Augmented reality startups want iPhone to open up

More than a dozen augmented reality companies have asked Apple to open up the iPhone 3GS’ live video feature for their apps. (mobile-ent.biz)

So wait and see. And iPhone will not stay alone – “Mobile Augmented Reality” could be one of the most exciting trends and disruptive innovations in the next years. Google that phrase and see Nokia on top of the listing … And there is that Layar video from June 2009 (“Browse the world!”).

The World-as-a-Store – uPOS, the “Ubiquitous Point of Sale”

New buzzwords for 2010 might be: MARcommerce. ARcommerce, the long tail of “reality shopping” … Scenario as shown in the clip: See something, get info, get price, (call the owner with the next click if you want), buy it. Hmm, actually a wellknown usage scenario to the futurist – but now it is knocking on your door, no longer a “vision”.

 

 

Augmented reality startups want iPhone to open up | Mobile Content | News by Mobile Entertainmenthttp://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/33644/Augmented-reality-startups-want-iPhone-to-open-up

 

Copernicus changed our direction of perspective (source: wikipedia.org)

Hm, what a long winter break. Well, I have been reading some predictions for 2009 (like this at RWW or that at VentureBeat), I enjoyed texts looking back at 2008, too (e.g. Andrew McAfee or  McKinsey). When I came across the RWW post I thought about my own “social media wish list”. I have to confess in the first place the radical and techno heretic thought occured to me: “Could please someone just stop the noise!” The majority of folks out there has no ”social media wish list” just because they are not participating. Their social networking is working fine with phones, address books and calenders – and so the question is: Why  is it a mess for so many to organize the social life(stream) on the web? There is a complexity of service options, habits, expectations, aggregators and this makes users really tired. The landscpae is unripe and there is much space for improvements. I want to pick only one issue.

Copernican revolution of the social web in 2009?

When users complain about social networking one point is fragmentation and the resulting number of services and feeds one has to manage. So, could we please have some paradigm shift with the services serving the user and not the other way round? This Copernican revolution of the social web could mean to build up a technically autonomous layer for identity, authentification, social relation management. This is like a u-turn in perspective and isn’t it this, what the ideas and approaches of social network portability etc. are about? But reducing the work load to manage the networks will not be enough to bring the social dimension to flourish.

Social network concepts of today are primitive and stupid

It is time to integrate professional experts of the social in the development process – i.e. the guys of the sociological and humanities department. Think about the “collision of worlds” and role conflicts, when the social architecture (relation modes, transparencies, “hiding places”) is not adequately designed. User control and service transparency have to be much better to avoid the user’s dilemma (what to show and what to share with whom). There have to be relation types (friends, family, relatives, colleagues etc.) with differentiated rights to share parts of your life. For the moment I would call this “transparency management” – which is more than identity management. To understand the issue just read this article:  ABC News: Friended by Mom and Dad on Facebook.

Image source: en.wikipedia.org

Update: Links

• Social Media in 2009: Our Predictions and Desires (readwriteweb) 
• Ten tech predictions for 2009 (VenturBeat)
• My Two Top 2008 Technologies (McAfee)

CommunityCamp 2008 was the first of it’s kind in Berlin – a thematic barcamp, focused on the fuzzy issues of community. There were practical down to earth sessions around community management and some sessions for research issues and academic reflection as well. In my first session “Mobile Communities – types, trends, potentials”, I was trying to think forward beyond the services of today. There are apps on the mobile device just to keep in touch, others are location aware or realize social mapping. The combination of 

mobile, social, semantic and sensor technology will bring a new space of possible “socio-technical configurations”. My abbreviation for the monster word “mobile-social-semantic-(sensor)-web“ is “moss web”. Succesful design of the architecture and interface needs a lot of sociological analytics and kind of “social usability” concepts.

The Saturday session was rather huge and we only made first steps to find relevant building blocks and understand the problematic situation of “transparent society” (David Brin 1998). The following Sunday session I held together with “Mo” (Mostafa Akbari, mosworld) a mobile expert from RWTH Aachen. The fruitful discussions resulted in the following slideshow (but I take all responsibility for any weaknesses).

More presentations (German): CommunityCamp Dokumentation

Update: More impressions from the CommunityCamp: blog.blinker.net

Is Google totalizing the infosphere? Cam head for Google's controversial Street View (googlewatchblog.de)

Michael Arrington’s post made the point: Organize All The World’s Information, Then Put Google Ads On It

My comment there:

Google quietly changed from time to time. The “official mission” of organising the worlds information is no lie, but it is the half truth only, as you point out. Google is an advertising company – THE advertising company of the world.

I count it on my fingers. We will see perfectly contextual mobile advertsing FOR EVERYONE soon, for every local business – easy as an Adwords account – it will be an extension of it.

And there is still the dilemma at the core of the business model of Google: Do not make your search results too good to keep the click-through-rate high because this is just the source of revenue. Null sum dilemma. …

Some more musings about Google’s roadmap

Up to now the business model was primarily about online advertising. But exactly in which sense? The brilliance of the Google business model was to run “micro auctions” in the attention hungry attention economy (i.e. Adwords). Every big and small business searching desperately for the “customer one click away” competing with all the other businesses and products.

Ironically the Google search engine is a search engine for information only in an instrumental sense. Looking behind the glass of course you see it’s business purpose is to be a search engine to find customers. If you sometime have controled or managed an Adwords campaign this perspective is quit obvious. This are two sides of the same coin and others have pointed this out too: 

As competition for the best keywords increases, prices go up. Now that the (patented) system is in place, this takes virtually no investment on the part of Google. In this case, it is Google’s customers that are driving the increase in ad revenues for Google. If advertisers want search ad exposure, they have no choice but to pay. Another Reason Google’s Business Model Is Brilliant 

Of course this is a nice model for Google, especially since the company is so dominant in the market. I let Arrington speak again:

It’s unlikely Google will ever find another money machine as efficient as search advertising, which accounts for about 40% of the $40 billion advertising dollars spent online each year. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to try. Today they unleashed two new forms of advertisements:click to buy links on YouTube and adsense for Flash games.

… Most people still think of Google as a search business. But what the analysts understood long ago, and the rest of us are realizing now, is that what they really want to do is organize all the world’s information, and then put ads on it. ( Organize All The World’s Information, Then Put Google Ads On It )

Android, Maps, Chrome, user’s data – twine it all together …

But now think about Android, Google Maps, Street View and the fact that Google knows your behavioral data like nobody else (they bought DoubleClick for US$3.1 billion (Wikipedia), and with Chrome there is a new frontline, the browser battle. See the possibilities? Think about revenue sharing when Google enables the click-to-buy in real life settings while you are on your way looking for a restaurant, cab or a movie. ( Think of Augemented Reality too.) That enabling of business is quite better than advertising, which is always only the preparation to business.

iPhone timeline 1999-2008 (iphonegold.org)

UPDATE 2010-10-09: My prediction was rather risky in July of 2008 and it has been proven correct. In April 2010 I even have been taking part to organize the “1st European Augmented Reality Conference” ARBcon.eu. If you are interested in AR/MR and a contact just join the Linkedin group or the Xing Augmented Reality Group (350+)

Future fact: Super convergence of mobile connectivity, the social web and contextual intelligence will create an eco-system of mixed reality applications.

Well, the iPhone 3G just has been released. Not the quantum leap hysteria like in the release of iPhone 1.0. But what comes to my mind is the wellknown quote of the cyberpunk author William Gibson: “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.”

There is a “digg of the day” for me showing the iPhone timeline starting with Dec 15 1999 – the day when Apple registered the domain iPhone.org. Means: (i) Steve Jobs keen vision started in the last century, I never doubted that he is ahead of times, (ii) progress needs a bit of patience too. Now, what will we see on this timeline in 2010/2011? I am quite sure that augmented reality stuff is leaving the labs in the very near future. Here is a short trip into one trend vector of the future mobile device – mixed reality.

Check the nutrients of your food (Mac Funamizu 2008)

View the past history of a place (Mac Funamizu 2008)

SOURCE OF INSPIRATION FOR THE MIXED REALITY SCENARIO: Since Feb 2008 Mac Funamizu created a cool design study, shown on his blog in six posts up to now with a lot of images. Last one published today: Part 6: “Future of Mobile Search- Power of Visualization” – visit his works part 1-5 too! Not enough? Just two more hints – visit demos of innovators at e.g. Nokia (Demo at youtube) and e.g. Enkin from the the Android developers community.

RELEVANCE: Super convergence of IT trends will lead to the paradigm of “information transparency” in the real world. [+] New business patterns and models will emerge. [-] New challenges for protecting your privacy and security will arise.

(Mac Funamizu’s work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License)