At the beach on Cape Cod this week, lots of seals but haven’t see any great white sharks yet. Perfect weather for grilling and chilling.
A few weeks ago I mentioned Klik, a cool facial recognition app based on Face..com’s API that identifies people by name when you take their photo. Since then, Facebook acquired Face.com, and Face.com stated that they would be pulling their API from the marketplace. This was bad news for Klik, which had to pull its app from iTunes.
The lesson there is that building a service on top of Twitter or Facebook is a risky proposition. What happens to TheCompleteMe, Likebright or any of the other current crop of social dating services? With tens of millions of sites using Facebook connect, I can’t see Facebook pulling a fast one here, but ones never knows. Look at how poorly Twitter has treated their developer ecosystem.
Lets talk about augmented reality. If you don’t know what that is, check out this video of the Yelp Monocle. You hold the phone up and look at the screen. Yelp will overlay little floating bubbles that display what places of interest are nearby. Yelp does a decent job at recommending points of interest, restaurants and bars, super helpful while walking around unfamiliar cities.
To see what’s coming next with augmented reality, check out Pranav Mistry’s TED talk about SixthSense. In this case he is not talking about Bruce Willis, he’s talking about a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.
The new $1,500 Google Glasses look cool and have enough horsepower to do some amazing stuff. Here’s a few videos to check out.
The maturation of the augmented reality market is going to trickle down into the dating industry. The basic use case I see for this in the dating space is pulling out your phone, pointing it at the person across the mosh pit, bar, concert venue or walking down the street. The app pulls up their Facebook (or some other) profile, and lets you message them.
There are have been a number of somewhat creepy apps that have crossed the boundary of what I consider basic privacy, and companies will continue to flirt with that line as augmented reality becomes more prevalent in our daily lives. One thing is for sure, the company that get this right is going to be sitting on a goldmine.
