Popular travel book publisher Lonely Planet has begun selling Augmented Reality apps for 10 US cities for $5 each in the Android Marketplace. The apps were built in conjunction with Mobilizy, the company behind user generated content AR app Wikitude . In addition to offering Lonely Planet content overlayed on top of locations you view through your phone's camera view, you can also plan itineraries and get step by step directions from the app. Augmented Reality is a technology in a formative stage but support from the Lonely Planet brand is a big, if unsurprising, step. Sponsor Will consumers go for it? GoMoNews is skeptical , pointing out that AR technology is still clumsy and Lonely Planet's offering is very limited so far. National Geographic's travel blog voices no such concerns . Travel is the most logical application of consumer-focused Augmented Reality, but we expect a large number of consumer and marketing companies to explore this new paradigm of layering data on top of the viewed world. Some of the most interesting applications of Augmented Reality are outside the consumer market; AR could prove very useful for medical procedures or mechanical repair, for example. The technology remains limited, though, by the inability of most applications to process live video of what they are actually looking at, instead of merely offering up data based on what's believed to be in a given GPS position. Discuss

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Lonely Planet Launches Augmented Reality Apps

The Twitterati have spoken! Throughout 2009, a few tech topics got so much attention that they managed to make Twitter's trends. Google Wave was one of the most notable of these, obviously, but what were the other subjects of such interest to Twitter-using geeks? Twitter has just released a list of the top 10 technology-related trending topics of the year; here's what tweeps have been talking about. Sponsor 1. Google Wave The most-talked-about app of the year - on Twitter and likely in many other circles, was Google Wave. As invitations rolled out in waves, each initiate was given a limited number of invites to pass on to friends and colleagues. This left the twittersphere clamoring for Wave invites and drove the keyword into Twitter's general trending topics on multiple occasions. If Wave did nothing else right, they certainly mastered the art of the viral marketing campaign. 2. Snow Leopard Apple fanboys (and girls) the world around rejoiced when the newest Mac operating system was released this year. Snow Leopard was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in June 2008, which meant that Mac geeks had been waiting to buy their copies for more than a year by the time the OS hit shelves in August of this year. 3. Tweetdeck This Twitter app became wildly successful this year and made tech headlines for its Facebook and LinkedIn integration, its iPhone app (a strong competitor to challenge Tweetie 2), its themed interfaces, and more. 4. Windows 7 The longsuffering Windows users among us had long been suffering when Windows 7 was released this year. Better, smarter, faster and less buggy, the OS promised to be the answer to our prayers and a reason to hold our heads up in front of Mac users. Windows also had an interesting marketing campaign that kept their OS on the tips of tongues - and the top of trends - for several months running. 5. CES The Consumer Electronics Show, held each year in Las Vegas, is a gadget geek's version of the AVN Awards, also held each year in Las Vegas. Coincidence? Most definitely. 6. Palm Pre Several years ago, geeks fell in love with the Treo. Then Palm devices kind of fell off the face of the earth and out of public favor until this year, when the company released the tiny touchscreen device known as the Pre. The first iteration of the device hasn't yet become overwhelmingly popular, but the Pre definitely has its fans. 7. Google Latitude In 2005, location-based app Dodgeball was bought by Google. The Dodgeball creators went on to make Foursquare, and this year, Google replaced Dodgeball with Latitude, which very simply shows you where your friends are on Google Maps. Latitude could be the basis for more tricky applications in the future, but location tech in general can be a difficult technology to master. 8. #E3 Another yearly holy-grail-of-its-industry conference, E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, is held in Los Angeles. This con is where gamer geeks die and go to heaven. 9. #amazonfail Amazon suffered public criticism this year when certain gay and lesbian books were removed from sales rankings for containing adult content. The trouble was, most of the titles in question weren't "adult" in nature at all, leading media and the general public to the conclusion that Amazon execs were deeply and terribly homophobic. In the end, it turned out that a single Amazon employee in France set a Boolean flag on adult content from False to True, taking out 57,000 books in his wake. Whoopsie! 10. Macworld And finally, there was MacWorld. Steve Jobs was unable to make the event, and Apple announced that the 2009 con would be the last year the company would participate in the show. The company announced a few modest treats, including new versions of iLife and iWork, as well as a 17-inch MacBook. Apple further announced that music sold on iTunes would be DRM-free. And that's it for Twitter's top trends! Do you think the right topics got the most attention? What do you think would have been trend #11? Let us know your thoughts in the comments! Discuss

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Twitter's Top 10 Tech Trends of 2009

In my recent post about the rise of content farms like Demand Media and the current incarnation of AOL, I posited that Google (and search in general) risks becoming less relevant as the Web gets drowned in lesser quality content. This is due to the scale at which these content farms are operating at - Demand Media alone pumps out 4,000 new pieces of content every day . The solution is of course for Google and other search engines to find better ways to surface quality content , whether that be from traditional news media, blogs or even Demand Media ( not all of its content is poor quality ). So how can Google evolve to identify quality content better? Sponsor Quality! Pah, Does Google Need to Bother? Perhaps we should first answer the question: why should Google be worried about the quality issue? After all, it has a virtual monopoly on the search market. The obvious and PR answer is that Google wants to provide the best search results possible for its users. But there is another big reason why Google needs to do something. So-called "quality" content providers are already well advanced in routing around Google, or at least making them less relevant. As I wrote yesterday, Reuters is onto something with its subscription business model. According to Chris Ahearn , President of Media at Thomson Reuters, the company already makes the "vast majority of its revenues" from subscription-based business models targeted to "vertical and niche markets." Reuters also provides services as well as just content. Bloomberg is another leading media company finding success with this strategy. The subscription model is making inroads, because the users themselves are flocking to it. A prime example comes from VC Paul Kedrosky , who became frustrated after doing various Google searches for "dishwasher reviews" and getting unsatisfactory results. He says that this has made him "more willing to pay for things" - in that case a Consumer Reports review of dishwashers. As Kedrosky archly noted, "the opportunity cost of continuing to try to sort through the info-crap in Google results was simply too high." What Google Can Do Google surely knows that quality (or lack thereof) in its index is a problem. As one part of the solution, Google is currently experimenting with real-time search results from social media sites like Twitter, MySpace and even Facebook. The theory is that users are more likely to get timely, relevant results by tapping into their social network. That's all well and good, but real-time search is unlikely to give you better results on the dishwasher search and other topic-focused search queries. So what else can Google do to identify and surface quality material? Some readers in Sunday's post (Tadhg, Charles Coxhead and others) argued that Google's current algorithm accounts for quality well enough, through the link economy. But many others thought that Google must improve its ranking of quality. Here were some of our readers' suggestions: Neutralize the link dilution; A.J. Kohn , who further wrote that "the introduction of SearchWiki, their measurement of short-clicks versus long-clicks, the new domain/brand SERP listing, snippet links, and use of breadcrumbs all point to a gathering movement to help determine quality without such a reliance on an ever diluted link ecosystem." Do a better job ranking authority; for more on this read Clay Shirky's post on "Algorithmic Authority." Introduce a user rating system; Tony Masinelli. Leverage sharing networks to determine where the quality is; Alex Kessinger . Special curation and algorithms on top of that; William Mougayar, whose company Eqentia does precisely that. p2p recommendation (i.e. filtering through your peers); Nick Taylor . Capture engagement data; Mark Littlewood . Give special weightings to categories of content, e.g. content farms, social media bookmarks blogs and Twitter; Aaron Savage . Use anti-spam type software to identify content that makes too much use of keywords; Barry . Track reputation against authors rather than URLs - a 'PageRank for People'; Marshall Clark . These are all great ideas. Google is almost certainly already doing some of these things already - as will other search companies. John Battelle is expecting a "major breakthrough" in search in 2010 and I hope he's right. One thing is for sure, Google will need to do more in 2010 if it's to stay ahead of the content farms and continue to surface quality content for its millions of users. Discuss

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How Google Can Combat Content Farms

The Web 2.0 world may seem at times like a glamorous, hip place. Services get wild attention. The names are something out of the space age. The companies work out of coffee shops and lofts. But the money has a way of running out before the entrepreneur can find a way to make a profit. No wonder the enterprise world can look so enticing to a Web 2.0 company. So, we thought it might provide some perspective by looking at companies that are showing signs of reaching into the business market or have made the big switch. Sponsor Posterous is a stylish miroblogging service that has gained attention for its ease of use, especially the simplicity in it as a publishing tool. We corresponded with the company today and were told that it will launch a "Posterous for Business," service. The news follows an update to Posterous that allows multiple users to create group blogs that allow users to post to a group page on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. A company logo may be placed in the Posterous blog with a description. That's a big deal. Facebook group pages are becoming important for business users. It can be a bit clumsy trying to update to group pages from outside Facebook. This is an important development for the microbogging service, pointing to its entrance into the business market. Box.net started as a consumer service for people to store online files. In 2007, the company turned to the enterprise and has not looked back. In February, the company launched a new interface. Today, their client roster includes companies such as Nike, Oracle and Marriott. Its direction is pretty clear. The enterprise is where box.net sees its future. Xobni launched in January of 2008. The company billed itself as a social network for your inbox. Cool service. Today, Xobni places a good bit of its attention on the enterprise market . Xobni offers a service that allows administrators to provide Xobni for employees. It can be customized and has features to make it regulatory compliant. Control features are built into the service. In November, the company announced its integration with Salesforce.com. Xobni's future looks more and more like an enterprise play. No Going Back There is no looking back once Web 2.0 companies switch to a business focus. The business market is so entirely different than the consumer world. Free services can remain intact but once the move happens, it's rare to find a small company that can manage to dive deep into the enterprise while maintaining its focus on the Web 2.0 world. Some have been able to do it. WordPress is an example of a company that has had success with both consumers and the enterprise. Perhaps that will be the case with Posterous, too. Discuss

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Forget the Web 2.0 Glamour - the Money's in the Enterprise

Google Apps is adding Google Groups to its enterprise suite of applications, another example of Google's commitment to developing an online application environment that is compelling enough for users to move off the Windows platform. Google Groups has to this point been a consumer service. As part of Google Apps, it now integrates with Google Docs, Google Calendar, GMail, Google Sites and Google Video. Sponsor Adding Google Groups is another shot across Microsoft's bow. Striking is the speed in which companies like Google can innovate with web-based applications, compared to Microsoft's long development cycles. Designing for the browser is so much more efficient that you have to wonder how much of a lead Microsoft can hold in face of the fast development cycles from Google and others in the enterprise collaboration space. In 2007, Google Apps had three products: Gmail, Google Docs and Google Calendar. Today, Google Apps includes 24 products. The cost for Google Apps is $50 per user/per year. In the current Microsoft desktop model, the costs to develop products make it seemingly impossible to keep licensing costs as low as Google Apps. The customer investment is magnified by the technology investments that IT departments need t make in order to keep desktop applications running inside the enterprise. This not to say that Google is lacking any weaknesses of its own. The addition of Google Groups adds another level of functionality to its enterprise suite. Still, the features are fairly simple, compared to the Windows platform. Features Google is adding groups to address the challenges for both the IT administrator and the user. In Google's view, managing groups is a significant administrative burden for IT. The user, in turn is dependent on IT to create the groups. Google's answer is to create a group environment that can be controlled by the user or the IT department. The IT department can control all groups that are created or it can give complete control to the user. This will all sound familiar if you have ever set up your own Google Group. The process is pretty straight forward. The time it takes to set up a group is minimal. You give the group a name and create a group email and web address. You then add a short description and set controls for who has access. Members are added by sending an email with an invitation. Google Groups for the enterprise is designed for users to collaborate on projects. For example, Google Docs and shared folders may be added to a group as can mock ups from Google Sites. Calendar items can be added or a testimonial using Google Video. Dependence on email is its weakness. All changes or additions are sent through email, just as in the consumer version of Google Groups. The saving grace is Google search, which makes it easier to find information in the email. Activity streams are all the rage and seem like they would potentially fit if the groups were designed differently. But you can see why email is the default. Google Groups on the consumer side is designed for email as a distribution mechanism so it makes sense it would be the same for the enterprise. In Conclusion Adding Google Groups is not a dramatic improvement to Google Apps. But it will be compelling to watch how the collaboration market unfolds in 2010 in the face of rapid feature enhancements from Google and a host of competitors competing for a piece of the enterprise market. Discuss

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Google Groups the Latest to Join Google Apps in the Battle for the Enterprise

The web isn't about pages any more. Now it's about streams, feeds and syndication. As part of our annual Best of Series , below are our picks for the most important RSS and Syndication Technologies of 2009. You can see last year's list here and most of those remain important services. Only one service makes a repeat appearance this year. It was a very big year for this class of technologies, after a long, sleepy period the Real-Time Web began to cause substantial disruptions over the last 12 months. Check out our list below and let us know if we've missed anything important or who your picks might be for next year. Sponsor This is the fifth in our series on top products of 2009: Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2009 Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009 Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009 Top 10 International Web Products of 2009 Facebook has 350 million users today. Just 12 months ago there were a mere 140 million Facebook users . A syndicated stream is the default view in Facebook, meaning that 210 million more people have been introduced to this paradigm by Facebook in 2009. That's a powerful cultural change. Twitter may not be anywhere near the size of Facebook, nor growing as fast, but for tens of millions of people, 2009 was a year they got comfortable with streams, lists (just like cute little OPML files!) and soon geolocation data - thanks to Twitter. Echo, from JS-Kit is a reverse syndication service for distributed social media conversations. It brings back tweets and other mentions to the page they refer to. The service is growing fast and becoming more sophisticated every week. New features come so fast and furious that it's overwhelming but the end result is an experience that brings the dispersed social web back together again. Fever is a gorgeous new RSS reader that costs $30 and lives on your own server. It's got a very interesting system for ranking hot stories by your own criteria - we just wish we could change the timeframe so that ranking was for every 2 or 3 hours, not per day. Fever looks great and works wonderfully on the iPhone. If people ask you what good web-based alternatives there are to Google Reader, Fever is a good place to start looking. PubSubHubbub (and RSSCloud ) are two feed formats for the real-time web. PubSubHubbub is method for pushing real-time updates from a publisher, to a hub and then to all subscribed parties - immediately. RSSCloud is a similar technology that originated years ago as a part of the RSS spec. These are the protocols that a whole new era of user and developer experience on the web will be built on. Superfeedr is a new service powering millions of real-time feeds. It's a transformer, from lots of different formats into real-time feeds in PubSubHubbub or XMPP. It's like FeedBurner for the real-time web. Tweetdeck (and Seesmic ) are the market's leading stream readers. They are tools for reading and writing to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and someday other social network streams. There are lots of innovative stream readers on the market, from the beautiful Skimmer to the Inspector-Gadget style Favit , but Tweetdeck is the clear market leader. It's in a perpetual back-and-forth battle of the sweet features with Seesmic. Both are dramatically changing the way users experience the flowing social web. Honorable Mentions: Feedly Twingly Twitterfeed Public Radio Tuner Regator Collected.info Postrank just keeps getting smarter. This social media analytics service tracks distributed conversation regarding blogs and feeds and scores items based on the relative engagement of those conversations. The usefulness of this service just doesn't stop and the company's movement into large-publisher analytics and APIs this year should bode well for customers, developers and consumers. Postrank is the only service on this list that was also on 2008's list. ActivityStreams is a proposed standard way to markup user activity data in social networks. If everyone adopted the standard, then streams of data would be interoperable, we could see what friends on other networks were doing and we wouldn't be locked-in to the big networks because little innovators could provide tools for conversation. So far Facebook, MySpace, Netflix, Sun Microsystems and more are working hard at making this a reality. 2009 was a big year for ActivityStreams, right down to last week's announcement that a feed normalization API was released by startup Cliqset . The Breaking News Online iPhone App is the best remnant of a fabulous story that's changed dramatically in recent weeks. BNO is a news organization that's so fast in breaking news from around the world that the Red Cross watches them for disaster news and MSNBC syndicates their stories. Unfortunately, the company owned by now 19 year old Michael van Poppel sold control over its wildly popular Twitter account to MSNBC this Winter, but the iPhone app remains a very valuable resource. BNO's research and original reporting is definitely one of the biggest stories in syndication of 2009 and its iPhone app is a must-have. Discuss

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Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies of 2009

Much of this blog's coverage centers on technology and companies based in the U.S, particularly in Silicon Valley. However, thriving tech communities exist around the globe, from Toronto to Tel Aviv, and the success of internationally-based web products serve as a reminder to all of us that innovation knows no borders. Check out our picks for the top 10 international web products of 2009 and let us know your favorite international apps in the comments. Sponsor This is the fourth in our series of top products of 2009: Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2009 Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009 Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009 Spotify , Stolholm, Sweden By September 2009, we were calling Spotify "one of the most highly anticipated applications" that had not yet come to the U.S. This lightweight streaming music app made headlines consistently throughout the year. They closed huge amounts of funding in August. And later that month, the company got an iPhone app through the App Store approval process - even though it competes with iTunes - thanks in part to the FCC . In fact, you, our readers, said it was one of the most exciting apps of the year in a survey we conducted this fall. There's more good news, according to co-founder Daniel Ek: "We aren't interested in just trying to hype the company and then flipping it," he wrote in a blog post this October. "We are in this for the long haul." And we look forward to reporting on Spotify's successes in 2010, as well. FreshBooks , Toronto, Canada We first wrote about Freshbooks late last fall. The Web-based invoicing software quickly became one of the most popular in its class; within a few months, Salesforce launched a FreshBooks Connector that took advantage of the startup's APIs. Though FreshBooks had seen many similar partnerships with other CRM systems, the stamp of approval from Salesforce confirmed FreshBooks as a leading product in its category. Jolicloud , Paris, France This lightweight Internet OS for netbooks allows simple access to web- and desktop-based applications. Although products of this kind are currently all the rage and becoming quite common, Jolicloud offers something unique: The inherently social ability to "subscribe" to other users of the OS and see what apps they're using. It's beautiful, it's one of the reasons we're excited about Linux on the netbook , and it's in private alpha. Request your invite now! Hootsuite , Vancouver, Canada This real-time stat-tracking, link-shortening, list-making, tweet-scheduling, multiple accounts-handling Twitter app does it all. Last month, we named HootSuite one of our top 10 apps for small-business success . The app also integrates Facebook profiles and, as of today, Facebook Pages. OrSiSo , Singapore With less than half a million dollars in angel funding, OrSiSo emerged in 2009 as an interesting - and occasionally confusing - AIR-based app for organizing social networks. The company's name stands for "Organize, Simplify, Socialize." The product accomplished all three goals so well that it won an award in February for introducing "status-quo-challenging new ideas" and representing Singapore positively to the international market of users, investors and media. Next page: International Web Products 6-10 Moshi Monsters , London, UK This simple social game of Tamagotchi-like pets was launched by parent company Mind Candy in 2007 but has seen a tenfold traffic increase this year, with unique visits approaching the half-million mark. This cute and casual MMO competes against such giants as Mafia Wars and FarmVille, yet it doesn't rely on a major social network to get users. We hear it's also being used in the classroom to teach fiction and creativity. Wetoku , Seoul, Korea When we tested Wetoku this summer , we were thrilled with the instant, lightweight video recording capabilities of this app. Intended as a "talking heads" app for long-distance video interviews - a welcome boon to bloggers in particular - the app found itself in steep competition with tech giants like Skype as much as hungry startups like TinyChat. It had drawbacks, such as low video quality. But the benefits, such as instantly embeddable content, seemed to outweigh the negative factors. "This is the kind of thing that would make remote, instant video journalism possible," we wrote. Tweetmeme , Reading, UK Tweetmeme is one of our favorite tools for filtering noise in the real-time web. It's also recently surpassed the traffic benchmark of 1M monthly unique visitors. The site surfaces the most popular links and retweets on Twitter, and this year, it found a revenue stream , launched a real-time version , and trounced its competition . Jimdo , Hamburg, Germany Jimdo was founded a couple years ago but only recently came up on our radar . A drop-dead simple website editor, multimedia DAM (digital assets management) system and CMS, this company saw significant growth - including reaching the 1 million users mark - in 2009. Twingly , Linköping, Sweden Twingly launched in 2007 with the promise that users would "never spend time on irrelevant news again." But it wasn't until this year that we became aware of this Swedish startup. At our real-time summit, their CEO led a brilliant breakout session on how to filter the firehose of available online information. Solving information overload is one of the primary concerns of real-time web enthusiasts, and Twingly is one startup dedicated to solving this problem. Honorable Mentions: Busuu, Madrid, Spain Readtwit, Tel Aviv, Israel Feedity, Australia Webjam, London, UK LouderVoice, Cork, Ireland My6Sense, Herzliya Pituach, Israel Huddle, London, UK Wonga, London, UK Face.com, tel Aviv, Israel Wakoopa, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Special thanks to our friends around the world who helped us with this list: Zee Kane of The Next Web, Ayelet Noff (a.k.a. Blonde 2.0), Ewan Spence and Ezra Butler. If you feel we left out an important international web app, please let us know about it in the comments! ReadWriteWeb's Best Of Lists for 2009: Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2009 Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2009 Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009 Discuss

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Top 10 International Web Products of 2009