Does your kid want to play with unicorns? You should check out next week’s Toy Fair in New York, where toy makers are converging with the latest-and-greatest augmented reality technology that brings once-static games, books and toys to life. With augmented reality, a kid viewing a book or game though an iPhone, iPad, web cam or other connected device, will see and hear animated characters that were once flat on the page.

The proliferation of these products shows that augmented reality, a technology which has a conference of its own, is going mainstream as more people carry smartphones, are always connected and want the latest and greatest experience.

San Francisco-based Nukotoys will be on hand to show off NUKO trading cards, which pop with animated monsters when viewed through an iPad, iPhone or iPod. The Monsterology cards, now in beta, will let kids collect, trade, train and play with 3D unicorns, cyclopses and sea serpents, the company said.

Digital Tech Frontier will show off its new Popar book line. The books are encoded so that a user with a webcam and a PC, will see 3-D, moving images — rocket ships blasting off, planets spinning, etc. — as they read.  (See video here.)

Other AR-adopting toy makers include Character Options, which is using the technology in its new Appgear shown at the London Toy Fair last month. And perennial fan favorite Lego is using AR in its Life of George game and in some of its product packaging.

There are many potential uses for AR. Hewlett-Packard was on the road at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and other venues showing off Autonomy’s Aurasma for retail and other applications. Bodymetrics demonstrated an AR fitting room at CES; some realtors are using AR to make house listings more compelling.

With more than 184 million iPhones on the planet, plus all the other iPads and smartphones out there, the addressable audience for AR goodies will only grow as will applications beyond fun and games.

Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user antjeverena

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Intel’s wireless ambitions go beyond smartphones and tablets. It’s set its sights on the guts of the mobile network as well. By embracing a new network design concept called Cloud-RAN, Intel believes it can reshape wireless networks from highly-specialized architectures into more generic computing platforms that run over its off-the-shelf silicon. And in the world’s largest operator, China Mobile, Intel sees the opportunity to make that vision happen.

China Mobile has a massive network of 700,000 GSM and 220,000 3G base stations built into towers throughout China’s vast landscape. The base station is easily the most expensive element of the wireless network, and as China Mobile looks to the next wave of wireless technology, LTE, it doesn’t want to repeat that enormous infrastructure investment by installing pricey hardware at the bottom of every tower. Instead, it’s looking for Intel’s help to move all of that network intelligence into the cloud, leaving only the radios and antennas at the cell site.

The Cloud-Radio Access Network (Cloud-RAN) isn’t the public cloud of Amazon Web Services. Rather it’s a private cloud run by each operator in local data centers, but the principle is the same. China Mobile could centralize an enormous number of now-distributed computing resources. That would not only save capital and operating costs, but it would also allow it to webscale the network’s biggest number-crunching requirement – converting the analog fuzz scooped out of the airwaves into digital ones and zeros the network can understand.

Using supercomputing principles to handle baseband processing means no longer having to build networks to meet peak demands at every tower. Cell sites usually see huge upticks in use at a few predictable times each day: during work hours in a business district, for instance, and mornings and evenings out in the suburbs. Outside of those peak times, that capacity just goes to waste. But with Cloud-RAN, operators can allocate capacity where and when needed, following the flow of network congestion from the suburbs to the central city and back again. By putting their base stations in the cloud, operators could drastically cut the processing power necessary to run the network as a whole – by some estimates as much as 40 percent.

Meet the Cloud-RAN players

Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks have developed Cloud-RAN platforms of their own, giving them fancy names like lightRadio and Liquid Radio respectively. Meanwhile, chipmakers Texas Instruments and Freescale have both begun retooling their baseband designs for future cloud implementations. But Intel aims to take the concept one step further. Instead of merely relocating base stations to the cloud, Intel proposes using its multi-purpose Xeon processors to perform the same signal processing tasks that are now the purview of highly-specialized equipment.

In short, Intel wants to replace the big-iron wireless networks of today with what are essentially server farms that can be built and deployed for a fraction of the cost.

At a telecom industry conference last year, the GM of Intel’s Communications Infrastructure Division, Rose Schooler said that the telecom industry has been hobbled by its fixation on proprietary network interfaces, opaque platforms and a morass of complex signaling protocols – that’s code for telecom vendors not wanting to open up any more than wireless standards require. By adopting the more open standards of the computing industry, the wireless industry could innovate at the faster pace of computing, Schooler said.

Not surprisingly, the traditional telecom vendors think Schooler and Intel suffer from a case of wishful thinking. Freescale and TI have also tapped into computing architectures for their next generation of chip designs. Freescale uses IBM’s PowerPC, while TI has begun integrating ARM cores into its latest basebands. But TI hasn’t done away with the key proprietary component of its baseband designs: the digital signal processor (DSP). No matter what Intel claims, wireless networks are highly specialized creatures and therefore require highly specialized silicon, said Tom Flanagan, director of technical strategy for TI’s wireless base station infrastructure team.

“Its kind of naïve to think that you can replace this highly optimized technology with something general purpose and not lose anything,” Flanagan said in a recent interview. “We build that expertise into the hardware because hardware is exactly where it needs to be.”

For Intel to replicate base station with generic Xeon processors would require it to build many of its functions into software, and doing baseband processing through software is a highly inefficient way to run a network, Flanagan said.

What are Intel’s chances?

To build a wireless network business, Intel doesn’t just need to battle the established telecom vendors, it has to make the case for Cloud-RAN to the wireless carriers. Last year at CTIA, Verizon CTO Tony Melone was dismissive of the new cloud architectures emerging at the show, saying that they were neat design concepts, but hardly ready for prime time. Verizon Wireless is the world’s most aggressive carrier when it comes to LTE and implementing new network technologies, so Melone’s lack of endorsement is telling.

Another obstacle is the enormous backhaul capacity that a Cloud-RAN architecture would require. Sending raw unprocessed radio frequency data over the network to a cloud data center would require much more bandwidth than a copper or microwave backhaul link could provide. That means fiber is the only way to support Cloud-RAN, and no operator has fiber links to all of its cell towers.

But if Intel lands a contract with China Mobile it may not have to worry about other customers. An LTE deployment from China Mobile could eventually scale to more than a million cells, translating into a heck of a lot of high-end chip sales. Intel, however, faces competition from the incumbents on that front as well. Intel has been working with on China Mobile’s Cloud-RAN project since its inception, but recently the carrier began testing Alcatel-Lucent’s lightRadio technology as well.

Given the decline of its core PC business, Intel needs to find new markets for its X86 processors and figures that the wireless industry is ripe for the picking. But its attempts to break into other aspects of that industry have flopped. Intel has tried for years to challenge ARM’s dominance in the mobile computing market with its Atom processors, but the X86 architecture’s notorious power problems have kept handset makers disinterested. Only earlier this month did Atom start showing life. Most recently Intel has been trying to position its processors as a means of making dumb femtocells and picocells smart.

I’ll give Intel one thing. It’s tenacious. With every wireless initiative fail – note WiMAX – it immediately launches another. And where it can’t develop a wireless technology on its own, it buys a company that can. Cloud-RAN could be a key turning point for Intel or another flop, but we’ll probably have to wait several years to find out. While China Mobile is trialing LTE now, its commercial rollout could be as far away as 2014.

Dice image courtesy of Flickr user alancleaver_2000

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Mobile gaming falls somewhere between great time waster and rising addiction, and the obsession seems to be taking hold with women more than men, according to a new user survey by mobile social network MocoSpace. The company, which says it has the largest mobile gaming community, surveyed 15,000 of its users in December and found that 26.7 percent of women respondents age 30 and over played mobile games more than three hours a day, compared to 18.5 percent of men in the same age group.

Overall, women said they played mobile games more than their male counterparts. Nine out of 10 women (90.4 percent) 30 and older said they played mobile games and 77.7 percent of females 12-29 said they played mobile games. Meanwhile, 82.8 percent of men 30 and above said they played mobile games and 72.9 percent of younger men said they did as well.

Now, these numbers might seem high and could reflect MocoSpace’s user base, which is inclined to play games through MocoSpace and other channels. Also, MocoSpace’s users said they are heavily reliant on Android as their preferred platform, well ahead of the iPhone. But the numbers support other findings that suggest that women are some serious video game players. Flurry last year said that 53 percent of mobile social gamers are women, with a great density in women 18-49.

The increase appears to be more recent for women gamers. When asked how much they play now compared to the previous year, 58.5 percent of women 30+ and 44.9 percent of females 12-29 said they played more compared to 44.1 percent of men 30 and over and 36 percent of younger men who said the same. Only 12 percent of women 30 and over said they played less.

Overall, MocoSpace found mobile gaming is rising compared to console and PC gaming. Almost half of respondents (46 percent) said they played more mobile games now compared to the previous year compared to 26 percent for console games and 23 percent for PC games.

The data, if representative across the mobile spectrum, shows that mobile gaming is a huge opportunity that is not limited to one gender or another. In fact, just like casual and social gaming, women are very much at the head of the mobile gaming market. Developers and publishers should consider how to broaden their portfolios to ensure they have games that appeal across the spectrum.

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OnLive has announced that its streaming game service can now be played on the Android smartphone the Sony Xperia Play, using its slide out game pad to control the games. Read more…

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If you haven’t seen the latest Samsung Galaxy S II advertisement, you’re missing one of the most controversial conversations going on right now. The video spot takes clear aim at Apple iPhone buyers, causing some iPhone owners to be offended by the ad. Here it is, in case you missed it.

Personally, I find the ad to be humorous, as it’s poking fun at the reality of iPhone frenzy when each new model arrives: Long lines of customers still reading and researching what Apple’s latest handset can or can’t do. On the flipside, I see where Apple fans could feel slighted. But — and it could just be me — I’ve felt slighted by Apple’s own commercials.

The company has been running several spots that start out with the line, “If you don’t have an iPhone…..” The ads then go on to show all the things you’re missing out on by not owning an iPhone. I get that. However, I always come away with a feeling that the unfinished beginning sentence could be answered with “… you’re an idiot.”

Anyway, we’ll all have different thoughts on this one, making for a good poll. Regardless of whether you use a phone from Samsung or from Apple — I use both, by the way — what’s your take on this ad? Has Samsung gone too far, or is turnabout on Apple fair play?

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Want to use social networks to find videos you like, but not just watch random footage of cute kittens? Palo Alto, California-based mobile app maker Eye-C thinks it has found a solution for this problem. The company’s Eye-C app, which launched Thursday for Android and iOS, squarely focuses on hash tags as a way to collaboratively compile playlists and discover videos, music and photos.

Eye-C’s app taps into your Facebook friend stream, and also allows to connect with other Eye-C users directly and see what media they’ve been sharing. Users can for example search for hash tag, like #occupywallst, and then play a steady stream of videos about the movement.

Of course, the idea to use hash tags for collaborative playlists works both ways: Users can also simply tag something they’ve found online, share it with other Eye-C users as well as people on Facebook and Twitter, and hopefully inspire other people add to it. “Just tag something with a descriptive term, and it becomes a list,” Eye-C CEO Ari Birger said when I talked to him on the phone a couple of days ago. Users can also filter hash tags by friends or simply browse all the media their Facebook contacts have been sharing.

Birger also shared an interesting backstory about Eye-C: The startup initially whipped up a personal media player application called Eyecon, which can still be downloaded from the Android market. The app put a heavy emphasis on DLNA, making it possible to stream content stored on a local hard drive straight to a TV set with DLNA-support while controlling the playback on your handset. However, the interface simply didn’t have mass market appeal, explained Birger, which is why the company decided to fold the technology into Eye-C.

The result is that Eye-C still supports DLNA playback, which allows users to play those hashtag playlists on a TV screen, provided they own a DLNA-certified TV set or connected device. Think of it as Airplay for hashtags, if you will.

Birger told me that the company eventually wants to bring Eye-C to other platforms as well. “We started with mobile because it creates an easy to carry controller,” he said.

One thing that’s still missing from Eye-C is a closer Twitter integration. Currently, users can share videos with their Twitter followers, but not actually follow hash tags bubbling up. I’ve been told that this will be added to the app by the end of fall. I also had some issues getting the app to sync with Facebook on some of my Android devices, and I sometimes found Eye-C a bit too complex to navigate, with too many options available to browse media, friends lists and so on.

Still, I have to admit that the idea impressed me: Hash tags have become a great way of crowdsourced curation, and tapping into that to program your media playlists is a pretty clever idea, especially around any current events.

Check out a few screenshots of the app below:

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