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Augmented reality (AR) has a long way to go before it achieves widespread acceptance and exposure to the public, but thankfully, many of the leading companies are continuing to make large strides towards this goal with commercialization of applications and the growing popularity of AR advertising. Earlier this month, metaio , one of leading vendors of AR software and services, updated its iPhone application junaio to version 2.0 in an effort to keep up with the growing AR browser market, but it is a truly useful implementation of AR in this app that will help the emerging technology reach more users. Sponsor Previously, the junaio app was its own social network that allowed users to create AR scenes by importing 3D models into still images captured from the phone's camera, but with the latest version of the software, junaio is now competing with Layar and Wikitude and others in the AR browser space. A few weeks after releasing the updated application, junaio announced it had formed a partnership with BART, San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit system, to bring live train data to the app. Subway maps have been one of the more popular implementations of AR on mobile phones, especially with Paris-based developers Presselite and their popular, award-winning Metro Paris Subway application. With this latest release, junaio is taking advantage of the API provided by BART to not only place locations of nearby stations in a user's field of vision, but also estimated arrival time of trains at each station displayed live in real-time in the AR point-of-view. The AR community needs more partnerships like this to be formed; it is practical applications like this that will push AR into the mainstream. There are a dozen different ways to find the nearest pizza place via an AR app on mobile devices, and frankly, that's getting a little old. It's not enough to just point me toward something, and I don't think that will be enough to convince enough of the general public to embrace the technology. Desktop-based webcam AR is way ahead of mobile AR in terms of providing practical applications. Examples include the USPS virtual box that helps customers determine which size box to use for shipping; the virtual mirror technology which helps customers try on sunglasses, hairstyles, clothing, makeup, shoes, etc.; and more recently, Samsung's TV sizer AR experience that lets users see what a new TV might look like mounted on their wall (see video below). These are the kinds of applications that are helping AR kick the reputation of being a gimmicky novelty technology and instead build one of practicality and usefulness. If mobile AR solutions are going to continue to gain corporate ads and sponsorships, they will need to find innovative ways other than pointing things out to survive in the long run. Discuss
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Practical Application is the Golden Ticket of Augmented Reality
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The Google break from China raises some questions for the enterprise considering cloud computing. It's one thing if the network goes down. That can be fixed. But when the government does its own blockade, that's another story. Google Apps customers face this very issue. Google has the thorny task of explaining to its customers of what they may expect when using Google Apps in mainland China. Sponsor First off, it's important to clarify that Google is not shutting itself out of the China market. Google has stopped censoring its search services: Google Search, Google News, and Google Images on its Chinese domain, www.google.cn. But Google intends to continue to do R&D in China ad it will maintain a sales presence there. But for people working in China, there can be a bit of a mixed message. What if you are using Google Apps in Beijing? What can you expect? To keep customers updated, Google has created a Google Apps status dashboard that updates daily to show what in the Google network is working on a day-to-day basis. Google Groups, Blogger, YouTube and Google Sites are entirely blocked. This could pose a number of issues. For example, a customer may use Google Sites for an intranet, project site or an employee profile page. You could go on with the issues this presents but basically it's one of the downsides when using a cloud computing service in face of a repressing regime. Google has some recommendations for those doing business in China: "... it is important to know that there are several networking configurations and associated technologies available to help ensure ongoing access to your critical business services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. These network configurations, such as a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, secure shell (SSH) tunneling, or using a proxy server, are already in place by many businesses with worldwide operations who serve their users from various locations. Companies should consult their own technical, legal and policy personnel to find a solution that works best for them." But then what if the applications do work? Where is the data? Who can access it? Google says it does not host a customer's data in mainland China nor do Google employees in China not have access to Apps systems or customer data. Discuss
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Google Apps in China: It May Work, It May Not
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We store music on iTunes despite its stringent DRM, preventing us from freely sharing music. But like any innovation in the marketplace, it takes time for us to determine what is acceptable and what is not. The promise of cloud computing and the ability to store limitless amounts of music may perhaps be that turning point. But it could also mark a more stringent time than we have ever known. Sponsor Canonical has unveiled the public beta of its Ubuntu One music store that gives a glimpse of what cloud computing may offer as an alternative to storing music on our hard drives or a proprietary service like iTunes. This is new territory. As Canonical point out, integrating a cloud service like Ubuntu One with buying music is new for digital music stores. Ubuntu One serves as a desktop music service that stores the music in the cloud and syncs it with your computer. It allows someone to purchase music and then store it in their Ubuntu One account . Ubuntu One also serves as a service to store other kinds of information such as images or documents. The service will go live in late April to coincide with Ubuntu's new release . In the meantime, Canonical is looking for beta testers to give it a try. Helpful infomation is on the Popey blog : As with everything in Ubuntu Lucid, the developers are keen to get people testing the store before Lucid is shipped at the end of April. If you're running Ubuntu Lucid either on bare metal or inside a Virtual Machine, it would help greatly if you could take some time to test this new functionality. So far only a very limited number of beta testers have been using the store, so opening up the store to public scrutiny should generate plenty of feedback to the developers. These are the early days of music services that allows you to purchase, store music in the cloud and sync with your computer or smartphone And it comes with definite kinks. The Ubuntu One service is free for up to 2 gigabytes of storage. If you go beyond that you start to pay. That could happen pretty quickly as people can use the service to store any kind of information they want. Plus, there are the copyright laws that have had to be taken into consideration for the service. Music, in some respects, defines how we view the ways we store information. Music is deeply personal. We want easy access to it. We want it always to be there. Cloud services may provide this capability but they also run the risk of acting as walled gardens that can be controlled perhaps even more easily than a service like iTunes. Discuss
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Canonical Ubuntu One Music Service Goes Into Public Beta
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At the RSA Keynote a few weeks back, Amazon's Security Lead, Steve Riley participated on a panel with other security leaders of the industry. We were impressed with the openness of all of the participants, and particularly excited with the new concepts coming from at Amazon. Riley used a term that is being used within his part of Amazon, the "Think Cloud". As we understand it from the discussion on stage, a Think Cloud is a "body of knowledge" that is a real-time information base of Amazon cloud that can be pivoted all the way down to the threads and individual data concurrency. It would be an index that acts like a control point that helps define movement of data through a servers and compute tasks. Looking at the journey from the data point of view, including data about the environment itself and how to repair itself when damaged and keep data concurrency in tact. Sponsor Here's the RSA cloud security keynote to get a bit of inspiration to benefits of portable (cloud) computing. In this 30 minute discussion, there are several notable considerations from the contributors on how cloud security challenge can be thought of as a big opportunity and that perhaps now is time to debunk the myth that security is not a part of the cloud. We picked out a few of Riley's comments that we believe are leading towards the idea of the Think Cloud and why Amazon may be there first. I/O Amazon knows it is critical to be able to have good inputs and outputs. And emphasizes ease of use even more than data portability standards themselves. Riley described a great use case where an un-named customer used Amazon for compute, another cloud provider for data processing, SalesForce for crunching, and then pushed the results to Facebook. Interconnection is happening and applications are already "using all the clouds out there". In this case, all the way down to the consumer. When we look at this pattern, it we see parts that mimic the history of web in the enterprise. Back-end systems moving data around, optimizing, and passing it to the a web portal. And, the portal demanding "real time" updates for key pieces of data, while relying on batch for others. We can see that idea of a Think Cloud may come into this pattern to help set boundaries and checks so that when a piece of data passes through an Amazon, it is returned reliably, ever time. Perhaps a Think Cloud is a registry that does part of what a smart Enterprise Services Bus does when registered new applications for master data, that is keeps track of activity. In a way, we need to solve the cloud-equivalent "floating point" problem in the CPU of generations past in the computer itself. On the CPU math co-processor, the question was, "Does it know how to do math correctly every-time under all conditions?". Perhaps the question in the cloud may be "Are all my customers still in the database even though that thread died?", or "Do we have encryption set on every cpu that this user's information is stored in memory or on disk". Solving that problem of interchange the role the concept of Think Cloud might lead. Many legacy applications won't make it to the cloud. At least, not as-is. Riley comments that "servers are disposable horsepower, they come, they go". In other words, Since applications sit on top of servers, and servers are sinking into the cloud, applications will sink or swim based on how they migrate to this model. So, the first movers are "the rats" that have jump ship as it started to sink. Follow the rats, or drown. The tear-down of the server into the n-resource cloud breaks-or-suboptimizes server based applications in a fundamental way. Thinking back, this is very similar to web services revolution in the enterprise, where just because an application can export its data model, doesn't mean it is optimized for web services, or API level interaction. We find this almost a reverse-trend to server virtualization, which has expanded the physical compute space. Perhaps we are finding that there is some new turf to be claimed on where the cloud reaches and virtualization ends. We like to think of it as "smart service bus" meets "smart application" on infinite resources. Infinite, or course, equaling the credit in your PayPal (or other) form of payment collection required by either, or both parties. As reported by The Register's Cade Metz, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer recently pointed out that this is a potential opportunity with Microsoft and Azure. Where, instead of "only" focusing on infrastructure clouds, the company is working towards a new programming model, Steve said on March 4, 2010. "I think Azure is very different than anything else on the market. I don't think that anyone else is trying to redefine the programming model" When we look at the services recently in our post, Is Amazon's Computing Fabric a New Economy , we noted a series of services outside of core computing that start evolving Amazon quickly down the path of a new development paradigm. Abstracting storage, network, monitoring, and perhaps in future security, in raw terms gives rise to new opportunities to bind them back together. Security is the topic for RSA. Compliance is the reason to get it right. If the computing model wants to be secure, it needs to know the assets and their relationships. As reported by Search Cloud Computing , Amazon's Riley also tipped the audience at RSA that Amazon is weighing in on encryption as a service offerings. This is another example, where that now Amazon is supporting a new services such as Virtual Private Cloud, it moves one step closer the knowledge point for all the key assets, including their peers within the corporate network. We find this area, as well as certificate management, to be an area ripe for the type of thinking we see at Amazon. The problem to be solved isn't a better routine, but is how to apply it tandem with the moving assets and data that is ever changing in demand. Perhaps We Needed to Get to Random, to Get to Secure We wonder if Amazon's Think Cloud is something new, and if so, is a path towards solving the collision of the major parties in the network. If it joins network, storage, person, and server resources together, perhaps it is the brains of the next generation Internet. The winner will be the one that makes it simple, because as Devo on Chatroulette is proving, demand is asymmetric, and access control is from the eighties. Photo credit: RSA , Devo , Inc. Discuss
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Future: Amazon's 'Think Clouds' are Data Aware
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Kaiser Kuo presented today at SXSW about Google in China. He spoke about how the Google situation will impact Chinese Internet users, other companies and the Chinese government. In the presentation, Kuo (who also spoke to ReadWriteWeb a week ago) clarified how censorship in China works. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the Great Firewall that has the most impact in China - but something China calls "self-discipline." Kuo also discussed what the next moves will be from Google, since he believes that the ball is in Google's court and Beijing won't push the situation. Sponsor History of Google in China Before getting down to the nitty gritty of the current Google-China standoff, Kaiser Kuo gave some valuable context to Google in China. In 2005 Google started to hire aggressively in China, he said. Google's decision to enter China with a censored product immediately brought grief to Google, with some pundits describing it as a "black day for Internet freedom." Google defended its actions at that point by saying that not providing search to a fifth of the world's population would be a greater loss than having censored results. At first Google had a notice on their search results stating that they were censored. Kuo also pointed out that Google only omitted results that users wouldn't have been able to view anyway had they clicked through (because the pages or sites were blocked). At that point, Google didn't host Gmail, personal search history, Blogger or other services that had personal information. Google in China also protected their employees, Kuo noted. Google never had an easy time of it in China. For example, many Chinese users couldn't spell the word "Google." Regulators made it difficult for them, as did their Chinese competitors. Google did manage to make good revenues and market share, but never "moved the needle" against its Chinese search competitor Baidu. Kuo remarked that Google was not singled out for any special treatment by the Chinese government. In 2009 Google got into trouble due to pornography in its search results, and it went dark for a short time as a result. There has been a massive growth in Internet users in China in the four years since Google entered that market. There were 2-3 million Internet users in China when Google began operations there; now there are 384 million Internet users in China. Google has around 35% market share in China, which has not been matched by any other Western company. Its annual revenues in China is around $300-400 million in revenue, which is nothing to sneeze at. In mid-December 2009 there was a hacker attack on Google, which in January Google claimed on its blog came from China. At that time Google also announced it would stop censoring search results on google.cn. Kuo doesn't believe this announcement was a cynical retreat from China due to its being defeated by Chinese competitors, which many pundits suggested at the time. Kuo said that the challenge to Google's business model is around trust, for personal data in the cloud. So Google's blog post in China was appropriate, Kuo believes. Some people have suggested that the Chinese government used the strategy known in China as "Using Quiescience to control action." The government has however unblocked Google Docs and Groups, and has not blocked any further Google services since January. Currently Google is still hiring in China and is in the midst of negotiations with the Chinese government. Kuo believes there is deliberate confusion right now."It's impossible to grasp what Google is up against without having a better grasp of how censorship in China works." The Great Firewall There are two main types of Internet censorship in China, said Kuo. The first is The Great Firewall of China, which has been nick-named "Iron Curtain 2.0." It's a system of filters at domain name or page level. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger and other western sites have been blocked at this level. Kuo said that it's fairly simple for Chinese Internet users to "hop the firewall " using proxy services, free VPNs. So The Great Firewall is more of an inconvenience. Kuo pays for a VPN that allows him to access Western websites. Self-Discipline The second form of censorship is "more pernicious and effective," according to Kuo. It is carried out by Internet companies, on instructions from Chinese government. All Internet sites in China have to practice what is termed "self-discipline." Failing to adhere to this form of censorship means having your website or service shut down. There are some 30,000 "Internet police." Two cartoon avatars are wont to show up if a Chinese user visits pages with content offensive to the Chinese government. Most Internet users in China don't come across the Great Firewall, because most Chinese Internet users don't use Western services like Twitter and Facebook. But, Kuo said, "Google is different." It has become "a real part of the Internet culture in China." Kuo then talked about how Chinese censorship nowadays is almost all social media sites, such as social networks and microblogging sites. How Chinese Netizens Use The Internet Kuo mentioned that the Chinese Internet is more "entertainment superhighway" than "information superhighway." Online gaming is big in China. Most Chinese Internet users, Kuo said, enjoy the Internet that they have - rather than worry about the one that Western pundits think they should have. The Internet has also emerged as a de-facto public sphere in China. As long as you don't overstep certain boundaries (political activism and so forth), then the "will of the masses" is often expressed on the Internet through the likes of bulletin boards or social networks. Regularly, Chinese netizens are exposing public officials. However Kuo warns that there are "very very serious limits" to what is emerging in the public sphere. For example, anonymity leads to a lot of trolling. It's ad-hoc, reactive and informal - however it is a "squeaky wheel that is regularly getting grease." Also, a minority are pro-democracy - most of the netizens in the public sphere are pro-Chinese government. Next Moves from Beijing and Google Kuo said that the Chinese government will wait for Google to make the next move. It realises it has nothing to gain by pushing Google or being openly hostile. The ball is in Google's court and it will probably keep to its word that it will stop censorship in China. It may still shut down operations in China, which in practice means closing google.cn. But this has a lot of problematic scenarios - including the difficulty of having translations done for Google.com and staffing issues of closing down. The pros of pulling out of China include saving face and appeasing western users. But the cons are significant. They include a backlash from tech-savvy, urban Google users, a setback to scientific research, a global black eye for their image, and ceding the virtual monopoly in search in China to Baidu. The moderate scenario is that Google.cn is shut down, but continues to work with its mobile partners in China, R&D and sales continue to operate in China, and Google services will be unblocked. The best case scenario, Kuo believes, would be if Google stopped censoring google.cn - but the service stays online. Discuss
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What Google Will Do in China (SXSW Presentation)
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