O'Reilly News & Commentary

Four short links: 6 July 2011 - China Snaffling Facebook Stock, DNS Douchebaggery, Corporate Whores, and Comic Relief

By Nat Torkington
July 6, 2011

China Wants to Buy Facebook (Forbes) -- Beijing approached a fund that buys stock from former Facebook employees to see if it could assemble a stake large enough "to matter." This has implications for Facebook entering China. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is reportedly "wary about the compromises Facebook would have to make to do business there." If she...

Augmented reality and books, together at last? - Four vastly different projects marry augmented reality with publishing.

By Peter Meyers
June 17, 2011

Here are four examples that illustrate how books and other publications are starting to use AR to power their pages.

Four short links: 16 May 2011 - Minority Report, Embedded Strings, GNU Voice Software, and Nigerian Emotional Masters

By Nat Torkington
May 16, 2011

Entering the Minority Report Era -- a survey of technology inspired by or reminiscent of Minority Report, which came out ten years ago. (via Hacker News) Sally -- a tool for embedding strings in matrices, as used in machine learning. (via Matt Biddulph) GNU SIP Witch Released -- can be used to deploy private secure calling networks, whether stand-alone...

Softly buzzing phones could yield better augmented reality - Foursquare's Dennis Crowley on subtle forms of augmented reality.

By Jenn Webb
May 5, 2011

Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, says subtle interactions — like a buzzing phone — could lead to better augmented reality experiences than those provided through cameras and screens.

Four short links: 3 May 2011 - Sentiment Analysis, Word Frequency, Design Process, and Plant Recognition

By Nat Torkington
May 3, 2011

SentiWordNet -- WordNet with hints as to sentiment of particular terms, for use in sentiment analysis. (via Matt Biddulph) Word Frequency Lists and Dictionaries -- also for text analysis. This site contains what we believe is the most accurate frequency data of English. It contains word frequency lists of the top 60,000 words (lemmas) in English, collocates lists (looking...

Four short links: 4 March 2011 - Javascript AR, Android Patterns, Node.js Book, and SMS Platforms

By Nat Torkington
March 4, 2011

JSARToolKit -- Javascript port of the Flash AR Toolkit. I'm intrigued because the iPad2 has rear-facing camera and gyroscopes up the wazoo, and (of course) no Flash. (via Mike Shaver on Twitter) Android Patterns -- set of design patterns for Android apps. (via Josh Clark on Twitter) Preview of Up and Running with Node.js (O'Reilly) -- Tom Hughes-Croucher's new...

Four short links: 23 December 2010 - Illusion of Government, Sterling on Wikileaks, Useful AR, and Real World Programming

By Nat Torkington
December 23, 2010

There Is No Such Thing as the Government -- absolutely spot on there is no spoon moment for government. And that matters. It matters because once you recognise that fact, you can start to do things differently. People do, of course, recognise it at the level of caricature I have described here and nobody will admit to believing that...

Strata Gems: DIY personal sensing and automation - A simple app turns Android phones into intelligent agents.

By Edd Dumbill
December 21, 2010

Tomorrow's augmented reality is being built today on mobile devices. The Tasker app for Android puts the power of the phone's sensors and network into the hands of non-programmers.

Video pick: A real-time translating app - Word Lens translates printed text from Spanish to English and vice versa.

By Mac Slocum
December 17, 2010

It looks like the future of augmented reality has already arrived. Word Lens is an iPhone app that uses the built-in camera to translate Spanish text to English and vice versa. See it in action.

Strata Gems: Kinect democratizes augmented reality - Tomorrow's reality will be prototyped on phones and gaming consoles

By Edd Dumbill
December 15, 2010

Developers can now hack up augmented reality solutions with commonplace gaming consoles, accelerating innovation in virtual extensions to our daily lives.

"Then and now" with an augmented reality twist - National Archives' AR contest puts old photos in a modern setting.

By Alex Howard
December 9, 2010

The National Archives is running one of the coolest competitions ever to originate in the nation's capital: an augmented reality photo contest.

Four short links: 17 November 2010 - Data Metrics, AR Intervention, Facebook Export, and Android ROMs

By Nat Torkington
November 17, 2010

Understanding Your Customers -- I enjoyed Keith's take on meaningful metrics. We talk a lot about being data-driven, but we interpret data with a model. The different take on meaningful metrics reflect the different underlying models that are lit up by data. It's an important idea for the Strata conference, that gathering and processing data happens in the context...

Four short links: 15 October 2010 - Long Tail, Copyright vs Preservation, Diminished Reality, and Augmented Data

By Nat Torkington
October 15, 2010

Mechanical Turk Requester Activity: The Insignificance of the Long Tail -- For Wikipedia we have the 1% rule, where 1% of the contributors (this is 0.003% of the users) contribute two thirds of the content. In the Causes application on Facebook, there are 25 million users, but only 1% of them contribute a donation. [...] The lognormal distribution of...

How augmented reality apps can catch on - For mobile AR to gain mass appeal, it needs a platform or an engine.

By Mac Slocum
October 13, 2010

A recent interview with Lynne d Johnson at Web 2.0 Expo NY got me thinking about how augmented reality apps can gain widespread adoption with companies and consumers. Here's two ideas.

Bookish Techy Week in Review - Contrarian views on ereading's merits, Google Editions still MIA, and new interactive apps from Lonely Planet and Gourmet.

By Kat Meyer
September 24, 2010

This week we noticed: the Chronicle of Higher Ed worrying about ereading's effects on youth, while a Harris poll suggested ereaders read more; fall showed up but Google Editions did not; the ECPA doesn't do a lot to protect privacy in the cloud; certain libraries are lending things they probably shouldn't be; and TOC Frankfurt is just around the corner.

Reality has a gaming layer - Kevin Slavin sees a world where games shape life and life shapes games.

By James Turner
September 23, 2010

Kevin Slavin, managing director of Area/Code and a speaker at Web 2.0 Expo New York, has worked at the the intersection of games and reality for nearly a decade. In this interview, Slavin explores the impact of mobile apps and the unexpected ways games shape our lives.

Four short links: 16 August 2010 - Augmented Games, Matt Jones, Nuclear Data, Historical Tweetage

By Nat Torkington
August 16, 2010

Gearbox (YouTube) -- smart toy company, first product is a ball that rolls in the direction you tilt your iPhone. Their home page says they're a Boulder-based startup. (via BERG) Five Things I'm Thinking About (Matt Jones) -- the things he's talking about were either on our radar or are now. Read and enjoy. 1945-1988 -- art visualizing nuclear...

Augmented reality as etiquette coach - Alasdair Allan has a practical goal for AR: putting names to faces.

By Mac Slocum
July 30, 2010

Alasdair Allen, author of Programming iPhone Sensors, says real-time facial identification -- the sort that pairs names and faces on the fly -- is closer than you might think. He expands on that topic and a number of others in this video interview.

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