get the impression that someone has just put a plastic bag on your head - which I am not advocating by the way if there are any kids reading. Apparently this is one of the must-listen-to jokes doing the rounds at the moment - interestingly it's audio and not video - the power of the imagination - and stereo output is alive and well it seems:

http://david-heron.me.uk/blog/2007/04/08/virtual-barbershop/