internet cool?!

The following is an homage to an awesome post I found over at Rubbishcorp. Go read it. Or read it here. Or whatever. Either way, its the best compilation of the affects of Augmented Reality on your fancy pants mobile device. It’s about to become as big a deal as Ron Burgundy…

Augmented Reality technology isn’t new, but it is taking on a whole new meaning in your mobile device. As positioning and recognition technology strengthens it will find a much more mass audience. Devices sporting geotagging, triangulation, recognition, wireless and compass technology have raised the virtual/physical mobile experience bar as they all work seemlessly together (behind the scenes) to now serve everyone with masses of information layered over the ‘real’ world.

No longer will you have to haplessly unfold a map at a museum, search endlessly for the semolina in a supermarket or not know exactly how much further to go before you reach your a bar, train, resturant, etc.

Your face is even free game! This TAT demo shows your social network(s) profile, media, personal data etc. all hovering around your noggin’ when someone points an at you.

Nokia are in on the act with their indoor location systems as well as Point & Find and apple has also raised the bar by getting involved with this little beauty.

Add to that ViPR technology which has been around for a while and can recognize actual objects (via a connected database) and best not forge RFID that registers objects within close proximity and again can pull data from a connected online source.

Time people spend with mobile continues to rise and compete with other sources as a direct result the increasing usefulness of the technology in making connections in the ‘physical’ space. And the raft of Augmented Reality applications that make use of a devices enhanced positioning and recognition capabilities are not limited to phones - increasingly gaming devices and MP3 players use the technology.

Screen-based experiences are increasingly overwhelming our experience of the physical world making, further blurring the lines and making the virtual a very “real” part of our lives. Social networking has already transformed our relationships and Augmented Reality looks to be the thing that does the same for shopping, traveling, culture, drinking, language translation and pretty much everything else.

Like the MP3 player and camera before it location and recognition technology will soon be ubiqutous on mobile devices. The influence that has on our lives cannot be underestimated, it will be massive.

 

You never know where you are going to find the perfect color. Check out Loupe. You can capture your color inspirations so you don’t have to try and guess what that shade was when you are back at your computer. Simple and thoughtfully designed, Loupe lets you create color swatches from your photo library or using the camera to save colors as you find them.

Enjoi!

The folks at Metaspark were kind enough to give you an inside edge on your iPhone UX development. Yay! Thanks dudes!

from their site

While designing Notespark, we did a lot of UI mockups. As it turns out, I prefer using Fireworks for this kind of work over Photoshop, because it’s easier to manipulate objects on the screen. After doing some Google searching, it appeared there weren’t any good templates for doing iPhone mockups, so we built our own. The file is pretty complete now, so we’re sharing it with the rest of the world. We started out with a combination of bitmaps and vectors, but we found that vectors were easier to edit, so every single item has been redrawn as a vector [*], which should make it easier to edit to your heart’s content.

Access the CS3 version here and the CS4 version here.

Kudos to Metaspark for this one. Enjoi!

Rad, rad, rad! Meet Nearest Tube, but Acrosshair. One of the first augmented reality apps to go live in the iPhone AppStore.

Wandering around the UK and want to locate the closest Underground station? Simply look at your iPhone! This app displays All 13 lines of the underground network, pointing them out with colored arrows.

Users can see the nearest station, what direction they are in relation to their location, how far and what tube lines/stations etc. If you continue to tilt the phone upwards, you will see stations further away, as stacked icons.

Available to Apple iPhone 3GS users. Enjoi!

Holy Mother of Awesome. Meet CloudContacts.

You send them that stack of business cards you are collecting in a box and they scan them. THEN they connect each card with social networks and backing it all up on a cloud server so you can always get to your contact information.

Here’s an interview with Allen Stern (the guy behind CloudContacts), from CenterNetworks in New York. He tells us how he does it, and even spends some time talking about the latest web stuff, too. Nerdy!

One of the most representative cases of succesful online brand building in Spain is Atrapalo.com, an online travel agency that also promotes leisure activities.

Their latest idea? Think simple, smart and social. These guys took a page out of the Radiohead Book and created a vacation model in which you pay for your trip when you get back based on how much you think it’s worth.

Nice.

Read More here.

Thanks to Rubbishcorp for the snag.

you’re welcome.  :)

this one is for the markup nerds

The image below might look like a regular YouTube video player but the interesting part is that the YouTube video clip will play just fine even if you disable (or completely remove) the Flash Player from your browser.

How? The next major release of HTML, dubbed HTML 5, will include several new tags for embedding <audio> , and <video> as well as several other graphical types of content in web pages. These new tags will let you play video files in the browser without the Shockwave Flash plugin. Yay!

Currently, your browser needs a plugin to play embedded multimedia content. For instance, you need to install Adobe Flash Player for watching videos on YouTube while the QuickTime player is required for viewing movie trailers that are available on the Apple website.

Visit youtube.com/html5 to see the HTML 5 video tag in action.

Note: You need either Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome or Safari 4 to view this video. If you attempt to go with an older browser, it won’t be able to understand the content that’s wrapped inside the <video> tag. You’ll most likely get some kind of error message upon arrival. That said, HTML 5 still looks very interesting and exciting.

Enjoi!

I found this posting this AM from Guy Kawasaki on a new service called Twitterhawk. Basically an app that turns The Tweet into direct marketing on steroids. I for one am not a fan of the Twitter Ad-douche gold-rush, but I must say - there are some compelling points in here. What say you?

from the Twitterhawk site:

TwitterHawk is a real time targeted marketing engine…with true CPC link tracking…that will find people talking on twitter now by your chosen topic and location, allowing you to really hit your target mid conversation with ease. It will periodically search twitter for you and either auto-reply or generate a list of matches for you to respond toor reject from your twitterhawk account.

from Guy’s article:

Twitterhawk is a “real-time, targeted-marketing tool”—or the ultimate spam machine. First, let me tell you why I’m telling you about it: Because it can help you use Twitter as a marketing tool. Second, let me tell you how it works. You create keyword searches like what you can do at Search.Twitter.com.

For example:

• “Fashionweek”
• “Homeschooling”
• “SEO” within 50 miles of 94031
• “Audi” within 50 miles of 94031

Then you compose up to five responses to the tweets that it finds for each search condition and schedule the search intervals. An Audi dealer in Palo Alto, for example, can use this to find sales or maintenance prospects on Twitter. Twitterhawk will then tweet your responses for when it finds the right keywords in the right area.

Essentially this is a way to monitor public conversations for keywords without being the NSA while Dick Cheney was running things. In other words, this is as good as it gets for targeted marketing. The closet analogy I can think of is how Gmail searches your email and inserts ads based on the words it finds in your messages.

This is when the panic ensues: “Holy kaw, if many people started using Twitterhawk, it would mean the death of Twitter as a means of social networking and communication!” Let me tell you why this isn’t true:

1.  Twitterhawk charges $.05 for each tweet that it sends. What spammer can afford to pay $.05/tweet in order to ask you to help get money out of Nigeria or to sell you penis-enlargement products? By the way, Twitterhawk tracks how many times people clicked on the link, so that you can determine your per click cost.

2.  There is a blacklist of terms that Twitterhawk will not respond to. I don’t know what’s on the list, but I suspect words like “the” are probably on it to prevent too many matches.

3.  There is a limit of twelve fully-automatic tweets per day per search. At this rate, it will take a long time to find someone to help get money out of Nigeria or a man who wants to get his aforementioned penis enlarged.

4.  You cannot send the same person more than one tweet based on the same search. This means that the Audi dealer cannot send you a tweet every time you mention the word “Audi.” The dealer gets one shot at you.

5.  You can edit each outgoing tweet when you set Twitterhawk to manual approval. This means that you can use Twittehawk to find tweets to respond to and queue them up for individual answers. (The reason to manually approve each tweet is that you wouldn’t want to send a tweet such as “We’re an Audi dealer located in Palo Alto. We’d love your business,” in response to a tweet like, “I’m so glad I just sold my 1970 Audi. It’s given me nothing but trouble.”

At this price and at this rate, Twitterhawk is hardly a spam tool. It is, however, a very powerful marketing tool if you use it sparingly and precisely. The Audi dealer, for example, might find that it sent out 100 tweets at a total cost of $5 and got one oil change customer out of it. That’s probably worth it—particularly if the customer returns for more expensive work or buys a car.

Looking at it another way: How else can you find people within driving distance of your dealership who are interested in Audis? Radio, TV, and newspaper advertising? Don’t make me laugh. It’s certainly worth trying—although, in truth, you can try Twitter targeted-direct marketing without Twitterhawk by simply using Twitter’s search capability or most Twitter clients anyway.

I close with an interesting story. When I first heard of Twitterhawk, I went nuts and set up searches for mentions of text like “Fashionweek” which resulted in automatic tweets to visit Fashion.alltop. After sending a few thousand tweets like this (perhaps TwitterHawk created the twelve/day limit in my honor!), my @alltop account was suspended, so I’ve cooled it. Clearly, there is some danger in pushing the edge of marketing, and I’m figuring that out too.

See Guy’s original article on OpenForum here.

Here’s the first episode of Richard Branson’s PitchTV, which is airing onboard Virgin Atlantic planes during June.

Do you want to a chance to be featured on PitchTV and get your business idea seen by thousands business professionals from all over the world? If so, just upload your short video to PitchTV.

Here’s Richard Branson’s introduction to PitchTV:

“As part of it’s 25th Anniversary celebrations, Virgin Atlantic is launching a new show, PitchTV, which will air onboard and will also be available online here.

We’re now inviting entrepreneurs in search of investment and exposure for their business ideas to upload short video pitches.

The community here will vote for their favourite video pitches and each month, the winning videos will feature as part of Virgin Atlantic’s PitchTV show which will air on their inflight entertainment system – gaining exposure to the hundreds of business professionals who regularly fly Virgin Atlantic. Anyone interested in hearing more about the most popular entrepreneurs’ business ideas will then be able to get in contact and maybe help take their ideas further.”