February 27, 2010

AR App Development: Metaio Releases Unifeye Mobile SDK

 
 

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via ReadWriteWeb by Dana Oshiro on 2/15/10

metaio_dec09a.jpgAt today's Mobile World Congress, augmented reality company Metaio unveiled its Unifeye Mobile SDK and Android demo at Sony Ericcson's Creation Day. The company is offering developers a chance to experiment with feature tracking, 3D animation rendering and real-time interaction. In other words, the world of augmented reality applications is about to heat up.

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We first spoke to Metaio in November when we looked at the company's consumer application, Junaio. Since then Metaio has continued to work with clients like BMW, Siemens and Popular Science to produce augmented reality products on the Unifeye platform. Because of this established presence with major corporations, the release of the Unifeye mobile SDK should have marketers salivating at the thought of dictating the design of their own experiences.

The SDK will allow 3rd party developers to take advantage of the Unifeye platform applications including its configuration templates, 2D texture / image tracking, 3D object tracking, marker tracking, GPS tracking plug-ins, video support and web-based rendering engine. According to the company, " You can choose from different programming layers by either using the comfortable high-level (black-box) API or having individual component access to rendering, capturing, tracking on a low-level basis."

As more companies provide tools for the mobile AR development space, it will be interesting to see whether developers opt for their own proprietary applications or whether they choose to build their ideas within pre-existing applications via the Layar model. Regardless of how platform allegiances play out, there's no denying that the release of new tools can only encourage further innovation in the types of experiences being developed. Perhaps we'll see our user-generated AR experience in the near future. For more on the SDK visit metaio.com/products/mobile.

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February 26, 2010

Square's On-the-Go iPhone Credit Card Scanner Will Cost $1

 
 

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via ReadWriteWeb by Chris Cameron on 2/16/10

The blog iPhone Alley reported Monday night that Square, the forthcoming mobile credit transaction service co-founded by Twitter's Jack Dorsey, will launch early this summer for the low price of $1. By plugging a small square card reading device into the iPhone's headphone jack, anybody with the device can instantly conduct credit card transactions using the service's iPhone app.

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Usually, running credit card transactions means opening up a special merchant bank account and dealing with various fees. Any bank account will work with Square, and the only charge to use the service is $1 for the application and the card reader accessory; however, Square can afford to give away the dongles because they will be banking 2.9% of each transaction. Users can also pick their favorite charity and Square will donate a penny to it from its cut of each transaction.

Not only could this app be the new best way to pay back your friend who bought your drinks at the bar, but it could also become a killer app for small businesses. For just $1, anybody can have the functionality of a full blown credit card reader on their phone. Small merchants won't have to resort to dealing only in cash, and record keeping would be made simple with the service tracking each receipt. Square recently produced the introductory video below to familiarize people with the service (with some awesome use of motion graphics, I might add).

A similar device and service from mophie called "marketplace" plans to bring a credit card scanner to their popular line of iPhone cases. Using this device would mean being stuck with a mophie case, and while the price has not been announced, mophie's cases can range from $10 for a basic hard case, to $100 for their battery pack cases.

Frequent users, however, might be more accepting of a case implementation like the mophie over a small, easily losable dongle like Square. Square's website says the accessory works with "any device with an audio input jack," which means the app will likely work with the iPod touch and iPad as well. One question mobile skeptics may have for both of these services is how it will work if the device is lacking an internet connection or cell signal; can payments be cued up to send at a later time?

Is Square going to be your startups mobile credit app of choice? Or will you be going with the mophie or a similar product? Will these apps even take off? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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Google Shopper: A Mobile Shopping Companion

 
 

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via ReadWriteWeb by Sarah Perez on 2/19/10

Is there any business Google doesn't want to be in? Despite the fact that there are already plenty of excellent mobile shopping applications for the Android smartphone operating system, Google has decided to launch their own. Via an announcement on the Google Mobile blog, we're introduced to the search giant's latest creation: Google Shopper. If you're at all familiar with mobile shopping applications, then you can probably guess what this app does. It scans barcodes and retrieves prices. It can also find product information using photos snapped with your phone's camera. You can do voice searches, too. Apparently, Google didn't want to make just another mobile shopping app, they wanted to make a better one. 

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With the new Google Shopper application, currently for Android only, you can scan a barcode or snap a photo of a retail item and the app will return a list of search results for that product, complete with prices, ratings, photos and descriptions. And where do these results come from? Google Product Search of course. You can star your favorite items for later retrieval, access your browsing history and share items with your friends via Gmail, IM, Facebook and Twitter.

Another bonus: if you're not actually in a store doing some shopping, you can use the app as a custom interface to Google's Product Search portal. With the provided search box, you can either type in a product name or just speak into the phone's microphone and Google Shopper will retrieve results - much like how Google's standalone mobile application does with web searches.

Why Does Google Need Another Mobile App?

If you own an Android mobile phone, then you've probably already installed one or more mobile shopping companion applications. ShopSavvy, for example, was one of the first barcode scanners on the scene. Designed mainly to scan high-end goods like DVDs, CDs, books, and consumer electronics, after scanning a barcode, you're provided with a list of both local and online prices for that same item.

Amazon, on the other hand, wanted to go beyond the barcode. With its Amazon App for Android, you can scan barcodes but you can also snap a photo of an item using the phone's camera. Amazon then searches through their inventory for that item and displays either the item itself or a similar product if the catalog doesn't have that exact item available.

Then, of course, there's Google Search for mobile and the related downloadable application. From either web interface, the Shopping vertical is easily accessible - only a tap away under the "More" section. So what prompted Google to release a dedicated shopping app like Google Shopper? Perhaps they saw the success of Amazon and ShopSavvy and wanted to redirect mobile users back to their engine and their search results?

While that's obviously a major factor in the decision, it's notable that Google Shopper is only available at launch time as an Android application. If there was ever any doubt that Google plans to favor their own mobile platform over rivals from Apple, Windows Mobile, RIM and others, we can put that to rest now. Whether Google is or is not working on a version of the app for other mobile platforms is almost besides the point. If they are, then how clever of them to launch the Android version first instead of waiting until everyone could use it, and if they aren't...well, then specialized Google apps for Android just became a huge selling point for the phone, didn't it? If we had to guess, it's the former - after all, as much as Google wants to promote their mobile OS, they're more interested in search traffic and multi-platform mobile applications are the way to get more of that.

For Android owners, Google Shopper is available now. You can grab your copy from here.

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Twitter Hits 50 Million Tweets Per Day; Still Dwarfed by Facebook & YouTube

 
 

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via ReadWriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick on 2/22/10

Twitter just announced that it now sees 50 million non-spam messages every day. That's interesting but it means more when you look at it in context.

The company says that means there are 600 tweets per second. According to a separate Tweet by Twitter's new VP of Communications this afternoon, approximately 83 tweets per second contain product or brand references (20%). Here are some other interesting numbers and an official chart. Putting Twitter in context, Facebook and YouTube remain much larger.

Twitter is showing remarkably strong growth, though.

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Some interesting data points:

  • Two years ago, TechCrunch reported that a source close to the company said there were 3 million Tweets being sent per day in March 2008. Twitter didn't respond to that report but today said the following: "By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day." So either that estimate was off by a factor of nearly 10X or 90% of Twitter messages at that time were already spam. Most likely reality was somewhere in between. In other words, true activity on Twitter appears to have been smaller than was believed a few years ago.

  • YouTube was reported this Fall to be serving up 1 billion videos per day. That means there are 20 times as many videos played on YouTube each day as there are Tweets sent. Twitter remains less mainstream than YouTube. In July of 2006, that number was 100 million. That was 18 months after YouTube was launched and 4 months before it was acquired by Google. Twitter was launched in July of 2006. That means that YouTube saw 2X as many video views (100m) after 18 months as Twitter now sees Tweets after more than 40 months. In terms of sheer numbers, YouTube grew twice as fast in less than half the time. Of course that's a little arbitrary to equate video views and Tweets, and YouTube videos are infamously expensive to deliver. Is it fair to compare Tweets published with videos consumed? With a grain of salt, I think it is, those two acts require roughly the same investment of time and energy by users. You certainly couldn't compare Tweets published with videos published, as there is a much higher barrier to entry in video.

  • How much bigger is Facebook? According to Facebook VP of engineering, Mike Schroepfer, last October that site was seeing 8 billion minutes being spent on the site every day and on a busy day it could see up to 1.2 million photos served per second. "Served" photos is probably more comparable to total deliveries of Tweets (one for every follower of every person who sends each tweet) but the number is big none the less. Last June the company said it was seeing 1 billion Facebook chat messages sent per day. Given its incredible growth, that number is probably much higher today.

50 million Tweets per day doesn't look so big in comparison. That is a pretty nice growth curve, though. Twitter says it will be releasing more numbers soon.

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Recognizr: Facial Recognition Coming to Android Phones

 
 

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via ReadWriteWeb by Sarah Perez on 2/24/10

Swedish software and design company The Astonishing Tribe, also known as TAT, has been developing a rather astonishing augmented reality application for mobile phones. Originally built as a software concept, the Android app called "Recongnizr" is a mobile prototype that allows you to use your phone in order to "see" who a person is and what web services and social networks they're connected to. App users can also associate traditional address book details with their profile like their full name, address, phone number and email, for example.

And all of this data can be accessed just by aiming your mobile phone at someone's face.

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We first looked at TAT's mobile concept back in July of last year. At that time, the application was called "Augmented ID." Using facial recognition and tracking technology from Polar Rose, a photo tagging startup, the app is able to match 3D models of faces captured with the phone's camera to those stored in a database on remote servers. This matching technique, which captures the shape of the face and other distinctive features like the contour of the eyes, the nose, and the chin, is one of the three methodologies for performing facial recognition. It's ideal for mobile interfaces such as those found in Augmented ID/Recognizr because it's not one that's affected by low-lighting scenarios, a very real possibility for mobile interfaces such as this.

Improvements to the App

Since our last look at Augmented ID, it's clear that the company has been making great strides in the development of this mobile application. Most notably, the interface's design has been greatly improved. It now has a much cleaner layout and looks to be far easier to use. The social networking icons, for example, now appear big and bubbly, casually overlaid on top of each other in a row at the bottom of the screen, ready for dragging upward when you go to create your own profile. The same icons, all evenly sized, also float around people's heads after the app recognizes them. You can then tap the icons to see the profile information they contain. For example, a Twitter icon could showcase the user's latest tweets when tapped.

The recognition process, too, seems improved. A square shown by a broken line appears on your mobile's screen around the face you're trying to recognize. This closely resembles the autofocus systems found on most digital cameras today. When the app "sees" the face, the square's outline turns from grey to green and the social networking icons zoom in from all sides to float around that person's face.

The only downside to Recognizr (besides the fact that the prototype isn't available for use today!) is that it requires both participants to use the mobile application in order to work. That makes the app far less creepy than some all-knowing "Minority Report"-like technology, but severely limits its potential at the same time. Since the prototype is currently Android-only, too, the database of users available for facial matching would only include those who have installed the application on their Android phone and have taken the time to set up their own profile.

That's not to say that some future version of the application couldn't scour the web for faces to match - implementing this feature would be challenging, but not entirely impossible. There are plenty of photos on social networks to pull from in the case that a particular person wasn't already a Recognizr user. However, whether or not the company plans to develop their app to that point is unknown at this time.

Coming Soon to Android

After demonstrating Recognizr at the recent Mobile World Congress, Dan Gärdenfors, head of user experience research at TAT, announced that his company plans to partner with someone who can help bring the mobile concept app to market. He anticipates having a commercial application available in a little as a month or two.

You can watch video demos of both Augmented ID and Recognizr on YouTube, here and here.

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