Killer Apps

The only reason that HP (or Samsung, Motorola, Nokia/Microsoft, and the others) has a chance in this market is that those incompatible mobile OSes nevertheless all run the two greatest killer apps of them all, aka web browsers and GPS navigation. Most of the other apps (mail, social networks, etc.) that users need are web or cloud-based and can be accessed via the browser if an alternative is not provided. In this sense, there is only one OS and it is the one supported by HTML and other established web formats. Apple may be at a slight disadvantage because it does not support Adobe's Flash standard.

What those companies may need to do is identify a handful of the top killer apps in the existing market and spend the right amount of money to make sure that those apps migrate to their own platforms. Providing powerful tools that can facilitate app migration should probably be at the top of their to-do list. After that, the market will become very much like the car industry, a matter of status, gadgetry, trend and fashion. Eventually, there will only be one basic OS, preferably a user-customizable OS

HP's Risky Triple Play

Yesterday, HP announced its first three products using WebOS, the operating system for mobile devices that was its main prize for acquiring Palm in July of last year. HP is already known for printers, PCs, and laptops, but the new products—a tablet, an updated smart phone, and a new super-small smart phone—highlighted a new strategy for the company.

The Touchpad tablet, Pre 3 smart phone, and Veer mini smart phone, show WebOS in three different sizes. By announcing them together, HP hopes to emphasize both the flexibility of the operating system and how well WebOS can work for a user who owns multiple devices running it. It also hopes to spur developers to create apps for the platform. However, this may still not be enough to capture a market that's dominated by other big companies such as Apple and Google.

Palm's WebOS operating system was the ailing company's last-ditch effort to reclaim the market it once dominated with its popular PDA. The WebOS operating system uses Web technologies familiar to developers, such as HTML and JavaScript, instead of Objective C, the specialized language used to program apps for Apple's iPhone. The Palm Pre, which was the first device to feature the operating system, was praised for its design when released in June 2009, but it was a flop in the market, leading to HP's acquisition of Palm.

The acquisition of Palm, and the launch of these three devices, is an important move for HP, the world's largest personal-computer maker. The market is shifting away from desktop and laptop computers toward increasingly powerful smart phones and tablet computers. But the strategy HP has chosen is risky. It aims to innovate its way to a successful position in this emerging market, which is dominated by Apple with the iPhone and iPad, and by other hardware companies that use Google's free Android OS.

Now HP hopes to use WebOS to give it a leg up in the current war for mobile-device users. The Touchpad is a tablet designed to compete with Apple's iPad and its imitators. The Pre 3 is an updated entry into the smart-phone market. And the Veer is something of a novelty: a smart phone about the size of a credit card, although considerably thicker.

"For the first time, WebOS is on a device [the Touchpad] that lets its intuitive nature shine through," said Jon Rubinstein, a senior vice president and general manager at HP. Rubinstein is a former Apple executive who served as executive chairman of the board at Palm.

Turning Augmented Reality into an Open Standard

A research team at Georgia Tech hopes to make augmented reality (AR) on smart phones more useful by developing an open standard for it.

Currently, there is no standard way to create or render AR applications, which overlay information on the live video feed from a phone's camera. Companies such as Layar help app developers create AR functions, but they use proprietary technologies. That means, among other things, that different AR apps may be unable to talk to each other or share data. The Georgia Tech team hopes that its open standard, an enhancement of existing Web protocols, will yield a common way for every Web browser to store, transmit, and manipulate data for augmented reality services. If it does, you wouldn't need a separate app for each AR function on your phone—one browser could show them all.

"We're the only people who are trying to piggyback intimately on top of Web architecture," says Blair Macintyre, director of the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech. The standard developed by his group is known as KML/HTML Augmented Reality Mobile Architecture, or KHARMA. It combines the Keyhole Markup Language (KML) used by the Google Earth mapping program with existing HTML and a handful of other protocols invented by Macintyre's team. The group also has built a reference browser—a sample of the technology in action—called Argon.

KHARMA is an evolution of the Web, rather than a wholesale invention of standards specifically designed for augmented reality. In contrast, almost all previous attempts to create a standard platform for augmented reality either in academia or commercially have been proprietary or purpose-built. This difference, argues Macintyre, could be the key to Argon and KHARMA's success. Argon is not yet open-source, but once it's stabilized, Macintyre's team will release the code base.


"My hope is that three years from now, all we've done is folded back into Webkit [the open-source engine that runs the Safari and Chrome browsers]," says Macintyre. "I joked at one of the meetings at one point that we know we've succeeded if the project is gone in three years."

Not everyone is sold on this vision. Avideh Zakhor, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leading AR creator, believes it may be premature to work on standards when the technology itself is still in its infancy. "To me, the research problems are still wide open," she says.

Zakhor's work focuses on creating truly believable augmented reality experiences. She, together with her team, uses image-recognition algorithms to chase the ultimate goal: pixel-perfect imposition of objects, surfaces, images, and textures onto the reality viewed through a smart phone or headset. For now, AR apps don't recognize objects as much as they merely know where in the world they are, by relying on GPS and the location of cell-phone towers.

Argon is a browser built with expansion in mind, however. Its basic framework should be able to incorporate the kind of image-recognition algorithms that Zakhor is working on, Macintyre says.

One of the potential barriers to adoption of Argon—which has thwarted all augmented reality browsers to date—is the lack of a "killer app" for AR. But just as a Web browser is valuable mainly for its universality—it allows for e-commerce and e-mail and the consumption of media and a hundred other functions—a flexible AR browser could be greater than the sum of its parts.

"One of the goals of Argon is to find out what's the killer app for AR," says Hafez Rouzati, the lead developer of Argon and a doctoral student at Georgia Tech. "By releasing something like Argon, we're allowing people to show us. There's only so much we can imagine ourselves."