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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There’s no time like the present to be using technology to do something really big. Of course, a lot of people and companies are already doing just that — but unfortunately, they don’t always get the kind of wide exposure they deserve. That may be partly because the media coverage of such big-picture, highly technical projects is not as accessible and absorbing as it could be.

So it’s awesome that video sharing site Vimeo has joined forces with General Electric and video publisher Cinelan to launch “Focus Forward” – a micro documentary series that aims to showcase big, world-changing technology innovations in a compelling way. The project’s website describes its mission thusly:

“In the span of three minutes, these films will encompass everything from medical advances to economically viable ‘green’-powered homes to the development of wireless technologies in Third World countries, not to mention innovations in transportation and healthcare, gene therapy and waste management, or any other sphere of art and knowledge that inspires them.”

In all, it’s a very cool mission. The series launched in January at the Sundance Film Festival, and some of the biggest names in documentary filmmaking — including Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame) Gary Hustwit (who made Helvetica and Objectified) and Jessica Yu (who won an Oscar for Breathing Lessons), among others –are signed up to make Focus Forward films that will premiere online and at film festivals throughout the year.

But to me the most exciting thing is that the project, which is hosted on Vimeo, will also be open to submissions from the general public. People who submit videos to the contest, which is called the “Focus Forward Filmmaking Challenge,” will be up for $ 200,000 in cash prizes, including a $ 100,000 grand prize. Submissions will open during the Tribeca Film Festival this April, and the prizes will be handed out next year at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. This is what Focus Forward says it’s looking for:

“We’re looking for professionally produced, three-minute end-to-end stories about people or organizations whose innovative efforts in medicine, computer science, robotics, engineering, green energy, or other fields of applied technical knowledge have had a significant positive impact on humanity. Recent, cutting-edge inventions that are changing how we live today are of special interest.”

With how inexpensive digital SLR cameras with video capabilities have become in recent years, and the huge amount of innovative tech projects out there, there is a lot of opportunity to create awesome films that fall into the Focus Forward mold. It’ll be exciting to see what people come up with.

Here’s a video explaining what the Focus Forward Film Challenge is all about:

Focus Forward – Short Films, Big Ideas: Filmmaker Challenge from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

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While location-based services are bringing a lot of context and relevancy to the world, the technology is a lot harder to use indoors. But a Finnish company called Walkbase is looking to bring to market a very simple and scalable solution for indoor positioning that can help map out rooms using crowd-sourced data and smart self-learning algorithms.

The company — which opened its API to developers in October and will soon be deployed in some upcoming third-party apps — is moving ahead with its own application to showcase how the technology works. It’s introducing a new app for Android called Checked, an automatic Foursquare check-in app that lets people check-in to locations without having to open their app. There have been previous auto check-in apps but they often wear down the battery and are not that accurate.

But Walkbase has a different approach. Through the network of apps that will use its API, it’s building up a database of room fingerprints every time someone uses its technology in an app. Each time someone checks-in, Walkbase scans the room for Wi-Fi and other signals and uses the data to define a room. The self-learning algorithm can filter out less reliable information and can adjust when certain Wi-Fi access points go down or move.

Checked users can then save their favorite locations on the app and the Walkbase technology can check them in when they arrive. The check-in is verified against Walkbase’s database, which can cut down on fraud and inaccuracy. If the database doesn’t have data on that location, the person can submit a new location entry to update the database. The database already has hundreds of thousands of check-ins thanks to a few apps that are already testing the technology. About 200 developers have signed up for Walkbase’s technology. Walkbase can not only define rooms but also determine which floor a user is on based on their surrounding environment.

Walkbase CEO Tuomas Wuoti said Walkbase can get to accuracy of three to five meters. But unlike other indoor positioning efforts, like Google’s new indoor positioning on Android, it doesn’t try to pinpoint a user’s location on a map. It settles for a little less specificity and instead works to map out rooms. That allows the system to scale more easily and it also means it doesn’t require as much battery use because it’s not scanning at such frequent intervals. Other systems can run down batteries or require venue owners to submit maps of their malls or buildings.

“We’re relying on crowdsourced and noisy data,” Wuoti said. “We do a good job of making noisy data clear enough to do good positioning for commercial benefit. That’s where the biggest commercial value is when a user or customer walks into a room or a store.”

Wuoti believes that merchants and restaurant owner can use this technology to push relevant content to owners based on their location inside. So a restaurant could deliver its menu to a user who has checked in. Or a retailer could push out very specific advertising when a person walks into an area within store. The check-in data could also provide useful analytics about customer flow in a location.

Walkbase was created out of an Åbo Akademi University project in 2009 and recently got $ 500,000 in seed funding. Wuoti said he’s talking to a lot of bigger technology companies and developers and said the first apps leveraging its technology will appear by summer. The technology is limited to Android right now and won’t work on iOS because Apple hasn’t opened up its APIs.

It will be interesting to see how successful Walkbase can be. A lot of big players like Nokia, Microsoft, Google, Motorola and others are also working on indoor location technology. This is a big opportunity to get more targeted data on users and also fulfill user intent on what they might be looking to do. And it gives a way to better push out advertising, which could be annoying for some users but very appealing for retailers and merchants. Walkbase will have to get over the initial barrier in any crowd-sourced project, building up the initial database. But it could be an attractive way for developers to leverage location indoors. And at the very least, it could be another way for users to handle automatic check-ins.

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Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson

Yahoo’s newly appointed CEO Scott Thompson may have only been on the job for three weeks, but he has already made one thing very clear: The discussion over whether Yahoo is a media or tech company must come to an end.

In a call with analysts and investors to discuss Yahoo’s latest earnings results, Thompson held back from making definitive statements on many issues — but in regards to the media vs. tech discussion, he minced no words:

“Our media leadership is imperative, and we have and will continue to develop best-in-class products, engineering, and technology. We must end the debate about which is more important: We are a media company and a tech company. We must do both. End of the discussion… There’s a longstanding debate within the company, but we better be darn good at both. In fact, we need to be great at both when it’s all said and done. We are going to stop this debate.”

Thompson’s stance is interesting, especially in a world where many successful tech companies are claiming to focus on specialization, not diversification — with Facebook and Twitter being two of the most high-profile examples. It’s also a bit puzzling, as Thompson also stated that he would be “very aggressive” in evaluating which parts of the business Yahoo should let go in the weeks and months ahead, saying:

“We will get speed back into the equation and move aggressively. To me that is how we get to playing offense from playing defense.”

Can Yahoo really focus on both technology and media while making the cuts necessary to regain its edge as a leader in either field? Only time will tell, of course. But from the looks of it, with co-founder Jerry Yang’s recent departure and Yahoo’s stock lagging in the middle of its 52-week range at $ 15.60 per share, many people aren’t exactly optimistic.

Image of Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson courtesy of Flickr user YodelAnecdotal.

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The impending Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act have the Internet in a tizzy, but Congress has a lot more to think about on the technology front than just intellectual property. Even digging below the surface of the SOPA debate, you see that the issues at play — such as defining Internet borders and squelching innovation on the web — have broad effects that span everything from the digital divide to international commerce.

So, now that the rushed and ill-conceived SOPA and PIPA are essentially dead as currently written thanks to President Obama’s opposition, Congress has an opportunity to rethink and recast the bills in light of the myriad complaints cited by their opponents. While it’s at it, Congress might want consider other methods for ensuring the United States keeps its place atop the burgeoning Internet economy. Based in part on what I heard during hours of policy panels at last week’s CES event, here are five questions Congress needs to answer in 2012.

1. Internet or Internets?

On the one hand, Congress embraces the idea of a single, open Internet even while discussing the topic of online privacy. During a panel on congressional tech policy, Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) said that online privacy legislation will happen, but Congress will not take a broad European Union-style approach to the issue. As the Entertainment Software Association’s Christian Genetski noted in a subsequent panel on privacy, and as we’ve explained before, overburdensome data-protection laws can cause problems for international commerce and stifle innovation in arguably America’s most-promising industry.

On the other hand, supporters of the House’s SOPA and the Senate’s PIPA legislation might as well be encouraging a collection of separate, but interconnected, national networks. Jayme White and Ryan Clough, staffers for Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), respectively, noted on a panel dedicated to combating piracy that allowing U.S. companies and courts to unilaterally cripple foreign web sites is not so different from how China censors content or even imposes restrictions on foreign imports.

2. Who does SOPA really target?

Still, nobody denies that trying to enforce intellectual property rights against foreign infringers is a noble goal. But one big problem with SOPA and PIPA is that they also have the potential to come down hard on U.S. companies that even appear to run afoul of their harsh, possibly unconstitutional penalties. Howard University professor Lateef Mtima said “this is being framed almost like an old Western,” because while there will be a showdown at noon between rightsholders and pirates, there will also be a lot of collateral damage.  Those could be web startups, small businesses or, as Casey Rae-Hunter of the Future of Music Coalition pointed out, online storage services that independent artists — copyright holders themselves — depend on for storing, sharing and collaborating on music.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) was adamant that SOPA’s and PIPA’s reliance on U.S. courts contradicts the acts’ alleged targets. He argues, including in his alternative OPEN Act, for reliance on the International Trade Commission, the body typically charged with handling IP concerns that cross international boundaries. Not only is the ITC experienced in shutting down the cashflow for foreign entities not bound by U.S. law, he argued, but such an approach leaves rightsholders with their existing avenues for addressing IP concerns within the U.S. legal system.

3. Privacy or security?

It strikes me as very possible that people conflate online data privacy (i.e., how sites use and display personal data) with online data security (i.e., how sites protect data from cybercriminals), especially in the wake of mega-breaches like the one that hit Zappos earlier this week . While both important issues, the approaches to solving them are very different.

If security is the biggest concern, cracking down too hard on privacy might prove to be a bad idea. It could be detrimental to innovation, as well as to the ad-driven business models that keep so many popular services free to use. In the wake of the FTC’s intrusive, 20-year legal settlements with Facebook and Google, Genetski suggested it might not be such a bad idea to have a lawyer present in product meetings. However, in a web world that’s both fast-moving and full of largely hypothetical harms, I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.

But if privacy really is our concern, Harvard’s Susan Crawford suggested an approach near and dear to my heart (something on which I recently elaborated in a GigaOM Pro report on data (sub req’d)). Perhaps the best method is to enable a marketplace whereby companies can compete on privacy, thus letting the free market, not Congress, decide what’s acceptable and what’s not. We might find consumers are open to a lot more than many assume they are.

4. Can we auction off spectrum already?

The only reason we’re talking about any of these issues is because the web has enabled a world of almost perpetual connectivity where we can access content and share information to our hearts’ content. But that’s a big “almost,” as one CES audience member noted to the panel of Republican lawmakers. Inside the Las Vegas Convention Center, he explained, mobile data connections were extremely bogged down, leaving many attendees unable to access email or the web.

There is a goldmine of wireless spectrum freed up from when television made the switch from analog to digital, and today’s 4G devices could really benefit from it. Running up to this year’s election, there’s a lot of talk around boosting the economy and growing jobs. More access to wireless broadband means more apps, more devices and more productivity, all of which lead to more tax revenue and more jobs. So maybe Congress finally needs to figure out how it will make that currently unused spectrum available and force operators to use the excess spectrum they already have available.

5. How can we connect rural America?

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) noted on multiple occasions during the CES congressional panel that despite all the talk about 4G and web apps in the country’s metropolitan areas, the situation isn’t the same in America’s rural areas. Many rural Americans aren’t as wired (although not necessarily by choice) or as tech-savvy, nor are they typically as affluent. The web is an increasingly important platform for social interaction and information, and while access might not be a fundamental right, not having access is certainly a major hindrance.

I can speak from experience having just spent nearly a week in not-too-rural Wisconsin with no 4G access and, in some places, no DSL or cable broadband. Shimkus cited the potential for legislation such as SOPA and proposed privacy legislation to raise the price of web applications that might now be free, which would in turn cut off access for many people, assuming they had reliable Internet connections in the first place. As technology legislation makes its way through the process, there’s a real possibility for rural America’s concerns to get overshadowed by those of the myriad corporate interests involved, and that would be a big mistake.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user ctj71081; private-property image courtesy of Flickr user PaulHorner.

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Like something out of a sci-fi movie, Vuzix has found a way to put a hologram in your glasses without the need for an unsightly battery pack. Read more…

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Just for fun, I thought I’d spend some time last night playing with Google Insights for Search to find out what parts of the country are most interested in technology — at least the buzzwords that fill my day — and when that interest hit its peak. It wasn’t surprising to see Silicon Valley rank at or near the top everywhere, but did you know Utah was so into next-generation programming?

As an introduction, it’s probably good to have an understanding of how Google Insights ranks search interest. Essentially, it normalizes data to give a picture of how likely people in each state are to search for a particular term, not necessarily what states had the most overall searches for any particular term. Here’s how Google explains it:

Just because two regions show the same percentage for a particular term doesn’t mean that their absolute search volumes are the same. Data from these two regions – with significant differences in search volumes – can be compared equally because the data has been normalized by the total traffic from each respective region.

The state maps are accurate as of Jan. 8, 2012. The embedded charts are live and will change over time.

Cloud computing

Search interest in cloud computing peaked in April 2011, the same month Amazon Web Services suffered a four-day outage that made national headlines. Coincidence?

Somewhat interestingly, people in Massachussetts, Maryland and Washington, D.C., were more likely do search for “cloud computing” than were people in California. However, there is a respectable tech and venture-capital scene around Boston, and a large federal presence (both government and military) in D.C. and the surrounding areas.

Big data

It’s hard to call the November 2011 the peak for interest in big data, as it has been growing consistently for the past year and might well go even higher.

Utah? Hmm. I’ll chalk up New York’s presence to the banking industry.

Hadoop

Cloudera launched in March 2009, the same time interest in Hadoop began its steady ascent.

I’m not sure what to make of the disparity in interest between “Hadoop” and “big data” among the states. Perhaps the two aren’t as tightly aligned in people’s minds as I thought. Although, “big data hadoop” was the No. 4 search term for “big data”.

NoSQL

The peak in October 2011 might have something to do with Oracle getting into the NoSQL space. I’m blanking on the March 2010 spike — any ideas?

Again with Utah, although the government seems less concerned with NoSQL than with other tech trends.

A few more interesting points

Utah ranks highly in interest for other programming trends, including Node.js.

The Salt Lake City metropolitan area actually shows up high in interest for Javascript and iOS.

If you’re wondering who’s interested in more-advanced techniques, look to advanced tech universities. I’m going to assume the presence of Carnegie Mellon University has something to do with Pittsburgh’s relative interest in machine learning.

And people apparently get interested in sharing photos via Instagram when they’re on vacation.

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We’ve written before about the need for newspapers to be “digital first” and to think like startups as they try to adapt to the evolution of the media industry. Can a traditional newspaper take an even bigger step and actually help give birth to new technologies or services by acting like a startup incubator? At least two of them are planning to give it a try: the Philadelphia News Network just launched an incubator, and Digital First Media recently launched a venture-capital arm and says it plans to invest in tech startups. While both of these efforts could easily fail, at least these two media entities aren’t just sitting back and relying on paywalls to save them.

The Philadelphia incubator is known as Project Liberty, and is being operated by Ben Franklin Technology Partners, a non-profit agency aimed at fostering new business in Pennsylvania — who also chose the three existing entrants to the program — but will be based in the same complex that is home to the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, as well as the online site Philly.com. The project is being funded by a $ 250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, which has backed a number of media-related startups over the years, and gives the three startups six months worth of office space and other support while they work on partnerships with the papers.

New technologies could help companies adapt

Read/Write Web has an overview of the three startups that have been accepted to the program: CloudMine provides an API service that makes it easier for developers to come up with new applications, and another named SnipSnap lets customers scan printed coupons and then use them online — a natural fit for a newspaper that carries plenty of advertising inserts. The third is ElectNext, which is developing a web app to help readers decide who to vote for, a goal that has an obvious fit with the editorial side of the newspapers.

The CEO of the Philadelphia News Network, meanwhile — former Newsweek publisher Greg Osberg — has said he has much bigger goals for the project, and that he wants to “find the next Foursquare and house it at Philly.com.”

Whether that’s going to happen or not remains to be seen, but at least the startup idea shows a spark of life from the newly reformed newspaper company, which was created after lenders to the previous owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News bought the assets out of bankruptcy. And it’s not the first unusual venture to come out of the new media company: earlier this year, it announced a plan to offer discounted Android-based tablets to readers who signed up for one or two-year subscriptions to the Inquirer and the Daily News.

Digital First Media, the parent company of the Media News Group — which owns a chain of newspapers across the U.S., including the Detroit News, the Denver Post and the San Jose Mercury News — is also wading into the tech-startup funding game. The company’s CEO, John Paton, who helped turn around the bankrupt Journal-Register Co. before taking the helm of Digital First Media, last month announced the creation of a new venture-capital arm that will invest in media-related tech startups. Paton said this approach was a natural outgrowth of the company’s “digital first” mantra, which he has outlined in a number of presentations as well as on his blog.

Experimentation is something more companies should try

I admit I was skeptical when I heard about Digital First’s new venture-capital entity, in part because it sounded like the media company was going to try and compete with the hundreds of VC firms and angels who are already trying (and mostly failing) to pick the next Foursquare or Facebook. But Paton said the emphasis of the new venture would be on partnering with companies that could help the company take advantage of digital media in new ways, which is something more traditional media outlets should be thinking about.

Other media companies have already taken similar steps in this direction: the Financial Times just acquired the company that developed its HTML5 app, which allowed the newspaper to do an end-run around Apple’s restrictions on iOS apps — as well as the 30-percent fees it charges content companies that offer subscriptions. And the New York Times helped give birth to News.me, a social content-filtering app that was later acquired by Betaworks, a New York-based incubator run by John Borthwick, in a deal that gave the newspaper shares in the company (News.me has since been spun off). The NYT also has its own in-house incubator of sorts in the beta620 lab project.

As Om and others have mentioned, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the explosion of incubators — a trend that didn’t end well in the last tech bubble — but despite the low odds of success, it’s still interesting to see companies like the Philadelphia Media Network and Digital First Media trying to think outside the box a little.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users John Donges and David Daniels

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Ask Newt about SOPA or online privacy.

Imagine if your son or daughter created a brilliant mash-up for their English class that you thought was a perfect display of his or her personality, so you decided to share the mash-up on your family blog. Unfortunately, little Susie or Johnny included a brief movie clip or perhaps a fraction of a song in their class project, and suddenly your blog is gone thanks to a complaint from a rightsholder and the passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). If you want your blog back you can take the offending material down, and if you don’t want to do that, then you could sue arguing fair use. Regardless, it’s up to you to figure out what’s wrong and fight to have your blog re-instated.

A growing problem as the web and technology becomes more central to how we share, communicate and work is that an average person doesn’t know how abstract laws can affect their lives and the media doesn’t expose how well (or poorly) politicians understand technology. As a result, certain companies with lobbyists are getting away moulding our laws and policies in their favor and in the process they are going to hinder how Internet works and thrives.

Horror stories about SOPA abound, but what about your cell phone? Can a police officer search the contents of your phone during a traffic stop? Can a customs agent rifle through your laptop files as you return from a trip abroad? What about the history of your Google searches or checkins on Foursquare, can those be used against you in a court of law? These are not idle issues and instead of focusing on who is a socialist or paying  attention solely to where someone stands on social issues such as abortion or gay marriage, the broader media, politicians and citizenry need to start paying attention to and thinking about tech policy.

So while debates over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) will continue to rage as we head into an election year in the U.S. France, The U.K and other places, we should ask elected officials about how they view the Internet and how connectivity can change the world.

Thomas Friedman danced around the issue in his New York Times’ column Tuesday, when he suggested politicians need to be asked about how we can bring to bear the budding infrastructure we’re building to connect people and things to solve some of our problems. Sure the web is disruptive, and disruptive is scary, especially for politicians, but as technology becomes more engrained in our lives it also becomes a target for politicians. So we need politicians that understand it and view it as a tool, yes, one that can be abused, but also one that can be harnessed for society’s benefits, such as improving rural access to healthcare.

Rather than letting the web turn into a partisan issue kind of like spectrum policy has become, or letting industry interests try to cut the web off at the knees as the content industry seems to be doing with SOPA, it’s time to shape some questions that can help voters understand how politicians stand on various issues such as privacy, censorship and the real issues where the government’s views on technology will impact citizens’ lives. I’m not suggesting every Congressman must have a detailed understanding of what a DNS server is, but it’s time they stopped equating the Internet with nerds, and look ahead to how the web can improve government, lower costs and maybe solve some pressing problems.

Here are a few questions I’d like to see at the upcoming debates, but feel free to offer more in the comments below. Honestly, as citizens we also need to be thinking about how we would answer these questions (or want our politicians to answer them) as well.

• As the Internet is changing the skill sets demanded by employers, what does the federal/state/local government need to do to ensure our educational system keeps up? Are there subjects we need to add? Procedures we need to change? Skills our administrators and teachers need? Infrastructure that should be as important as a chalkboard is in classrooms?
• As people store more information online, what do you see as the biggest risks for consumers, corporations and governments? What laws need to change?
• Can you name an area of government where you see adding connectivity or developing a program that uses connectivity could improve service and/or save taxpayers money?
• Our digital footprints are forever and we’re now leaving digital records of every casual search, photograph, thought and place we visit. When much of this information was in a physical form, to get at this data required the government to justify the need to invade someone’s privacy. Our current laws don’t always protect digital information in this same way. Should it?
• Do you consider our current wireline broadband market competitive? How do we keep improving it? Is fiber to the home to as many places as possible a good goal for the government to pursue, recognizing it could cost taxpayers billions?

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