In the tech community, some folks have been talking about “augmented reality” for years. But only recently has it started to really catch the attention of a more mainstream crowd. What is this seemingly sci-fi catchphrase, and why should you be paying attention?

What IS Augmented Reality?

Augmented Reality (or AR) has been referred to as a way to “layer ‘virtual story worlds’ over the real world“.

Ever listen to an audio guide while traveling? You were augmenting your experience audibly. Augmented reality can allow you to do this visually as well.

How’s THAT possible?

Chris Grayson has created this simple video to explain how a combination of features on your cell phone can make mobile-aware AR possible:

And this is for real?

Yup! Owners of the iPhone 3GS users can get their first taste of AR googness in the new Yelp application. While there has been some controversy surrounding the inclusion of such a feature in the application, this doesn’t overshadow the significance of its inclusion at all.

The Yelp iPhone app has always offered an ability for users to find services based on their location, but Augmented Reality allows for an enhanced user experience. Looking through the “monocle”, you can see the street in front of you, but with Yelp results superimposed.

So what’s the controversy?

Developers had been asking for the ability to include Augmented Reality in their applications, and Apple had told them to wait until the next iPhone Operating System (3.1) upgrade. The Yelp developers tapped into some undocumented, private APIs to build out this functionality. The concern among developers is that this may further cause Apple to slow down the approval process on new applications to ensure they’re not violating the App Store rules. (Note: I seem to recall a Google App that did the same thing, without so much uproar).

Cool, sure. But where’s the applicability to my organization?

With AR just starting to seem viable and likely to have mass appeal, we’ve only started to consider where it may be used:

• historical recreations of places (i.e. tours)
• traffic updates
• how-to instructional guides
• home renovations/decorating

The iPhone is so cutting edge to support this!

Hm.. well, not really: the Android phone has supported Layar, an Augmented Reality browser, for several weeks now. And Augmented reality isn’t just a “mobile phone thing”, it is also showing up in the Entertainment industry in full force.

Below is a product demo of a new augmented reality game coming out from PlayStation in a few months:

For more about augmented reality, you can check out the Facebook page dedicated to such, or tagged articles on ReadWriteWeb.

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1. Why I Switched from an iPhone to the Nexus One
2. Is “Building an iPhone App” really a Good Mobile Marketing Strategy?
3. what’d I miss? Top learnings from 11-17 to 11-23

So far this year I’ve spoken at two conferences with my co-worker Tonya Peters, and we conduct a “social media terms quiz” to assess the level of knowledge of the audience. The one term that consistently throws people off is “crowdsourcing”.

Crowdsourcing is basically what it sounds like: outsourcing to a group. Or according to John Howe, author of Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business:

Crowdsourcing is when a company takes a job that was once performed by employees and outsources it in the form of an open call to a large, undefined group of people, generally using the Internet.

For those who have read or heard of Jonathan Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds, the premise is that the overall knowledge of a large group is greater than that of any individual member of that same group.

Crowdsourcing is interesting for an organization from the perspective that it makes it possible to tap into the true desires of the consumer. Dell opened themselves up using when they launched IdeaStorm “to gauge which ideas are most important and most relevant to” the public. The same platform was used by Starbucks when they launched My StarbucksIdea. (which, I’m always surprised to learn, is not as well-known as I would have expected).

My Starbucks Idea allows passionate caffeine-quaffers to share their ideas for Starbucks. Similiar to the model on digg.com, ideas are suggested and then the community make vote them up or down. This gives Starbucks an idea of what the community sees as important. Those little green stir-sticks with the stoppers on top? That idea didn’t come from someone inside the company; that was a suggestion from the site. In the first six months, over 75,000 suggestions were made. In their annual Groundswell awards, Forrester Research gave MyStarbucksIdea a big thumbs up in the Embracing category.

I find this an incredibly intriguing model, and more and more companies are turning to this community model of soliciting feedback. Both Dell’s IdeaStorm and MyStarbucksIdea are powered by salesforce.com, but there are a few other providers in the mix. Organizations can sign up with Get Satisfaction for a fee, and there is even a free version available from UserVoice.

According Forrester social technographics research from October 2008, 37% of U.S. adults fall in the online behavior segment known as ‘critics.’ These folks may not blog or upload videos, but they will comment and rate/review content from others. Crowdsourcing is a great way to engage these folks who have opinions and simply are looking for that outlet to share them.

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2. Learning about Learning to Listen
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Today I came across a blog post about Twittad, a way to make money off your twitter profile. The jist of the service seems to be that you sell the background of your profile to an advertiser.

I’m pretty interested in this idea for a few reasons (and no, not interested because I think it’s a good idea).

From the perspective of an advertiser:
As a frequent twitterer, I can’t say that I visit people’s profile pages very often at all. Instead, I use twhirl on my laptop, and twitterific and twinkle on my iPhone. So I’m curious about how much traffic a profile page is likely to garner. How many eyeballs would an ad really get?

Branding the background of the page means that an advertiser can add a graphic, but no links. This means a profile viewer can’t simply click an ad to visit your site, he must type the URL in directly. I can only assume that this would result in fewer visitors than a standard clickable ad would elsewhere.

However, we have no way of knowing. Currently there are no metrics available on twitter profiles views, and without clickable links, click-throughs obviously can’t be tracked. How does an advertiser know if his ad was effective? There doesn’t appear to be any way to calculate the ROI or effectiveness.

Is the investment worth it for an advertiser? It’s hard to say. Certainly it’s not a large investment (some of the going rates are $5), but many of the twits willing to accept advertising aren’t exactly highly followed.

From the perspective of a twit:
I will admit, I haven’t done anything to modify the default display of either of my twitter feeds. Both @afhill and @afhill262 are basically twitter-branded. However, if I were to change the overall feel of the profile pages, I would want them to promote my personal brand, not that of an advertiser. Obviously it would depend on the objective of your twitter account.
I often recall a comment made by Marsha Collier at iCitizen last May. She said that she doesn’t have adWords on her site because she views her personal brand integrity as more important than the income she could make off advertising.

I’ve already questioned how often a profile page is viewed anyway, so I don’t want to make too much of a case for not diluting the brand by placing an ad on this page. At the same time, is it worth putting an ad on your profile for a couple lousy bucks? Particularly in light of the fact that you don’t actually get paid until you have $20 in your account?

I know that there’s been an unofficial race to figure out how to many money off twitter. I’m just not sure this is it. And without metrics or tracking associated with the program, we’re not likely to find out.

Edit: After a response by the CEO of TwittAd, I started thinking about how some level of measurement could be achieved. If TwittAd serves up the background ads, they could use their own metrics packages to determine how often the ads are served up. That could potentially even allow them to shift their offerings from time- to impression-based. As well, educating advertisers on using a custom URL in the ads could help to identify which visitors were coming as a result of viewing twittAds. It’s an inexact science to be sure, but there may be ways to come up with some means to measure the impact of the investment..

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Until only a few years ago, I would have stated that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) had nothing to do with web accessibility. However, the landmark case against Target has altered the landscape.

Part 36 of the ADA refers to “nondiscrimination on the basis of disability by public accommodations and in commercial facilities”. A quick look at the published “standards for accessible design” makes the intended focus of this law clear: the document is entitled “ADA Accessibility Guidelines for Buildings and Facilities”, and calls out the need for ramps and wide aisles.

As a result, web developers haven’t worried too much about the applicability of the ADA. The lawsuit raised against Target in 2006 changed all that, however.

It was deemed that ADA applied due to the cross-channel integration of the online and in-person experience. It was services like “buy online, pick up in-store” that put Target at risk—users of assistive technologies could not take advantage of this service.

A very significant consideration is that unlike WCAG or Section 508, there are no clear “ADA Web Accessibility Standards” to follow. This is about actually ensuring equal access, not fulfilling a checklist. This makes it arguably a much more daunting initiative.

However, this is not to say that every online retailer or service provider needs to be concerned with such a lawsuit. Rather, it was the blurring line between the online and physical spaces that made them vulnerable. While it would be ideal to optimize the entire online experience for disabled users, at the very least accommodations can be made to ensure that any experiences that extend to the physical location (where accessibility is required) also do so online.

“This doesn’t mean that the ADA applies to all Web sites, but on the other hand, if there’s a bricks-to-clicks type of business and there is some integration of the experience between the two, I think the court is saying that those sites need to comply with the ADA”
- Eric Goldman, assistant professor and director of the High Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara University School of Law.

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1. what’s the deal with… Web Accessibility and Section 508?
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WCAG (Wu-CAHG) stands for the “Web Content Authoring Guidelines”, put forth by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). WCAG 1.0 was released as a Recommendation in 1999, and WCAG 2.0 is now in Candidate Recommendation status.

The Section 508 Standards were actually based on WCAG 1.0; Jim Thatcher has a side-by-side comparison of the two on his website.

WCAG lists three levels of compliance. The definition of the levels seems somewhat backwards: by not complying to a certain level, you are barring access to certain groups of individuals:

• Priority 1: one or more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document.
• Priority 2: one or more groups will find it difficult to access information in the document.
• Priority 3: one or more groups may find it difficult to access information in the document.

One of the most important things to know about WCAG is that there is no governing body to enforce compliance. These are guidelines, not laws. That being said, many organizations model their accessibility policy after these guidelines, or will publicly state their commitment to following these guidelines. Even with no external governance, an organization that does not fulfill an stated commitment stands to suffer from negative perception by users.

When WCAG 2.0 was first drafted, it met with much industry critique as being too difficult to understand and too technology-agnostic. It has gone through extensive revision and it now close to being considered a formal recommendation.

The new guidelines offer more quantifiable success measures: whereas the techniques for satisfying WCAG 1.0 stated that there should be “sufficient contrast” between foreground and background colors, WCAG 2.0 techniques explicitly call out color contrast ratios to satisfy.

As in any case, meeting guidelines or standards does not guarantee that a site visitor will have a positive experience or be able to complete his tasks. However, these guidelines can help a site designer or developer identify common areas of difficulty and work to eliminate those.

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3. The New Accessibility Guidelines: WCAG 2.0 (@Media Notes)

Anyone who has heard me speak about web accessibility knows that I typically call out two motivating factors behind accessibility: usability and regulatory compliance.
Let’s face it, usability can be a hard sell. But if an organization is being tasked with meeting certain standards/guidelines/laws, there may be no choice. The trick, therefore, is knowing if it applies.

“Section 508″ refers to a section in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (amended in 1998). Its purpose is stated as follows:

The purpose of this part is to implement section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended (29 U.S.C. 794d). Section 508 requires that when Federal agencies develop, procure, maintain, or use electronic and information technology, Federal employees with disabilities have access to and use of information and data that is comparable to the access and use by Federal employees who are not individuals with disabilities, unless an undue burden would be imposed on the agency. Section 508 also requires that individuals with disabilities, who are members of the public seeking information or services from a Federal agency, have access to and use of information and data that is comparable to that provided to the public who are not individuals with disabilities, unless an undue burden would be imposed on the agency.

Basically, Federal agencies have an obligation only to use or buy products that are accessible. It is not readily known that this also extends to agencies such as post-secondary institutions that receive federal funding. Organizations that wish to sell to these markets must provide products that meet these standards.

Section 508 refers to all electronic technology, and there are standards for software applications, telecommunication products, and others. When looking at web accessibility, we consider section 1194.22: Web-based intranet and internet information and applications.

When an agency is evaluating products or services, it has the obligation to secure the “most accessible” solution. Yes, this acknowledges that there may be some gaps in compliance. When I attended the Access U Conference last year, the representatives from various colleges were all discussing the relative merits of different CMSes, looking for the “most accessible” solution.

To facilitate the assessment of “most compliant”, organizations will often complete a VPAT – a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. This template allows an organization to document how they do or do not meet each standard. Filling out this template, even if it means acknowledging shortcomings, gives an organization the opportunity to show what they are doing to commit to accessibility. It also makes an organization eligible to list their products in the BuyAccessible Product and Services Directory, which may be used by agencies to find accessible solutions.

While many organizations are not obligated to comply with Section 508 standards, it may still be a good exercise to be familiar with the standards and the rationale behind them. Many of the standards map directly to the WCAG1.0 Guidelines… oh wait, that’s another post, entirely…!

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I like to hang out in the LinkedIn Q&A section, and recently someone asked about the relationship between RSS and Feedburner. This is a slightly lengthened version of my response:

RSS refers to the format (more or less standard). Many, many services out there offer an RSS feed. That way you can syndicate your content: people can get it when they want it, rather than having to come to your site to see if there is anything new.

There are two implications to this:
1) metrics: you can’t measure page hits. What’s your traffic like?
2) maintenance. What happens when you change your URL, do you lose your subscribers?

Feedburner helps with both of these issues (and more!) You create a feedburner URL (http://feeds.feedburner.com/afhill) and then can access your metrics via the feedburner site. You can see how many subscribers you have as well as how often they’re acting on the posts they’re reading. You can get some more information about their platform and how they’re accessing your information.

Using feedburner also allows you to dress up your feed a bit more. You can incorporate your del.icio.us bookmarks into the feed that is pushed out, without having them actually show up on your blog, or add in your flickr photos. You can choose to post only content excerpts, and select which means of social sharing you want to enable directly from the feed. Feedburner offers options you likely never even considered! All these options are organized into 5 sections on the feedburner site: Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize and Troubleshootize. This may seem a bit daunting, but all the features are easily enabled and disabled, so it’s easy to experiment and optimize for your own needs.
I personally use several Wordpress plugins related to analytics (Feedburner Feedsmith, Google Analytics, Wordpress Reports and the Most Active Widget) and Wordpress reports gives me the option to monitor my RSS circulation right from within my Wordpress dashboard. Handy!

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Personalization is the idea of tailoring an experience to a specific individual. This is particularly prevalent in e-Commerce. There are a few ways to achieve this.

The ATG e-Commerce platform uses ‘a scenario engine’ to provide personalized content. The engine uses a rules-based system, either based on user attributes or user behaviour. These can be simple (“the user has set her preference to be movies, so we will show her movie-related content”) or incredibly complicated (“in the past week, the user has clicked on at least three movies and at least four television shows, so we will show her randomly served up movie or tv-related content”).

Such rules-based systems are powerful, but they also necessitate a fair amount of planning and development. ATG actually recommends a specific job role dedicated to writing and configuring such rules. So what if you’re not entirely sure what the specific rules you need are?

An alternative that is gaining ground is based on Bayesian probabilistic theory. Don’t worry, there’s no need to actually know the name of it Bayesian theory “us[es] the knowledge of prior events to predict future events.[1]” This is the basis of the Cleverset product recommendation offering (Cleverset has now been purchased by ATG to round out its offering). Bayesian theory is (perhaps unsurprisingly) well-discussed within academic circles. A few example papers include: “Online Recommendation Based on Customer Shopping Model in E-Commerce”, or “Website Morphing”.

Many people have an amazon.com recommendation story: they purchased a baby item once as a gift, and continue to have baby items recommended to them on each visit. A rules-based system such as ATG allows you to set thresholds (you must buy at least three baby items – perhaps even on three different visits – to have baby items recommended). A system that uses Bayesian reasoning basically modifies itself based on your behaviour to predict the likelihood of your buying another baby item.

The above example is based on targeting content to a user, based on activity. When I first came across an article referencing Website Morphing, I was quite intrigued. Rather that focusing on content, Bayesian theory is applied to the cognitive style of the visitor. Whereas our goal for a particular site visit may change, we all have preferred learning styles. How I choose to gather information on a site can dynamically modify how it is presented to me (I am adverse to video tutorials, so I will enjoy a site more if that information is provided differently). According to the MIT Sloan professors that are doing this work, “morphing websites can increase sales 20 percent [2].” I have been in email contact with the author of the paper, and he states that they have continued to try out their system in limited markets, and continue to see the same positive results.

Personalization is one step in providing an optimized user experience. When looking to incorporate personalization into an experience, consideration must be made both as to the specific approach as well as the nature of the personalization (is it content or presentation that is tailored).

[1] What is Bayesian Logic? retrieved July 7, 2008 from http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci548993,00.html
[2] MIT Sloan Professors Find That Morphing Websites Can Increase Sales 20 Percent retrieved July 7, 2008 from http://rismedia.com/wp/2008-05-22/mit-sloan-professors-find-that-morphing-websites-can-increase-sales-20-percent/

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3. what’s the deal with…Agile Software Development

I am starting a new section on my blog, called “what’s the deal with…”. Recently I’ve found a need to preface most of my discussions by setting expectations about semantics. Moving forward, I will be sharing some of my thoughts/opinions/insights on various buzzwords, trends or topics.

Twitter is steadily gaining in popularity, despite its lack of stability. I believe that the simplicity of the service is a major contributing factor to this popularity. As opposed to a closed system that users must use “as it was intended”, twitter has been an easy platform for people to leverage to meet their own needs. I’ve collected a decent amount of links to third party apps that build off twitter. Kathy Gill actually drafted up an interesting article on twitter genres. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to tweet.

In an effort to make the service more powerful, some conventions are being established. Most people recognize “@username” to be a reference to a specific user on twitter (and their name will be linked to their account). Something else users may see are hashes (#) before words. My first exposure to this lead me to hashtags.org (another similar service is twemes). Hashtags.org is an opt-in service. A twitterer can follow @hashtags, and then may use hashtags.org to track realtime tweets that reference that specific hashtags. I’ve seen people throw hashes in front of half of the words in their tweets, to try to leverage this tracking.

Except…

Using hashtags.org requires two things:

1. you must opt-in
2. you only access content prefaced by a hash.

There are plenty of services out there that track all the text within tweets on the public timeline, not just of those who opt in. So if you wanted to know about, say, iCitizen, you could go to http://summize.com/search?q=iCitizen. You get the items prefaced with the hash, as well as without.

So why use hashes at all? For me, it’s a good way to give some context around a tweet. I’ve found it particularly useful for events. When I spoke recently at Spring <br />, I had a few contextual tweets:

Just ran into an old coworker from lexis. He better not heckle! #springbr

@ssaldoff – thanks! they’re recording all the presentations so they’ll be available online later #springbr

The tweets would have felt unnatural had I had to write “just ran into an old coworker from lexis at the spring break conference. he better not heckle” or “they’re recording all the presentations here at the spring break conference so they’ll be available online later”. As well, I would have had to be sure I was referencing the conference the same way every time for it to be easily found. The hashtag offers that context without making the tweet too long.

So that’s the deal on hashtags. Adding additional context to 140 character message..

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I am starting a new section on my blog, called “what’s the deal with…”. Recently I’ve found a need to preface most of my discussions by setting expectations about semantics. Moving forward, I will be sharing some of my thoughts/opinions/insights on various buzzwords, trends or topics.

When I worked at LexisNexis, I had the opportunity to work on LexisNexis Publisher, which was run as an agile project (as opposed to as a more traditional “waterfall” software development life cycle project.) I came into the project mid-stream so did not get all the initial training the rest of the team did. However, I was quickly able to recognize what made this methodology so different, and the pros and cons of the approach.

Some of the principles behind the agile manifesto (which I just pulled off wikipedia, and of which I had not been aware existed before tonight) are as follows:

• Customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software
• Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
• Working software is the principal measure of progress
• Even late changes in requirements are welcomed
• Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
• Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (Co-location)
• Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
• Simplicity
• Self-organizing teams
• Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

In my time on the project team, these underlying principles were very evident. We had “sprints” of roughly 30 days. Activities were broken down into tasks that could be accomplished within that time. We would meet with the appropriate business units to establish the overall project priorities and the goals of the sprint, and then meet throughout the sprint for clarification as required. The basic premise was that you could never really get too far down the wrong path. This falls completely into my line of thinking, which I often chalk up to user-centered design.. In actuality, it’s simply about ensuring you’re meeting the client needs.

Once a month, we would present our completed work for the last sprint, and then prioritize features for the upcoming one. There was an ongoing list of features that the business units could add to at any time, and then at the sprint planning meeting, they set up a prioritized list. It was then up to the team to determine how much could be committed to based on feature estimates and overall hours of availability. The team would then divide up the tasks, and we would have a plan for the next month’s activities and commitments. The idea of having releasable code every month was a bit of a challenge in some cases. The idea was that no task should extend from one sprint to the next, and activities that consist of several subtasks can make that a challenge (for example, a UI redesign may require wireframes, creative, development and testing – all the while developers must not be ‘waiting’ for other activities to perform).

Every day we had a 15 minute stand-up meeting, where every team contributor answers three questions:

1. What did I do yesterday
2. What am I doing today
3. What are my impediments

This gives the whole team complete visibility into how things are progressing.

Agile software development was initially designed for a team of developers, so the idea is that any team member can take over any task. By answering the above questions at a stand-up meeting, it is easy to identify if tasks are taking longer than anticipated, and other team members can pitch in. Each team member is accountable for his own progress, but tasks can be easily reassigned as needed. We also had a spreadsheet that was updated daily that showed the hours burned towards the project and specific tasks, to ensure we were progressing towards our goal appropriately. Although I never participated in this, I’ve heard of agile teams where all the tasks were written on post-it notes, and stuck to a wall. In the daily meeting, everyone would grab a sticky note, and that would be his work for the day. It was generally expected that team members were 100% dedicated to this project This helped to ensure “other commitments” were not holding up progress.

The notion of a self-organizing team is quite interesting. The scrum methodology refers to team members as either “pigs” or “chickens”. This is related to the level of commitment to the project. Like a restaurant that serves ham and eggs, pigs are completely committed, which chickens are only involved. The ‘ScrumMaster’ (basically, a project manager in non-scrum terms) is a chicken, while the developers are the pigs. In a daily stand-up, the pigs run the show, and often the chickens don’t get to talk at all. I personally found the idea of the team managing itself very empowering, and useful. As the developers, we are the most aware of what needs to get done and the means to get there. The team was able to rapidly identify and mitigate risk internally.

Our team was quite diverse: I was specifically a front-end developer, and we also had testers, visual designers and writers thrown in the mix. This introduced some challenges, as there was not the umbrella support from other developers for these individuals with more specialized skill sets. Ideally, there should be no impediments from within the team, but this was a risk with tasks only specific people could perform. I believe, however, that this is simply a matter of theory being put into practice. If we wanted to streamline development, we had to have those specialized individuals in the room as well, to ensure the developers are getting the support they need to work effectively.

Another common assessment of agile development processes is that it’s a way to slim down estimates and effort; not requiring documentation. To some extent, this may be true. There is less of a need for firm documented requirements and implementation guidelines due to the speed of the implementation itself. However, a desire not to have to document is not a valid rationale for trying to work within the agile methodology. Documentation can only be omitted if the benefits it offers (rationale for design or development decisions, tracking functionality changes or enhancements, specifying best practices) are captured otherwise. In some cases, this may involve having consistent resources on the team that can offer that history. Some organizations still document architectural decisions or practices, just in a more light-weight form.

Naturally, a lack of documentation has drawbacks. It’s been noted that agile teams are most successful when the team are co-located, and consist of senior developers. Documentation can help bridge the gap when developers are not in close contact or do not have as strong a development background. In other instances, quick and dirty, poorly documented code can dramatically impact not only the quality of the code, but also the ability to build upon it moving forward. With such rapid development cycles, code must at least be in a state that future enhancements or refinements can build upon it.
This is actually another aspect of agile that was sometimes a challenge to developers. All the work done of the project should be a direct result of the prioritization by the business units. This means that some clean-up or optimization tasks that developers may want to do, may not receive the appropriate approval. It is up to a project team to determine how best to balance these pressures.

Even several years removed from working within this methodology, it still strikes me as a very viable, beneficial development process – under the right circumstances. I like the benefit to the client: they have performed the prioritization exercise and will get what the consider the most significant features. In return, they receive a realistic list from the developers of what is feasible within the time alloted. At the end of each month, they have the freedom to release code, to roll back, or to change direction completely. Developers can focus on development, having a clear sense of what is expected of them on a daily basis. It is easy for the whole team to identify and mitigate risk rapidly.

Because scrum is so team-focused, it’s important that the right people comprise the team. While the goal is for the entire team to be cross-functional from a capabilities standpoint, there is still a need for the team to comprise of strong, motivated, talented developers. There must be a high level of trust and personal responsibility for the team (as well as the project, and product) to thrive.

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