[Link] http://www.pheedcontent.com/click.phdo?i=71a7e840486e4a6e411f89a897e8cde3

MeeGo Selected as In-Vehicle Infotainment Platform

Location-based service - Broadband networks - Business - Telecommunications - Location and Tracking

[Link] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/P2b1ih6aexk/coffee_mugs_get_connected_with_rfid.php

Fill 'Er Up! Coffee Mugs Get Connected with RFID

Despite the deeply intrenched techie community within coffee shops around the globe, the process of buying coffee has yet to see significant innovation. Sure, there are some new ways to order coffee, even via text message, but a unique and elegant purchasing solution has evaded coffee shops and other frequented business - that is, perhaps, until now.

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A company called Smug Coffee has created what it says is the world's first smart mug, or "smug." Instead of opting for wasteful plastic cups, coffee drinkers can instead buy a special mug with embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) chips that store account information and purchase habits.

Customers simply present their mug to a special scanner at check-out, and the barista can see their recent coffee orders - making a personalized ordering experience much easier. No need to grab a wallet or fork over cash - the chips connect to the customer's coffee shop account and automatically deduct funds.

RFID and similar technologies have long been used to provide customers with new ways to interface with a point-of-sale. I have used a special key fob to charge gas purchases to my credit card since I was in high-school, and other solutions let customers wave their cards at a special scanner. What the technology has been waiting for is practical and elegant implementations, and Smug accomplishes that.

The Smug not only speeds up ordering and paying, but it helps save Mother Earth one plastic cup at a time. By using the mugs, customers are offered discounts and deals and can earn points toward free drinks. Encouraging the reuse of mugs puts a dent in the use of plastic cups that end up in a landfill. While the use of RFID is limited to the store where the mug is purchased, having the mug may also cause frequent coffee drinkers to think twice about using a plastic cup when at other coffee shops.

Eventually, solutions like the Smug will be commonplace and we will hardly realize the technology behind the purchases we make. Simply resting the mug near the check-out will tell the cashier our purchasing habits so we can order up "the usual" and pay for it without even thinking about it.

The brainchild of Marquette University student Chris Hallberg, Smug Coffee is currently supported by a handful of small coffee shop chains, and processed its first transaction in May of this year. What are some other great examples of RFID in the consumer space? Let us know in the comments below!

[Link] http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/UdJ3tiEXjMs/augmented_reality_becoming_more_like_the_readwrite_web.php

Augmented Reality Becoming More Like the Read/Write Web

When content management systems (CMS) like WordPress and Blogger hit the Web several years ago, the Internet entered a new age where it became quick and easy for anyone with a computer to contribute content. This week, augmented reality (AR) took a significant step toward becoming more like the read/write Web with the launch of an online mobile AR CMS for creating content on the Layar platform.

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"Augmentation" - a Web-based tool for generating mobile AR content - was created by Layar Partner Network member Hoppala. With a Layar developer account, users of Augmentation can easily and instantaneously place their content in Layar with zero code and a few clicks on a map. Custom icons, images, audio, video and 3D content can all be added by way of a full screen map interface, and Hoppala will even host all of the data.

The company has been providing content management solutions for Layar since launching a beta test of its Layarserver in August of 2009. This project, however, is new in that it provides a tidy user-friendly GUI for adding myriad AR data instantly to Layar. For a more detailed look at how the Augmentation Web app works, watch the video embedded below.

As more tools like Augmentation lower the bar of entry for augmented reality, a flood of AR data will begin to fill platforms like Layar, junaio and Wikitude. This progression is not unlike that of the Web with the widespread popularity of blogs. With the Web, however, powerful search engines make finding relevant content much easier and Websites are (for the most part) browser agnostic.

This is not the case with mobile AR, where content is limited to the browser it is built for. Efforts for standardization in AR will help ease this problem, but what is really needed is a new open mobile AR browser that can aggregate content from the other platforms. Looking forward, solutions like these will benefit the overall proliferation of AR, instead of fragmenting and limiting it.

Hoppala's Augmentation tool is a great next step for AR content creation, as it lets users focus on creating great content, not on the complex technical aspects of AR. That said, it signals the beginning of a new era for AR as content creation is as easy as hosting a blog. As augmented reality matures, the platforms through which we use it must mature as well.

Sensor Networks and the Rainforest Ecosystem

MocoSpace Architecture - 3 Billion Mobile Page Views a Month

This is a guest post by Jamie Hall, Co-founder & CTO of MocoSpace, describing the architecture for their mobile social network. This is a timely architecture to learn from as it combines several hot trends: it is very large, mobile, and social. What they think is especially cool about their system is: how it optimizes for device/browser fragmentation on the mobile Web; their multi-tiered, read/write, local/distributed caching system; selecting PostgreSQL over MySQL as a relational DB that can scale.

MocoSpace is a mobile social network, with 12 million members and 3 billion page views a month, which makes it one of the most highly trafficked mobile Websites in the US. Members access the site mainly from their mobile phone Web browser, ranging from high end smartphones to lower end devices, as well as the Web. Activities on the site include customizing profiles, chat, instant messaging, music, sharing photos & videos, games, eCards and blogs. The monetization strategy is focused on advertising, on both the mobile and Websites, as well as a virtual currency system and a handful of premium feature upgrades.

Stats

Growing Engagement Gives Rise to Mobile Social Phones

How much time do you think consumers spend engaging in social networking on their mobile phones? Would you believe nearly 60 percent? Ground Truth, a Seattle-based mobile measurement firm, said today that it’s found consumers use their phones for social networking activities a staggering 59.83 percent of the time.

And INQ’s Social Mobile, which it unveiled at February’s Mobile World Congress Show, is just one of numerous handsets aimed at riding the cresting wave of engagement through social networking features:

• Motorola’s Motoblur — Announced in September at our Mobilize 09 event, Motoblur is a customized interface for Motorola’s Android phones that shows real-time status updates from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace right on the home screen. Users can update their own status directly through any Motorola phone that supports Motoblur — such as the Cliq or Backflip — making the interface a two-way social portal.


• Microsoft Kin — Two Kin models were announced this month that are targeted squarely at the social networking teenager. The phones support simple drag-and-drop sharing of pictures, video, and location on Facebook, My Space, Twitter and Windows Live. And all content shared or created on the phones is available online in a unique timeline.


• Sony Ericsson Zylo and Spiro — Just announced two weeks ago, the Zylo and Spiro combine the music features of the Walkman brand with native Facebook and Twitter applications. Users can share not only their current status, but tell the world what tunes they’re enjoying in ...

Big Data shakes up the Speech Industry

I spent a few hours at the Mobile Voice conference and left with an appreciation of Google's impact on the speech industry. Google's speech offerings loomed over the few sessions I attended. Some of that was probably due to Michael Cohen's keynote¹ describing Google's philosophy and approach, but clearly Google has the attention of all the speech vendors. Tim's recent blog post on the emerging Internet Operating System captured the growing importance of networked applications that rely on massive amounts of data, and it was interesting to observe in person its impact on an industry. (Google's speech and language technologies were among the examples Tim cited.)

Google thinks of seamless voice-driven interfaces as having two key features: (1) ubiquitous availability so users can access speech interfaces from any app and on any device, and (2) high-performance so speech technologies lead to frictionless user interactions. In order to produce and deliver ubiquitous, high-performance speech interfaces, Michael Cohen emphasized Google's big data systems as key to how they develop all their services.

Having speech technologies in the cloud lets Google quickly iterate and push enhanced speech engines on a regular basis. More importantly, their speech engines learn and get trained using real data from their many interconnected services. Speech engines typically rely on both language and acoustic models. Language models are statistical models of word sequences and patterns. Cohen pointed out that their language models use data collected from web searches, giving them access to an ever growing corpus that few can match (230 billion words collected, refined to a vocabulary of the million most common words). Cohen disclosed that some of the more recent acoustic models they're evaluating are built using unsupervised machine-learning algorithms. (These are speech algorithms trained on recorded speech that haven't been transcribed by hand.) While he coyly avoided explaining how an accurate system can be built from unsupervised techniques, it's likely they use data from their 411 service (

Internet of Things Explained (Video)

IBM's Smarter Planet team has created a great 5 minute video explaining the emerging trend of Internet of Things, an exciting topic ReadWriteWeb has and will continue to cover frequently and in depth. Internet of Things is about, as the video explains, the coming future when there are more "things" on the Internet (sensors especially) than there are people.

The result of that will be "a kind of global data field" the video says. "If we can actually begin to see the patterns in the data, then we have a much better chance of getting our arms around this. That's where societies become more efficient, that's where more innovation is sparked." Check out this artistic, succinct, optimistic and inspiring video explaining what could well become a big factor in how the future unfolds.

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This is heavy stuff, clearly aimed to fostering positive and substantial cultural change through technology - by opening up a new plane of options for humanity. Of course there's little critique of this movement in videos like this; that's something we're still exploring but we imagine surveillance is one down side. There's also some risk of paying so much attention to our machines that we lose track of the joy of engaging directly with the world around us.

The upside as described in the video is big, though.

"When we talk about a smarter planet, you can say that it has two dimensions. One is to be more efficient, be less destructive, to connect different aspects of life which do affect each other in more conscience and deliberate and intelligent ways. But the other is also to generate fundamentally new insights, new activity, new forms of social relations. So you could look at the planet as an information, creation and transmission system, and the universe was hearing its information but we werent. But increasingly now we can, early days, baby steps days, but we can actually begin to hear...

Intel, Nokia Open Source MeeGo OS

Memory Matters