Embrace augmented reality eyewear even if it looks funny right now

A lot of people couldn’t imagine life without their iPhones, Blackberries or Android smartphones. Just a few years ago Blackberries were the domain of of guys in crisp suits and power ties, plucking away on a tiny keyboard that would somehow lead to the downfall of some poor schlep’s bank account.

Taxis don't care that you're texting

Now, whether it’s on the streets of New York City or down the aisle of a local Walmart, its commonplace to see someone paying more attention to the tiny screen of their phone than to to the sights and sounds around them.

There has been, finally, a lot of forward progress in the world of augmented reality, and more importantly, the futuristic hardware that will drive it. Up to this point, virtual reality has required goofy looking eye-gear to perform its duties. Usually the viewer would be given an image made from small LCD screens that would “project” an image of 45-90 inches in front of them. Nothing behind these images were visible and because of the close actual proximity of the screens a eyestrain-induced headache was sure to follow.

Few people would be caught dead wearing such a contraption. In a society where bluetooth headsets have a certain amount of douchiness associated with them (at least according to The Daily Show), a Geordi LaForge piece of eyewear would be sure to cause one’s chase from town from an angry torch-wielding mob. The thing about those bluetooth headsets though is that there weren’t really necessary. In fact, they were often more trouble than convenience. The batteries on them had to be charged, they had to be readily accessible (or permanently attached to your ear), and you had to have already figured out how to pair it with your phone – usually not an obvious task. It’s was just easier to hold the phone up to your head when the phone rang, phone radiation be damned.

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Google releases Dart programming language

Google unveiled the working version of Dart today. It looks to me that one of the primary selling points is that it’s designed to be run both on the server side and the client side (browser). I love my PHP but it has to depend on other client-side code (HTML / JavaScript / Flash) to do anything.

What’s also interesting is that Dart code runs in Javascript right now – so no plug-ins necessary if I understand it correctly.

I’ve been looking at a lot of different languages and how to apply them lately and i think my next big project is going to be done in Python. That said, I’d love to take a peek at Dart and see what it can do. I’d be hesitant to use it for anything large-scale right now (it has been out less than a day) but I’d love to see if there is a groundswell of curiosity around it in the next few weeks.

Take a look at Dart for yourself.

Facebook Drives 44 Percent Of Social Sharing On The Web

If you are still wondering why Google is pushing so hard with its new product Buzz, it is because it wants in on social traffic. For many sites on the Web, social traffic coming through Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace is beginning to rival, and in some cases overtake, search traffic as the single biggest source of traffic. This traffic comes from shared links, photos, and videos. By its own numbers, 5 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every month.

What isn’t easily appreciated is the extent to which such social sharing is tied to different identity and authentication platforms across the Web. If you can log into a site easily using your Facebook or Twitter account, it is easier to broadcast links from that site to your friends.

To get a sense of which services on the Web drive the most sharing, I asked Gigya for some stats. Gigya powers sharing widgets on more than 5,000 content sites, including ABC.com. NBA.com, PGA.com, Answers.com, and Reuters. Consumers can click a share button on these sites and send an article link, photo, or video via a menu of different services including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and AOL. Over the past 30 days, people have shared almost a million items over the Gigya network. Facebook and Twitter dominate with about three quarters of all shared items between them. Here is how the services break down (note that these are relative numbers) :

Distribution of shared items
Facebook: 44%
Twitter: 29%
Yahoo:18%
MySpace:9%

It makes sense, people prefer to broadcast links rather than share them one at a time via email. Although Yahoo makes a strong third-place showing. When it comes to authentication, simply using your existing username and password to log into another site, Facebook is still the most popular via Facebook Connect, but only just barely. Google via Gmail and Yahoo are almost equally popular, at least on certain types of sites where people are just reading for themselves like news sites. On entertainment sites where people are more likely to share content, Facebook Connect makes up the majority of logins.

Apple and Google just tag teamed the U.S. carriers

Google’s event today was supposed to be about one device, the Nexus One. Instead, we heard a lot of: “more devices,” more manufacturers,” “more carriers,” “this is just the beginning.” Today was not about one device, it was about Google’s first step in helping to reshape the mobile landscape in the U.S. And thanks to the groundwork laid by Apple, it just might work.

Think about your cellphone and cellular service five years ago. Both were likely horrible. But you were content in your misery, because you didn’t know any better. Then came the iPhone. It was a mobile device that was so good, people were willing to ditch their existing service providers en masse (I did) to go to the only one that had it: AT&T. And while you might think that would be a big plus for AT&T, it actually shifted a massive amount of industry power to Apple. They had the device that everyone wanted. And they used that leverage to renegotiate their exclusive deal with AT&T to pay out a huge amount of money for each device sold.

Sure, there were hot selling mobile devices before it — the Motorola RAZR, for example, was the best selling phone for many years in a row — but the iPhone had two advantages: 1) Thanks to Apple’s complete control over the device, including, maybe most importantly, its software, they created a user experience that the RAZR never could.  2) Thanks to the App Store, there is some amount of lock-in to the device because users are spending a ton of money on apps and if they switch phones, those all go away.

With the iPhone, Apple has created a device that all the other U.S. carriers lust after. And that, in turn, has allowed Google to come along with Android. When the G1 launched a little over a year ago, it was the first of many devices to be heralded as a “iPhone killer.” It wasn’t. But Google didn’t care about that. All that mattered to them at the time was getting their foot in the door of an industry that they, like Apple, had not at all been a part of leading up to that first device. It worked. The carriers were so desperate for an “iPhone killer” that they seemed willing and ready to negotiate with Google to get as many devices out there as possible to ride the Internet-enabled smartphone tsunami that the iPhone earthquake started. (more…)

Ten technologies that will rock 2010

Now that the aughts are behind us, we can start the new decade with a bang. So many new technologies are ready to make a big impact this year. Some of them will be brand new, but many have been gestating and are now ready to hatch. If there is any theme here it is the mobile Web. As I think through the top ten technologies that will rock 2010, more than half of them are mobile. But those technologies are tied to advances in the overall Web as well.

Below is TechCrunch’s list of the ten technologies that will leave the biggest marks on 2010:

1. The Tablet: It’s the most anticipated product of the year.  The mythical tablet computer (which everyone seems to be working on).  There are beautiful Android tablets, concept tablets, and, of course, the one tablet which could define the category, the Apple Tablet.  Or iSlate or whatever it’s called.  If Steve Jobs is not working on a tablet, he’d better come up with one because  anything else will be a huge disappointment.Why do we need yet another computer in between a laptop and an iPhone?  We won’t really know until we have it.  But the answer lies in the fact that increasingly the Web is all you need.  As all of our apps and data and social lives move to the Web, the Tablet is the incarnation of the Web in device form, stripped down to its essentials.  It will also be a superior e-reader for digital books, newspapers, and magazines, and a portable Web TV.
2. Geo: The combination of GPS chips in mobile phones, social networks, and increasingly innovative mobile apps means that geolocation is increasingly becoming a necessary feature for any killer app.  I’m not just talking about social broadcasting apps like Foursquare and Gowalla.  The advent of Geo APIs from Twitter , SimpleGeo, and hopefully Facebook will change the game by adding rich layers of geo-related data to all sorts of apps.  Twitter just recently launched its own Geo API for Twitter apps and acquired Mixer Labs, which created the GeoAPI.
3. Realtime Search: After licensing realtime data streams from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and others, Google and Bing are quickly ramping up their realtime search.  But realtime search is still treated as a silo, and is not regularly surfaced in the main search results page.  In 2010, I expect that to change as the search engines learn for what types of searches it makes sense to show Tweets and other realtime updates.  In the meantime, a gaggle of realtime search startups such as Collecta, OneRiot, and Topsy will continue to push the ball forward on the realtime search experience.  Realtime search will also become a form of navigation, especially on Twitter and Facebook.  The key will be to combine realtime search with realtime filters so that people are delivered not only the most recent information but the most relevant and authoritative as well.
4. Chrome OS: In November, Google gave the world a sneak peek at its Chrome operating system, which is expected to be released later this year.  The Chrome OS is Google’s most direct attack on Windows with an OS built from the ground up to run Web apps fast and furious.  Already a Google is rumored to be working on a Chrome Netbook which will show the world what is possible with it a “Web OS.” It sounds like it would be perfect for Tablet computers also (see above).  Chrome is a risky bet for Google, but it is also potentially disruptive.
5. HTML5: The Web is built on HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and the next version which has been taking form for a while is HTML5.  Already browsers such as Firefox and Google’s Chrome (the browser, not the OS) are HTML5-friendly.  Once HTML5 becomes more widespread across the Web, it will reduce the need for Flash or Silverlight plug-ins to view videos, animations, or other rich applications.  They will all just be Web-native.  HTML5 also supports offline data storage, drag-and-drop, and other features which can make Web apps act more like desktop apps.  A lot of Websites will be putting HTML5 under the hood in 2010.
6. Mobile Video: With video cameras integrated into the latest iPhone 3GS and other Web phones, live video streaming apps are becoming more commonplace—both streaming from phones and to them.  As mobile data networks beef up their 3G bandwidth and even start to tiptoe into true broadband with 4G (which Verizon is heading towards with its next-gen LTE network), mobile video usage will take off.
7. Augmented Reality: One of the coolest ways to use the camera lens on a mobile phone is with the increasing array of augmented reality apps.  They add a layer of data to reality by placing everything from photos to Tweets to business listings directly on top of the live live image captured by the camera.  Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera, Layar, GraffitiGeo and even Yelp are examples of augmented reality apps.
8. Mobile Transactions: As mobile phones become full-fledged computers, they can be used for mobile commerce also.  One area poised to take off in 2010 are mobile payments and transactions.  Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s latest startup Square turns the iPhone into a credit card reader.  Verifone has its competing product, as does Mophie.  The idea is that any mobile phone can become a point of sale, and those mobile transactions can tie into back-end accounting, CRM, and other enterprise systems.
9. Android: Last year saw the launch of nearly two dozen Android-powered phones, including the Verizon Droid.  In a few days, Google’s Nexus One will launch as the first Android phone which can be unlocked from any given carrier (it is launching with T-Mobile). Android is Google’s answer to the iPhone, and as it reaches critical mass across multiple carriers and handsets it is becoming increasingly attractive to developers.  There are already more than 10,000 apps on Android, next year there will be even more.  And other devices running on the mobile OS are launching as well.
10. Social CRM: We’ve seen the rise of Twitter and Facebook as social communication tools.  This year, those modes of realtime communication will find their way deeper into the enterprise.  Salesforce.com is set to launch Chatter, it’s realtime stream of enterprise data which interfaces with Twitter and Facebook and turn them into business tools. Startups like Yammer and Bantam Live are also making business more social.

via TechCrunch