Probably not good news if you've just fallen off the wagon: Stella Artois has just leaped aboard the augmented reality advertising app bandwagon, and it's almost certainly the way beverage ads will go in the future, mainly through convenience.
We've shown you many times the different, exciting ways that AR can expand the utility of your humble smartphone--mainlyfor fun, but also for useful purposes. Well, Stella Artois has just launched an AR iPhone app dubbed Le Bar Guide that is, so the company says, the "first global 3D augmented reality iPhone bar guide." Essentially it's an AR app that tells you where you can sink a glass of Stella's finest beer nearby to your present location, wherever that may be on the planet. And it therefore neatly wraps up AR's potential fun factor, usefulness, and commercial viability in one tiny app.
The blurb says the app is "for beer connoisseurs and lovers of fine bars around the world"--mostly that involves highlighting bars that serve Stella. But by letting you find bars that serve the brand by locality or rating, the app is promoting both Stella Artois' products and the establishments that actually sell it--damn clever. Thanks to the convenience of AR-assisted navigation to said bars (handy if you're already a little under the influence) it'll probably drive plenty of new foot traffic there. And with the words "Stella Artois" ringing in the mind of the app's users, it'll also likely be responsible for a healthy chunk of sales too.
And that's why you'll see plenty of other beer makers quickly chasing Stella's tail--if there's money to be had, you can be sure they'll try and get hold of some, by hook or by crook. And while this will be no doubt very convenient for the average beer-drinking, smartphone-owning Joe, it could quickly result in a kind of small-market saturation problem (that'll face many products in the AR advert game at some point) with too many competing offerings. Then the companies will have to work out clever ways to make their AR app stand out from the others--using more aggressive AR ad tactics than mere convenience such as this app offers. What do you think the perfect solution might be? I think I may have one idea: AR App-driven drinking games. Oh deary deary me.
Barnes and Noble's E-reader Delays: Bad News for Stores, Good News for Publishing?
Barnes and Noble's innovative Nook e-reader, with its neat color-LCD screen, promises to really shake-up electronic publishing. But now it looks like the company's struggling to meet pre-order quotas, so it's delaying in-store sales--leaving empty some rather large displays that have already been installed to showcase the device. This will be analyzed as both good and bad news for the bookselling chain.
First, the good news: The Nook is of great interest to the gadget-loving and publishing worlds because it looks like a real competitor for Amazon's Kindle--both technologically (since you could argue it's really what the Kindle 2 should have been like) and from a big-name publishing backer point of view. It looks well designed, far better than any Kindle yet seen, and it'll have an extensive library of titles from an established name. Both points could make it attractive in the nascent e-book-buying marketplace. The company's bricks-and-mortar stores also offer a sales channel that Amazon can't compete with, since getting your hands on one and trying it out could easily convince many potential buyers--a business model that works exceptionally well for Apple hardware.
B&N recently said they'd sold out of the Nook because of higher-than-expected demand, and today the company is saying it's going to delay shipping units for sale in stores because of continuing supply versus demand problems in the run-up to the holiday season. The team is apparently working hard to deliver the November pre-orders before Christmas, though later orders may have to wait until January. And instead of being available today in-store, you'll have to wait until at least December 7th if you want to buy one in person--though you'll have to be quick as the numbers are likely to be very limited, and it'll only be sold in the bigger B&N outlets. That does sound extremely positive, a big tick in the "this is going to be a success" box for the Nook, and a strong suggestion that B&N's technological gamble will pay off.
Now the bad: The delay could be a sign that B&N put in a massive under-order for the device because it wasn't confident in its plans, or is having trouble on the manufacturing side. And don't forget the controversy over the Nook's design. This could be a doubly bad sign if the company's also bungling its effort to create a sales ecosystem to support the Nook--and it absolutely needs an integrated sales channel to be successful. There's even a third grim angle on this news: Too much of a delay could mean the Nook doesn't generate any kind of snowballing popularity among the public. And then, if Amazon quickly pulls a Kindle 3 out of its back pocket, and the much-expected Apple iTablet surfaces sooner rather than later in 2010, then these will seriously threaten the Nook's future by grabbing huge chunks of its potential market away.
AOL's CEO Tim Armstrong has just launched his company into a world of controversy (nothing new there, then) by promising to "spark a revolution." In what? In online news reporting: He's got plans to automate it, kind of. Try not to snigger, please.
Armstrong's plan, despite that grand promise, is actually pretty simple at heart. Instead of relying on AOL's experienced staff of editors and writers to put together the written content for AOL's news Web sites, the company will be employing an algorithmic system that trawls the Internet and examines the stories its Net visitors will most prefer. It'll then advise the humans in the loop which stories are likely to do well, and when to run them--particularly pieces like seasonal or sporting-interest ones. AOL will also be using Seed.com to share out article assignments among the large freelance staff. Payments for freelancers will also be calculated automatically, along with advertising fees. And, and this is the most intriguing part, it'll screen the submitted pieces for grammar and even check them for copyright infringements.
Is this the thin end of the wedge that ends with fully-automated news writing? It's clearly the next-level of automation to the automated headline-choosing at Huffington Post. And it certainly could spark a revolution off within a giant publishing machine like AOL--where the chase for every penny of profit, in terms of efficiency and targeted advertising is the key part of business. But will this work, or not? One risk is that even an automated story-selection system could result in a flat, bland and uninteresting publication--one that actually feels de-humanized. Assuming your target audience is sensitive to well-produced sites, that could be a big problem in terms of reputation. A fully automatically-written news site (not too technologically distant, by the way) would also run the risk of being treated like those irritating pop-up ads we all click past--obviously artificial and supposedly tailored to your needs by a clever Google cookie in your browser, but actually just visual chaff we tend to winnow out of our Web-browsing experience. Where would all the Web 2.0 and social-media debate and comment thread discussions go, when the source of the article is clearly a machine? Machine-hating definitely can't stir up the same kind of emotional response.
This is a viewpoint echoed by David Carr in a fascinating post over at The New York Times this weekend. Instead of bemoaning the sorry-looking fate of traditional news publishing in Manhattan, Carr notes that by thinking about it another way, the future of journalistic writing is actually getting brighter rather than dimmer: It's full of "bright young things" with "tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud" and "contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago."
If you tend toward Carr's thinking, then in the future online writing of news won't be dominated by automatic or even semi-automatic systems like AOL's...simply because the reading audience will become more savvy to the technology, and will always prefer the human touch. If you're more pessimistic, that doesn't mean AOL, and others, won't stop using this sort of tech or developing ways to automate the process more deeply. Let's hope that isn't the future for the greater majority of news writing--but if you disagree with me, and you can because we're both people, feel free to tell me in the comments.
Wikileaks is currently replaying the events of 9-11-2001 in a very unexpected way: It's releasing in roughly real-time chunks over 500,000 hacked pager messages that were transmitted that day. As a data source its chilling but historically speaking it's fascinating.
Wikileaks is usually associated with muck-raking and sensitive information leaking, but in this case it appears to be trying to shed its negative image by sharing with the public precious personal information that may shed new light on the tragic events of September 11th. That the site has gotten a hold of half a million pager messages sent by the Pentagon, NYPD, and transit network employees is perhaps a little questionable. But pagers have never been a particularly secure method of transmitting info, and Wikileaks is intimating that its source is a collective effort that had been gathering data for a long time before and since 9/11--that's one in the eye for conspiracy theorists.
The early messages are in many cases boring, since they contain automated reporting from computer systems as well as workers checking in, and network-wide notes to particular groups of employees about standard procedural stuff. It's when the time clicks around to 8:46 AM and the first WTC building impact that things go haywire, of course. Then the messages are a potent mix of panic, rapid-fire information sharing (dazzling in its inaccuracy at first), and the horrifyingly personal. Here's a tiny extract:
2001-09-11 10:00:05 Metrocall [0089531] C ALPHA I NEED TO KNOW YOUR AVAILABILITY ASAP WE KNOW NO DETAILS YET CALL ME AT xxx-xxxx THE WHOLE TEAM NEEDS TO RESPOND WILL HAVE MORE DETAILS LATER NEED TO KNOW YOUR SITUATION NOW. LEE
2001-09-11 10:00:05 Skytel [003940774] B ALPHA Slwynne2@xxx.xxx|.|ALL planes in air in US ordered to land. NOTHING taking off in US.
2001-09-11 10:00:05 Skytel [005071136] A ALPHA DAD, ITS TINA. CALL ME AT WORK ASAP
On the one hand Wikileaks' data is another potent reminder of the tragedies of that day, but it's also likely to be a rich data source for academics interested in group behavior and how the public responds to emergencies--the kind of research that could well save lives in future disaster situations. And that's something to be thankful for, at least.
See that little login window on the top right of this Web page? Mozilla, through Firefox, wants to do away with it--for all the best reasons. Mozilla's plan will simplify how you log into sites because, lets face it, IDing yourself should be easier.
The information comes directly from Mozilla's User Experience chief Aza Raskin's personal blog, and it starts with the lofty suggestion that "Identity will be one of the defining themes in the next five years of the Web." Hard to argue with that, given the explosion in user interactivity that the Web 2.0 phenomenon kicked off, and the fact that, as Raskin points out, "Nearly every site has a concept of a user account, registration and identity."
"Where's the problem with this?" you may well ask, since that seems all pretty natural to someone reading/interacting on the Web these days, what with endless blogs to comment on and social networking sites to update with your status. Well, logging into sites it's a problem that you may not have thought about, and it's one that's going to get worse as more sites demand ID-keyed entry. Every individual site is responsible for its own login and user registration process, which means every site follows a different path through the process--which has been a problem even since the days of Matthew Broderick's login problems with the NORAD computer in the classic movie War Games. (His character was trying to log in to a games computer.) Systems like Facebook's Connect go some way toward simplifying things by allowing you a single login identity, but they don't cover the whole UI issue.
Which is where, according to Raskin, your browser maker has been letting you down so far. Except for some "basic auto form-filling" and clumsy iframes, popups, and redirects to login/register pages, your browser does nothing to help with this process. What if there were a unified way to do all this, perhaps a simple UI or even a single button that would key in your identity automatically? Enter Firefox. Raskin reports that Mozilla Labs has been working on ways to integrate identity systems directly into the browser. At its heart it's a simple tweak as a superimposed "login to this site" button that sits on the browser URL bar--much the same way the page reload button does in the current Safari version. Clicking on the button takes care of all the login data handling for you rather than requiring you to find where the site's individual login section is. But behind the browser button there's clever code that also recognizes if this is your first visit and switches on a registration process, while warning you at the same time to verify you're not being phished.
Why put this in the browser? It seems to be the natural place--your browser is your window onto the online world so it may as well be a sophisticated key-holder and identity guardian too. Raskin notes that while Facebook's solution is a partial fix, "your identity is too important to be owned by any one company." Well, that may be true--and I, for one, am wary of potential hack threats that Facebook Connect could facilitate. But Mozilla is, I'm afraid, just one company too...would you trust it to be the keyring that holds your ID key to every single site you access? Admittedly you kind of already do, with the auto form-filling and password-remembering powers already built-in. Still, this is way more sophisticated.
Mac users may be more individualistic than PC owners, but new data suggests users of another Apple gizmo--the iPhone--are, on average, much freer with their online spending than their peers. It must be an individualism thing.
Olswang's research, contained in its recent Convergence Survey, shows that among the wide online community, 58% of people would pay to access a newly released film online, and 40% would be happy to buy access to a digital copy of a film that's already on DVD. But iPhone owners' stats for the same issue are 73% and 54%--a significant jump. And while 30% of people in general would pay for a digital book and 29% would pay for digital magazines, 42% of iPhone users would buy online texts and 38% of iPhone users would buy digital mags.
Why are these statistics so much higher for iPhone users? It's probably a direct result of the iPhone's ease-of-use, and particularly the simplicity involved in buying and downloading apps--an activity iPhone users do much more than other smartphone users. Once you're more used to buying online content of one sort, either directly as apps or as in-app content like digital texts for the Kindle reader application, it's less of a mental barrier to buying other content, such as media.
Seeing these figures, Mac detractors will of course make snarky comments about how Apple buyers will be accustomed to spending more anyway, thanks to the (fictitious) Apple Tax, and that's possibly why they're happier to spend on digital content. But what this data really means is that Apple's long-rumored iTablet, which would also rely on the iTunes ecosystem to distribute movies, music, and texts, would certainly encourage its buyers to spend more on these items than users of a Microsoft Tablet PC.
Net neutrality seems an innocuous concept when you look at it
rationally--but no one seems to do that. Especially not big-name ISPs and
cell-phone providers in the U.S. who are fighting the idea.
The Obama administration has been pushing net neutrality as a good thing for everyone. When White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin spoke about the issue last week at a conference on telecom technology, he noted that free speech and network neutrality are "intrinsically linked" (BoingBoing's authors must have been ecstatic). Then he went further, saying that, "if it bothers you that the China government does it, it should bother you when your cable company does it."
This last bit equated industry-led moves to question net neutrality with the extreme forms of net, and free-speech censorship practiced by authoritarian Chinese lawmakers. And that really annoyed AT&T's chief lobbyist Jim Cicconi--he called the words "ill-considered and inflammatory" (carefully ignoring the odd fact that a telecom company has a chief lobbyist on its payroll). Of course Cicconi's words might not be so surprising when you remember that he was a deputy chief of staff to famously tech-unfriendly George W. Bush.
Meanwhile, despite this low-brow political to-and-fro-ing, real censorship is still happening in China and no one can do a thing about it. The creators of the mobile browser system Opera had offered a loophole through China's strict Net censoring wall by caching foreign Web sites in overseas servers, thus making them accessible to the smartphone Web-browsing public inside China--this is essentially how Opera works everywhere else too. But by letting the Chinese access forbidden pages, Opera was circumventing the state authorities. But now Opera has "upgraded" its Mini mobile browser to a new Chinese version that complies with Great Firewall restrictions.
Despite Opera's official reluctance to comment on this move, as noted by the BBC, it's pretty obvious that the company has folded to pressure from the Chinese government, presumably complying with net-neutrality-squashing censorship rulings in order to continue doing business in the country.
Just yesterday TiVo was in the news for its user-data deal with Google, but its execs have obviously been far busier than that: Today there's fresh info that TiVo is expanding--it's due to launch a co-branded DVR TV service in the U.K. with Virgin.
Back in 2000, TiVo partnered with BSkyB and Thomson to build a digital video recording system for BSkyB's multi-channel satellite network. But the nascent satellite industry in the country couldn't really support this innovation--and fewer than 35,000 units were sold, prompting an exit from the market in 2003.
Nowadays the technology has moved on, and the public has become used to cable and satellite television. Sky, the biggest cable and satellite operator in the country, has had its own DVR system--Sky+--in the market for years. But it's not particularly capable of offering video on demand over its network, as its limited by its satellite distribution channels. And that makes room for other competing systems, like Virgin's fiber-optic cable TV network, to offer VOD to customers who are now interested in accessing movies and shows when they want to see them and not when the network deems it timely--quite possibly driven by the rise of video on demand on the Internet.
Virgin had been building its own system, mixing "traditional broadcast TV content with on-demand programming, Web-based entertainment and interactive features" but seems to have abandoned that goal for a partnership with TiVo, no doubt planning to leverage TiVo's considerable expertise. TiVo is going to be developing the middleware and UI software for the Virgin-branded set-top boxes, and Virgin will get to be the exclusive distributor for TiVo products in the U.K. TiVo's CEO Tom Rogers noted that it's just part of the company's plan to expand "its global footprint through strategic alliances with leading international media companies."
Forget NASA's giant rockets, forget even the Russian Space Agency's vintage but reliable Soyuz vehicles: The future of space travel for you and me (assuming we're filthy rich) is in private hands. Jeff Bezos' and Richard Branson's, actually.
Jeff Bezos' Mystery Blue Origin Rocket
Jeff Bezos, better known as founder and CEO of Amazon.com has a sideline you might not have heard about. The fact you've not heard about it isn't perhaps a surprise--his Blue Origin spaceflight project has been largely shrouded in mystery, despite interest from NASA.
But just recently the Blue Origin project's timeline was publicized on the Web site, particularly highlighting the timing for human flight into space--2012. Unmanned launches of science experiments are expected in 2011, and three experiments have already been selected.
Not much is known about the actual vehicle itself, which is dubbed New Shepard, apart from its vertical launch and vertical landing status--somewhat similar to the experimental Delta Clipper X rocket system by McDonnell Douglas. That's not a bad comparison to draw in fact, since several engineers who worked on the DCX project then became Blue Origin employees.
LauncherOne
Another space project in the news is Burt Rutan's LauncherOne vehicle, a partnership project with Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic company. LauncherOne is designed to revolutionize the space cargo-launch business by offering a private, ultra-low cost system to get small satellites into the void. When complete, LauncherOne will get a piggyback lift up to altitude under the wing of launch aircraft Eve, and will take payloads between 1kg and 200kg up to a maximum 800km altitude for a $1 million to $2 million price bracket--significantly less than half the current fee of $5 million to $10 million.
Having failed to win any money towards the project from the U.K. Government recently--historically a body with a somewhat closed mind as far as space funding goes--LauncherOne is now an internal project inside Virgin Galactic.
SpaceShipTwo
You'll be hearing a lot about SpaceShipTwo in the coming weeks, since it's due to be officially unveiled on December 7th. SpaceShipTwo is the Scaled Composites-built space vehicle that'll be carrying Virgin Galactic's paying passengers on their six minute pop-gun rides into zero gravity 110km above the Earth's surface.
Captive test flights will begin early in 2010, and the limited timeline info made available suggests that the first manned flights into space will begin sometime in 2011--plenty of time to load up on astronaut ice cream and build your Bowie MP3 playlists.
Someday soon Bertrand Piccard is going to throw the switches on his Solar Impulse Foundation aircraft, tug back on the stick and pull it into the air. Then he'll fly it right around the world. The impressive technology demonstrator's just about to take its maiden flight. Let's hope it's not cloudy.
The Solar Impulse Foundation, cofounded by Piccard, has some loft goals about promoting research and innovative exploitations of renewable energy use in the aeronautics industry, getting the information and news about inventions out to the public, and promoting sustainable development. One route to doing this is to tackle the tricky challenge of flying around the world in a solar-powered aircraft, and that's exactly what the SIF set out to do in 2003--with building starting in 2007.
Several weeks ago the impressive-looking vehicle, dotted with 12,000 individual photovoltaic solar cells underwent some initial engine power tests, and last week it rolled down the runway in Switzerland under its own power in some low- and high-speed taxi tests to test out controls, handling, and the delicate undercarriage. Under a test-pilots command, ground speed reached 10 miles an hour, and conditions were almost right for a first flight. Instead the team played it safe, and that flight should happen some time this week, if all goes well. Playing it safe sounds particularly sensible when you learn that the Solar Impulse is the size of an Airbus, but weighs about as much as a mid-sized car.
Of course solar-powered aircraft are nothing particularly new: NASA's Pathfinder aircraft has been in the news for several years, and QinetiQ's Zephyr aircraft broke some world records when it was demonstrated to the U.S. Air Force last year. But both of those aircraft are designed for specific tasks--mainly loitering around a specific location at very high altitude for defense or communications-node purposes--and they're unmanned, which frees up their design to be very, very light.
Piccard's vehicle is important because when it flies, it'll be a very potent demonstration of how far solar-power technology has come: It's efficient enough to fly a person into the air under power, and then fly that pilot around the world. Of course Piccard isn't envisioning a future where we all hop into our solar sail-planes for the journey to work, pseudo-Jetsons-style. Instead it's supposed to act as a symbol, "almost a provocation" as the Web site puts it, that solar technology could have a valuable role in aviation, an industry that many finger as being a serious eco-threat, with its almost exclusive reliance on fossil fuel. Fingers crossed then that the first flight--and more important the first landing--goes well this week, since Piccard's six-year effort as resulted in just a single fragile airframe.
