The eLearning industry has its roots in innovation, as a disruptive technology for education and training. At Upside, we strive to innovate in our product and service range, and find it’s a bit of a hit and miss affair.
It often makes me wonder, is there a set of rules we can use to foster innovation?
Last week I came across a very interesting article – Will the iPhone replace the stethoscope? in Time’s newsfeed. The article refers to an iPhone app called iStethescope – developed by Peter Bentley, a researcher from University College London – that allows you to use the iPhone to measure heartbeat. The article reports that the app has already been downloaded by 3 million doctors. The Guardian while reporting on the same app mentions “experts say the software, a major advance in medical technology, has saved lives and enabled doctors in remote areas to access specialist expertise” Isn’t that fantastic?
About a month back I blogged about Smokescreen which allows advertisers to run simple Flash movies on iPad/iPhone using HTML5/JavaScript. Today while checking my twitter feed I discovered Frash which runs Flash content on iPad/iPhone in a Safari browser. It’s an effort to take the Android implementation of Flash Player to run on iPad/iPhone.
Smokescreen project is an effort to bring Flash player to the iPhone/iPad without installing the Flash plug-in. It’s an open source project implemented in HTML5 and JavaScript. For now this project is targeted at advertisers to enable them to run Flash ads on the iPhone/iPad.
While we written about Microsoft’s Project Natal in the past, the interweb has been abuzz about a start-up from Israel that’s going to compete – Omek.
Their technology claims to “translate natural body motion into seamless 3D movement onscreen”.
The technology is claimed to be ground-breaking; you can judge from yourself; take a look at the videos.
We have been experimenting with development of Augmented Reality [AR] applications for some time now. Earlier this week we released the first Indian Layar app called Pune Layar and had earlier created a simple Car Game using FLARToolkit. While developing these applications we considered many alternative tools & technologies to develop such applications for learning. Here I share some of them that may be useful for our readers if they too wish to experiment with AR.
We believe Layar, the AR browser can have a significant role to play in mobile learning. We have been playing with Layar for a some weeks now and yesterday we released a layer for Pune city. This is our first public layer which would be useful for the public as well as (hopefully) provide us valuable feedback about Layar development.
Below I share my development experience of creating the Pune Layar.
We first posted about Augmented Reality way back in April 2009. Since then, we’ve been extremely excited by its potential in workplace learning and recently our innovation team has been trying out various SDKs/classes. AR applications around the world are being developed using FLARToolKit, LAYAR, UNIFEYE, D-fusion platform etc. So far, we’ve implemented FLARToolKit and LAYAR in AR application development at Upside.
It gives us immense pleasure to share our first real sample in AR Street Racing.
I have great respect for Apple as an organization particularly because I use an iPhone and I think the iPhone has definitely become one of those game-changers in the smartphone world and by a large margin.
I was looking forward to the Apple iPad even more so as we have been doing good stuff on mobile learning and putting up applications and tools on iPhone as pilots and on a trial basis. The iPad was supposed to be better and bigger than the iPhone, closer to a computer and much more than just a phone.
1. Meaning Tool: Training Semantic Search With Feeds
Meaning Tool is a semantic engine that offers users a chance to extract concepts from text using specific semantic trees. You define your categories of interest by creating 
search parameters and training them with related websites or RSS feeds. A great tool to see how semantic trees can help search.
Often the real meaning and potential impact of a database can be hidden behind all the raw names and numbers, but a well-chosen visualization can bring the data to life. Google fusion is a cloud based application from Google where you can share and visualize data online. You can visualize data in a number of forms like: Map, Intensity Map, Bar, Pie chart, Table, line etc.
