Green applications for augmented reality

A few weeks ago, I thought out loud about the potential for augmented reality applications. Augmented reality overlays information on your view of the real world. It used to take a lot of expensive and clunky gear to make work, but as mobile phones become increasingly powerful handheld computers with cameras, AR is coming to the masses. The question I had was whether the masses were interested.

Techie types like myself see problems and think about the technologies that we know and how they might solve those problems. We're constantly thinking about how to build a better mousetrap. Not everyone looks at the world this way. Interesting innovation comes from when people elegantly solve a common problem. Mind-blowing innovation happens when people create a technology that people find indepensible and can't remember what life was like before it.

Tom Tom Raftery of sustainability advistory company Greenmonk sees amazing environmental opportunities for Dutch AR start-up application Layar. Layar has opened up its platform and is offering a limited number of API keys, according to co-founder Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald. One of the key features of Web 2.0 technologies is their openness and extensibility. APIs allow applications to grow up around web services like the micro-blogging phenom Twitter, and open data standards allow people to add data and mash-up data sets.

Any environmental database with location information could be used to create an AR Layar, Tom Raftery says, adding:

This opens up enormous possibilities for Augmented Reality applications in the Green space. Imagine walking down the street and seeing emissions data for the companies/businesses simply by pointing your phone at them. Or pointing at machinery and seeing schematics, lifecycle emissions data, or…

A mashup of AMEE, the neutral aggregation platform which measures "the carbon footprint of everything on Earth", with Layar would be an absolutely awesome. Or a wiki with a Green Layar UI. Or….

The possibilities are limitless!

Forrester: Interactive to grow to 21% of all US ad spend by 2014

paidContent: Online ad spending in the US set to almost double in five years

And now for a not-so-negative online advertising forecast: Forrester Research is pegging the U.S. interactive ad market to reach $55 billion over the next five years—meaning marketers will go from spending just 12 percent of their total ad budgets online this year, to 21 percent by 2014.

Search and display will command the biggest percentage of spend overall—with $31.5 billion and $16.9 billion in spending, respectively—but most of the growth will come from social media and mobile advertising.

Advertisers will spend just $716 million on social media marketing (including ads on social networks, not to mention devoting resources to their own blogs) this year, but that will grow by 34 percent to top $3.1 billion in 2014. (This gels with a recent Forbes survey that found that senior level marketing execs planned to spend more on viral and social media campaigns over the next six months). Meanwhile, mobile ad spending will grow by 27 percent—from $391 million this year, to $1.2 billion in five years.

Your daily dose of social media reading

Here is what I'm reading. What are you reading? Leave those links in the comments and why you found it interesting

• Social Media Marketing Spend to Hit $3.1 Billion by 2014 >> Mashable

• Netbook OS Oddsmaking: Who Will Win the War? >> GigaOm

• Rupert Murdoch: We Don't Want Twitter >> Mashable

• Product Reviews as Social Media Marketing >> ClickZ

• How Community Arts Organizations Are Using Social Media >> Mashable

• News sites stay up during Jackson memorial >> CNET Webware blog

• What Men's Health Workouts can teach you about paid mobile >> Steve Outing

• The Decline of Traditional Advertising and the Rise of Social Media >> PR 2.0 Brian Solis

• The end of news websites? >> Online Journalism Blog

• Discussing Spot.Us Business Model with Mother Jones' Steve Katz >> MediaShift Idea Lab

Via delicious

Sun Valley: People will pay up for their internet addictions, says Malone

The internet's endless parade of free content has been the source of media industry angst in the media industry in recent years - but moguls attending the exclusive Sun Valley conference in Idaho remain optimistic that people will eventually be convinced to pay for access to websites like Facebook and YouTube.

"Sooner or later people are going to get addicted to some of these services and they'll be willing to pay for it," said John Malone, the chairman of American entertainment group Liberty Media.

Malone, whose company is a majority shareholder in News Corporation and also sits on the board of Discovery Networks, said that he believed there was still a chance to pay for online services.

After a panel entitled "Riding the Digital Wave", Malone said the optimists included investor Warren Buffett. The so-called Sage of Omaha, whose net worth currently stands at $37bn (£23bn), was apparently among those who said they would pay a small fee each month to use YouTube.

"The question is really the economics," added Malone.

Not everybody agreed that large websites can prove a valuable opportunity, however. Barry Diller, the former Hollywood mogul who now runs online conglomerate InterActiveCorp, said sites like Twitter would not necessarily be a great business opportunity.

"I think it's a great service. I just don't think it's a natural advertising medium," said Diller, a Sun Valley regular who also sat on the panel in question, alongside Malone and Disney chief Bob Iger.

That scepticism was reflected by another attendee, Rupert Murdoch - who famously bought MySpace in 2005 for $580m but recently said he blamed himself for the troubles that led the company to cut hundreds of jobs.

Although early speculation had focused on whether Murdoch could use the conference to broker a deal with Twitter chief executive Evan Williams, the 78-year-old has said he is not interested in buying the three-year-old startup.

"No," he told Reuters. "Be careful of investing here."

Murdoch also said he would not be buying the Los Angeles Times, the beleaguered newspaper currently undergoing bankruptcy proceedings.

The Sun Valley conference is held each year by boutique investment bank Allen & Co, which has close ties to Hollywood and was an underwriter of Google's multibillion dollar stock market launch in 2004.

The event plays host to an exclusive list of the world's most influential media executives, technologists and investors, who get together to discuss the state of their industries. In between sessions they indulge in golf, biking and hiking in the area around the exclusive resort.

Attendees so far this year include Bill Gates, Time Warner chief executive Jeff Bewkes and prominent Silicon Valley investor Reid Hoffman. Google's Eric Schmidt, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are also expected to turn up at the gathering.

Reporters are traditionally barred from the conference, but this year they have also been denied access to the resort's bar - where they traditionally meet with attendees to discuss events.

"One good thing for the reporters: we can still order drinks from the bar," quipped Reuters media reporter Robert MacMillan on his blog: "They deliver them to us in the lobby."

Digital film: An £8,000 projector ushers in the future for independent cinema

Hampered by distributors' demands and the move towards digital, indie cinemas have found an affordable solution

The picture on the ageing silver screen in front of us is unquestionably of theatrical quality. The independent film-makers Michael Bergmann and Doug Underdahl move around, checking from all angles. It is, as Bergmann has warned, different: not film's luminous grain nor video's harsh flatness. This digital image is thrown by a high-end Leica business projector powered by … a Macbook Pro running QuickTime Pro. Two emissaries from Leica's nearby US headquarters seem stunned. They had no idea their projector could throw a 1920x1080 image 100 feet at 24 frames per second in this quality. For comparison, Bergmann slips in an ordinary DVD. We all agree – ugh.

Bergmann's latest film, Tied to a Chair, for which Underdahl was director of photography, and which recently won the best in festival prize at the Heart of England International Film festival, is caught in two traps, like many independent films. First: the transition from film to digital. Second: shrinking distribution for independent and art films. Bergmann's movie has been digitally produced but the Washington theatre in New Jersey, which wants to show it, only has film projectors. Buying a digital projector costs $60,000 (£37,000). A good 35mm transfer about the same. Neither film-maker nor cinema can afford it.

We Leica it

It was during this impasse that Bergmann read about Leica's £8,000 Pradovit D-1200, and thought its specifications might suffice. Theatrical digital projectors are either 2K (a resolution of 2048x1080) or 4K (4096x2160).

To compensate, Bergmann and Underdahl have placed their rig in the 10th row of the audience, blocking off about 20 seats. Underdahl, who co-designed and fabricated the remote-controlled pan/tilt head for the deep-dive segment of Titanic, has built a box to hold the projector and laptop. For a commercial cineplex with a projectionist who services six or seven screens at once, it wouldn't work. But for an independent cinema or a film festival, it may change the game.

The digital cinema analyst for Screen Digest, David Hancock, believes Europe and Asia are about two years behind the US in terms of digital screens but are catching up. "At the end of 2008, we had nearly 9,000 screens," he says, talking of the large commercial exhibitors. "And then recently, a lot are going for 3D." Most US screens are either converted or signed up. We are getting close, he says, to the tipping point – "the time when you can no longer justify 35mm as a format because most screens are digital. We're not there yet."

The situation is very different for the independents, who make up 40% of UK screens and control only 20% of the box office. Largely, the problem is money: who pays for new projectors? "There is a huge problem in Europe and the US with independent cinemas who don't belong to a circuit and don't have the mass to do financial deals," Hancock says.

Venues such as the Washington theatre (which also shows first-run Hollywood films) are dying everywhere. Marco Matteo, who grew up watching movies in this 1927 theatre, wants to restore it and turn it into a multipurpose community resource that shows movies, stages concerts and gives local students hands-on facilities. That is also Hancock's vision. "I think of 35mm as a good-quality, single-bladed knife," he says. "But digital is a Swiss army knife. The options are there, and it opens up a whole new world of entertainment. You can take back what the cinema started as – a broad content entertainment medium." Before television, cinemas showed news, serials and drama. "A 35mm projector can only show what's on a reel that comes in at some expense." Digital can come from anywhere – radio, TV, satellite.

He doubts laptops are the answer. What is making digital cinema take off, he argues, is standards. "The DCI [Digital Cinema Initiatives] creates a minimum standard that people can have confidence will go forward – a single universal standard so we're not ending up in a world where there are 15 or 25 different projection systems using different coding."

You could, Hancock says, "get one distributor or producer to give you a film. But if you're a cinema and choose to go that route you're severely limiting your access to films. It still needs encryption."

Under lock and key

The studio system is tightly locked down. Not only encrypted, but supplied with a key delivery system so that the file only opens on a specific server to show on a specific projector at a specific time. The more likely approach for independents, he says, is to create a buying group large enough to negotiate better prices.

But that assumes everyone is as paranoid about protecting their copyrighted streams as Hollywood, and that may not be true. The film-maker Nina Paley, for example, explained at the Ebertfest film festival in April that she refused to agree to distributors' demands that she sign over all rights to her film, Sita Sings the Blues, for five to 10 years.

Instead, she bucked the system by putting her film on the net (sitasingstheblues.com) under a Creative Commons licence and inviting the audience to distribute it. Two distributors have picked it up, and the film is now booked at festivals in 2010. Paley has arranged a DVD release in response to audience demand.

Alongside Paley, Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, directors of the Katrina documentary Trouble the Water, said that even winning the Sundance Grand Jury prize and being nominated for an Academy award didn't help.

"We didn't self-distribute," said Deal, "but it feels like we are." Would it really be so surprising if independent theatres and independent film-makers created their own system? One they could afford?

Jack Schofield: Digital Britain? We haven't even got decent digital radio

I had hopes for the Digital Britain report. It had the chance to do some original thinking of the sort that could transform society, like Sir Rowland Hill's Penny Post, if not Aneurin Bevan's National Health Service. Sadly, Lord Carter lacked the imagination or the guts of a Birmingham teacher and a lad who left school at 13 to work down a mine.

It's not as though we don't know what needs doing: which is to install fibre to the home. Ian Mackintosh pointed this out – and analysed the economic implications – in his book, Sunrise Europe, published in 1986. Yes, "we can't afford it," though it turns out we could afford to dig up half the country to exploit short-term North Sea gas, to fight foreign wars, and to bail out a morally and intellectually bankrupt financial system.

More than 20 years later, European countries are well on the way to becoming what Mackintosh called OICs, "Once Industrialised Countries". And we still don't have the infrastructure needed to support the information society that is our only hope of a prosperous future.

Carter surely appreciates this, but he offers no compelling strategies. Instead, he's trying to juggle a hotchpotch of overlapping systems of the sort that Mackintosh rejected. However, even those of us who like hotchpotchery may be disappointed by his report.

Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), for example, is a mess. It needs a complete overhaul that breaks the connection both with FM stations and FM broadcast areas. Simulcasting on FM and DAB doubles the costs of commercial stations without providing any extra listeners, or extra revenues, which seems to suit the BBC, but helps nobody else. It's like launching Sky to deliver BBC TV at a slightly lower quality than you already have. No wonder it's a flop.

There's a similar lack of vision with regard to WiMax, which works as a sort of high-powered Wi-Fi. WiMax masts can provide 4-6Mbps broadband over a range of about five miles, and WiMax should be almost free in portable PCs, because Intel is combining Wi-Fi and WiMax in some of its radio chipsets. If not, a USB dongle will do the job.

Sticking a WiMax transmitter on top of every BT exchange would probably fill in most of the holes where people cannot get 2Mbps broadband (and satellite will do much of the rest). WiMax would also provide a cheap way to multicast digital radio.

Mobile WiMax could even be used to deliver broadband – and therefore digital radio – to cars, though that would require a much bigger investment.

The report does include WiMax, but Carter bows before the desire of "the incumbent mobile radio operators for the mobile broadband networks to be based upon either 3G technology or LTE". Well, they would want that, wouldn't they? They'll be charging us for it.

But given the mobile industry's inability to deliver 3G properly, we can only assume LTE (Long Term Evolution) is a very long way away.

WiMax isn't completely lost, because the report includes the release of the "WiMax-suitable" 2.6GHz spectrum before 2010. But this isn't news: Ofcom confirmed it in April. And it may not be good news. The spectrum could go for an insane amount to someone who will have to sell WiMax at a similarly silly price, or who isn't interested in WiMax at all.

There goes the chance to do a deal with BT to put WiMax masts on its exchanges in exchange for roaming, pricing and public access concessions.

In general, I am in favour of letting commercial companies fight it out. When it comes to national infrastructure, however, there's a case for the nation to be involved, hence the report. But what's the point if it doesn't do the job?

'Traveling Geeks' discuss journalism in the 21st Century

For the inaugural live audience for the Guardian's Media Talk podcast, Matt Wells asked journalists and social media experts how to solve newspapers' problems in the 21st Century

With the worst economic crisis in a generation – some might argue in several – and the worst decline in advertising in history, Matt Wells, the host of the Guardian's Media Talk podcast, asked a panel of journalists and social media experts how journalism had to transform itself to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

It was the first time that the podcast was recorded in front of a live audience, and joining Matt:

• Emily Bell, the Guardian's director of digital content
• BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones
• tech blogger Robert Scoble
• Sarah Lacy, blogger at TechCrunch, columnist at BusinessWeek and also co-host of Tech Ticker on Yahoo!
• social media expert JD Lasica of SocialMedia.biz

Scoble, Lacy and Lasica are touring the UK with the "Traveling Geeks", a group of social media luminaries and 'technology influencers' from the US. They will be appearing at several events in London on Thursday and in Cambridge on Friday.

Wells began by sketching out the sobering state of the media. TV is playing catchup to YouTube. "Radio is even more stuck in the dark ages," he said, and the result is that about 20,000 journalists have lost their jobs in the last 18 months. Wells wondered how long it would be before the UK lost one of its national newspapers.

In the US, the situation is worse. Lacy said, by the end of the year, "we could have 10 major metropolitan cities that no longer have major daily papers. No one thought it would happen so fast."

Scoble said that advertising was moving from print to online and jokingly blamed another member of the Traveling Geeks, Craig Newmark, the founder of online classified service Craigslist.

While some might focus on advertising, Lacy thought that newspapers had an even bigger problem. "The papers are losing their audience as well," she said.

Lasica worked for newspapers for 20 years, and he said, "with some sadness, the state of the news industry is not good". He doesn't know a person under 25 who reads a newspaper.

Lacy interjected that she doesn't know a person under 35 who reads a newspaper.

Bell laid some of the blame at the feet of the newspaper industry itself and accused papers of losing touch with their audience after enjoying years of monopoly.

The recession with its collapse in advertising and the technological disruption that began long before the recession have led to volatility in the industry, Lacy said. With the recent death of Michael Jackson, the celebrity gossip blog was just as likely to be right as CNN, she added.

With all the changes in the media, Lasica said that news consumers needed to become smarter, more discerning. "They need a BS detector or as Hemingway said, a crap detector," he said.

In the age of rolling, breaking, Twitter-fed and spread news, for the BBC to maintain its brand, Cellan-Jones suggested it should not focus on always being first. The BBC has a standard of always having two independent sources before reporting a story. "It is not a bad brand to have to be a bit more careful," he said.

Joking that on the web you're never wrong for long, Bell said that exclusivity was diminishing in value with the speed at which stories circulate now. "Very few news organisations live in the centre of the story. The rest is about context," she said.

Journalists could no longer expect audiences to come to them in the age of Twitter, when the barrier to entry technologically was a text message, she said, adding:

You have to go where they are, and they spend most of their time speaking to others. From that point of view, it's quite hard for journalists to mentally cross that Rubicon.

Lasica said it was disappointing how long it had taken news organisations to change. Ten years ago, they debated whether they should have a website and risk canabilising their print readership. Five years ago, they debated whether their journalists should blog, and now, they are debating whether journalists should be on social networks.

"Social media can be used for public service journalism," he said, pointing to National Public Radio's use of Twitter to report voting problems during the US elections.

But the discussion quickly shifted to business models and how to pay for journalism. Should newspapers put their content behind a paywall?

Bell said that she felt trapped in Groundhog Day, having the same debate the industry had almost ten years ago. In some ways she was happy for Rupert Murdoch to waste time debating on whether to charge for content. "Hurray! Every time you think about an old model that won't work, it's another minute you can tick off the life clock of your organisation."

When Cellan-Jones asked whether she was ruling out ever charging for content, she said that people paid for utility and that there might be the opportunity to charge in the "apps market". But, she added, "Pay for content? I just don't see it."

Lacy pointed out that subscriptions had never really been a profit centre for old media.

Wells asked if it pay models might work if newspapers banded together to charge.

"That's just stupid," Lacy said. "It's like the war on Google. If papers provided what the audience wanted, the audience wouldn't be fleeing, and they wouldn't have a problem."

Lasica returned to his belief that newspapers had been slow to react. Working for almost two decades in newspapers, he saw little change.

"They need a new kind of approach. There has to be a willingness to experiment, to move on and to innovate," he said. Newspapers need to open up their sites and create a community platform to collaborate on content and technology with their audiences.

Craig Newmark wasn't part of the panel, but he was in the audience, and although Wells admitted that he must be "fed up to the back of his teeth" with the charge, he said, "You are being blamed for the death of newspapers." His free advertising platform has been blamed for depriving newspapers of a huge chunk of their income.

"No one serious is blaming us for those things," Newmark said. He's more concerned about trust in the media. "What can you read that you can actually believe? We rely more on a network of friends for information than we do the media."

Lasica said that newspapers would have to find a new business model to pay for important journalism, for difficult, time-consuming investigations that ordinary people won't do. "It's hard work. No one wants to spend their Saturdays digging through corporate records," he said.

Scoble said that the news industry must learn that business models are changing. TechCrunch makes the majority of its money from charging admission to its conferences.

Cellan-Jones said one possibility is that a whole generation had grown up with the expectation that things are free on the internet but they pay on their mobile phones.

Wells asked Bell if it mattered if in the future there won't be a paper version of the Guardian.

She said no and referred to Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger's comment that the paper might have bought its last presses just a few years ago.

The key thing is not whether the Guardian is printed but its approach to journalism, it's content and community, she said.

Lacy bluntly said about the future of printed newspapers:

Shut 'em down now. They've been dragging it out this long. They need to force figuring out next model instead of dwindling and slowly die.

You can listen to the full podcast of Media Talk and hear the questions our studio audience asked. But you can still comment either here or on Media Talk.

• Will you miss your newspaper?
• Do you think the decline of professional journalism is about money or trust?
• Will you pay for content? If so, what content is so important or valuable that you'll pay for it?

Media Talk podcast: The digital future

It's a very special edition of Media Talk this week - recorded for the first time in front of a live audience in the bowels of Guardian HQ. And if you thought it was high time you were able to tell you API from your Bebo then this is the show for you.

Matt Wells hosts a panel of the finest digital media minds, including America's self-styled Travelling Geeks - social media wonk JD Lasica; Silicon Valley reporter Sarah Lacy; and influential blogger Robert Scoble - as well as the Guardian's director of digital content Emily Bell, and BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones.

Topics up for debate include what the death of Michael Jackson and the uprisings in Iran and China have taught us about the interaction between old and new media. Plus, why has the mainstream media been so quick to adopt Twitter? With Rupert Murdoch desperate to finally monetise his news sites, is it possible to put the free genie back in the bottle? And does it matter if, in the near future, there's only an online edition of the Guardian?

It's a longer programme than usual - but we hope you enjoy the live(ish) experience. Thank you to all of you who braved the rain. Carnegie Hall, here we come!

As usual, post your comments on the blog or Facebook, follow us, and if you think you and your iPod can handle even more talk about (new) media, check out the July edition of Media Talk USA with Jeff Jarvis.

Stephen Fry's fans take the piss | Media Monkey

Monkey's Twitter exchange of the day – probably not a regular feature, but stick with us – comes from Stephen Fry. Who else? Fry, it seems, was travelling home in a taxi last night when he urgently needed to take a leak. "Still in cab," he tweeted. "Clenched thighs so hard my testicles have shot up my neck. Dear me." Except his 600,000 or so followers appeared not to be entirely sympathetic, if his next tweet was anything to go by. "As for all you wicked people who tWEEted "sssssssss" and "tinkle" and "fountain". Shame on you. Home now. Made it." But does gadget addict Fry have a Wii as well?

OhmyNews appeals to readers for cash

Founder of South Korean citizen journalism site OhmyNews asks readers for financial contributions to keep business afloat

The founder of the South Korean citizen journalism site, OhmyNews, has appealed to readers for financial contributions to keep the business afloat in the global economic downturn.

In an open letter published on the OhmyNews site today, Oh Yeon-ho disclosed that the site lost 50,000,000 Korean Won (£248,735) this year amid fears of heavier losses as advertisers keep slashing their marketing budgets.

"For a news media to remain healthy, it will have to earn at least 50% of its income from the sales of content or paid subscriptions. Despite our best effort, OhmyNews still relies on advertisers for more than 70% of its revenue," Oh said.

He added that if 100,000 readers joined the venture contributing KRW 10,000 a month, OhmyNews would be able to survive without relying on advertising revenues.

Founded in 2000, OhmyNews proclaimed a new model of journalism with the motto "every citizen is a reporter". Most of the content for OhmyNews comes from ordinary citizens and only about a third comes from the 55-person staff.

But citizen journalism or not, OhmyNews has not been immune to the crisis plaguing the world's media. All media groups are struggling as they try to grapple with not just a cyclical downturn but with more profound structural changes. The current crisis has reignited the debate on whether to charge for online content, an idea recently mooted by Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News Corporation.

In the meantime, OhmyNews is turning to its readers to stump up the cash. OhmyNews quickly rose to prominence by providing a voice for a young and digitally aware audience and for mostly liberal groups.

But the novelty has worn off and South Koreans are turning to other competing citizen media platforms. The global financial crisis was another turn of the screw for the website.

In August last year, OhmyNews was forced to close its high-profile Japanese venture after trying to replicate its citizen journalism model there. It had entered the Japanese market with much fanfare in 2006 with backing from the Japanese media giant Softbank worth $11m (£6.8m).

OhmyNews is not a completely spent force, although the initial euphoria over citizen journalism has dissipated. The site helped whip up public anger over the issue of imported US beef because of fears of mad cow disease. The mass candlelight vigils last year threatened to bring down the government.

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