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"Do Crew" Augmented Reality Cartoons Help Get Kids Off the Couch
New York-based online video management company whistleBox has developed a new browser-based augmented reality (AR) experience geared directly at children by integrating it with the one thing every kid loves: cartoons. The project, dubbed Do Crew , is a series of animated stories for kids that include interactive AR games and challenges that the kids can play with using a webcam attached to a desktop or laptop computer. Sponsor In examples shown in videos on the Do Crew site, kids can control cartoon vehicles by jumping or leaning side-to-side, and can play other games by waving their hands in front of the camera. Think Project Natal but in a web browser, and integrated within kids’ cartoons. This is an excellent use of augmented reality technology because it is a practical application with genuine value, an attribute we discussed last week as being the strongest way AR can break into the mainstream. Best of all, with games like these, kids will no longer be passively glued to their sofas as this new AR project encourages the kids of stand and use their body and arms to control the games. The Do Crew developers state that their mission with the game is help combat the growing epidemic of child obesity. “Children will not stop watching television, and parents will not stop feeling guilt about that fact. So, where does that leave us? It leaves us with a rare opportunity to acknowledge this epidemic and treat it at the most basic level,” the site says. “The Do Crew team is dedicated to making all passive media active, and we believe that with a little technology and imagination we can reimage the personal computer or console video game system as effective electronic exercise equipment.” Going after the children’s entertainment market could also be a boon for the augmented reality industry which has yet to find the public spotlight. Time Magazine named AR as one of the top tech trends to watch in 2010 , and by engaging children, AR may be able to make significant strides towards mass public adoption and acception. Actually, AR experiences aimed at kids are not a new concept; a LEGO Store installation that helped kids see 3D reprensentations of model kits right on their boxes, and a web-based Topps baseball card experience that made the players on the cards come alive in 3D are two of the most well known AR roll-outs to date. New projects like Do Crew are not only great for kids, but also for AR as a whole as it strives to gain credibility and traction with as wide an audience as possible. Discuss
Twine CEO to Startups: Be Modest With Your Money
The semantic web is one of the leading trends we track here at ReadWriteWeb, so it was big news to us earlier this month when Evri announced it was acquiring Twine creators Radar Networks . Following the announcement, Twine CEO Nova Spivack wrote an inspiring and lengthy farewell blog post detailing the acquisition, and the story behind the development and growth of Twine. Towards the end of the post, Spivack outlined some lessons for budding entrepreneurs based on what he learned through his startup experience. Sponsor The number one piece of advice he suggests is to raise as little funding as possible from venture capitalists, and to stick with revenue funds, bootstrapping or angel funding to get by. Based on Spivack’s experiences with raising VC funding, he believes the conditions and strings that are attached to it aren’t worth it if the company can get by without raising any funding, especially in the current economic situation. “It is no easy task to get a startup funded and launched in this economy,” he writes. “The odds are not in your favor — so play defense, not offense, until conditions improve (years from now).” Part of playing defense, he says, is to curtail spending as much as possible – a suggestion that goes hand-in-hand with the modesty of raising as little venture capital as necessary. Spivack urges startups to avoid quickly spending and expanding upon bloating their bank account with investor dollars; instead, he argues for responsible saving and planning for unexpected downturns and crashes. “Assume the market will crash — downturns are more frequent and last longer than they used to. Expect that. Plan on it,” writes Spivack. “And make sure you keep enough capital in reserve to spend 9 to 12 months raising your next round, because that is how long it takes in this economy to get a round done.” One of the things we hear VCs look for in potential investments is traction, but Spivack, interestingly enough, says traction is not always a sure-fire bet for funding and success. He says VCs are more concerned with finding a company that is producing revenues preferably at a break-even level – something he attributes to an evolving VC landscape. “Venture capital investing has changed dramatically — early stage and late stage deals are the only deals that are getting real funding,” writes Spivack. “Mid-stage companies are simply left to die, unless they are profitable or will soon be profitable.” Spivack provides a number of other lessons he learned from his time with Twine, and be sure to read his entire post for a touching story behind his company. For now, note his most important lessons regarding modest spending and modest fund raising. A lot of startups enter the scene looking to become as flush with cash as possible, but in some cases, with some entrepreneurs, having too much money can be a bad thing. Discuss
POLL: What’s the Best Way to Support Startups, Services or Cash?
After wrapping up a panel with a gamut of pro- and anti-VC types at SXSW , I’m left wondering why there aren’t more services-oriented startup firms. Let me explain: Most of the time, when a startup goes after venture capital, they’re still in the process of building a product and bringing it to market. They need things like servers, developers, marketing tools and sometimes office space. Do they need money per se? Or is capital an increasingly arbitrary and unnecessary step in building a tech startup? Sponsor The fact is, almost every startup needs a little help. Maybe you get that help from the bank of Mom and Dad; maybe you get that help from your good friends at Mastercard. Often, you get that help from folks who want equity; you end up trading part of your assumed long-term success for resources you need in the short term. We are all familiar with the idea of trading equity for funds through angel financing and venture capital; we’re also familiar with the TechStars and Y Combinator programs that help to incubate and accelerate startups through minuscule amounts of capital and significant amounts of mentorship. But most of us are less familiar with models such as Mike Trotzke’s SproutBox or Marcus Whitney’s Remarkable Wit . These firms provide services (and sometimes keeping-Ramen-on-the-table amounts of cash) to early-stage startups in exchange for equity. They provide development, marketing and other services that most tech startups need without delving into the complicated issues of valuation and funding rounds. These guys are focused on the absolute bottom line of technology, which has nothing to do with money: Making a great product and finding people to use it. So, we’re interested to know from our friends in startups who aren’t taking the bootstrapping route, given the choice between pure capital or business-building services, which would you choose? Take the poll, and let us know the reason behind your decision in the comments. We’ll be following up soon based on the results. What would you rather have for your startup: Services or cash? polls Discuss
Weekly Poll: What Companies Will Be at the Top of the Cloud in the Next 5 Years
We take a look at the future of cloud computing services this week. We want to know: What companies do you think will be at the top of the cloud world in five years? This past week, we had 93 people respond to the question: ‘Is There A Place For Open-Source in the Data Center?” The respondents were pretty much in full support of the open approach. Of the 93 people who responded, 83 said, yes, there is a place for open-source. But we wonder what it will take to get such a movement to a pace of note. We do have faith in the open-source way but how will this effort transfer to the data center? Sponsor The organizers have the right idea. Michael Manos of Loose Bolts writes: “If you think of the Linux movement, and all of those who actively participate in submitting enhancements, features, even pulling together specific build packages for distribution, one could even see such things emerging in the data center engineering realm. In fact with the myriad of emerging technologies assisting in more energy efficiency, greater densities, differences in approach to economization (air or water), use of containers or non use of containers, its easy to see the potential for this component based design.” Let’s move on to this week’s question. It’s certainly true that cloud computing is one of the most category filled markets you can find. Platform-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service – the list goes on. What companies do you think will be at the top of the cloud world in five years? opinion We do see the same big name companies making their stake in the market, no matter what their category. It’s evident that there will likely be a handful standing over the next several years. Who will they be? Discuss
Beyond Twitter Search: Semantic Analysis of the Real-Time Web
Many of you probably never heard of the Ellerdale project until this week, when Twitter announced it was one of the company’s new partners in receiving the “firehose” of Twitter data, a full feed stream of tweets that was, prior to Monday, only available to the major players like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft. What Ellerdale is now doing with Twitter’s 50 million tweets per day is definitely interesting – the service uses an intelligent data-parsing engine to analyze the context of tweets and the links they contain and combines that with other data sources like RSS feeds and Wikipedia to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker that provides more than just a list of tweets – it provides an understanding of the world’s conversations. Sponsor Launched in late 2009, Ellerdale, still in alpha testing, tracks data sources from around the web, primarily Twitter, and examines what topics are being discussed. It then organizes these conversations into categories like “people,” “sports,” “politics,” “music,” “television,” and more. Within each category are conversation topics and sub-topics. For example, in the “people” section, “Sarah Palin” is a topic of conversation right now and the sub-topics are “The Tonight Show” and “Jay Leno,” referencing her recent appearances on those TV programs. You can click through on any of the topics or sub-topics to learn more about what’s being discussed. Although Ellendale’s best feature is its ability to highlight these sorts of trends, you can also use it to search the real-time web for your own keywords. Here, unlike Twitter’s own search engine , Ellendale won’t just return a simple list of tweets in response to a query. Instead, any topical page on Ellendale returns an incredible amount of data. There are summaries provided from sources like Wikipedia, Freebase (an online semantic database), New York Times’ people search and more. Related topics, in the form of thumbnail images, are listed above the live-updating message stream on every topic’s main page. To the right, a graph charts that keyword’s popularity over time and you can manipulate this to show you data from the past hour, day, week or month. Also to the right is a list of top articles from around the web, ranked by how many times they’ve been mentioned on Twitter. That article list can even be subscribed to via an included RSS feed. And let’s not forget the main dish – the live-updating stream of tweets. The message stream shows who tweeted what, when and what Twitter client they used to do so, which is the same information you would see on Twitter.com. However, where Twitter’s own homepage and search results pages stay put until you refresh them, this message stream moves in real-time as tweets come in. If it goes too fast for you (something that’s a real possibility when you watch a currently hot trend), you can pause the stream with a click of a button. For data hounds, search results like these are tantalizing to say the least. And this engine is now just one of many that has access to Twitter’s entire stream of tweets. The other new Twitter partners are also search and discovery services, including Collecta , Kosmix , Scoopler , twazzup , CrowdEye , and Chainn Search, all of which parse the Twitter data feed in their own way. Is any one better than another? That’s hard to say. Each has their own niche, site design and unique features which allow them to appeal to select groups of searchers. Ellendale is interesting because of its semantic capabilities, but it’s not the only one to offer those. Kosmix, for example, has been developing their semantic-based news portal for the last three years . The best part about all these new partnerships is that we’re about to see an entirely new way to search the web emerge. For quick real-time results, there will always be the major search engines and their more basic lists of tweets, but for true data analysis, we now have incredible new options like Ellendale and all the others. Discuss