It used to be that every industry had its gatekeepers.

Music had the fat guys with cigars that Pink Floyd loved to sing about.  Factories had foreman that slapped each other on the back.  Corporations had bosses that controlled resources.  Political parties had precinct captains and party leaders.  And for the last decade, publishing has had agents acting as the gatekeepers.

All these industries still have and will have gatekeepers that control people and products not based on their merit, but on the connections and favors owed.  That will never change completely.

But now there are other ways.

I’m fond of reading Seth Godin, both his blog and his books.  I would recommend Tribes and Linchpin to everyone, regardless of the industry, even someone tending the house and kids on a daily basis.

For years, he’s been teaching how to get past the gatekeepers of the world, even when that gatekeeper is one’s own fear.  Gatekeepers were a necessary tool in the age of the Big Industry.  In Big Industry, economies of scale provided the economic boost.  Favors worked when there wasn’t much competition and information was scarse.  Now those lumbering dinosaurs are too large to function in this nimble mammal world.

The publishing industry, one of the last of the great white behemoths, has just started to come to this realization–cue Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

The last few years, Dean and Kris, have been speaking online about taking control of your career as a writer.  They’ve been talking about this privately at their wonderful workshops for a long time before that, but we’ll stick with what’s in the public record.

This honest self-reliant tone struck well with me and it reminded me much of Seth Godin, albeit specific to the publishing industry.  Now that the e-publishing market is available; many authors, old and new, are debating the usage of such systems.  Dean and Kris are leading such a debate on their dual blogs.  Instead of the big bad gatekeeper in the huge conglomerate buildings of New York, we only have our own fear holding us back.  No longer is the holy grail of an agent required to get a book sold (not that it ever really necessary, but that’s a different discussion all together.)

Seth Godin’s book Tribes talks about how to build a movement one person at a time, slowly, leveraging technology and using our passion and skill.  The old way was to get picked by the elites, sudden and full of heady success.  The new way is to build deliberately, slowly and full of frequent failures.

Seth says it best as:

“Does your project depend on a miracle, a bolt of lightning, on being chosen by some arbiter of who will succeed? I think your work is too important for you to depend on a lottery ticket. In some ways, this is the work of the Resistance, an insurance policy that gives you deniability if the project doesn’t succeed. “Oh, it didn’t work because we didn’t get featured on that blog, didn’t get distribution in the right store, didn’t get the right endorsement…”

Dean and Kris have been telling us the same thing for years.  Be it on rewriting through workshops, or giving up because of rejections, or sending directly to editors.  Being a writer the way they explain it is the same way Seth describes Tribes.  It takes hard work and patience.  You can’t eat an elephant all in one bite and becoming a writer is one mighty big elephant.

Those frequent failures are going to be painful.  When you sell to a big traditional publisher, you can always blame it on them because of bad marketing or a bad cover.  When your book goes out on the e-publishing market and it doesn’t sell as well as you’d like, then it’s all on you.  But that’s okay.  Getting it out there is the hard part and you’ll do better next time.

Matt Mullenweg recently wrote about Apple and their willingness to fail in his post 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number.  If Steve Jobs, the turtlenecked guru, can stomach not having copy+paste on his first iPhone, then I can give it my best and be happy with the result.

In Dean’s New World of Publishing and Kris’s Business Rusch , they explain how to navigate this new world of publishing.   One of the most important points they make to new writers is that the new model is going to be slow.   But that’s okay, Seth already warmed me up to the idea that building a tribe takes time.

Plus, meeting people along the way, one-at-a-time, is a lot more fun than plugging into a massive corporate box any day.

For you experienced developers, the first question you’ll be asking is, “how are they going to do a car HUD without video access on the iPhone.”  So I’ll answer that question first.

Currently, video recording is not yet supported. However, the system takes snapshots of the screen at different intervals. The standard interval is set to about 10 seconds. If one vehicle is tracked this interval is reduced to 5 seconds. If a vehicle is close ahead or more than one vehicle is tracked, a snapshot is taken every 2 seconds.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk features on this new product from imaGinyze (though technically, its only submitted to the App Store and not yet out for purchase.)

The app does a pretty good job of tracking the lane you’re in, speeds, and distance to other cars.   And it switches between units easily for which ever side of the pond you’re on.  The app provides additional safety features giving you a lane switch warning, though if it switches between the 10 second frame interval then its not going to work so well.  Yet another reason Apple needs to give up the goods on the video access.

The functionality of the app shows what the GM windshield might do to improve the safety of its vehicles.  Though I really wish it would give that “Vehicle Ahead” warning to the a-hole tailgating me on the open highway and not to me.

More information:

Augmented Driving for your iPhone 3GS including the following features:

- Dynamic augmented reality overlays for lanes and vehicles
- Head-up display (HUD) for system and status information
- Lane detection and lane change warning
- Vehicle detection and low distance information
- System auto-calibration for easy setup
- Many configuration options and quick manual

The system is designed to work in good lighting conditions during daytime for visible lane markings on highways and country roads and for detection of regular cars. For operation, a fix mount is required.

While the Apple iPad Tablet announcement last month was disappointing for augmented reality developers and enthusiasts, the details about the upcoming Dell Tablet will make you salivate.

The Mini 5 will have a five inch touchscreen with both front and user facing cameras allowing full augmented reality capabilities.  WiFi and 3G connectivity allow enough bandwidth and the 1.0 GHz Snapdragon Qualcomm processor will give the Mini 5 the juice it needs to power resource-expensive AR apps.  It’ll run the latest version of the Android OS which gives it AR credentials right away since there are many apps already made for that system.

The price plan will affect the market that it’s trying to fill, though Dell says they will price it “competitively”.  But I don’t think I could have asked for better features from a tablet for augmented reality.  The weight of the device might impact AR since holding it up will be harder than a smartphone and since it’s a touchscreen, will you want to hold it with one hand and navigate with the other?  I hope some AR developers can incorporate voice commands into their games and products.

And while the screen might be too small in this version, they have eluded to a suite of tablet products so maybe a larger iPad sized version might come out in the future.  Personally, I already have a free smartphone from work, so a tablet that does different things on a bigger screen would be appealing to me.

Will this be a killer device for AR?  Probably not.  But it’ll give developers a bigger landscape to play on and increase the number of AR devices on the market.  The front facing camera certainly makes is a no-brainer for video conferencing.  Just add some facial recognition and you can talk to your kids while out on the road with bunny ears attached to your head.

[Via Wired]

Unless you’ve been living in a box today, you know that Apple finally unveiled the tablet iPad today. The biggest surprise about the announcement was the lack of a camera on the lap sized PC. No camera, really? If you don’t believe it, check the official spec page.

Besides the implications for augmented reality, which I’ll get to in a moment, the iPad not having a camera is a giant fail.  I actually expected the iPad to have two cameras.  One forward-looking so the iPad could function as a giant Polaroid and the other user-facing so videos could be recorded.  We could forgive eliminating one of them, probably the forward-looking one since its so big, but not having the user-facing camera is inexcusable. 

The series of tube we call the Internet has moved beyond simple text.  People want to record and upload videos straight to YouTube without having to yank out their dust-covered hand held or use Skype to call their friends while they’re watching the game. 

The Apple iPad not having even one camera is like hooking up satellite without DVR.  Sure you can do it, but why? 

Of course, I’m being overly melodramatic here. 

The real point to the iPad is competition for the Kindle, eReader and the Vook.  Apple wants to revolutionize the way we read magazines, books and newspapers.  Functionality for augmented reality isn’t even an afterthought.  How many people are using their camera lying in bed reading an interactive book?

And is this a major setback for augmented reality?  Not really.  A giant-sized magic lens would add a fun new canvas to play with, but really wouldn’t be a game changer.  Additionally, Apple isn’t expecting the tablet market to come even close to the smartphone market in sales.

So in the end, the iPad is a fail for augmented reality, but will probably give Jeff Bezos nightmares for months as he wonders how he’s going to compete against a Pentium 286 when he’s selling a Commodore 64. 

And maybe, just maybe, Steve Jobs is still working on a see-through AR-enabled HMD.  Then I’d say, all is forgiven Stevie, I’m coming home to Apple.

Reagan famously said, “Mr. Gorbechev, tear down this wall!”

While arguments can be made whether Reagan’s challenge had any affect on the end of the Soviet Union, it still marked an important time in history.  In that same speech, Reagan referenced some crudely spray painted words on the wall–”The wall will fall.  Beliefs become reality.”  These were probably the more important words that he said on that fateful day. 

These words hold true for the current problem facing augmented reality smartphone app developers.  Beliefs have become reality for the VCs that any important AR apps must be made for the iPhone.  As Robert Rice, CEO of Neogence Enterprises, paraphrased what he’s heard, “We are only interested in deals that are… running on the iPhone….” 

The problem with this is that Apple isn’t giving up access to the video stream from the camera.  Current AR apps are either using the non-visual sensors like the GPS and accelerometer, or using single frames as a reference which make apps laggy and unreliable.  Once again, Robert Rice opines about this problem in his post–The Candy Apple Conundrum:

But I am continually perplexed by Apple’s refusal to open up the undocumented APIs in their SDK to allow augmented reality researchers and developers access to the video stream from the camera. This is a critical element for any type of visual tracking (markers, feature tracking, and markerless tracking). Some people figured some work arounds to make it work with the 2.x version of the SDK which is nice, except that this automatically disqualifies any applications from distribution in the app store. What really kills me though, is that on one hand, Apple made a play for welcoming AR applications with the 3.x version of the SDK, but only provided access to the overlay, while at the same time completely changing where the undocumented API calls were located, further obfuscating things and handicapping all R&D.

It’s clear that there is a high level of frustration within developers and Robert’s not the only one to notice.  Kim-Mai Cutler from Venture Beat talks about how, “[apps are] still being held back because they don’t have the right application programming interfaces for manipulating live video.”  And back in July, Ori Inbar posted an Open Letter to Apple. 

Why isn’t Apple opening up the video stream to developers?  Is it for the Machiavellian reason that they are developing their own secret AR master take-over as hinted by their patent filings?  Does any of this matter?

If we look at the Q2 2009 smartphone sales by Canalys, we see that the iPhone only holds 13.7% of the market.  While Symbian dominates with a whopping 50.3%.  What gives? 

The iPhone has done a wonderful job of controlling the branding space of future smartphones, but the reality is that they are only number three.  In this case, beliefs have become reality.   While I’ll be the first person to crow about augmented reality on the iPhone if they do ever release the video stream, I also don’t think we should be holding our breath any longer.  I find it sadly ironic that their iconic TV commercial from 1984 can be applied to them now.

Mr. Jobs, I am a small press blogger, but I sense the slow churn of animosity towards the iPhone.  The apps are what make the iPhone sell, and if AR takes off while you’re still sitting behind your wall, hype will drive them to a Symbian or Android smartphone that does support augmented reality. 

So tear down that wall, Mr. Jobs.  Or we’ll find someplace else to go that doesn’t have any walls.