An international team of computer scientists has created software that lets anyone perform on-the-fly analysis of live streaming video on the iPhone. Used alongside existing methods of displaying data on top of the camera's view, this new functionality signals a fundamental change in the kinds of Augmented Reality (AR) that iPhone developers can create. Existing AR apps, like Yelp, Layar, Wikitude and others display data on top of a camera's view but don't actually analyze what the camera sees. This new development changes that.The iPhone has a private API for analysis of live-streaming video but developers' requests that it be made accessible haven't been granted by Apple. The new software opening up access to that API was made freely available to anyone this morning by the team that built it.SponsorThe Visual Media Lab at Ben Gurion Universityin collaboration with HIT Lab NZwrote the code in question and unveiled it along with video demonstrations at the AR-specialist blog Games Alfrescotoday. The unveiling comes just days before the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Realityin Orlando, Florida.In a demonstration video the team showed how software built on top of the now-exposed API could look at a 2D image drawn on paper and render the image in 3D. Then the 3D rendering is subjected to a physics simulation. This is of course just one use-case. Video AR-enabled software could do almost anything in direct response to the actual images seen through the iPhone's camera view, in real time. Image processing locally will be easier and faster than comparison with a large number of related images, something that would likely require some connection to the cloud, but these are early days.GamesAlfresco author Ori Inbar calls this the dawn of an era of "user-generated Augmented Reality."For the first time ever, the core code necessary for real augmented reality ("real" here means precise alignment of graphics overlaid on real life objects) on iPhone 3.0 is available to the publicHow will Apple respond? That's a big question; the company has had an ambivalent relationship with the emerging field of Augmented Reality so far and exercises infamously obtuse control over applications distributed through its app store.For now the code is being distributed for its creators by Ori Inbar, whose email address to request it is available at the conclusion of his coverage on GamesAlfresco.The possibilities here are huge. While location-based AR is clumsy at best so far, due to the imprecise nature of GPS and mapping data, these kinds of object-centric AR tied to the actual viewed world open up a whole new world of potential developments. Let's see what you've got, AR devs of the world!Discuss
News aggregation startup Thoorais celebrating its public release just one day after ReadWriteWeb's Real-Time Summit. In June, we wrote about the fact that CNN was hours behind Twitter in reporting news from Tehran.As real-time services continue to trump traditional media outlets, companies like Thoora have jumped on the chance to build a better news source. Since Thoora's recent demo at TC50, reviewers are already questioning whether the company can survive in what is proving to be a crowded space. SponsorBased out of Toronto, Thoora indexes stories from across the web and categorizes them under 25 verticals including science, technology, video games, mobile, world politics and television. Similar to Techmeme, Thoora aggregates real-time news stories; however, in addition the company also provides an open analysis of real-time trackbacks. Thoora aggregates interesting posts from a variety of different verticals in what resembles a Digg-like news dashboard. However, instead of displaying the number of in-community "diggs", Thoora displays "reactions". Reactions entail the number of news stories, blog posts, tweets and comments that can be linked to a particular story. Stories with the most reactions rise to the top of the list, whereas less popular stories remain lost in the news river ether. ReadWriteWeb recently recognized Thoora on our top 100 real-time web companies. To check out the service, visit thoora.com. Discuss
In the last two posts in this series, we discussed the Web of data, which makes structured interlinked data sets machine-accessible, and the Web of identities, which makes data about people machine-accessible while addressing privacy and data volatility.This time, we'll focus on the Web of services, which makes services accessible to and processable for machines. These Webs all have a semantic architecture in common and follow basic Web principles, such as being decentralized, modular, simple, addressable via URIs, and built for machines.SponsorThe services sector has become the world's biggest business sector, accounting for 64% of the worldwide gross domestic product. The sector has pressure on it to make its services easier and more widely accessible, as well as to quickly adapt to ever faster changes in the market environment.The effort to standardize such things as service-oriented architectures (SOA) and Web services has taken years, but still we have no clear definition of what constitutes a service at a conceptual level. The interface, which is the format of what goes in and out of the service, is often described formally, but what the service is actually doing, semantically speaking, is not. While there are a number of different approaches to semantically describing Web services, such as OWL-S, WSMOand WDSL-S, none so far has managed to break out of its academic confines.Today, there are already all kinds of services with different levels of complexity, and their number is expected to grow exponentially. The services follow different standards, and a lot of them are proprietary, uni-directional and designed to be used by humans to mash up something new. Editorial catalogs such as ProgrammableWeband search engines for Web services such as seekdaare designed for humans who are searching for a particular service for that reason. For tasks that are unsolvable for machines, there are even Web services such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which have humans in the back end answering tricky queries.The problem with all of this is that each of the tens of thousands of services is accessiblebut not findableby a machine without a machine-understandable description. Thus, every service nowadays has to be wired to a machine by hand. So, what would machines be capable of if services were annotated with semantic descriptions?Service discoveryGiven an index of Web services, a machine charged with finding the right service for a particular problem could choose one among those that have been indexed.Contracting and executionOnce a service has been selected, a machine could look up its terms and decide on contracting and execution details. How often would the service be needed? And what would be the cheapest contract then?Billing or revenue sharingDepending on the autonomy of the machine, one could imagine something like an Autonomous Agent, which automatically makes the best deal with the service provider on such things as billing or revenue sharing for service usage.Replacement on failure, based on experienceOf course, the machine would be able to replace a failing service with an equivalent one. It could also rate a service and publish it.Service orchestrationA machine could, given enough intelligence, split a task into sub-tasks and then discover, contract and orchestrate services to solve these sub-tasks. And after the sub-tasks have been addressed, the main task would be solved. Such orchestration could involve the parallelization of tasks, for speeding up or redundancy purposes, or chaining services (whereby the output of one service is inputted into the next).Research projects such as TripCom, SUPER, SHAPEand SOA4Allare dealing with these ideas and scenarios.Future scenarios are limited only by our imagination: machines could autonomously pursue goals on behalf of their master user or company, according to a specified level of freedom. These agents could solve increasingly complex problems and be granted increasingly more autonomy (finally ending up as Skynet).In the next and final post in this series, we will discuss how all of these scenarios could become a reality with the arrival of all three Webs: a revolution in the ability of machines to access, process and apply information.Do you also count the Web of services as a third Web? Where do you see its limits?(Photo by zorro-art.)Discuss
Twitter rolled out a limited beta of its new lists featureto a larger number of users late last night. With these new lists, Twitter users can now organize their friends into groups. By default, these lists are private, but one of the most interesting aspects of this new feature is that users can also make their lists public - something many Twitter users have been looking forward to for a long time. SponsorThird-party Twitter clients and tools like TweepML, TweetDeck, Brizzly, Nambu and others all offer their own implementation of this feature, though Twitter also gave early API access to this feature to a number of third-party developers. Currently, adding friends to a list is still a bit cumbersome and either involves a lot of clicks from a user's profile page or a visit to the 'following' page. The list of users you follow, however, is organized in chronological order, so finding users on this list is quite hard.One interesting aspect of this feature is that a user's profile will now also show a section that highlights the public lists a user was added to. This could have some interesting social ramifications. After all, Twitter's emphasis on follower counts has already created a bit of a popularity contest and now being part of a certain list that is being curated by the right person could add yet another dimension to this issue.Of course, these new lists will open up avenues for a new products as well. Third-party tools, for example, can now look at the public lists and maybe create new algorithms to rank a user's authority on Twitter. Import/ExportOf course, these are still the early days for Twitter lists, but hopefully we will also soon see a feature in third-party clients like TweetDeck that will allow users to export their existing lists or import their new lists from Twitter. Chances are that this is just a matter of time and this will probably be a default option in third-party clients once Twitter rolls this feature out to the majority of its users.Discuss
If you've ever created your own podcasts or home videos then you've probably got content sprinkled across YouTube, Vimeo and Blip.tv. As better video services arise, there's always that familiar debate: do you take the time to migrate your archives to a new service or do you embed multiple files into your site? Dutch video site Yubby creates a seamless solution for video display across 3rd party services. Rather than forcing users to embed multiple videos or links, the company lets users drag and drop videos from a variety of sites into a single embeddable player widget. SponsorWhile Yubby only really launched in the Netherlands in January, co-founders Vincent Everts, Remco Bron and Ronald van Woensel have been working together for more than 4 years. In 2005, the three were working on a Boxee-styleweb television software solution. After struggling with federal product requirements and deals with device manufacturers, the group took the best parts what was expected to be a set top box software and transformed it into a web-widget platform. While they remain in the entertainment content space, Yubby launches in the US as a great solution for video publishers, bloggers and artists. The company's American debut is timed with this year's Blog World Expo. Those familiar with the Blog World Expo site have unknowingly seen Yubby in action. The widgets are already attached to homepage content featuring more than 65 tech and social media powerhouses like Guy Kawasaki, Kara Swisher and Chris Brogan. The company lets users search video from the top 30 uploading services, create specialized channels and republish these channels to the page, sidebar or social media profile of their choice. While the widgets can be placed anywhere you can embed code, the company has already built WordPress integration for even faster video publishing. The product is currently free to general users and offers a premium service where publishers can integrate the site directly into their content management systems. To test Yubby visit Yubby. Discuss
Recently, Roger Thompson, chief research officer at security firm AVG, discoveredover half a dozen Facebook applications that had been compromised by malicious hackers. Although the apps' reach was small with relatively few users being affected, Thompson was concerned because it was the first time he had seen apps themselves hacked as opposed to something like Facebook profile pages, a common target for the still-spreading Koobface worm. While this incident alone wouldn't generate much excitement given the low-profile nature of the applications affected, it's not the only example of unsafe applications on Facebook. Another researcherjust spent an entire month scouring Facebook apps for security vulnerabilities and what he found is disturbing: six of the hacked apps were in the top ten, 9700 applications were affected, and the potential victims totaled 218 million users. SponsorHacked Apps Found Forcing Malicious Software on UsersIn the case of the hacked Facebook apps found by AVG, the apps had been compromised by the use of "iframes," which are bits of code embedded in the applications themselves. The iframes were able to load content from malicious websites into the applications' pages on Facebook.com, directing app users to install software on their computers by purporting to be an update for an out-of-date Adobe Reader product. At first, Thompson thought the apps had been hacked by the developers, but as it turned out, it was the developers who were the victims. After looking at the source code for the apps in question, Thompson found that the iframes had been injected into the apps' code due to infected software on the developers' PCs. Facebook quickly reacted to the situation and took down the compromised apps while also contacted the developers to warn them of the issue. Thousands of Apps Vulnerable to AttacksWhile hacked Facebook apps may still be a bit of a rarity today on the popular social network, security vulnerabilities that couldlead to malicious attacks are not. After spending a month on Facebook looking for application bugs, another security researcher made some disturbing findings. Specifically, the researcher, who goes only by the handle "theharmonyguy" online, was looking for a specific vulnerability he referred to as a "FAXX Hack." FAXX stands for "Facebook Application + XSS + XSRF" or, in other words, a cross-site scripting vulnerability - a certain type of security hole that could allow a hacker to access profile information, including personal details, status updates, and photos of a victimized user and their friends.The findings showed that many Facebook applications, even those that were widely used and considered trustworthy, lacked basic security precautions. There were some 9700 Facebook applications which were affected by vulnerabilities and over half of the applications in question had passed through Facebook's "Verified Application" program, a sort of "stamp of approval" designed to assure Facebook users of an app's general trustworthiness. Among the apps, six were ranked in the top ten by monthly active users including FarmVille, Causes, LivingSocial, Movies, Farm Town, and YoVille. The collective monthly active users counts for all the hacked apps totaled 218 million. However, that previous figure does include overlaps. Also, seven of the top ten application developers on Facebook were found to host at least one vulnerable app. While discovering the bugs, the researcher contacted each application developer to make him or her aware of the hole. For the most part, developers responded quickly and took the situation seriously. However, several developers took a while longer to respond. Nine took over a week to patch their application and one even took two weeks. And those delays were not due to the complexity of the required patches - these were, in terms of coding, simple fixes. What's most concerning about these findings is how widespread the problem was. Unlike the apps AVG discovered, this wasn't a minor, isolated incident affecting a small handful of users. Although the apps in question here were just vulnerableto attacks as opposed to being comprised themselves, it shows how risky it is to use any application, Facebook Verified or not. Is Any App Safe?On top of all these security issues, in August many Facebook users were surprised to discover the vast amounts of personal information they were revealing by their use of Facebook quizzes. Even if you limit access to your profile through privacy settings, Facebook quiz applications can see everything on your profile page when you take a quiz...or even when your friend takes one. To make matters worse, Facebook does not screen developers for trustworthiness nor do they require developers to comply with a privacy policy. With hacked apps, security vulnerabilities, lack of privacy policies, and apps that can read your private profile information, one has to wonder if using anyFacebook application is appropriate and safe these days. Discuss
According to mobile marketing firm Brand in Hand, female iPhone users are the worst demographic in terms of interacting with mobile ads on the iPhone. The company, whose high-profile clients include Procter & Gamble, General Mills and American Express, has run 60+ mobile ad campaigns over the past two years. During that time, they've had the opportunity to study the engagement of iPhone users with their ads. So why are women ignoring the ads? Apparently, they're too busy actually usingthe apps. SponsorWomen Use the Apps, Ignore the AdsFrom an article on AdAge, which reported on Brand in Hand's news in detail, the reason that the women were not engaging with the mobile advertisements came down to how they actually used their phones. The research showed that women, "especially so-called super-moms, are task-oriented and tend to use their smartphones to help them get things done." In other words, these busy iPhone users didn't have time to goof off by clicking (or rather, tapping) through on a mobile ad. Ads were seen only as distractions that would take them away from the particular task at hand. For advertisers trying to market to this particular demographic, the new findings will have an impact on what type of mobile campaigns will be run in the future. And given that only 18% of women age 18-49 have a smartphone today, according to Nielsen, smartphone advertisements just won't deliver the numbers that advertisers need. At least for now. A Better Alternative to Mobile Ads?Although the AdAge article didn't go into any detail about how marketers could engage smartphone-owning women in different ways, we think that there's at least one company that may have figured it out. Instead of offering distracting mobile banner ads that get in the way of the task that needs to be done, food and beverage giant Kraft introduced their own iPhone app instead.This branded effort, dubbed "iFood Assistant" (iTunes link), is a recipe app that helps users plan meals. This fits in perfectly with how Brand in Hand claim women use their smartphones - they launch apps designed for a particular purpose. Yet this time, while doing so, the women (and men, too, we suppose) are also engaging with the brand itself because the recipes featured in the iFood Assistant app include Kraft food products of course. This app is so successful that Kraft is even able to successfully charge for it, something that rarely works for branded apps. But Kraft's app sells - and sells well- priced at 99 cents in the iTunes App Store. They even hit their 3-year download goal in a matter of weeks, said Ed Kaczmarek, Kraft Foods director of innovation. While at the moment, Kraft's iPhone application appears to be the exception and not the rule when it comes to creative marketing efforts, it's a great example of how mobile marketing could and perhaps should be done, especially if you want to engage busy, task-oriented women. Discuss
Real-time information is red hot all around the web but it made a surprise appearance on YouTubetonight in the form of real-time search for comments, of all things. YouTube comments are notoriously not worth reading, but now you can search their full text...in real time. There are some very real, potential use-cases crying out for a tool like this. Companies in particular are likely to want to know what people are saying about their names in the comments on YouTube. You name your topic, though: it's now available for real-time search across viewer discussion.Real-time search appears to have been rolled out very recently, with no mention, on this page. In addition to search results continuously updated ala Facebook's newsfeed ("3 new results") there's also a frequently-updated list of "trending topics" on the search page.SponsorUnfortunately, there are no feeds being published to syndicate these search results into a reader off-site. The regular search on YouTube now has RSS feeds and Google Wonder Wheel data being published, so perhaps comment search will have feeds added soon as well.Proper nouns will likely be of interest to searchers watching YouTube comments. This could be a popular addition to the toolkits of social media watchers everywhere.What's the benefit of serving those results up in real time? For certain search queries you don't want to wait around to find out there's new results.What could be next? Presuming this feature is as real as it looks and goes live to the public soon, we'd love to see YouTube support something like the Salmon comment aggregation protocoland publish updates for this and other GData feeds through in a real-time syndication format.Thanks to Tikva Morowati for the tip. Tikva is the Community Platform Director for KGBWeb, a stealth startup made up of ex-Googlers and others in New York City that will likely make a splash among web-watchers later this year. Discuss
Microblogging represents the first wave in the enterprise. Now the questions is what represents the second wave and how adoption will occur.The issue of the second wave came back up again and again in "Applying The Real-Time Web in the Enterprise," at the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit today.SponsorBut though the first wave has had its impact, the group has questions about how quick the adoption has been.Those that are adopting social technologies often already use tools like Twitter. For the uninitiated, the technology is a bit mystifying and since it is optional, the adoption is not as great as it could be. The answer is not to clone Twitter but to find the application that really works for the enterprise user. The gap goes beyond microblogging and into the general realm of social technologies. For instance, mashups arose as an example. A woman in human resources may not have any interest in creating a mashup. Her views may change if i is not presented as a mashup and if she is assisted by a business analyst or IT worker who is familiar with the technology.It's the people with the expertise who have in some ways always been using real-time technologies. IRC channels, for instance, were originally used by IT to keep updated about projects. It's a tool similar to instant messaging and activity streams of the real-time web, But it had pretty much been inaccessible to most business users. A new generation of user interfaces are changing this dynamic. Tools that had been inaccessible are now fashioned in a manner that users understand. People use the social web. They get the notion of the status update. The enterprise applications that have adopted this style are the technologies that get better use.Machine-to-machine technologies that integrate the social web may help close the gap. These are tools that people are required to use for projects. By adding a "people" element, social applications may have more use for the business person.Still, the real-time web can not be viewed only in terms of the office person working on their desktop.Such a large percentage of the workforce are out in the field. Their use of mobile devices for establishing geo-presence is an area that should further develop, especially with the continued adoption of smart phones. Discuss
If you've ever worked with an advocacy group, you understand how important it is to stretch your scarce resources. In the face of dwindling government grants, a looming recession, and the fear of losing your volunteers, the real-time web can be a boon in getting legislation passed. Today's ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Summitattendees took time to discuss some of the cause-based tools that can help in this bubbling river of data. SponsorConsumers Unionemployees Tim Marvin and Gregory Foster work hard to ensure that consumers have access to a fair and safe marketplace. The organization lobbies government groups around issues of health care reform, product safety and ethical advertising. Nevertheless, a number of today's available advocacy tools fall flat. While organizations communicate with phone calls, videos, static sites, brochures, face-to-face lobbying and a spam-like email service called an "e-alert", only a few are utilizing the real-time web. Rather than insisting upon these traditional methods, the group discussed new ways to hack the law-making process. Below are some of our ideas:1.Real-Time Story Uploading:Voters can upload their stories via a microblogging service, tag it with a cause-related hashtag and geo-tag it to a specific constituency. From here the relevant representatives could be provided with a constituency feed and can search via the issues that affect them most. In this case, trending topics would indicate the most popular issues. 2. Legislator Meet and Greet:Similar to celebrity sightings on Twitter, users could Tweet when meeting their legislator and encourage nearby voters to come by and express their opinions. We call this "legis-stalking". 3. Legislative Activity Stream:While legislation is already being tracked via sites like Govtrack.us, there's no reason your friends shouldn't get your legislation-related activity stream and real-time commentary. From here machine-powered sentiment analysis could be used to show a politician's popularity and overall happiness amongst voters. 4.Tracker:Similar to Pivotal Labs' Tracker, consumer groups could collaborate on an issues-based project management tool. When representatives reveal their plans, each issue can be broken down into a smaller project with associated goals. If goals are verified by a specific percentage of voters, then the project is considered a success and reflects this percentage in real-time. If goals are left unfulfilled, then the project is considered a failure. From here a politician's overall success rate can also be calculated as a real-time reflection of effectiveness. We know these are just some of the ideas available with real-time activism. If you've got ideas on how organizations can better utilize the real-time web add your ideas in the comments below or in the event wiki. If you'd like to help Consumers Union build the tools we've discussed above email fostgr@consumer.orgDiscuss
