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Thanks to the growing popularity of mobile augmented reality (AR) applications such as Layar and Wikitude , as well as countless advertising campaigns from corporate giants, AR is beginning to make its way out of the shadows of obscurity and into popular culture. Once an experimental technology left for expert engineers, AR is becoming more and more accessible to both developers and consumers of the experiences. Now, the greater AR community has another feather for its cap as Time Magazine has recognized it as one of its 10 Tech Trends for 2010. Sponsor "One challenge for 2010 will be harnessing the growing ubiquity of webcams and smart-phones to make augmented reality useful as a tool in day-to-day life," writes Time's Dan Fletcher, pointing out the U.S. Postal Service's virtual box simulator that helps customers determine what size box to use by holding the item they are shipping up their webcam. Unfortunately, Fletcher merely skims the surface of AR in his 10 part article published Monday, and in doing so he unintentionally labels players in the mobile AR space as "gimmicky." I can see how it would be easy for someone investigating AR iPhone apps to be overwhelmed at the plethora of apps that let you shoot things in an augmented first-person perspective, but it is still disappointing that he failed to notice the quality apps in the space. But hey, it's still great for us augmented reality fans to see our beloved emerging technology receive national notoriety in a publication such as Time, so we'll take what we can get. AR snagged the #4 position on Time's list, but when you look at some of the other trends listed, you notice that AR is already taking advantage of most, if not all of them. Time's #1 tech trend for 2010 is location, and it points out the growing popularity of services like Foursquare and Gowalla . Mobile AR applications have been taking advantage of location data since day one and it continues to play a crucial role. After location comes "building platforms, not websites," which Layar has been developing with their third-party POI data-sets and their upcoming layer marketplace . Good thing "frictionless payments" is another trend to watch for in 2010, otherwise Layar's marketplace would be ahead of its time. Also on Time's list is social gaming, and social objects, immediately reminding me of Tonchidot's Sekai Camera app which lets users leave AR objects in physical space for people to interact with through the application. One could argue that AR uses all of the other nine technologies featured on Time's list with the exception of the iPad, which unfortunately has no camera with which to augment our realities. On a related note, Layar co-founder Claire Boonstra was named to Laptop Magazine's list of the most influential women in technology . Alongside Boonstra was Google 's Marissa Mayer, Caterina Fake of Flickr and Hunch fame, and Melinda Gates. This, as well as Time's inclusion of AR on their tech trends list, is great exposure for augmented reality. If you'd like to learn more about how companies are using augmented reality for marketing in both desktop and mobile-based experiences, be sure to check out our latest premium report on the subject which was released earlier this week. Discuss
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Augmented Reality Among Time's 10 Tech Trends for 2010
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In the past, we've talked a bit about issues of gender and technology , but today, this blog post brought another important aspect of tech and discrimination to our attention. We polled some of our friends on Google Buzz and asked whether ageism is something they've seen at work or that has effected their lives. And the responses were interesting - although some say they try to be as even-handed as possible, others said that age discrimination exists at both ends of the spectrum, especially when it comes to landing a job. Let us know your experiences and opinions in the comments. Sponsor What Experts Say A 2001 article from CIO started a conversation about ageism in IT. The response was dramatic. "Within days of being asked 'Do CIOs Discriminate Against Older Workers?' about 200 readers had posted answers; a majority of them gave a resounding yes... workers age 55 and older make up only 6.8 percent of the IT workforce." A couple years later, a 2003 study from the International Journal of Selection and Assessment explored how older and middle-aged programmers fared in the tech workforce. Results showed "that age was negatively associated with both annual salary and job benefits levels." But in 2009, another study showed what could have been seen as a turning tide. "The study, ' The Coming Entrepreneurship Boom ,' found that... the United States might be on the cusp of an entrepreneurship boom - not in spite of an aging population but because of it... The average age of U.S.-born technology founders when they started their companies was 39." What People on the Ground Say Perhaps the graying set are doing well as entrepreneurs, but what about when they apply to be programmers, information architects, web designers or other traditionally "young" jobs? In a lively conversation on our Buzz account , Aaron Hayes told us that ageism is alive and well, saying, "I turned 40 this year, and even though I can write Python circles around some... [and] have run several of my own small businesses - somehow, because the metabolic process of my cells has been occurring for several solar rotations beyond a subset of unspoken rules, I can be dismissed by some as a viable candidate for a startup. "And this apparently because people that have experience clearly can't have youthful enthusiasm, or passion." Even though, as Ruggero Domenichini said in the same thread, older employees might have "less ego, nothing to prove, been through failure [and] lived more." And person after person said that they had either hired older programmers and been totally pleased with their fit and performance or - in one case - not hired someone because of age and regretted it ever since. What Do You Say? We're interested to know what your experience has been, either as a younger startup exec faced with hiring decisions or as an older programmer working in IT. On a personal level, I have a great deal of respect and admiration for the older techies in my life - especially as I begin to earn a few gray hairs of my own. My old-as-dirt dad is a fabulous network engineer, and a lot of the best developers and entrepreneurs I know have lived long enough to have a mature, realistic and stable view of their abilities, the ecosystem and their colleagues. And in an amendment of the famous "Never trust anyone over 30" quotation, I'd have to say I'd gladly take the word of a 50-year-old who knew his stuff over a 25-year-old entrepreneur starting his first company. And the hypothetical 25-year-old would do well to take his older colleague's advice seriously, as well. As always, let us know what you think in the comments. Discuss
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Open Thread: Old Fogeys v. Young Whippersnappers, Ageism in Tech
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