If social and mobile are just steps down the road to contextual applications, Plantronics figures intelligence built into headsets can help pave the way.

Read the article in InformationWeek

Early integration partners include Sococo, creator of a unique bobble-head avatar collaboration tool; Five9, a provider of cloud-based call center software; and PGi, the company behind the iMeet and Global Meet virtual meeting services.

For example, according to a published case study, developers at Five9 used the SDK to leverage contextual data from agents’ headsets based on their availability at any point in time. With the Plantronics Voyager Pro UC, Five9 can intelligently sense the agent’s state, based on proximity to the work station, and forward the calls if the agent is away, according to Plantronics.

Plantronics has recently announced the Plantronics Developer Connection (PDC), which includes programming interfaces, technical resources, and forums through a software developer kit made for Windows environments, and serves as a community for developers to connect with Plantronics staff. The PDC also comes with an emulator to let developers test applications without a headset.

The Plantronics Developer Connection brings contextual intelligence and smart communications to existing applications so that they can benefit from information such as knowing the user’s headset state, communications capabilities, proximity, etc…

Read about the Sococo connection.

Article by David F. Carr

Microsoft’s keynote presentation from Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate VP for Office, casually referred to the product line that includes SharePoint and Lync as delivering a great social experience….Link to article

One of the best indications I had of the face phenomenon was a conversation with Sococo, a startup I like to think of as the bobblehead collaboration company. While hardly a household name, Sococo has proven it’s possible to create a sense of connection and intimacy even with a fairly abstract representation of remote participants. Each person is represented onscreen as a colored ball with just a bit of character. Essentially animated status icons, these avatars signal their availability for a call, videoconference, or impromptu chat visually–for example, by whether or not the avatar is wearing a headset or whether the door to its virtual office is open or closed. Sococo team spaces can also include screensharing and other modes of collaboration.

Sococo’s style of virtual collaboration contrasts with more literal, Second Life-style 3-D collaboration spaces, exemplified by products like Avaya’s web.alive (soon to be renamed AvayaLive Engage). However, Sococo president Chris Wheeler thinks incorporating people’s real faces might not be such a bad idea, after all.

“We are working on a way to overlay faces on top of the avatars. We haven’t done that yet, but it’s one of the most common requests,” Wheeler said. Possibly, the faces could be included in a pop-up contact card, or be displayed when the user hovered his mouse over an icon. The abstract avatars work as “a constant reminder of who is there, physically or virtually,” and as a way of organizing who is or is not available and who is included in which meetings, he said. “At the same time there is no substitute for the face.”

Sococo. Startup Sococo has rethought the metaphors for collaboration (think virtual team rooms that mimic a company) and the social nature of getting work done and managing projects in the digital world. The result is software-as- a-service provided on a per-user subscription basis that puts systems based on red, yellow, and green “availability” buttons to shame.

read the article by Eric Lundquist

Artificial intelligence has recently seen some great developments: better search engines, improved speech recognition programs, IBM’s Watson project, and more.

Underlying all of these advances are models of machine learning. Often, these models are in turn based on mathematical frameworks created by Judea Pearl, professor emeritus at UCLA, that enable algorithms that incorporate real world experiences and human reasoning.

Today, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) announced that its annual A.M. Turing Award—generally considered the highest honor in computer science—will be awarded to Dr. Judea Pearl for his work on the partnership between humans and machines, part of what is generally known as artificial intelligence. In particular, Pearl is recognized for creating a framework for reasoning with imperfect data that has changed how people approach real-world problem solving.

Read the article by Michael J. Miller