cloudseer + shared + analysis 4
Drinking Its Own Champagne - Amazon Moves Its Own Enterprise to the Cloud
july 2010 by cloudseer
The Amazon online retail service and Amazon Web Services have little or nothing to do with each other but the idea that the company's IT department would not use cloud computing almost seems implausible.
Or does it? Amazon IT is really like any other IT department. It has a mix of different systems and processes that have developed over the past several years. It's a global organization that has thousands of employees who depend on the IT infrastructure to manage finances, human resources and all the other functions in the enterprise.
For the past four years, Amazon IT has been working toward a move to the cloud. Along the way it has gone through the process that many companies are now also experiencing.
Sponsor
Amazon IT Director Jen Boden shared her unique story about moving to the cloud at an event this week hosted by her employer. SearchCloudComputing.com covered what she said in an excellent post on its site today.
The post provides insights into similar issues that IT directors face in moving to the cloud. It's her special status as someone who actually works for a company that specializes in cloud computing that makes her story different.
Drinking Her Company's Own Champagne
Boden has the luxury of working for a company with n-house expertise about cloud computing. But she still had to evaluate her employer in some ways as she would a third party vendor. What she experienced is a case study for anyone going through the process of choosing a cloud computing provider.
Boden says she did not have to adopt cloud computing. There was no directive from Jeff Bezos. She claims it was a business decision but also says she felt it was a lesson in "drinking her own champagne." We like that analogy far more than the one we hear from other companies about eating their own dog food. Yuck. Makes Amazon appear like they are of a higher class than the competition.
In the post from SearchCloudComputing, Boden said Amazons' enterprise portfolio includes Oracle E-Business Suite Financials software for reporting and business process needs. It also uses Appian for business process management and BMC for systems management.
Virtualization Played An Important Role
She said they decided to start internally by consolidating and virtualizing the IT environment. That's an example of good maintenance and organization as it helped get things in order before switching to the cloud. She said the effort provided more flexibility in where and how applications could be deployed and served.
Right now, Boden is in the preliminary stages of moving into AWS. She has started with simple, homegrown applications. The more critical aspects of the IT operation will move later. Finance will be last.
The planning began a year ago. It will most likely be another 18 months before the process is completed.
She said the biggest challenge is security and compliance. She said she would not have considered moving the company's financial applications to the cloud before last Fall. That's when Amazon began offering its virtual private cloud service. It's essentiailly a virtual private network, cut off from the public Internet. It also helps that Amazon has recently completed a major security audit.
But in the end, it's the people that make it all come together. She had had to negotiate with her auditors, assuring compliance. She had to help her IT department learn how to manage applications in a cloud enviroment.
Making her Sarbanes-Oxley applications fully virtualized and certified made it all a bit easier.
The lesson? Boden lowered the barriers. Virtualization smoothed out the process. In the end, she was prepared to drink her own champagne and move to the cloud.
Discuss
Analysis
shared
from google
Or does it? Amazon IT is really like any other IT department. It has a mix of different systems and processes that have developed over the past several years. It's a global organization that has thousands of employees who depend on the IT infrastructure to manage finances, human resources and all the other functions in the enterprise.
For the past four years, Amazon IT has been working toward a move to the cloud. Along the way it has gone through the process that many companies are now also experiencing.
Sponsor
Amazon IT Director Jen Boden shared her unique story about moving to the cloud at an event this week hosted by her employer. SearchCloudComputing.com covered what she said in an excellent post on its site today.
The post provides insights into similar issues that IT directors face in moving to the cloud. It's her special status as someone who actually works for a company that specializes in cloud computing that makes her story different.
Drinking Her Company's Own Champagne
Boden has the luxury of working for a company with n-house expertise about cloud computing. But she still had to evaluate her employer in some ways as she would a third party vendor. What she experienced is a case study for anyone going through the process of choosing a cloud computing provider.
Boden says she did not have to adopt cloud computing. There was no directive from Jeff Bezos. She claims it was a business decision but also says she felt it was a lesson in "drinking her own champagne." We like that analogy far more than the one we hear from other companies about eating their own dog food. Yuck. Makes Amazon appear like they are of a higher class than the competition.
In the post from SearchCloudComputing, Boden said Amazons' enterprise portfolio includes Oracle E-Business Suite Financials software for reporting and business process needs. It also uses Appian for business process management and BMC for systems management.
Virtualization Played An Important Role
She said they decided to start internally by consolidating and virtualizing the IT environment. That's an example of good maintenance and organization as it helped get things in order before switching to the cloud. She said the effort provided more flexibility in where and how applications could be deployed and served.
Right now, Boden is in the preliminary stages of moving into AWS. She has started with simple, homegrown applications. The more critical aspects of the IT operation will move later. Finance will be last.
The planning began a year ago. It will most likely be another 18 months before the process is completed.
She said the biggest challenge is security and compliance. She said she would not have considered moving the company's financial applications to the cloud before last Fall. That's when Amazon began offering its virtual private cloud service. It's essentiailly a virtual private network, cut off from the public Internet. It also helps that Amazon has recently completed a major security audit.
But in the end, it's the people that make it all come together. She had had to negotiate with her auditors, assuring compliance. She had to help her IT department learn how to manage applications in a cloud enviroment.
Making her Sarbanes-Oxley applications fully virtualized and certified made it all a bit easier.
The lesson? Boden lowered the barriers. Virtualization smoothed out the process. In the end, she was prepared to drink her own champagne and move to the cloud.
Discuss
july 2010 by cloudseer
The Death of the Pageview
march 2010 by cloudseer
The Web has hit a point where tracking pageviews is useless for startups.
There was a time when all you needed to succeed on the Internet were lots and lots of eyeballs, and the best way of measuring those eyeballs was by tracking pageviews (measuring exactly which pages on a website are viewed by individual visitors). The dot-com crash showed us that the eyeball-based business model was a failure.
Sponsor
Since then, startups have moved toward direct monetization strategies such as subscriptions and virtual goods - and these businesses using these strategies require very different metrics than an advertising-based business would. Make no mistake, pageviews were valuable metric once, but their time has passed.
Guest author Tim Trefren is one of the founders of Mixpanel, a real-time Web analytics service that helps companies understand how users interact with Web applications. He writes about analytics at the company blog.
For startups that sell something, metrics like average revenue per user (ARPU) and customer lifetime value (CLV) are vastly more valuable than detailed pageview tracking. It doesn't make any sense to focus on pageviews (an approximation for value) when you can measure the real thing directly.
There's also a clear pattern in the direction the Web is heading - toward interaction and responsiveness, and away from separate pages. If you're going for incredible user experience, on-page interactions are your bread and butter. Can you imagine what a drag it would be if the page reloaded every time you commented or 'Liked' something on Facebook? It would be awful.
This trend further devalues the pageview as a valid metric. If you have a highly interactive Web application that spans only a few pages, there's not a whole lot of value in seeing how many times those pages were loaded. Much more valuable information can be found by tracking the parts of your application that your users are interacting with the most. The benefits here are twofold: You can directly measure the things that are important to you, and you gain unparalleled insight into how people actually use your application.
If Not Pageviews, Then What?
When you're deciding how to incorporate analytics into your strategy, the most important thing is that you are gathering actionable data. By this I mean that you have to be able to use the information you gather to make a decision and take action. If you're not going to use it to make a decision, it's a waste of time to even look at it.
With this in mind, there are a few areas we should focus on: split testing, interaction tracking, conversion funnel analysis, and click tracking. These methods will give you the information you need to both improve your conversion rates and your understanding of user behavior.
Just a few years back, your only options were to roll your own analytics or to pay tons of money to a giant company like Omniture. This left startups in a tough spot, one many startup founders still encounter today: it's difficult to justify putting a lot of development time into analytics when it's not your main product, and it's hard for a small company to work with a large sales organization.
Luckily, the analytics landscape is changing. Many new companies are sprouting up to handle every aspect of your analytics, freeing you from the need to develop your own internal tools.
Split testing
Split testing involves creating different versions of your site and measuring how the changes affect user behavior. Your changes can be as small as a different call to action or as large as a complete redesign. With this data in hand, you can make changes to your website to massively improve your conversion rates.
What companies do it?
Google Website Optimizer is a free multivariate testing solution. It makes it possible to change a number of different things and determine the optimal combination of changes.
Conversion funnel analysis
Funnel analysis is a way of measuring conversion rates across multiple steps of user acquisition. For example, you can measure the rate at which visitors from the front page go to the pricing page, and then how many continue on to actually create an account. This is an incredibly important concept to understand, and can be applied to many aspects of your application.
What companies do it?
Mixpanel (my company) is a freemium service that provides funnel analysis and segmentation.
Google Analytics has a feature called Funnel Visualization that provides basic pageview-based funnel tracking.
KISSmetrics is a new company with a funnel analysis product in closed beta.
Click tracking
Click tracking is a great way to measure how effective your website is. Every click a visitor makes is recorded, so you know which links and buttons are receiving attention. There are a number of ways to report this data, but the most popular is to overlay an image of your website with a heatmap of all of the clicks. If your users aren't performing as you expect, you can try changing the page and continuing the test.
What products do it?
ClickTale is a freemium service that can generate click heatmaps and movies of single visitor sessions.
CrazyEgg is a paid service that can generate a few different reports for your visitor click activity, including heatmaps.
Event tracking
Event tracking is a way of measuring exactly what users are doing on your site. Things like invites sent, videos played, and user signups all count as events. This functionality will grow more and more important as the Web grows more interactive.
What companies do it?
Kontagent is a freemium service that is focused on Facebook applications. It can track Facebook-specific events like invites and notifications, among other things.
Google Analytics recently added basic event tracking to complement its pageview based service.
Measure Relevancy, Not Your Ego
Ultimately, analytics are crucial to online success. If you want to improve your startup, you've got to be measuring it. It's critical to measure the right things, though - the things that are actually important to your business, not things merely appeal to your ego. It can be mesmerizing to watch the unique visitor count go up day-over-day, but this is a dangerous diversion. The era of eyeballs equaling success is long past, so you should instead be measuring the things that are truly relevant to your business.
If you're not measuring your visitors yet, I urge you to get your toes wet - track something small. The conversion rates for the buttons on your front page would be a great place to start.
Is the pageview really dead? What other companies and services are available to help companies move beyond a pageview-centric mindset? Let us know in the comments
Photo by Iva Villi.
Discuss
Analysis
shared
from google
There was a time when all you needed to succeed on the Internet were lots and lots of eyeballs, and the best way of measuring those eyeballs was by tracking pageviews (measuring exactly which pages on a website are viewed by individual visitors). The dot-com crash showed us that the eyeball-based business model was a failure.
Sponsor
Since then, startups have moved toward direct monetization strategies such as subscriptions and virtual goods - and these businesses using these strategies require very different metrics than an advertising-based business would. Make no mistake, pageviews were valuable metric once, but their time has passed.
Guest author Tim Trefren is one of the founders of Mixpanel, a real-time Web analytics service that helps companies understand how users interact with Web applications. He writes about analytics at the company blog.
For startups that sell something, metrics like average revenue per user (ARPU) and customer lifetime value (CLV) are vastly more valuable than detailed pageview tracking. It doesn't make any sense to focus on pageviews (an approximation for value) when you can measure the real thing directly.
There's also a clear pattern in the direction the Web is heading - toward interaction and responsiveness, and away from separate pages. If you're going for incredible user experience, on-page interactions are your bread and butter. Can you imagine what a drag it would be if the page reloaded every time you commented or 'Liked' something on Facebook? It would be awful.
This trend further devalues the pageview as a valid metric. If you have a highly interactive Web application that spans only a few pages, there's not a whole lot of value in seeing how many times those pages were loaded. Much more valuable information can be found by tracking the parts of your application that your users are interacting with the most. The benefits here are twofold: You can directly measure the things that are important to you, and you gain unparalleled insight into how people actually use your application.
If Not Pageviews, Then What?
When you're deciding how to incorporate analytics into your strategy, the most important thing is that you are gathering actionable data. By this I mean that you have to be able to use the information you gather to make a decision and take action. If you're not going to use it to make a decision, it's a waste of time to even look at it.
With this in mind, there are a few areas we should focus on: split testing, interaction tracking, conversion funnel analysis, and click tracking. These methods will give you the information you need to both improve your conversion rates and your understanding of user behavior.
Just a few years back, your only options were to roll your own analytics or to pay tons of money to a giant company like Omniture. This left startups in a tough spot, one many startup founders still encounter today: it's difficult to justify putting a lot of development time into analytics when it's not your main product, and it's hard for a small company to work with a large sales organization.
Luckily, the analytics landscape is changing. Many new companies are sprouting up to handle every aspect of your analytics, freeing you from the need to develop your own internal tools.
Split testing
Split testing involves creating different versions of your site and measuring how the changes affect user behavior. Your changes can be as small as a different call to action or as large as a complete redesign. With this data in hand, you can make changes to your website to massively improve your conversion rates.
What companies do it?
Google Website Optimizer is a free multivariate testing solution. It makes it possible to change a number of different things and determine the optimal combination of changes.
Conversion funnel analysis
Funnel analysis is a way of measuring conversion rates across multiple steps of user acquisition. For example, you can measure the rate at which visitors from the front page go to the pricing page, and then how many continue on to actually create an account. This is an incredibly important concept to understand, and can be applied to many aspects of your application.
What companies do it?
Mixpanel (my company) is a freemium service that provides funnel analysis and segmentation.
Google Analytics has a feature called Funnel Visualization that provides basic pageview-based funnel tracking.
KISSmetrics is a new company with a funnel analysis product in closed beta.
Click tracking
Click tracking is a great way to measure how effective your website is. Every click a visitor makes is recorded, so you know which links and buttons are receiving attention. There are a number of ways to report this data, but the most popular is to overlay an image of your website with a heatmap of all of the clicks. If your users aren't performing as you expect, you can try changing the page and continuing the test.
What products do it?
ClickTale is a freemium service that can generate click heatmaps and movies of single visitor sessions.
CrazyEgg is a paid service that can generate a few different reports for your visitor click activity, including heatmaps.
Event tracking
Event tracking is a way of measuring exactly what users are doing on your site. Things like invites sent, videos played, and user signups all count as events. This functionality will grow more and more important as the Web grows more interactive.
What companies do it?
Kontagent is a freemium service that is focused on Facebook applications. It can track Facebook-specific events like invites and notifications, among other things.
Google Analytics recently added basic event tracking to complement its pageview based service.
Measure Relevancy, Not Your Ego
Ultimately, analytics are crucial to online success. If you want to improve your startup, you've got to be measuring it. It's critical to measure the right things, though - the things that are actually important to your business, not things merely appeal to your ego. It can be mesmerizing to watch the unique visitor count go up day-over-day, but this is a dangerous diversion. The era of eyeballs equaling success is long past, so you should instead be measuring the things that are truly relevant to your business.
If you're not measuring your visitors yet, I urge you to get your toes wet - track something small. The conversion rates for the buttons on your front page would be a great place to start.
Is the pageview really dead? What other companies and services are available to help companies move beyond a pageview-centric mindset? Let us know in the comments
Photo by Iva Villi.
Discuss
march 2010 by cloudseer
Lady Gaga as the Killer App: Moving Identity into the Cloud
february 2010 by cloudseer
Protocols, protocols, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. OAuth, OpenID, UX, Shibboleth, SAML, XRI, FOAF, Facebook Connect, that is a small sampling of some of the technologies that have been invented to move Internet Identity forward forward for the web.
Today, at the Open ID User Experience Summit, a jaw-dropping statistic was given that 89% of users coming to LadyGaga.com chose a third-party logon rather than create a new account. "Signup with Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace" is the default option on LadyGaga.com - and it works.
Sponsor
Do You Have the Credentials: Want to be on the Guestlist?
We wondered why is this site getting such high level of adoption of third-party logons, which hasn't been seen at this level anywhere else.
It seems that in addition to the momentum of the OpenID community, part of the story is about the landscape change occurring around video content. One great example is in the changes at YouTube including the Vevo ad wall. More than ever, tracking of the users that access protected content is becoming the norm. Even innocent phenomena like Rickrolling have been at risk as copyright holders are removing more and more content from YouTube.
Have you seen one of these notices on YouTube before?
It's an example of a piece of content that has been pulled. Vevo now serves up the same thing, and the content owner is provided with marketing tools to place around the content -ads, placement, positioning.
Google likes to get paid. It's easy to see that while searching for Lady Gaga on the current version of Youtube. In contrast to the list of free videos that once once stood, sites like LadyGaga.com are offered as one of the top links right next to the Vevo-supported link. Somewhere, in an office in Mountain View, there is a voice whispering "Show me the money".
Third Party Logon: Facebook and Twitter Connect our Personas
Ironically, when clicking on the link from YouTube and arriving at LadyGaga.com, the most prominent third-party logon solutions displayed are Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Universal Music uses the RPX services based solution by JanRain, a Portland, Oregon company to power this capability for the site.
Yesterday, at the OpenIDUX community meeting in Chicago, Brian Ellin of JanRain presented a set of slides on best practices in the OpenID world for User Experience and third-party logon.
This talk included best practices and notes from JanRain, the company he works for, supported population of 173,000 web sites that use it for a third party logon. The company offers credentialing from over 10 key identity providers including Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and soon LinkedIn.
Identity as a Service
For the user, there is little reason to know the technology that is behind the scenes. All we need is to be able to easily choose the provider we want - and that it all works. In fact, when it's done right, it's is less clicks and time. And of course, one less password to remember.
That being said, on the LadyGaga.com site at least three protocols are supported from the home page alone: OAuth for Twitter, Facebook Connect, and OpenID with MySpace. Getting the experience right first, has allowed these companies to support the work of integrated logon experience while the industry continues to innovate on the different core protocols for sharing identity across websites.
We spoke Lisa Hannah, Director of Marketing at JanRain. She shared information on their analysis of the social media trends of third party logon users. They represent a balance in building industry relationships, while at the same time finding consumer solutions that work well enough to drive adoption.
The Nice Thing About Change is That it Requires a Lot of Hard Work
The OpenID community iterating the solution to get it right. The organizations and leaders in the community, including individuals like Brian Kissel, Allen Tom, Monica Keller, Mike Jones, Joseph Smarr, Eric Sachs, David Recorden and Chris Messina have continued to build momentum in the community and find common ground - even beyond where the companies they represent (Google, Microsoft, Facebook) are deciding on the balance of power of this generation of the Internet.
Third-party logon is becoming standard practice. And like many things, it becomes easier to use with time. For this user, it's starting to feel familiar, like an old friend.
We'd Like to Ask Lady Gaga to Solve Health Care
It had to happen somewhere, and LadyGaga.com is the site that shows us a glimpse of a new world of the Internet. Behavior change is all about the incentive - and bling. Perhaps this type of evidence will motivate the federal government in the direction of third-party logon.
In the case of identity on the Internet, it is clear that there is benefit when open, mixed, and hybrid solutions are supported for the good of the user. As always, the experience is what matters.
We'll continue looking at Lady Gaga and third-party logon in an upcoming piece where we go through the details from a user experience and technical view.
Do you support the movement towards users signing in using third-party logons? What do you think about Twitter's OAuth, Facebook Connect and OpenID?
Discuss
Analysis
shared
from google
Today, at the Open ID User Experience Summit, a jaw-dropping statistic was given that 89% of users coming to LadyGaga.com chose a third-party logon rather than create a new account. "Signup with Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace" is the default option on LadyGaga.com - and it works.
Sponsor
Do You Have the Credentials: Want to be on the Guestlist?
We wondered why is this site getting such high level of adoption of third-party logons, which hasn't been seen at this level anywhere else.
It seems that in addition to the momentum of the OpenID community, part of the story is about the landscape change occurring around video content. One great example is in the changes at YouTube including the Vevo ad wall. More than ever, tracking of the users that access protected content is becoming the norm. Even innocent phenomena like Rickrolling have been at risk as copyright holders are removing more and more content from YouTube.
Have you seen one of these notices on YouTube before?
It's an example of a piece of content that has been pulled. Vevo now serves up the same thing, and the content owner is provided with marketing tools to place around the content -ads, placement, positioning.
Google likes to get paid. It's easy to see that while searching for Lady Gaga on the current version of Youtube. In contrast to the list of free videos that once once stood, sites like LadyGaga.com are offered as one of the top links right next to the Vevo-supported link. Somewhere, in an office in Mountain View, there is a voice whispering "Show me the money".
Third Party Logon: Facebook and Twitter Connect our Personas
Ironically, when clicking on the link from YouTube and arriving at LadyGaga.com, the most prominent third-party logon solutions displayed are Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Universal Music uses the RPX services based solution by JanRain, a Portland, Oregon company to power this capability for the site.
Yesterday, at the OpenIDUX community meeting in Chicago, Brian Ellin of JanRain presented a set of slides on best practices in the OpenID world for User Experience and third-party logon.
This talk included best practices and notes from JanRain, the company he works for, supported population of 173,000 web sites that use it for a third party logon. The company offers credentialing from over 10 key identity providers including Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and soon LinkedIn.
Identity as a Service
For the user, there is little reason to know the technology that is behind the scenes. All we need is to be able to easily choose the provider we want - and that it all works. In fact, when it's done right, it's is less clicks and time. And of course, one less password to remember.
That being said, on the LadyGaga.com site at least three protocols are supported from the home page alone: OAuth for Twitter, Facebook Connect, and OpenID with MySpace. Getting the experience right first, has allowed these companies to support the work of integrated logon experience while the industry continues to innovate on the different core protocols for sharing identity across websites.
We spoke Lisa Hannah, Director of Marketing at JanRain. She shared information on their analysis of the social media trends of third party logon users. They represent a balance in building industry relationships, while at the same time finding consumer solutions that work well enough to drive adoption.
The Nice Thing About Change is That it Requires a Lot of Hard Work
The OpenID community iterating the solution to get it right. The organizations and leaders in the community, including individuals like Brian Kissel, Allen Tom, Monica Keller, Mike Jones, Joseph Smarr, Eric Sachs, David Recorden and Chris Messina have continued to build momentum in the community and find common ground - even beyond where the companies they represent (Google, Microsoft, Facebook) are deciding on the balance of power of this generation of the Internet.
Third-party logon is becoming standard practice. And like many things, it becomes easier to use with time. For this user, it's starting to feel familiar, like an old friend.
We'd Like to Ask Lady Gaga to Solve Health Care
It had to happen somewhere, and LadyGaga.com is the site that shows us a glimpse of a new world of the Internet. Behavior change is all about the incentive - and bling. Perhaps this type of evidence will motivate the federal government in the direction of third-party logon.
In the case of identity on the Internet, it is clear that there is benefit when open, mixed, and hybrid solutions are supported for the good of the user. As always, the experience is what matters.
We'll continue looking at Lady Gaga and third-party logon in an upcoming piece where we go through the details from a user experience and technical view.
Do you support the movement towards users signing in using third-party logons? What do you think about Twitter's OAuth, Facebook Connect and OpenID?
Discuss
february 2010 by cloudseer
Is Augmented Reality Garbage or Golden?
august 2009 by cloudseer
We've been writing a lot here about Augmented Reality (AR), technology that displays layers of data on top of our view of physical reality through mobile phone cameras, projected images and webcams. It seems like a red-hot field and something we should cover all the more. Some people think that's not the case though; they say it's just hype, a technology looking for applications or a recipe for disappointment.
Below we offer you a chance to let us know what you think. Please take our poll and let us know if you think these services being heralded as Augmented Reality are the real deal or something not worth reading about. Just below the poll we offer some links to a few of our most important articles about AR and some opposing viewpoints from readers. Let us know what you think!
Sponsor
Is Augmented Reality a Meaningful Technology Development or Useless Hype?(polls)
Key posts from our past coverage include:
Augmented Reality: A Human Interface for Ambient Intelligence (A good introduction)
Augmented Reality: Five Barriers to a Web That's Everywhere
Prepare Yourself: Augmented Reality Hype is on the Rise
First iPhone Augmented Reality App Appears Live in App Store
Hyperlinking the Real World
Two Opposing Views
Readers have been debating the value of AR in comments on our past coverage. Here are two good ways of articulating opposing views on the subject:
Former HP Labs team member turned tech consultant Gene Becker is optimistic.
"In the same way that the web browser on a computer screen is a window into cyberspace, an augmented reality viewer is a window that looks out on the blended physical/digital landscape, the geoweb, the city as platform.
We're just at the beginning of a fifty year adventure where we will infuse the physical world with connected digital experience. AR browsers like Layar and Wikitude are like Gopher was in 1991 -- early, geeky, not a lot of content, not a great experience...but watch what happens next."
An anonymous commenter left these critical thoughts:
"I must thank MK for the app list. It confirms to me there are no useful AR apps right now, and also that the feasible apps are very limited, because they all seem kind of similar to one another.
It's just so much easier for me to use an ordinary browser map application and see all the locations of interest for any conceivable query than to mess around with a phone's camera.
AR seems kind of like voice recognition to me, in a way.
Recall that some years ago there was a massive hype storm about how much better voice input would be than typing. But despite the general availability of a fairly decent program (Dragon), most people still use keyboards because keyboards just have more utility and usability combined. That's how I feel about these crappy AR apps until there are some serious breakthroughs in both hardware and software.
I mean, you really need a lightweight high-res infinite-battery HMD with meter-accuracy location for it to make much sense to me -- snapping photos through a cellphone and looking at crappy low-res decorations on the result seems very weak to me, especially given the error scale of GPS. But no such HMD exists. Alternatively (as in Vinge's novel) you need something like a long-range RFID on every object or location of interest, and that isn't going to happen any time soon either.
Like voice recognition, there may be some special purpose AR apps in the short term that are useful and effective for narrow uses. I'm sure Dragon is great for many disabled people, and for the few people who are really skilled at dictation, so perhaps the same kind of niches can be found for low-tech AR.
But I don't think it will be broadly useful in the near-term, so it seems to me to be an unworthy thing to spend so much time and effort hyping right now."
What do you think? Let us know by voting in the poll above and in the comments below.
Discuss
Analysis
shared
from google
Below we offer you a chance to let us know what you think. Please take our poll and let us know if you think these services being heralded as Augmented Reality are the real deal or something not worth reading about. Just below the poll we offer some links to a few of our most important articles about AR and some opposing viewpoints from readers. Let us know what you think!
Sponsor
Is Augmented Reality a Meaningful Technology Development or Useless Hype?(polls)
Key posts from our past coverage include:
Augmented Reality: A Human Interface for Ambient Intelligence (A good introduction)
Augmented Reality: Five Barriers to a Web That's Everywhere
Prepare Yourself: Augmented Reality Hype is on the Rise
First iPhone Augmented Reality App Appears Live in App Store
Hyperlinking the Real World
Two Opposing Views
Readers have been debating the value of AR in comments on our past coverage. Here are two good ways of articulating opposing views on the subject:
Former HP Labs team member turned tech consultant Gene Becker is optimistic.
"In the same way that the web browser on a computer screen is a window into cyberspace, an augmented reality viewer is a window that looks out on the blended physical/digital landscape, the geoweb, the city as platform.
We're just at the beginning of a fifty year adventure where we will infuse the physical world with connected digital experience. AR browsers like Layar and Wikitude are like Gopher was in 1991 -- early, geeky, not a lot of content, not a great experience...but watch what happens next."
An anonymous commenter left these critical thoughts:
"I must thank MK for the app list. It confirms to me there are no useful AR apps right now, and also that the feasible apps are very limited, because they all seem kind of similar to one another.
It's just so much easier for me to use an ordinary browser map application and see all the locations of interest for any conceivable query than to mess around with a phone's camera.
AR seems kind of like voice recognition to me, in a way.
Recall that some years ago there was a massive hype storm about how much better voice input would be than typing. But despite the general availability of a fairly decent program (Dragon), most people still use keyboards because keyboards just have more utility and usability combined. That's how I feel about these crappy AR apps until there are some serious breakthroughs in both hardware and software.
I mean, you really need a lightweight high-res infinite-battery HMD with meter-accuracy location for it to make much sense to me -- snapping photos through a cellphone and looking at crappy low-res decorations on the result seems very weak to me, especially given the error scale of GPS. But no such HMD exists. Alternatively (as in Vinge's novel) you need something like a long-range RFID on every object or location of interest, and that isn't going to happen any time soon either.
Like voice recognition, there may be some special purpose AR apps in the short term that are useful and effective for narrow uses. I'm sure Dragon is great for many disabled people, and for the few people who are really skilled at dictation, so perhaps the same kind of niches can be found for low-tech AR.
But I don't think it will be broadly useful in the near-term, so it seems to me to be an unworthy thing to spend so much time and effort hyping right now."
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august 2009 by cloudseer