In December, I visited Parrot 's development labs in Paris to check out the company's newest project. While Parrot is mostly known for its Bluetooth headsets and speaker systems, the company's newest project combines augmented reality with a remote controlled helicopter. This helicopter - the AR.Drone - features four rotors to keep it stable and a front-mounted camera that is linked to an iPhone or iPod touch. The rig is controlled via an iPhone or iPod touch and the device's screen can show an augmented view of what the helicopter's camera sees. Sponsor AR Meets the Real World What's most exciting about this product is how it combines a real helicopter with this augmented reality view. Instead of just looking at an augmented view of the world through the phone's camera, you get to see the world through the drone's camera. The iPhone takes the view of the camera (via Wi-Fi) and replaces markers with anything from walls to dinosaurs. During our discussion with Parrot in December, we couldn't get any information about the price of the AR.Drone out of the company's representatives. Given how sophisticated the hardware is, however, chances are that it won't be very cheap. The drone, for example, features two camera. Besides the camera that feeds the video to the iPhone, the drone also features a second came that is mounted underneath he structure and augments the drone's autopilot. Hands-On With the AR.Drone We got a chance to play with a prototype of the AR.Drone in Parrot's labs and while it took a while to get used to the controls (the app uses a combination of the phone's tilt sensors and on-screen controls to manipulate the drone). The video on the iPhone was surprisingly clear and didn't show any noticeable lag. Sadly, we didn't get a chance to try out the AR features of the app, though. Parrot will launch the AR.Drone later this year. The company plans demo the helicopter at CES this week but the exact date of the public launch remains unclear. A Drone for Developers In its current iteration, the hardware and software is clearly laid out for gaming, but Parrot also released an SDK that will allow developers to use the hardware for other purposes as well. It will definitely be interesting to see what games and other tools the developer community will come up with one the AR.Drone is launched. Parrot told us that it hopes that developers will look at the hardware as a platform and the company hopes to create an active developer ecosystem around the AR.Drone. More Videos Click here for more videos of the AR.Drone in action. Disclosure : Frederic met with Parrot during a trip that was partly sponsored by Parrot . An Early Demo Discuss

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Parrot's Remote Controlled Helicopter Takes Augmented Reality to the Next Dimension

This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the five biggest Web trends of 2009. So far we've explored these trends: Structured Data , The Real-Time Web , Personalization . The fourth part of our series is on Mobile Web . We're including Augmented Reality in this category, as we think it's a key element of where the Mobile Web is heading circa 2009. In April we reported statistics from browser company Opera showing large growth on the Mobile Web. According to Opera, there was a 157% increase in usage of their Opera Mini web browser from March 2008 to March 2009. What's driving that growth is devices like the iPhone, new mobile operating systems like Android, and hot applications like Augmented Reality. Sponsor Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Apple Dominates Mobile Web, But Android on The Rise... We named Apple our Best Bigco of 2008 , mostly due to the success of the iPhone and accompanying App Store. By most statistics, Apple is in a fairly dominant position in the Mobile Web. At the beginning of the year we reported data from AdMob (a leading mobile advertising marketplace) showing that Apple has a 48% market share of smartphone traffic in the United States. That figure doesn't just come from the iPhone, but the iPod touch too. By June 2009, Apple's share of smartphone traffic in the U.S. had surged to 64% . Perhaps more significantly though, Apple's share of worldwide smartphone traffic had increased to 47%. This is important, because internationally other smartphones were utilized much more than in the U.S. before the iPhone arrived. However, Apple can't afford to rest on its laurals. Google's mobile OS Android has been making rapid progress. According to the latest Admob statistics available, for July '09 , requests from the Android Operating System increased 53% month over month and Android now has 7% worldwide OS share. The iPhone OS dropped slightly to 45% worldwide and 60% in the U.S. Bigco Initiatives & Trendy Startups All of the big Internet companies have strong Mobile Web initiatives. We discussed Apple and Google above. Yahoo continues to push Mobile Web , which currently goes under the OneConnect brand. Microsoft has announced a number of mobile initiatives this year, including a mobile version of Microsoft Office and MySpace bringing its platform to Windows Mobile phones. Earlier this month Facebook announced a mobile expansion of their Facebook Connect platform . "Facebook Connect for Mobile Web" enables developers to add a Facebook Connect button to their apps in order to make them more social. Probably of most interest is watching the up and coming Mobile Web startups. We've had our eye on Brightkite for some time, but perhaps the trendiest startup right now is Foursquare . It's a location-aware social app for the iPhone, but only available in a limited number of countries currently. Augmented Reality Augmented reality, the addition of a layer to the world on your mobile device, has been a very hot trend this year. As we noted in August , it is in everything from mobile apps to kids toys. Many people think that "AR" will soon be talked about by everyone the way they used to talk about "social media" and "Web 2.0" before that. That remains to be seen, but there's no denying there is a lot of interest in AR right now. As we reported at the end of August, the AR apps are starting to flow into Android (the early leader in this space) and iPhone devices. We reported that the Paris Metro Subway was apparently the first AR-enabled app to be accepted into iTunes. Then came a new Yelp app with AR , which any 3Gs owner can turn on by shaking their phone. Presselite , the company that made the Paris Metro Subway app, followed up with a London Bus app for the App Store. Conclusion Clearly mobile devices are an increasingly important way to access the Web. Many of our readers have smartphones nowadays, a good proportion of them being iPhones or Android devices (our statistics prove this). And there is no shortage of mobile web applications flowing into the App Store and Android's marketplace - not to forget Nokia and other prominent mobile manufacturers. What's perhaps most encouraging however, is the entirely new class of mobile apps we're seeing. Augmented Reality is the most obvious example. It's been a big year for mobile, with much promise to come. ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data The Real-Time Web Personalization Mobile Web & Augmented Reality Internet of Things Discuss

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Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Mobile Web & Augmented Reality

Dailymotion , the Paris-based video sharing portal that is extremely popular in Europe, just launched its first set of iPhone applications. Dailymotion launched two apps: a free ad-supported version ( iTunes link ) and a paid version for $5.99 ( iTunes link ) that does not feature any ads. The apps allow iPhone users to play videos from Dailymotion's catalog of roughly 12 million videos. Dailymotion users can also use the apps to upload videos directly to the service. Sponsor Until now, the only way to access Dailymotion from the iPhone was through a mobile-optimized web interface. Given YouTube's position as a default app on the iPhone, this put Dailymotion at a significant disadvantage. In terms of content, Dailymotion can't really compete with YouTube, where users now upload more than 24 hours of video per minute , but the app can easily compete with those from other streaming video services. One feature of the app we especially like is how easy it is to browse through different categories. This is also where Dailymotion's international focus shines through, as the app also makes it very straightforward to restrict searches to popular videos in a specific country. Discuss

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YouTube Competitor Dailymotion Comes to the iPhone

BlueKai is an online marketing firm that provides data to marketers, ad networks and publishers. The main purpose of this data, held in a repository called the BlueKai Data Exchange, is to target ads to consumers. BlueKai claims to have now aggregated "intent data" from over 160 million unique users on e-commerce, online travel agency and auto comparison sites. What is "intent data"? Broadly speaking, it's data that purports to show the intent of Web users when they browse a website. For example, a recent report from BlueKai collected and analyzed online shopping data over Black Friday week. In this post we look at that report's findings and then ask some questions about the validity of the data. Sponsor Black Friday Online Shopping: Netbooks & Nintendo Popular BlueKai defined the resulting "shopping intent" data as "search and shopping related activities by consumers on retail and price comparison sites." Specifically these "intents" included price search by auto make and model, travel destination search by airport or city, and activity on price comparison sites. The report analyzed "more than 10 million online shopping intent actions" for PCs and video game consoles through the week ending November 28, 2009. Here's a chart showing that netbooks , rather than the recently released Windows 7 , had the biggest increase in shopping intent actions in the PC category over the Black Friday holiday period. BlueKai explained: "Online intent actions by those shopping for Netbooks surged 81% during the week of Black Friday versus the prior week, with Netbooks reaching 7.1% share of total PC online intent actions for the week ending November 28. Just a month prior, Netbooks comprised only 2.7% of PC-related online intent actions on the BlueKai Exchange." Here's another chart, this time showing that Nintendo game devices, and in particular the Wii, held the most interest amongst online shoppers during Black Friday week. How it Works A New York Times article earlier this year profiled both BlueKai and a similar data house called eXelate . The Times explained how they work: "They both track who is interested in what through a cookie, an invisible bit of code on a Web page. When someone does a search, for example, on Kayak.com for first-class flights to Paris in September, that information can be captured by a cookie, and Kayak.com can sell that cookie using eXelate or BlueKai." As well as intent data, BlueKai recently announced a new service that gives advertisers access to shopper profiles. BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol claimed that this gives advertisers insight into "actual shopping patterns," as opposed to merely surveying a user base. The problem is, BlueKai is inferring things about a consumer that may not be true . Claire Herminjard of the now defunct Lookery , which tried (and failed) to make a business of capturing explicit user data via a piece of javascript in partner sites, put it well : "[we] make no assumptions about users. If we don't have data on a consumer, we don't pretend that we do (or assume what we think it may be)." Although Herminjard was primarily trying to position Lookery as a better data source, her other point was that BlueKai is essentially a "black box" and its data can't be substantiated when it comes to users - or their intents. Questions Over Data Reliability, But There's a Big Market For It What BlueKai is doing is similar to the methods used by the raft of recommendation engines we've profiled this year . We found in that series that each recommendation engine had its own methods and algorithms; and that it was difficult to judge the accuracy of the data and which company's method worked best. Likewise I'm somewhat skeptical of BlueKai's data claims, especially given how unreliable web data usually is (Alexa anyone?). Nevertheless, BlueKai is attempting to mine a large store of data that up till now has been very difficult to gather and analyze on a large scale online: user patterns on commerce sites. Whether or not the data is reliable is an open question for now, but there is a large market for it - and that will continue as long as online advertising is the main business model on the Web. Discuss

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BlueKai: Intent Data or Black Box?

Yesterday, during a meeting with a number of startups in Paris, we met up with the team behind the Green Watch project. Just like Google collects data from cell phones with GPS chips to aggregate real-time traffic information, this watch measures ozone levels and noise pollution. The watch connects wirelessly to the wearer's mobile phone and sends updates to Citypulse , an open platform for receiving and storing environmental data. The Green Watch is currently only a prototype and not available for sale. Sponsor While it is still an early stage project and mostly meant as a proof of concept, the Green Watch does opens up interesting possibilities. Currently, environmental data is typically collected at a small number of locations. In Paris, for example, only 10 public sensors measure the air quality for the whole city. Crowdsourcing the measurement of environmental data could make it possible to create a real-time map of current ozone levels, for example. Through the Citypulse platform, the Green Watch project wants to make this data available for free. Citypulse was developed by the members of Citu , a group of French university labs, startups and government organizations. How Do You Convince People to Wear These? Of course, in order to turn this project into a commercial success, the developers would first have to persuade users to buy these devices for completely altruistic reasons. The prototype is also rather bulky . Also, as wrist watches are slowly being displaced by mobile phones, the developers will have to give users a good reason to wear a watch again. Air quality sensors, after all, don't work very well in trouser pockets. Disclosure : The author met with the Green Watch team during a lunch that was sponsored by Cap Digital and Invest in France. Discuss

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The Green Watch: Crowdsourcing Air Quality Measurements

If you haven't already heard, this week is the Paris-based Le Web Conference. ReadWriteWeb will be live blogging the event in the next couple of days, with startup writer Dana Oshiro attending with the Social Media Club House and news writer Frederic Lardinois attending as a TravelingGeek . The event will showcase some of Europe's best and brightest tech companies. Below are a few resources for those attending the event: Sponsor 1. Le Web iPhone app : A few days ago we wrote about the fact that Ustream and band app creation site Mobile Roadie have teamed up to deliver an official Le Web iPhone application. The service offers program information, maps and a feed of event-related news. PicTranslator : PicTranslator allows users to take a photo of a menu or signage for instant translation. For $1 you're given a chance to see basic translations, listen to pronunciations and try your hand at communicating in the language of love. 2. Tell Me Where : Based out of Paris, this service allows users to find nearby places in more than 15 categories including fashion, parking, tourism and restaurant-related picks. The iPhone app allows users to connect to their Facebook accounts and view places recommended by your friends. Users can also upload their photos and experiences using the app. 3. Metro Paris : This service allows users to navigate the Paris metro as well as the bus line with ease. Using your phone's GPS, the service allows you to view your closest metro stations and offers real-time alerts on line interruptions. In late August, ReadWriteWeb covered this service's augmented reality release . It is the first known augmented reality app to appear in the App Store. 4. Spotify : If you plan on being in Europe beyond the conference dates, you might want to signup for Spotify premium. The iPhone application offers users real-time file syncing and the ability to cache offline music playlists for use on the metro and other non-wifi enabled areas of the city. 5. Currency Converter : If you haven't gotten used to converting currency, this application calculates the cost of all your rich and sumptuous meals. This year's Le Web is dedicated to highlighting Europe's best and brightest real-time web companies. For a primer on the real-time web, you may want to check out ReadWriteWeb's latest report The Real-Time Web and its Future Discuss

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5 iPhone Apps to Get You Ready for Le Web

At this year's LeWeb conference, Pearltrees will launch the beta version of it's bookmarking and curation service. In this beta, Pearltrees will introduce some interesting features for Twitter users. Starting Wednesday, Pearltrees users will be able to connect their Twitter accounts to the service. Pearltrees will continuously scan your Twitter account and index every link you share on Twitter. Currently, shared links on Twitter are often quickly forgotten, but thanks to the new Pearltrees connection, you will be able to easily create an archive of all the links you have shared with your friends. Sponsor We got a chance to discuss Pearltrees and its upcoming launch with the company's CEO Patrice Lamothe in the startup's Paris offices today. According to Lamothe, the average Pearltrees user already spends about 12 minutes per day on the site. According to Lamothe, the company's mission it to give users the option to curate anything on the Web and make it easy to archive all the links and content you share online. You can find our in-depth review of PearlTrees here . Thanks to the new Twitter feature, which will put all of the links you share on Twitter into a drop box on Pearltrees, you can now easily create a complete archive of all the content you share. You still have to organize this content yourself, however. Pearltrees does not feature auto-tagging. Also Coming This Week: Real-Time Updates Starting on Wednesday, Pearltrees will not just allow you to import links from Twitter, but the service will also be able to send out alerts to your Twitter friends when you update your own pearls. In addition, the company will also introduce a new search feature and updates from other users you follow will be updated in real time. It's important to note that Pearltrees' focus is less on following other users. Instead, Lamothe stressed, the real value of the service is in following the content that others users create on the service. API Coming Soon Early next year, the company will introduce an API that will allow developers to access bookmarks and import and export data from other services. The details of this API are still in flux, but will likely allow developers to easily connect other social networks to the service as well. Discuss

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Pearltrees Beta Launches on Wednesday: Will Let You Archive the Links You Share on Twitter