Toluu

O'Reilly Radar

http://radar.oreilly.com/

Augmented reality as etiquette coachToday

Identifying local landmarks and uncovering hidden coupons are fun augmented reality applications, but "Programming iPhone Sensors" author Alasdair Allan has a loftier AR goal.

"I'm terrible with faces and names," he said during a recent interview at OSCON. "So, I want those little glasses where you see someone and it's like: 'This is Gary. You met him in 2005. His wife is called Mary. He's got three kids. His birthday is ...'. That sort of thing. That's my ultimate goal."

Allan's ideal is based on facial recognition, which is a step above facial detection. But you can't have identification without detection, and detection is something we're close to seeing in real-time. Allan himself successfully built a real-time face detection demo on the iPhone 3GS. The iPhone 4's improved hardware makes the same functionality easier to implement. (Not trivial ... just easier.)

Allan touched on a number of additional topics during our OSCON chat, including:

• How (theoretically) a geolocation database -- like SimpleGeo -- could be matched up with a cloud-based facial recognition database.
• How iPhoto's Faces tool could influence FaceTime and other real-time video applications.
• He closed with a brief rundown on the types of sensors commonly found in many smartphones ... and why the introduction of gyroscopes in Android phones is now a near inevitability.

The full interview is available in the following video:

Four short links: 30 July 2010Today

1. The No-Twinkie Database -- These are all the Twinkie Denial Conditions described in my “Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!” Designer’s Notebook columns. Each one is an egregious design error, although many of them have appeared in otherwise great games. A collection of "don't do this" for app designers. (via waxy)
2. Cloud Privacy Heat Map (Forrester) -- a map showing the degree of legal support for privacy and data protection across various jurisdictions. (via azaaza on Twitter)
3. Wesabe on GitHub -- Wesabe has closed, but is open sourcing its code.
4. Laurie Santos TED Talk -- monkeys make similar irrational decisions as we do. "The errors we make are predictable and immune to evidence." Sound like you? Watch this excellent talk.

Which social gaming companies are hiringYesterday

Disney's announced purchase of Mountain View gaming startup Playdom, follows on the heels of EA's purchase of London-based Playfish last November. Based on active users, Zynga remains by far the biggest online social gaming company. But what other independent companies are growing?

To see which companies are expanding, I used our data warehouse of online job postings1 to detect recent hiring2. Zynga and Playdom put out the most job postings over the last three months, with Watercooler, a Redwood City startup, finishing a distant third3:

While I focused on online social gaming companies, I checked to see which companies were showing interest in games for smartphones, and found not too many were mentioning the iPhone or Android platforms on their job posts. Outside of Zynga, Playdom and Popcap Games, none of the other companies had (many) job postings that mentioned th

Facebook Mountain ("I wish I knew how to quit you")Yesterday

"Apple is 'Evil' and Facebook is 'a Photo-sharing Site'" -- Fred Wilson, VC (investor in Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga).

It's the ultimate form of respect when the competition vilifies and diminishes your accomplishments, so take respected VC and blogger Fred Wilson's comments in that light. After all, he's got investments in a number of companies that Facebook is a potential threat to.

But let's face some facts. Love or hate Facebook, you don't grow to 500 million users if you are not doing something incredibly right.

Moreover, you don't engage those same users to the point that 50 percent of the active user base logs in daily unless you have found a way to turn the social equivalent of lead into gold.

Mind you, this is a service legions diss, dismiss and outright distrust. A service with customer satisfaction levels that rank below the airline industry.

It begs the question: Why isn't this ship sinking, as opposed to being an unstoppable force that's swallowing up the web one 'Like' and Facebook Connect sign-on at a time?

U

Four short links: 29 July 2010Yesterday

1. How to Raise Funds for Non-Profits (Joi Ichi) -- One organization sent a message to all of their donors during the Haiti crisis asking them to give to an NGO that they had vetted. They didn't ask for any money for themselves. This had a hugely positive effect and the donors trust in the group increased. Wallets aren't zero sum.
2. legislation.gov.uk -- very elegant legislation system for the UK. Check out the annual analysis, for example. (via rchards on Twitter)
3. The Great WebKit Comparison Table -- So far I’ve tested 14 different mobile WebKits, and they are all slightly different. You can find the details below. (via Andrew Savikas)
4. Node and Scaling in the Small vs Scaling in the Large (al3x) -- In a system of no significant scale, basically anything works. The power of today’s hardware is such that, for example, you can build a web application that supports thousands of users using one of the slowest available programming languages, brutally inefficient datastore access and storage patterns, zero caching, no sensible distribution of work, no attention to locality, etc. etc. Basically, you can apply every av