Augmented Planet Event Wrap Up

lester — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:37:09 +0000

Good morning, firstly thanks to everyone who attended the Augmented Planet meet-up yesterday. I hope you had a good time and it was worth while. There was around 75 people who made the event so lots of interest in the technology. Feedback from everyone I spoke with was extremely positive, it’s something that you’d like us to do again. A few people offered to donate a venue for next time which will be fantastic, we’ll try to get a beer sponsor as well. The good news is we are looking at planning another event for April so we hope to see you again.

Thanks of course to Nitin Samani, John Wyer for helping out and of course our guest speakers Myles Peyton, James Alliban and Chris O’Shea. You’ll never know the stress me and Nitin went through until John turned up with his laptop.

If you didn’t manage to write down all the demos that I showed this is the list with links to a YouTube demo.

Hyperlinking demos
RedLaser (barcode scanner)
Bableshot (language translator)
SnapTell (product recognition)
CubeCheater (solve the Rubix Cube)
GetFugal (logo recognition)

Marker demos (links to try the demos)
Lost Valentinos (the band demo)
Twitter business cards
GE SmartGrid

Mobile demos
Layar
Wikitude
Junaio

Markerless demos
I couldn’t install the codex for this one, but this is the mobile face recognition demo I was planning on showing.
TAT
Links to speakers websites
James Alliban
Myles Peyton
Chris O’Shea

Both Nitin and John where taking photos, once they send them over I’ll put them in to Flickr and send out the link.

Next up for me, I am attending the Vodafone AppStar event tomorrow. If you are a developer and building Widgets then they have a few places left at this free event. You can find out more and register here appstaruk.eventbrite.com.

GetFugu Logo Recognition For Android And iPhone

lester — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 19:38:19 +0000

I have avoid blogging about GetFugu for a few weeks now, the last few times I looked at their website it wasn’t working, but now they seem to have sorted that problem out.

Solutions that use markers to give you your information about a product or service are interesting but in reality how easy is it to go into a brand like Coke and say ‘hey we have a great idea, every time someone takes a picture of your logo we can send them to your website or give them special promotions’. I’m sure they’d say that’s cool, at least up until the point where you tell them they have to embed a new special logo (marker) with each of their products in the future. It becomes a hard sell at that point.

GetFugu gets around this problem by recognising actual logos rather than rely on markers, you point your iPhone or Android camera at a logo, and if they have it in their database then they can give you more information. For branding it has huge potential as nothing special is required, it’s instantly compatible with all existing material that has the clients logo.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLq0-Iw595A

In it’s current form it’s a bit limited and probably has more potential for advertises than usefulness for consumers like you or me. Very few times do I find the need to take a picture of a logo. But it has potential for expansion, I’m sure they have plans to tie in promotion discounts, if you take a picture of beers you could be offered a discount.

Here are some items I’d like to see for future version:

Take a picture of any product. I could be out shopping and take a picture of a bottle of wine and get more info about the product (Wine.Com have an api hint hint)
Weight watchers would be an interesting use case, take a picture of a food box and see it’s calorie content/daily points etc.
Expanding the weight watchers theme, if I scan the product before I eat it, it adds the details to my daily food intake list.

That’s just a couple of random ideas, I’m sure you have more.

Augmented Planet » GetFugu

Augmented Planet Event Wrap Up

GetFugu Logo Recognition For Android And iPhone