Our core business is innovation. Doing new things that we see as promising. Things like Context Services and Augmented Reality that we envision as adding to the world in the future. And making that happen now. Wikitude does that now.

While forging these new paths you get used spearheading them. To be the first in one way or the other. Its part of the kick. But once in a while you see someone way ahead of you. Off in the distance on the same path and with a clearer view. Jyri did that. Verner and Joe too.

This weekend we saw Robert Rice of Neogence in this post.

At Ugotrade, Tish Shute posted an AR overview and an interview with Robert Rice. Go to the source and read it. Print it. Share it. Its long and worth it. It will help you shape your opinion and understand Augmented Reality and Virtual Worlds like SL. You will get a sense of the state of Augmented Reality.

For us this post is great because it is so ahead yet on the same path we are on with Zcapes. Zcapes is at the foothold of Augmented Reality. Zcapes will be a base of content to build your augmented real world. Its a start of something very big. And that big thing is what Robert Rice seems to be building at Neogence: An immersive mobile augmented reality platform with tools, sdk, and infrastructure plus applications. Looking forward to that.

image from Ugotrade

Tip of the hat to Tim Oreilly’s tweet.

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From EFF’s Tim Jones:

Last night, Lawrence Lessig, a close ally and former board member of EFF, chatted with Stephen Colbert about Lessig’s new book Remix, and how America’s broken copyright laws are criminalizing our kids:

Colbert: You say our copyright laws are turning our kids into criminals, because they’re keeping kids from doing all the remixing they want of pre-existing art and copywritten material, right?

Isn’t that like saying that arson laws are turning our kids into pyromaniacs?? They’re breaking the law! You can’t just throw the law out the window!

Lessig: “Totally failed war.” Is that familiar to you?

Colbert: No. No. You’re saying we need a surge?

Lessig: We tried the surge. For ten years we’ve been waging this war. Artists have not gotten any more money, businesses have not gotten any more profit, and our kids have been turned into criminals.

The whole thing is great - watch it!

Colbert also makes his personal stance on remix culture clear:

Colbert: Nobody should take my work and do anything with it that is not approved! Ever ever never ever take anything of mine and remix it! For instance, I will be very angry and possibly litigious if anyone out there takes this interview right here and remixes it with some great dance beat. And it starts showing up in clubs across America.

Lessig: Actually, we’re joint copyright owners. I’m ok with that. You can totally remix this. I’m fine with that.

And Mobile will help break this old copyright system. By recording, sharing and remixing everything you want… You will add value.

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I just saw and heard the presentation by Daniel Suarez called “Daemon: Bot-Mediated Reality” over at Fora.TV. I was impressed. What put me to this were the repeated recommendations from Jyri Engeström.

Watch it now here or download it (via free registration) and watch, listen or read it later (or order the book). Its an hour and definitely worth it.

Bots are automated/autonomous programs that do things. And their power and their numbers are growing. Growing a lot. This combines to an intelligence like system enabled by ubiquitous connectivity and computation which in turn leads to paths like Kevin Kelly’s machine (article) and Kurzweils singularity. How this will be in detail we can not see, yet the direction is clear. But that is the far future.

A bit closer is what we can do now. Now, today, the Project VRM is developing projects to make their vision happen. A vision of a set of tools, technologies and services that help individuals go to market and manage relationships with vendors. And, in turn, vendors who align themselves to these tools, technologies and services will have the opportunity to build better relationships with their customers.

Projects like the Mine or even Dataportability and OpenID which are ‘outside’ of Project VRM are working towards making the VRM vision happen. These are the tools in development in order to make a VRM world. And these tools, these protocols enable us to ‘talk’ VRM. To build our conversation between individuals and vendors.

The trick is how to cope with the ever complexifing world. As you experience the overload of email and tweets every day this will also happen with a VRM situation full of requests, feeds and api links enabling VRM. So how do we cope? I see that bots will be the answer.

Bots that know where we are, how we feel and what we do, that now our context and manage our incoming and out going conversation, that manage our reputation and ping us humans when needed. They do it already in World of War craft as Suarez tells us (select chapter 7: The Sophistication of Game Bots). In your email you have started already by making filters, the next step is that you make a Yahoo pipe or a Apple script to help you cope. And SPRX is doing its bit by developing Zcapes which will know your context and help you use your shared situation.

Today the tools, protocols and rules of VRM are being developed. Tomorrow the VRM conversation will start and lots of the talking will not done by ourselves, it will be done by Bots. The VRM Future will be Mediated by Bots.

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