"Intelligent design" might be controversial as a theory for how the universe was created, but it's a good way to make VUIs or" Voice User Interfaces" natural and expressive.

Sheyla Militello, who works on Loquendo's marketing and business development, and who was recently appointed Project Manager for different EU projects, wrote an essay for Loquendo that points out, "The necessity of at least partial automation of customer support via CRM, mostly due to economic reasons, is anything but new. There are a huge number of companies that have considerable costs and resources dedicated to call/contact centers and that depend on them for a significant part of their business and support."

Militello says callers want to have their needs quickly and courteously met. Fair enough, but there's the classic dilemma: "From the end-user's perspective, nothing beats having an empowered and well-trained person on the organization's front-end. From the provider's perspective, well-trained and empowered customer service representatives are expensive."

In short, she says, "users and providers do not use the same criteria when measuring VUI usefulness and effectiveness. The user's criteria are, for example, 'Can I get the information or perform the transaction I want? Is the result worth my effort to get it? Do I feel like I'm receiving a valuable service?' while the provider's criteria are 'Does it reduce the load on customer service agents? Are users satisfied with the experience? Does it increase the number of users I connect with?"

Market research firm Infonetics Research has released the fourth quarter edition of its Data Center Network Equipment market share and forecast report.

"Cisco continues to dominate the overall data center network equipment market, as few vendors can match the breadth of Cisco's product portfolio," notes Matthias Machowinski, Infonetics Research's directing analyst for enterprise voice and data, in an opinion calculated to surprise precisely no one.

But there's hope for Cisco's competition: In each segment, the report finds, "Cisco encounters strong competitors that are focused on that segment, whether it's Juniper for data center Ethernet switches, F5 in ADCs, or Riverbed/Blue Coat for WAN optimization."

Highlighting the data center, the report finds that Ethernet switches hit $3.2 billion in 2009, "capped by a very strong fourth quarter, indicating a resurgence in data center build-outs, along with the general recovery in network equipment sales."

Dell'Oro Group, a vendor of market information about the networking and telecommunications industries, has announced that it has launched coverage on the Wireless Packet Core market. 

The new report tracks GGSN, SGSN and PDSN equipment used in mobile networks to transmit data traffic.

"We've been watching the Wireless Packet Core market develop over the last two years, and are pleased to officially begin quarterly reporting on this market," said Tam Dell'Oro, Founder of Dell'Oro Group, adding that Wireless Packet Core "is the third mobile infrastructure program that we've launched in the past two months."

And the first report's a nice optimistic one: Market revenues grew almost 30 percent in 2009, with growth coming from all three market segments.  GGSN and PDSN sessions led the market's shipment growth with each increasing approximately 60 percent during 2009.

Better be sitting down for this news: More guys than gals have an iPad and iPad owners tend to be wealthier.

Shocked us, too.

Mashable has put together some interesting graphics Yahoo is out with interesting findings concerning the demographics of iPad owners.

The service analyzed the behaviors of Yahoo iPad users and found that men outnumber women two to one, Flickr usage is 143 percent higher than average, and international traffic accounts for 10 percent of all traffic even though the device is only available for purchase in the U.S.

The other stats Yahoo uncovered are fairly obvious. 48 percent of Yahoo iPad users own an iPhone and 94 percent of them possess "solid wealth and strong incomes." The company estimates that the "demographic profile of the iPad Yahoo! user closely followed the interests on Yahoo! that we would suspect" -- usage of Flickr, Finance, News and Sports properties show much higher than average traction on the iPad, Mashable reports.

Bearing in mind, of course, that we're talking only about the Yahoo-using subset of iPad owners - granted a fairly large subset, but a subset nonetheless. Still, if a larger net were cast, no doubt the basic finding would hold true, as Mashable says: "The device is popular with men, appeals to individuals with disposable income and offers a desirable browsing experience."

According to Agence France Presse, Google on Thursday released free software that "lets smartphones based on its Android operating systems be used as language translation tools."

The Goggles application can now help you translate English, French, Italian, German or Spanish "after pictures of words are taken with cameras built into smartphones such as the Internet giant's Nexus One."

Or as ZDnet says, "For those of you planning on going abroad this summer with your Android-based smartphone, there will be another tool at your disposal should you have some issues with the local language."

Google software engineers Alessandro Bissacco and Avi Flamholz said in a message posted on Google's site that "We are hard at work extending our recognition capabilities to other Latin-based languages."

"Our goal is to eventually read non-Latin languages (such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic) as well." Yeah, well, that's this reporter's goal too. Bet on Android getting there first.