Amazing Technology: Augmented Reality Business Card

"AUGMENTED REALITY ",it sounds so futuristic , doesn't it? Augmented reality is actually really futuristic and there will be a time when it will be very common and would be everywhere, from business cards to restaurant menus.You will understand by the end of this post that how this so called "Augmented Reality" works.  Do you remember the picture on the left ,doesn't it seems familiar? Yes, this is the picture from the Black Eyed Peas song 'The Dirty Bit' and the picture shows Will.I.Am holding a blackberry playbook and looking at augmented reality in action.

There is this one advertising company JWT London which  has used image-recognition app Blippar to create a unique and innovative new business card that lets people view their show-reel and receive directions to their office.

Blippar brings real-world images to life with augmented reality to provide overlaid digital information or interactive experiences for the user. By using the app to “blipp” the back of JWT London’s card, you can watch the agency’s showreel on your smartphone and also use the device’s GPS to bring up a map that provides the route to JWT’s office.

Watch this video to see it in action.

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IIT-B TECH-FEST :An event to look forward for

From dancing robots by the famed Alebaran Robotics(video at the end of post), one of Europe’s largest Robotics Company, to the Skype-controlled I Mind robot and innovative real-time applications of the basic sciences of nature, Techfest’s exhibition has something for everyone. The Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay’s (IIT-B’s) Techfest is scheduled to take place from January 6 to 8, 2012. The IIT-B’s annual festival is expected to have 35 international exhibits from 16 countries, where famed Nao Robotics, T’N’T Robotics, The Crazy Copter and many more will bring to life the essence of robotics and basic sciences. Exhibition has always been the most popular segment of this world-renowned technology festivals. With the kind of exhibits for next year, the IIT-B’s Techfest will surely bring to India the state-of-the-art technology being practiced across the world. Shrey Singh, a member from the Techfest’s organising committee explained, “The NAO Robot from Aldebaran Robotics, France, a world leader in humanoid robotics, will be presented at the fest. The robots are capable of expressing emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, happiness, excitement and pride and will get upset if the human fails to comfort it or when confronted by a stressful situation that they are unable to cope with. Some robotic applications are being presented in India for the first time.” Shrey added, “The exhibition also is going to present interesting technologies like the smallest Quadcopter, one such prototype that we saw in the film, 3 Idiots. But the one being presented at the Techfest, coming from Sweden is the smallest with dimensions of just one inch. This can be used for army surveillance, wireless network extension, roof inspection and pipeline inspection and cell tower inspection.” Shreya explained, “Nature’s Raincoats, another segment, is a public understanding of science collaboration between researchers at the Nottingham Trent University and the University of Oxford that originated as an Exhibit for The Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition 2009.” Here is a look at what you will be seeing at the fest:

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Google to offer a small virtual drive in cloud

Google is now offering a small virtual hard drive in the cloud so you can access all sorts of files anywhere — the latest salvo in an arms race to become the dominant player in cloud services.

As with many Google initiatives, this one may be deceptively modest: When it is completely rolled out,Google Docs will accept uploads of any kind of file — not just text and spreadsheets. That move heightens their competition with Microsoft, and takes on Apple and a number of small startups in the business of creating backup and storage space on remote servers.

This business is suddenly becoming viable with the ubiquity of broadband connectivity (which
makes things almost as accessible as they’d be on your hard drive) and the popularity of netbooks (which are usually light on internal storage). Cloud computing also makes it possible never to lose data when you drop your beloved laptop, or when you don’t have it with you.

It’s already a crowded field, with all of the usual suspects: Microsoft’s cloud-based platform, Azure, is already available in a fully a la carte pricing scheme geared toward their core enterprise customers, and it offers a 25-GB online Skydrive for home users through its Microsoft Live services. Apple’s Mobile Me (once known as iDisk) has a 20-GB floor for $100 a year and a family plan in keeping with their mainly consumer focus.

For now, Google is portraying the initiative less dramatically, as a USB key rather than as a hard-drive replacement.

Instead of e-mailing files to yourself, which is particularly difficult with large files, you can upload to Google Docs any file up to 250 MB…. This makes it easy to back up more of your key files online, from large graphics and raw photos to unedited home videos taken on your smartphone. You might even be able to replace the USB drive you reserved for those files that are too big to send over e-mail.

While text documents and spreadsheets don’t count toward the total, the offering is actually quite underwhelming in terms of capacity: 1 GB, with extra storage available for $0.25 per GB/year. By contrast, Gmail now offers more than 7 GB of storage for e-mails and attachments, while Google’s Picasa lets you store 10 GB of photos.

But perhaps this is just a beginning of the famed Google Drive, a full-on hard drive in the sky. It’s one more step to make the free Google Docs into a compelling alternative to Microsoft Word — another attempt to break the hold Microsoft has on the desktop to transition users to using the internet even more (because that’s where Google makes its money).

If this is the precursor to something larger — say a giant Google drive that combines Gmail and Picassa, etc., Google ought to get themselves and their checkbook over to Dropbox, the little startup that offers a fabulous service that turns a folder on your PC or Mac  into a shared storage drive. And if I were at Yahoo or Microsoft, I’d hope to get to Dropbox ahead of Google.

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Myrobots.com: A social network for your robots

Today i came across this news on Engadget.com which said that there is a site in line which will allow your  droids to have social updates.We have Facebook,twitter and other social media's to share our thoughts and and now there will be one for the droids also.Human civilization entered the era of robots long ago, we are using robots to make our work easier and our life luxurious and i don't think the world in which robots will have brain is very far away.This is the article that i came across today.


 " According to NewScientist, there's a new site on the block that'll allow your droids to have status updates of their own. Furthermore, MyRobots.com aims to be a complete social hub for humanoids; aside from the "I need to be charged" updates, they'll also secure a complete profile with name and photo. Of course, apps couldn't be left behind, which is why the company is planning a cloud-based app store to cap off its efforts. Unfortunately, just like The Facebook in its early days, the site is only open to a select few for now: Nao and Arduino-based robots. Needless to say, if you're going to have your mechanical partner make you a sandwich, the least you can do is let it share its feelings with friends."

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FACEBOOK'S NEW FEATURE:TIMELINE

A few days back, Facebook rolled out its new Timeline feature to the masses. This ultra-illustrative, chronological listing of posts, photos, shared links, check-ins, and more is a radically different arrangement than the Facebook profile you’ve been used to.

And now that your life can be exposed for everyone to see — and scrutinize — you may be interested in curating the new interface. Once you’ve activated Facebook Timeline (go here to do so), you’ve got seven days to tweak it to make sure it’s just how you like before it goes live for everyone to see.

Below are five quick tips on how to
personalize, privatize, and generally get the most out of Facebook’s newest feature. It doesn’t take long to master the new interface, and it’s an important exercise for anyone interested in, well, reputation management.

1. Privacy 101: How to Hide Things

You probably already know that Facebook has controversial positions on privacy. So you may now find that some things included on your timeline are best kept from curious eyes. This could be anything from an embarrassing status message you posted in simpler social media times, to a rant your ex left on your wall a few months ago.

To hide a Timeline element, click the pencil icon at the top of the offending post, then choose “Hide from Timeline.” Easy.

And please note: Any privacy settings you’ve already set still apply to the Timeline interface. So the photos of you getting wild at last weekend’s kegger are still safe from Mom.

If you prefer to keep your profile public, but don’t want everyone to see what you posted back in high school, for example, you can also tweak your Timeline settings more generally. Click the arrow next to your Home button at the top of the screen to access your Privacy Settings. Scroll down to “Limit the Audience for Past Posts,” then choose “Manage Past Post Visibility.” Now click “Limit Old Posts” — all of your past posts will only be visible to your friends.

2. Tell Your Life Story: How to Add Past Events

Privacy, schmivacy! Perhaps, you want the whole world to know the day you were born, the first time you rode a bike, and that debate club award you got in high school. These events aren’t listed on your Timeline, but they can be.

To add a status update, photo, place check-in, or life event to your Timeline, simply hover the mouse over the line in the center of the page until it turns into a plus sign, and reveals the option to add one of those four types of posts.

Now, Facebook can accurately reflect your entire life — and not just the events that occurred after you first signed on.

3. Add Some Individuality: How to Customize Your Timeline

There are a number of ways you can personalize your Timeline so it highlights the posts, pictures and events you cherish most.

First, you can add a cover to your Timeline. Toward the top of your profile, above the buttons where it says “Update Info,” you should see “Add a Cover.” Once you click that, you can select an image from your photos, or opt to upload a new image. Once it loads, you can adjust the positioning of your cover image.

If you set a cover photo and then decide it’s not as great as you first thought, just hover your mouse over the image, and a “Change Cover” option menu will pop up, letting you reposition the image or select a new one.

For photo albums you’ve created, you can change the primary photo that displays (you could do this before, but now the process is different). Simply click the pencil icon in the upper corner of the album post, and select “Change Primary Photo.”

You can also choose to highlight a post — expanding it from a small, half-page-size post to a wide-screen version — by selecting the star icon in the post’s upper-right corner. Conversely, you can click the star on a maximized featured post to make it normal again.

4. Appearances Matter: How to Check Out Your Timeline From Different Angles

If you decide to make a number of posts and photos private or hidden from your Timeline, you can still get the full, complete view of your Facebook action history.

On your Timeline, click “Activity Log.” There you’ll find posts and information you need to review before it publishes to your profile, as well as a complete look at your interactions on Facebook. This is log completely private to you.

You can choose to filter what you see by clicking the “All” dropdown menu at the top. You can choose to see only your posts, posts by others, posts from specific Facebook apps (“Hmm, let’s look at my past Farmville accomplishments”), photos and more.

Like before, you can also check how others view your profile. Next to “Activity Log” is a cog icon. Click that, and you can choose “View As…” and either enter a friend’s name or click the “public” link to see how your profile looks to strangers.

5. Information Overload: How to Organize Friends and Filter Updates

Now that your Timeline is all straightened out, you might as well do some house cleaning on what shows up in your Newsfeed.

When you add a friend or follow someone’s public updates, Facebook automatically sets the level of posts you see to “Most Updates.” You can change this by going to that profile, and clicking the “Subscribed” button. You can change it to “Only Important” updates or “All updates,” and you can also filter what types of posts you’re interested in seeing: things like life events, status updates, or photos.

And if you haven’t done so already, you can organize friends into lists, a la the Google+ Circles feature. Facebook Lists rolled out in September.

Just go to the left-hand side of your Newsfeed page, click “More,” and toward the bottom you’ll see “Lists.” You can add friends individually to lists like Close Friends, Family, or Co-workers. You can click “More” next to Lists to add other lists of your choosing — “Acquaintances,” “Poker Club Members,” you get the picture.

The average Facebook user has 130 friends, but I’d venture to say that most of you reading this have far more than that, so this will help streamline your Facebooking experience.

One last thing: If you’re one of those people who’s still into “poking” your friends, you can still do that. Go to your friend’s profile, and the Poke option is listed under a gear cog dropdown menu next to “Message.”

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