When Apple announced iOS 4.0 earlier this year, some additions to the SDK (software development kit) caught the attention of augmented reality (AR) developers - specifically, open access to the phone's camera APIs. But with the introduction of the new hardware in the iPhone 4 made this past Monday, the possibilities for AR on the popular smartphone skyrocketed. Today I had the opportunity to chat about the device's impact on AR with Stefan Misslinger, lead iPhone developer for metaio, one of the leading AR companies and makers of the mobile AR browser junaio.

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Enhanced Image Tracking

For some AR experiences, image recognition and tracking are essential to a quality customer experience. The application needs to be able to analyze the data being taken in from the camera in order to properly overlay 3D objects into space, but previously this functionality wasn't available for iPhone developers. When Apple announced iOS 4.0, the inclusion of access to live camera data in the iPhone SDK provided AR developers with the ability to bring image tracking to the iPhone.

Other mobile operating systems, like/> [...]

Thu Jun 10, 2010 15:15 pm

Image by Gary Hayes via Flickr

I had dinner last night with Frank Reed, whose writing graces this page each Friday. Somehow the conversation got around to self-promotion, a dirty little hyphenated word that no one really wants to admit to, but that we all must do to be successful. Frank and I admitted to each other that neither of us is very good at self-promotion, being old enough to have been profoundly uncomfortable with our various pre-Internet forms of self-promotion. (Many of us even refer to those who are good at it as "shameless" self-promoters.) But in thinking about our conversation, I think that both Frank and I are actually good at Internet-style self-promotion, because it stems from helping other people.

I told Frank the story of how I became a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, a situation that required self-promotion if ever there was one. When I first became aware of such a position, I (perhaps grandiosely) thought that I was qualified for the position in every way, but I had one impediment. I needed to collect letters of reference from other Distinguished Engineers. There was just one problem: I didn't know any.

I was advised to just start calling a few up and ask them to write a letter for me. This struck me as incredibly awkward, and not at all the kind of self-promotion I am good at. So, I chose another, more Internet-age appropriate method, sending helpful e-mails to Distinguished Engineers when I came across information they would be interested in. And to ensure that I had suc/> [...]

Sat Jun 12, 2010 01:10 am

Novell is providing the first glimpse of Pulse, its new real-time collaboration service. The new service will eventually fully integrate with Google Wave. This version does not include Google Wave as part of its service. But there is an expectation that eventually the integration will serve as a federated platform that may serve as the basis for new open-source collaboration efforts.

Novell is releasing the service initially to analysts and participants at BrainShare, its user group meeting next week in Salt Lake City. Each person will get to invite one new user, Novell will provide a fuller release in the next few months. A release at the end of the year will include OpenID as a core aspect of the platform.

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The service resembles platforms that we see emerging. It has a real-time activity stream. People may create their own groups within an activity stream. Groups may also be created with external communities such as partners or customers. Pulse will be available as a SaaS or on-premise.

The service includes a co-editing feature, much like you see in Google Wave.

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Fri Mar 19, 2010 10:50 am

Posted by JoannaLord

When it comes to marketing your brand online there is just so much to do. We spend our days researching, creating, implementing, and then measuring the success of our efforts. There are dozens of channels to participate in, and obviously thousands of ways to go about marketing your brand, but however you slice it—online marketing comes down to introducing new audiences to your brand, keeping your current brand users happy, and evolving the brand/company itself.

Unfortunately I think the first two steps often overshadow that third step to the process—evolving the brand/company itself, probably because to grow as a company you really need to take a pause and evaluate where you are currently standing. As marketers, the idea of pausing is equated with losing momentum which scares the hell out of us all. This industry moves too quickly, and pausing to reflect on where your brand is compared to your competitors seems like time poorly spent.

I am here to argue just the opposite. A few weeks ago I gave a presentation at PubCon South on “Competitive Intelligence on the Social Web,” and I wanted to extract a few of my key arguments and offer them up the SEOmoz audience both as thought provokers and for feedback. In my opinion competitive intelligence is one of those marketing steps we all say we did, but few of us rarely do. It’s true. Most of us are big fat liars when it comes to “doing competitive intelligence.”

For example, competitive intelligence IS NOT:

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Wed Apr 28, 2010 21:40 pm