Finance Geek

WASHINGTON - What one finds when reading congressional legislation is invariably surprising. Take the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill, for instance, which was created by merging Senate and House bills. When the Senate returns from recess one of its first actions will be to vote on the bill, which passed the House on June 30.
I was searching the bill for a provision about derivatives. What did I find but Section 342, which declares that race and gender employment ratios, if not quotas, must be observed by private financial institutions that do business with the government. In a major…

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A grim twist in the market’s road to health has heightened investors’ sense of doom and gloom. We’ve seen this before; take a look at what happened then.

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Hey, kid, want to buy 10,000 Twitter followers? Reputation and taste are important forms of online currency, and hucksters are lining up to get rich from those who will pay for followers.

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You want an adviser who knows something about you and your goals. It’s also important to understand your adviser’s motives, expertise and methods.

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Unemployment checks provide Americans with income when the private sector cannot — and people who receive benefits spend the money right away, stimulating the economy.

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Stocks are having their strongest day in recent memory as an upbeat forecast from State Street Corp. has investors looking toward the upcoming earnings season with optimism. Following seven down days in a row amid global econ

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AT&T says partner Alactel-Lucent is responsible for a weekend glitch that sent smartphone users’ upload speeds plummeting. A patch is in, and the company says 3G service for iPhone users is back to normal speed.

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Maybe the market has put in a bottom. Then again, as we know, maybe it hasn’t.What we can be sure about is that traders and investors are looking at every bit of data they can find to improve their chances of being right. For Alec Levine of WallachBeth Ca

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Well before the “Financial Crisis of 2008″ there was a prominent, but largely ignored group of Austrian School economic thinkers who were warning of difficult times ahead. To some, including this writer, the economic problems of the past and present are and were the expected result of Austrian malinvestment whereby limited capital flowed into non-economic concepts that our federal masters championed.
Thomas Woods’ essential book, Meltdown, is the best yet when it comes to describing how this occurred.
It should first be stressed that this is not a partisan book. The…

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New York City is in the midst of a serious heat wave, but on Wall Street the stock market is on a major cold streak. Stocks are down 9 of the past 11 sessions. Even Tuesday’s higher close was still well off the highs of the day.Doug Kass of

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Provided by Business Insider, July 7, 2010:If you’re in the camp that thinks the deficit is still a non-issue, and that the US can’t possibly default on its debt, then this will be maddening to you.Fears over the deficit — almost certainly a medium-to-lo

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I blogged about Dutch virtual reality business Layar last week and I spent 20 minutes last night playing with the app whilst I was waiting for a friend to come meet me for a drink in north London.  As I mentioned in last weeks post they have an active developer community and what these developers do is write Layars which run within the Layar augmented reality browser.  All Layars share the same underlying structure – when the Layar is opened the iPhone/Android phone opens up the camera and the screen shows the camera view augmented with content relevant to that Layar which is tied to a specific location and within a distance set by the user. 

mobypicture have written one of my favourite Layars and from the iPhone screen grabs below you can see how the interface works.  In the first image you can see the wall in our office augmented with pictures taken nearby.  The circle in the top right corner has white dots for all the photos within 800m and the photos layered over the top and the detail at the bottom shows pictures in the direction my phone was pointing.  I was pointing the phone in the direction of Google’s offices in Victoria and as you can see in the second and third images the Layar found a picture of my friend Anil who heads up corp dev for Google in Europe. 

The Layar browser provides the camera interface, link to the compass in the phone and format for displaying the content on the screen.  Each Layar then integrates whatever content they are interested in – in the case of mobypicture it is pictures taken nearby, other interesting apps are the Tweeps around (3D), and the Rolling Stones Exile on Your Street campaign.

As you can see for Layar the notion of augmented reality is taking reality as per the camera view and augmenting it with interesting content.

Foursquare however has come up with a different idea which doesn’t use the camera and the phone’s compass, but simply takes the location information from a user checks in and pushes the relevant data via an on screen alert.  For example, the Independent Film Channel (IFC) just announced a ‘layer’ on Foursquare which takes descriptions of places crowd sourced from the IFC member base and then pushes them to Foursquare users who opt in who get to see ‘the world as IFC fans see it’  – see the picture below.

The Wikipedia article on augmented reality focuses heavily on adding content to video in the way that Layar does, so the Foursquare notion stretches traditional definitions in this area, but they do so in quite a cool way. One of the limitations of Layar is that you have to open the app and wave the phone around to find the content you want, which (for now at least) is not a natural feeling process (trust me…).  To access the Foursquare augmentation of reality I only have to make a single opt in and then use Foursquare as I normally would, which seems like a lower barrier to adoption. 

What do you think – is augmented reality just hype? is the camera view important?

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