Finally the future has come. This morning the curtains parted, revealing Moses with the Tablets Jobs with the iPad and the crowds oooohhhed and again, the future looks good for developers, publishers, game players and just about anyone who finds it useful to have the whole wide digital world in their hands.

Follow Wired coverage of the blessed event here or just go for it, grab your sleeping bag and camp out in line at the Apple Store to be the first on your block. See you on the cue!

David Polinchock, Adam Broitman, Doug Dimon, Richard Carey, David Curcurito & Bill Sobel - Photo © Tim Dwight

The panel discussion on Augmented Reality I moderated for Sobel Media’s executive breakfast series was eye-opening — and not just because the early hour allowed for watching the sun rise down Central Park South or Bouchon Bakery’s excellent java augmentation (though the latter surely helped).

Before we seated the panel, Esquire’s Creative Director David Curcurito led off with a demonstration of the magazine’s augmented reality issue on Samsung’s high-definition video wall, showing Gillian Jacobs: Funny Joke from a Beautiful Woman and other segments of the A/R issue as examples.

David Curcurito demonstrates the December 2009 A/R Esquire - Photo © Tim Dwight

Some call it a gimmick – as admittedly I did when I picked up a copy of Esquire off the news stand in December – but seeing it demonstrated properly left me feeling that print isn’t dead, it’s only hibernating. I can imagine using marker-based A/R in any number of print applications, from marketing communications to news, non-fiction (textbooks?) and fiction as well –  any print that would benefit from an overlay of real-time multimedia information.

Our discussion spanned the beginnings of A/R more than twenty years ago, the emergence of heads up displays, marker-based A/R, location-based A/R and its myriad applications for advertising, marketing, entertainment and more. Though the Foursquare and Yelp iPhone apps didn’t get much love from the panel, location-based A/R is one of the richest area for this technology (IMHO) and there’s huge potential in using A/R as a game mechanic as well – in fact I already am – but I’ll save that for another post.

David Polinchock describes an A/R experience at Disney World - Photo © Tim Dwight

Since I was serving up the questions there was no way to take notes on everything we talked about, but several media bloggers in attendance were more diligent in capturing the key points:

• Digi-Day Daily
• Media Post
• Unthink Media
• NYC Production News
  

And for more on Augmented Reality in general:

• How Augmented Reality Works
• The Reality of Augmented Reality
• Easter Egg: Yelp Brings A/R to the iPhone
• Layar Technologies A/R Apps for Android & iPhone
• Esquire editor-in-chief David Granger demo of the entire A/R issue
• Augmented Reality Posts on Mashable
  

According to the study, “With technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth.  Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week).  And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.”

There also appears to be a social effect at work: as the number of children using mobile devices increases, the amount of time they spend using them increases as well.

“Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston who directs the Center on Media and Child Health, said that with media use so ubiquitous, it was time to stop arguing over whether it was good or bad and accept it as part of children’s environment, “like the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat.”

As I’ve long suggested, this is causing a new kind of generation gap larger than the one boomers like me faced with our parents. If you’re an educator or media producer the implications and the impact on your audience are equally enormous. For more, read the Times article or download the full report here (pdf).

Never one to shy from what’s new and what’s next I’ve accepted an invitation from Bill Sobel to moderate a Sobel Media breakfast panel on Thursday January 21st with four New Yorker’s using AR today: David Curcurcito, Creative Director at Esquire; David Polinchock, former Chief Experience Officer at Brand Experience Lab; Doug Dimon, Creative Director/Broadcast Design at Creative Bubble/NYC; and Adam Broitman, Partner and Ringleader of Circ.us.

So what is reality once it’s been augmented? Wikipedia defines Augmented Reality (AR) as “…a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality.” That sounds exactly like Layar Technologies AR browser for Android that I posted about last year.

Since last summer AR has started showing up in several of my iPhone apps — Yelp’s Monocle feature, the FourSquare social AR game — and most recently in Coke ads for James Cameron’s hit movie Avatar.

John Cox writes in Network World, “Augmented reality is [...] a new interactive relationship between mobile users and their surroundings. It’s easy to make AR sound like the latest technology in search of an application but an analogy with jet fighter pilots might help. Pilots look through the cockpit window or a helmet faceplate. The inside of these surfaces is treated to display transparent images of cockpit controls and navigation data a technique called “head-up display.” Data images and text overlay a view of the real world.”

This definition of AR easily encompasses the “first and 10″ line projected onto the field during televised football, as Bill wrote in the event invitation, and it’s used in some of the automobile dashboard technologies that I was ranting about a few days ago.

To learn about what’s coming next and how you might want to consider using AR in your projects, I hope you’ll join us on the 21st. And although the meeting begins on the early side at 7:30AM, to compensate I understand our reality will be well augmented by an irresistible Bouchon Bakery buffet. See you there!

A few years ago, after one swerve to many during my then daily 2-hour commute, I stopped using my mobile phone to talk or text behind the wheel. Not that I didn’t use a hands-free earpiece and not that I was impaired or suffer from poor reflexes, but I decided that death and dismemberment just ain’t worth it. Last year the zeitgeist seemed to be catching up with legislation pending to outlaw the practice; some talking of installing jammers to prevent it. But something happened.

Flash-forward to CES, the annual tech-lust-fest going on in Las Vegas this week and the media is full of breathless reports about car makers’ move to the fourth screen: your car dashboard. Gimmie a break!

ZDNet reports that “…with Sync Ford is opening up millions of possible revenue streams, thanks to the wealth of services that the company can offer to the driver/consumer with Internet connectivity.

Ford CEO Mulally stressed during his keynote speech here at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, noting the company’s “four principles” — quality, safety, fuel efficiency and “smart” technologies — and how Touch and Sync work to accomplish the last two.

“These are the features that set us apart — our signature brand technologies,” Mulally said, adding that the features were “strategically important” and help to differentiate the company’s offerings from competition.

This is pure greed, hubris and, yes, insanity. Barring a parallel move to auto-pilot systems that take the driver off-line (hmm… not a bad idea for some I’ve known) if in-dash computers become common place we’re all going to be worse off — some of us a lot worse off. Let’s stop the madness before this tech becomes commonplace. Write your Congressman or Representative today!

Still, I get questions and have many myself about what works and what doesn’t, which is why today’s Mashable post by Leah Betancourt about what to avoid when building an online community caught my attention. Some of the take-aways that jibe with my experience:

• Simply having a presence on various online networking platforms won’t work in the social media sphere. The key is spending time to build relationships to not only engage with site users, but to get them to interact with each other.
• Organizations should use well the social media platforms they’re already on rather than spreading themselves thin for the sake of being everywhere online [...] Make sure you’re not diluting a community presence by having several outposts, but no nerve center.
• Not sure where to start? Then find out which social media platforms your audience is using, how they’re using it, and whether it makes sense to be on there. If so, reach out to them in those places.

Planning to start an online community for your business or product in 2010? Then you’ll want to read the whole post which continues here. Oh, and Happy New Year!

“The most detailed report comes from Financial Times, whose sources claim the product demonstration will take place Tuesday, Jan. 26 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco — a venue where Apple has held its previous iPod events.

The Silicon Alley Insider’s Dan Frommer cites a “plugged-in source in the mobile industry” who said Apple has contacted select developers to ready a higher-resolution version of their apps for the tablet event.

The vast majority of rumor reports regarding the tablet have described the product as a 10-inch version of the iPhone or iPod Touch. Boy Genius Report’s source suggests there may be two models. The source also said the tablet would be announced January.

Practicing the black art of stealth product development is baked into the Apple DNA so this may be just one more example of trying to throw everyone off-scent. Or not. Aftrer all, it is Christmas…

“Bunge’s team brought the games to an elementary school in Oakland with historically low state test scores. The researchers asked some second, third and fourth graders to stay after school to play. The kids’ IQ averaged a 90, and their brain speed (a subtest of intelligence) ranked them at only the 27th percentile. The children’s parents, on average, were high-school dropouts. These were the kids every education policy hopes to target, and every thought leader has an opinion on how to improve.

Twice a week, the kids played the games for an hour and fifteen minutes. Every fifteen minutes the kids moved to a new table, to make sure their brains always had something new to figure out. (The neuroscientists thought it was important the sessions remained fun.)

After just eight weeks – twenty total hours of game playing – Bunge’s team retested the children’s intelligence. They were specifically interested in the kids’ reasoning ability. According to the classic theories of intelligence, reasoning ability is considered both the core element of intelligence and also the hardest to change. Allyson Mackey, Bunge’s graduate student who supervised the study, thought she might see gains of 3 to 6 points, at most. “From adult training studies, we knew some improvement was possible,” said Bunge. “But it was enormous.”

The children’s reasoning scores, on average, leapt 32%. Translated to an IQ standard, that bumped them 13 points. For comparison, consider that a 12 point gain is normally how much a child’s IQ goes up after an entire year of school. By giving the children precisely targeted games, Bunge and Mackey were able to beat that, in just 20 hours of game playing.’ [Newsweek article continues...]

Bunge Lab at UC Berkley

NurtureShock book website

Question: How do you find so many links to tweet?

Answer: I use three principal sources: Alltop, StumbleUpon, and SmartBrief. These sites curate and aggregate information to make the hunt for quality links much, much easier.

Question: What is your workflow?

Answer: I find interesting links and write-up a short summary using BBEdit that I post to Holy Kaw, and then Objective checks the Holy Kaw RSS feed once per hour and tweets new articles.

Question: Isn’t that a long, complex process just to tweet something?

Answer: Twitter is a marketing tool for me. It’s not a “social” activity or a game. This process is what it takes to make Alltop successful.

Question: How long do you spend on Twitter every day?

Answer: Asking me this is like asking Tiger Woods how much he plays golf. “It’s what I do.” If I’m on the computer, I’m on Twitter, and I’m on a computer eight hours per day.

Question: If a company wants an active, aggressive presence on Twitter, how many people does it take?

Answer: One person working really hard, unencumbered by a clueless boss and a Luddite legal department, can do it. Certainly one person can get things going enough to prove that Twitter makes sense for a company to add more people to do it even better.

Repeat Tweets

Question: Why do you repeat your tweets from @guykawasaki?

Answer: I repeat my tweets because no one’s followers are on Twitter 24 x 7 x 365 nor do they scroll back to see what was tweeted already. This is the same reason that ESPN and CNN repeat news stories throughout the day—can you imagine a news network assuming that everyone has seen a report after running it once or that everyone has recorded the news and will look back?

I have tracked repeated tweets, and the amount of click throughs on the second and third instances of a tweet is almost as high as the first one.

Question: Do you recommend that companies repeat their tweets?

Answer: Yes, if they want to ensure that as many followers see their tweets as possible. There will be tiny number of people who will complain, but you cannot make all your followers happy.

In fact, if you’re not pissing someone off on Twitter, you’re not using it to its fullest potential. Companies should not let a few angry people dictate their marketing practices.

Ghostwriters

Question: Do you use ghostwriters?

Answer: Yes, four people contribute to my tweets: Annie Colbert, Gina Ruiz, Noelle Chun, and Catherine Faas. 
I use ghostwriters because I want to provide as many interesting links as possible, and five intelligent people (assuming you think I’m intelligent) looking for interesting stuff will find more than one intelligent person. At the end of every Holy Kaw post, you can see who created it if you’re curious.

Question: Do your ghosts respond to @s and direct messages for you?

Answer: Never. They only tweet outgoing links to interesting sites and blogs. They never respond for me or as me.

Question: Why did you hide your use of ghostwriters?

Answer: I didn’t hide this fact. As soon as I started it, I disclosed it. My attitude is: “As long as the tweets are good, why does it matter who wrote them?” Do you think Ralph Lauren himself designed every article in his store?

Question: Why do some people attack you for using ghostwriters?

Answer: Because they are angry, little people who cannot generate content, so they try to generate controversy to get attention. They also assume that I have to cheat and use ghostwriters to respond to people because they are incapable of dealing with the volume of @s and direct messages that I get.

Question: Do you recommend that companies use ghostwriters?

Answer: Most companies are “brands,” so this isn’t an issue unless people are so dumb as to think that Richard Branson is @VirginAmerica. Issues arise when the Twitter account is a person’s name.

For example, should @Lancearmstrong use a ghost? For some tweets, I’d say it’s perfectly okay—tweets about cycling news and information, for example. However, if @Lancearmstrong says his bike was stolen, he pulled a hamstring, or he can’t stand the color yellow, it has to be him.

Let’s say the Twitter account is for the CEO of a company. I’d rather read the interesting tweets of a good ghost than a clueless CEO. It’s the same reason politicians have speechwriters. As my mother used to say, “Behind every successful politician is an amazed speechwriter.”

>> Read the complete interview on American Express’ Open Forum here.