July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google had its first $50 billion year in 2012. But with its massive investments in mobile, someday it might make that much just on the little plastic and metal devices we carry in our pockets.

In fact, digital ad company WordStream has counted no fewer than 21 ways that Google is monetizing mobile, from good-old-fashioned Google AdWords to Groupon-light Offers to augmented reality assistant Google Goggles and, someday, Google Glass.

Google even wants to replace your dead-cow wallet with a shiny digital one. But if you won’t buy what you want with Google Wallet, it hopes to at least guide you to your next purchase with Google Shopper.

Here’s the full list, in visual form, along with WordStream’s perception of how well Google is using its mobile tools to generate mobile money:

photo credit: Louish Pixel via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by Trak Lord 

Augmented reality (AR) may seem like a futuristic concept, but it will be a reality of our digital lives in 2013. AR is a new technology that blurs the line between what’s real and what’s computer generated by enhancing what we hear, see and feel. Next year, I predict that it will be everywhere. Here are my five reasons why:

The glasses are coming, the glasses are coming!

Whether it’s Google’s Project Glass or concept videos along the lines of “Sight”, the Internet can’t get enough of Terminator Vision. A few companies have however made some pretty impressive technological leaps this year: this fall, Vuzix debuted their monocular AR prototype for industrial use at the annual InsideAR conference; Innovega showcased their Augmented Reality contact lens prototype at the 2012 Consumer Electronic show, for which they’re currently seeking FDA approval; and researchers at the University of Washington successfully displayed a single pixel on an eye (albeit, that of a rabbit).

In the meantime, retails brands like Oakley and game favorite Valve were just as quick to throw their hats in the ring alongside patent applications from tech giants Apple and Microsoft. But don’t bother Santa with your letters – widely available (and affordable) wearable augmented reality devices probably won’t hit shelves until 2014.

Smartphones will be AR-equipped

We might not get Paul Smith AR goggles anytime soon, but expect OEMs, handset manufacturers and carriers to integrate optimized augmented reality, visual display and camera performance into the next generation of smartphones, because it’s basically already happening.

Premier-to-punchline-to-rising-star Nokia recently launched the City Lens app, exclusive to its Lumia suite of devices. UK-based chip designer ARM has had its eye on AR for a while, powering and optimizing experiences for its architecture found in the Samsung Galaxy SII, SIII and Note devices. And let us not forget Telefonica and their mad dash to serve mobile augmented reality advertisements to the entirety of their O2 network, alongside mobile coupons and location-based services.

Location, Location, Location

GPS and geodata were responsible early on for bringing augmented reality to the forefront. Applications like Junaio and Layar made a splash in the tech world, offering location-based navigational “channels” and “layers” where UFO-like billboards bobbed on the horizon, displaying information about your surroundings. In 2013 expect to see the next generation of those GPS-based experiences, incorporating not only data from on-board sensors like the gyroscope and camera, but other niche mobile technologies that rely on proximity such as NFC.

Companies like Hover are already deeply embedded in generating and augmenting 3-D maps of urban areas, and my company (AR firm Metaio) has successfully developed “snapping algorithms” that pull this kind of data from the cloud and tightly align it to the real world. Expect your city to get a lot more augmented in 2013.

The death of the gimmicky app

Disclaimer: there will always be marketers that abuse useful technology for their own nefarious, poorly designed purposes(re: QR codes), but expect to see brands move to better, faster and stronger apps that give their audience clear incentives for regular use. 3-D bunnies smiling at you from conference marketing material may have seemed novel at the time, but creating a new app for each one-off experience is neither scalable nor tolerable from a user’s perspective.

The 2013 IKEA Catalog app featured an augmented reality viewer that visualized furniture in 3-D and served related video and digital content to readers – and was the most downloaded branded app of 2012, even after launching in July. With that kind of success as a benchmark, expect other companies to start managing entire product lifecycles with augmented reality solutions- not unlike Mitsubishi Electric with their enterprise MeViewAR app that visualizes heating and cooling units in the real world. Mitsubishi Electric has already moved to the next phase for 2013, intending to visualize 3-D maintenance instructions for service technicians.

The birth of the elusive killer app

It doesn’t exist, and it probably won’t. Augmented Reality is a horizontal technology, which means that the nigh-limitless applications make it a challenging endeavor to develop the Evernote-YouTube-Wordpress-Instagram of Augmented Reality. We did however see the AR Angry Birds, and even if it isn’t official it’s still a pretty clear indication that a successful AR game could lead the way for massive adoption. There are already some good examples out there, like the new JengAR game that inserts the 3-D content into the environment itself rather than needing a printed image.

Expect more games to take this approach in 2013 as we move toward experiences that engage users in their actual surroundings. But the most amazing app for which the industry could possibly hope is only peripherally related to augmented reality. 3-D content is tough- it’s difficult and expensive and time-consuming to create, and may present the biggest barrier to producing augmented reality experiences. Augmented reality needs an app that easily generates 3-D content and exports it in major supported formats. Think “Draw Something” meets iMovie, in 3-D.

That would be something.

Trak Lord is the head of US Marketing for Metaio, the leader in augmented reality research and applications. Before joining with Metaio, Trak attended Dartmouth, where he first started working with augmented reality technology, only to relocate to Silicon Valley and consult for social media and augmented reality startups.

Since joining Metaio, Trak has traveled all over the world evangelizing augmented reality and Metaio’s research. He also manages Augmented Reality Blog, the most widely read source in the industry.  

When he’s not at Metaio, Trak enjoys vintage motorcycles, 19th Century French novels and coffee. Lots of coffee. 

A picture speaks a thousand words, and with its latest update, Google Translate can translate both.

The updated Google Translate app now lets users translate objects like street signs and notes just by photographing them.

While the feature is new to Google Translate, it’s been a fundamental part of Google Goggles for a while now. Goggles lets users search the web by photographing physical objects like landmarks, books, and text on street signs (which can then be translated).

Lack of pure novelty aside, the addition is a massively important one to Google Translate, which can now help people save lots of time when encountering new words in a foreign language.

Alongside the camera addition, the Google Translate update also improves Japanese handwriting input, adds dialect preferences, and offers instant translation results.

Photo: Shutterstock/Stephen Aaron Rees

CNN profiled Hartmut Neven, director of the Google project, who said that, in order to be identified by the software, people using the app would have to check a box to give Google permission to access their pictures and profile information. Google has not said what personal data might be displayed once a person is identified, CNN reported.

“We recognize that Google has to be extra careful when it comes to these [privacy] issues,” Neven told CNN. “Face recognition we will bring out once we have acceptable privacy models in place.”

Funny, in the spring of 2010 I heard Google staff engineer David Petrou say that Google Goggles (which taps Google’s massive computing power to identify pictures of objects and products that you take with your phone camera) was capable of recognizing faces, but that the company had chosen not to do so out of concern for privacy issues. Evidently, the company changed its mind about privacy enough to let Neven proceed with his project.

Google Goggles is good at recognizing things because it goes through a dozen different kinds of image searches, figures out the best result, and then returns an answer as to what it thinks an image is. This technology comes from Neven’s own startup, Neven Vision, which was acquired by Google in 2006. The object recognition technology led to Goggles, while the face-recognition technology has been incorporated into Picasa, Google’s photo-sharing service. That software helps recognize faces in your computer’s photo library, where there isn’t as much of a privacy concern. Google also acquired another image recognition company called Like.com in 2009. And Google has filed for patents on face recognition.

In a statement, Google said, “As we’ve said for more than a year, we will not add facial recognition to Goggles unless we have strong privacy protections in place. We’re still working on them. We have nothing to announce at this time.”

Neven said the effort to identify faces today had stalled internally out of concerns about how privacy advocates might respond. Privacy issues are no small matter. Last year, Google had to pay $8.5 million in a legal settlement over complaints that its Buzz social-networking tool exposed the names of people with whom Gmail users regularly communicated. Google also agreed this week to let the Federal Trade Commission review its privacy procedures every couple of years. Google also got into trouble for collecting private data via is Street View vans that take pictures of streets.

The stalker problem isn’t a joke. If you can identify a person’s name based on a photo, it isn’t that hard to find that person’s home address as well. But Google evidently thinks a lot of people would want help recognizing strangers.

The company has not fully described what it intends to do with the app or when it will introduce it. It might be introduced as an add-on to an existing tool, such as its image search engine.

[photo credit: CNN]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has finally brought its Goggles visual search feature to the iPhone as part of its Google Mobile App.

Google software engineer Milan Broum announced the addition of Goggles, which lets users perform visual searches using their iPhone’s camera, in a blog post today. The feature only works on version 4.0 of the iPhone’s operating system with an iPhone 3G S or iPhone 4 — the only models that contain auto-focusing cameras.

The company previously released Google Goggles on Android last December, and it’s been an exclusive on that platform until now. Microsoft ended up releasing its own spin on visual search in its Bing iPhone application in June, which makes me wonder what took Google so long to bring Goggles to the iPhone.

In my testing, Goggles seemed fairly accurate at recognizing books and DVDs. I also found it to be faster than Bing’s visual search. Broum stresses that Goggles is still a Google Labs project — so the company still has to put a lot of work into it before it’s ready for prime time. For example, it doesn’t yet recognize things like plants, animals, or food.

Google put together this short video to demonstrate the iPhone version of Goggles:

With the wow factor of services like Google Goggles, which lets users search objects in the real world through the built-in cameras of their Android devices, it’s clear that visual searching is more than a mere fad.

At the DEMO conference today, Berkeley, Calif.-based IQ Engines is taking visual searching to the next level with its image recognition engine, which has its roots in neuroscience. Its engine can easily label and identify images, letting users search with images the same way they search with text on standard search engines.

As we wrote previously, the company’s goal is to provide an application programming interface, or API, that will allow all different types of businesses — from online retailers to mobile application makers to photo gallery sites — to provide visual search capabilities.

The visual recognition engine employs three systems: An exact object identification engine, an object classification engine, and a human computation network (crowd sourcing some labeling work). The company says that the engine will improve over time as its used more.

The company began as a joint project between University of California at Davis and University of California at Berkeley neuroscientists and computer scientists who wanted to design “a system that mimics how the human brain sees, stores and retrieves images and their features.”

Unlike competitors like Google Goggles, IQ Engine’s visual-search technology can identify and label any legible image — not just images it has already dealt with. Other visual search engines simply return no results if they can’t identify an image. IQ Engines also says it’s the only company to make an open API available so that third-party developers can utilize its image-recognition technology.

IQ Engines says hundreds of developers are using its API to develop applications, most of which are slated for release this fall. The company also released its own iPhone app several months ago, which goes by the name of oMoby.

Founded in 2008, the company landed $1 million in funding in June from angel investors, and combined with National Science and National Institute of Health grants, it has raised a total of $2 million so far. It’s aiming for a second round of funding this winter.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/980795693

T-Mobile hopes to reignite some of the excitement from those early days by launching the T-Mobile G2 Android phone later this month. The company just took the wraps off the HTC-built cell phone, which uses the Android 2.2 software and a Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM7230 microprocessor running at 800 megahertz. The device, pictured right, is reminiscent of the original G1 (pictured below), which also had a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

It’s interesting to compare the G2 to the G1, to mark the progress of technology. This phone has a 3.7-inch touchscreen, which is likely much more responsive than the single-touch 3.2-inch touchscreen on the original. It has a 5-megapixel camera with a flash and 720 high-definition video recording, 4G connectivity using T-Mobile’s new HSPA+network2 (for faster data connection speeds), a Swype keyboard, and 4 gigabytes of internal memory with an 8 gigabyte microSD memory card.

T-Mobile humbly notes that it ignited the spark that set the Android world ablaze two years ago. Now, with the launch of the G2, the company is returning to its original partners Google and HTC to launch a true 4G phone, said Cole Brodman, chief technology and innovation officer at T-Mobile USA.

Andy Rubin, vice president of engineering at Google and the creator of the Android business, noted that there are now 80,000 Android apps, compared to just 50 at the launch two years ago. This new phone will be faster at loading web sites, running apps, playing videos, downloading files and more. It has seven customizable home screen panels, including a dedicated panel with one-click access to your favorite Google apps. The phone is tightly integrated with Google Voice (which transcribes voice mails to text)), Google Goggles (object recognition) and Voice Actions (which allows you to control your phone with your voice).

The phone will be available exclusively in the U.S. from T-Mobile in the coming weeks.

Google Goggles is one of the more interesting experiments being done in visual search. If you have an Android phone, you can already use the Google Goggles visual search app to take a picture of something and then submit it to Google as a search query. Google will take perhaps 6.5 seconds to send you three results that show you what the object is.

You can take pictures of a landscape, a barcode, a sign, products, text and other things. By and large, Google Goggles returns pretty good results within seconds. Over time, this technology will get better and better as both hardware and software improve, said David Petrou, staff engineer at Google Labs, in a speech today.

Petrou delivered his keynote talk about the topic of visual search at the Hot Chips chip conference at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. He did so because visual search evidently requires a ton of processing power in a mobile device. It thus represents a huge computing challenge for chip designers who have to come up with better, low-power processors to be able to meet Google’s needs in the future.

Right now, the accuracy isn’t bad. Google Goggles delivers a single result — meaning it thinks it knows exactly what you want recognized — about  33 percent of the time. Google has more than 1 billion stored images that it can use to recognize the submitted queries. Google trains its search engines on those images to get better at recognizing them.

In most cases, people are doing one of two things when they submit a picture. They don’t know what the image is and want to know about it. Or they know what it is and they want to know more. Users have used the app to look up trivia, settle bets in bars, or just find out something while traveling.

“When it works, it’s magical,” said Petrou. “But we are just at the beginning and we have a long way to go.”

One of the challenges is that Google is trying to create a universal visual search tool. Wine Spectator can create an app that tells you more about the bottle of wine you are drinking (and it has). But Google has to make Goggles work for all search possibilities. Google also has to deliver specific results. If you take a picture of a chair, it can’t just tell you it is a chair. It has to tell you what kind of chair it is and who made it. Finally, it can only deliver a few results on a small cell phone screen, not thousands, so it has to prioritize its results.

Google can use the technology to recognize faces. But it chooses not to do so out of concern for privacy issues, Petrou said. But people seem to want to recognize faces. Roughly 25 percent of queries submitted to Google Goggles have faces in them. Google thus has to figure out a way to handle these searches without violating privacy.

Today, Goggle Goggles is structured so that Google receives the query and then dispatches it to a bunch of different search engines that work on it simultaneously. It can submit the result to a barcode reading engine or a text engine or a photo engine. Each engine delivers a piece of the puzzle back. Google synthesizes the results and then sends them back. Some tasks are easier to do; some are hard. Optical character recognition, or reading text inside an image, is particularly difficult and often takes a few seconds to do. On top of that, it takes time to get results because of delays in shipping large images over the cell phone network. Google also has to work hard to make sure it doesn’t deliver false results.

Petrou said he hopes that hardware designers will develop faster ways to send  and process pictures as well as improve the processing power on the phones themselves. There are other ways to speed up the results. The independent search engines can send their results back immediately upon finishing, rather than waiting for Google to synthesize a result. That can save 3 seconds from the process, but it may also be less accurate.

Over time, Google is working on improvements. It acquired a company to help improve its results and is expecting to launch an iPhone app later this year. It is also figuring out how to do a more universal program that works on HTML5 technology, a new standard that is making its way into more phones. At some point in the future, Petrou hopes Goggles can be used to improve financial transactions, process credit cards, or determine if a user is happy or not. In short, the computational problem seems to have no end in sight, and that’s what hardware designers like to hear. It means that there will be a use for the chips they’re designing far into the future.

Plink’s only product thus far is PlinkArt, an Android application that lets you identify any work of art by taking a photo of it. The app has been successful among art aficionados. Its developers — PhD students Mark Cummins and James Philbin — report that the app was downloaded more than 50,000 times in six weeks after its launch. PlinkArt currently has data for tens of thousands of famous paintings.

The developers will be moving to Santa Monica, Calif., to work on Google Goggles, Google’s visual search endeavor on Android phones. Goggles allows Android users to take a picture of anything to learn more about it, and Google has already used it to dabble in art recognition. By acquiring Plink, Google will bolster Goggles’ art recognition capabilities even further.

There’s no word yet on what the acquisition means for the PlinkArt app. The company was considering developing an iPhone version of the app, but it’s very likely that Google nixed any possibility of that with the purchase.

Google has been working on Goggles for about two years now and confirmed recently that it will be bringing it to other platforms eventually, including the iPhone. Google definitely sees a future in visual search, which would allow smartphone users to look up information in a natural way without typing into a search box. It’s also one of a trifecta of innovating mobile search technologies that Google is exploring; the other two are location-based search and searching by voice.

Plink recentlywon $100,000 as the winner of the Education/Reference category in the most recent Android Developer’s Challenge, according to the Guardian.