Ten days ago Foursquare reached the two-million-users landmark, just three months after it had reached the one-million mark. A week earlier, the company received $20m in venture capital from a who's who of Silicon Valley luminaries. It appears the trajectory for Foursquare is only upwards. But as the critical mass of Foursquare users swells and intensifies over the coming months and years, the concerns over privacy are likely to magnify. In June, Webroot, a Denver-based internet security firm, surveyed 1,645 users of "geo-location-ready mobile devices", including 624 in the UK: 29% said they shared their location with people other than their friends; 31% said they accepted a friend request from a stranger; and, yet, 55% still said they were worried about their loss of privacy.
johannessimon81 on 09 Nov 13Interesting historical perspective. Progress since the late '80 really seems to be fairly slow. ?: Do we need to wait for the singularity until speech recognition works without flaws?
Paul N on 13 Nov 13The problem is that we don't yet understand how speech in humans actually works. As long as we merely build either inference or statistical language models we'll never get perfect speech recognition. A lot of recognition in humans has a predictive/expectational basis to it that stems from our understanding of higher lvl concepts and context awareness. Sadly I suspect that as long as machines remain unembodied in their perceptual abilities their ability to either properly recognize sounds/speech or objects and other features will never reach perfection.
