Rapleaf wants every person to be able to have a meaningful, personalized online experience. To achieve this, Rapleaf helps leading businesses personalize customer interactions through deeper customer insight. The San Francisco based company also brings new and effective data segments to the online marketplace to help advertisers reach their ideal audience. WSJ explained how the system works and here is an example data RapLeaf had on one user. via WSJ Research (click above link to see an interactive graphics)
Three researchers (Arjun Jain, Thorsten Thorm¨ahlen, Hans-Peter Seidel and Christian Theobalt) at Germany’s Max Planck Institute have developed MovieReshape, a software program that can alter the images of people on the film in order to change their body type.
Abstract: A system for quick and easy manipulation of the body shape and proportions of a human actor in arbitrary video footage. The approach is based on a morphable model of 3D human shape and pose that was learned from laser scans of real people. The algorithm commences by spatio-temporally fitting the pose and shape of this model to the actor in either single-view or multi-view video footage. Once the model has been fitted, semantically meaningful attributes of body shape, such as height, weight or waist girth, can be interactively modified by the user. The changed proportions of the virtual human model are then applied to the actor in all video frames by performing an image-based warping. By this means, we can now conveniently perform spatio-temporal reshaping of human actors in video footage which we show on a variety of video sequences.
The software is still in development, and will not be officially debuted until Siggraph, the computer graphics conference in Seoul, South Korea that takes place in December.
The software will save costs in any instance where special effects can be employed, including in commercials, where one ad could be filmed, then the actor's body-type could be manipulated to meet local "standards of beauty".
For more information read reaearch paper (Adobe Acrobat PDF, 6.6 MB).
Note: If you read this via Email or Feed-reader can't see youtube video click Permalink below to see.
Marketers are spying on Internet users -- observing and remembering people's clicks, and building and selling detailed dossiers of their activities and interests. The Wall Street Journal's What They Know series documents the new, cutting-edge uses of this Internet-tracking technology. The Journal analyzed the tracking files installed on people's computers by the 50 most popular U.S. websites, plus WSJ.com. The Journal also built an "exposure index" -- to determine the degree to which each site exposes visitors to monitoring -- by studying the tracking technologies they install and the privacy policies that guide their use.
via blogs.wsj.com (Click here to see an interactive tool)
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to roll out sophisticated electronic ID tags to track individual pairs of jeans and underwear, the first step in a system that advocates say better controls inventory but some critics say raises privacy concerns
