Thursday, January 12, 2012

The Black History Mobile App had its fits and starts over the past 12 months, but the app formally launched in August 2011.  We now have content for 12 U.S. cities.

Development

We contracted in last 2010 with a Boulder, Col., company to build the back end for the content management system and the front-end interface with should have been compatible with various augmented-reality browsers, especial Layar and Wikitude.

The company did complete the content management system to house the back end but, after several tries, was not able to build a stable interface with the Layar browser.

It attempted to build a native iPhone app that would incorporate augmented reality but, after four builds, could not make that work either.

It was clear I needed a new developer. I attended the Augmented Reality Event in Silicon Valley in May 2011 where I was able to learn a lot more about augmented reality. I met a senior vice president for Layar, the Amsterdam-based augmented-reality company. I also talked to a couple of augmented-reality startups, including Hoopla. I followed up with several AR developers but found that US-based companies were very expensive ($20K and higher). I finally settled on an Aussie company called BuildAR.

Over the summer, I worked with BuildAR to export my data to its backend. We had a few issues with the importation, but finally worked it out in late July. We got content into the BuildAR system, loaded in art and then I went in and manually corrected some of the imports, which took time.

I also contracted with a graphic designer to do a logo and AR placeholders.

Content

One of the hardest aspects has been getting enough content to build the app out in multiple cities.

I achieved my prototype goals: to have content in Washington, D.C. and Phoenix, AZ. I then created content for Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Charleston, Cincinnati, New Orleans, New York, Nashville, Richmond and Columbus, OH. In advance of a conference of African Diaspora travel promoters that was held in Nova Scotia, Canada. in September, I also included content in Nova Scotia so users of the app can find out about the black settlements of Halifax and other important history. I did most of the content research and writing myself, however, got valuable feeds from Nola Vie in New Orleans and a friend and former colleague, Sharon Scott, in Charleston. I hired and paid for content to be collected in New York City and in Ohio.

An important future aspect of the app will have to be a mechanism where citizens and upload black history that they know about in their town. A crowd-sourced data collection system is the way to go.

Marketing

I also launched a placeholder website until I can raise a bit more money to create a way for users to submit information. The public site is located here:
http://www.wix.com/hillretha/blackhistorymobile

The other marketing asset is a video created to highlight how the app works. The video was unveiled at the 2011 Online News Association Conference in Boston. You can see it here: http://youtu.be/_JZRx9y7oJU

Additionally, the app has been featured in the Boston Globe, a Cox magazine that is mailed to millions of Cox cable subscribers, the African Diaspora tourism site, the PBS MediaShift and several ASU publications. The project has been tweeted and retweeted by people interested in augmented reality.

Next Steps: Partnerships

My next step is to expand the Black History app into a business. I think the value proposition is to become an AR content provider, not just of African-American history, but of women’s history, state history, etc., and seek distribution partners.

The two distribution partners I am concentrating on are:
• Vuzix, the makers of AR glasses. Heads of display is the key to wide AR mobile adoption. Having to walk around with a mobile phone to your eye is not the best way to experience AR. The Vuzix glasses look like sunglasses, but what they need is more content. I think history content is a natural for tourists or new residents of a city.
• MVS Labs, which is working on incorporating augmented reality into automobile windshields.

I am also pursuing content partnerships with the Smithsonian Institution, Cycling Through History, the National Park Service and Soul of America.

I am in talks with Comcast and Disney for continued funding. The iPhone app will be released when I have a sponsor and a backend to allow for crowd-sourced content.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

After a long summer of redoing the Black History Augmented Reality app, it is up and running

on Layar once again. I am very appreciative of BuildAR, an Australian company that worked

with me to get all of my cities coded correctly for the Layar platform.

Currently we are in the following cities:

Baltimore
Boston
Charleston
Chicago
Cleveland
Columbus, OH
New Orleans
Philadelphia
Phoenix
Richmond, VA
Washington, DC
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

There isn’t nearly enough content in all of those places so I am working on a mechanism

where people can send me content. I will need a short description of about 50

characters and a longer description of a couple of sentences, the address or intersection

of a location and a photo and maybe a link to a video (from YouTube or Vimeo) about the

subject.

I will be demonstrating the app at the Online News Association Conference in Boston

Sept. 24, 2011, then will spend the rest of the Fall figuring out the best way to allow for

user generated content and expanding to more cities. Several local news outfits have

expressed interest in partnering with me, so looking forward to that.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

As almost every innovator has discovered at one point or another, it is the team that you assemble that can help you soar or trip you up. Months into my Black History Augmented Reality project, I have good and bad news.

The good news is the content for nine cities is available in Layar where users in Baltimore, Boston, Charleston, Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C., can download the Layar browser and use the camera lens of their smartphones to find out about black history. I also have content for New York City and Ohio that I have to put into the database, and data from Detroit and Los Angeles are being collected now.

The bad news is the app designed specifically for the iPhone is not ready.

My developers finally admitted what was obvious for months: that they were unable to create an Augmented Reality native iPhone app. The developers tried to use a third party iPhone builder (despite my warnings against it) and then tried to integrate Layar Player into it. It just didn’t work.

Part of the frustration of working in the mobile space, especially with cutting edge augmented reality tools, is finding people who can do what they say they are able to do, and can do it at an affordable rate.

But ever the practical optimist, I have a backup plan to get the iPhone-specific app completed—and quickly. To make sure I had as much information as possible, I attended the Augmented Reality Event conference in mid-May in Silicon Valley - a true nerd festival—so I could get advice from people who are already in this space. I met Layar AR strategist Gene Becker, who schooled me on what I have to do to make his product work on a native app and who is putting me in touch with developers who can finish the project. [In the small world department, two of my former New Media Innovation lab graduate students - Chris Cameron and Adriane Goetz—are working for Layar in Amsterdam and gave me the heads up that Gene would be at the conference.] I also met up with representatives at Wikitude and Junaio, two other AR browser companies. And I learned about new content management systems that can make publishing to all three browsers much easier.

At the conference, I also learned about some bleeding edge AR products that are giving me all kinds of inspiration for what the Black History AR app can eventually become. I’m thinking an animated recreation or 3D modeling of famous events that happened in U.S. history. Imagine being able to get a recreation of the battle of Antietam while standing on that hallowed ground? At the very least, I’d like to track down as many historical photos as I can so they can be superimposed over places where history took place, similar to what the PhillyHistory project is doing. I would love to get that done in advance of the NABJ conference this summer in Philadelphia and the Online News Association conference in Boston.

Being a deadline-driven person, I’m stressing to get everything done by end of June, which will be one year after finding out I won the marvelous New Media Women Entrepreneurs grant. My deadline, not J-Lab’s. But I’m also excited about getting past the basics to doing some really eye-popping stuff with AR, to see how far and how fast I can push the boundaries. And I want to see if I can make a business here, and employ and teach legacy journalists about this new world, because, after all, that is what entrepreneurship is all about.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

The Black History Augmented Reality app has been well received by people who have used it. Currently, it is available through the Layar browser, an augmented reality application for most smartphones.  Layar works on the iPhone, and a version of the Black History Augmented Reality app specifically for iPhone is under development.

To find and use it, download the Layar browser and search for “black history”. If you live in or visit Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston, Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans or Phoenix, you can see points of interest pop up around your city.

I partnered with my fellow New Media Women Entrepreneurs at NolaVie to develop the locations for New Orleans.  You can read more about it here.

Currently, I am working on content for Chicago, Nashville, Detroit and New York City.  Ideally, I will crowdsource more content for existing and additional cities but need to work out a way to verify each entry. That means additional hands willing to help a startup by fact checking.  Until I get more funds to pay for that help, the bulk of the content will be researched and written by me.

My Boulder-based developers are still working on the iPhone version and have been at the mercy of software that is not overly friendly to augmented reality. We hope to have the iPhone version done for testing in a couple of weeks. As you can imagine, it is frustrating to have to wait so long, but given that augmented reality is a fairly new technology, I have to rely on (affordable) developers still feeling their way around the AR coding for native apps.

The good news is I have several media companies interested in partnering with the project, which will give those companies a risk-free way of testing augmented reality and give me, hopefully, a stream of income that I can pour back into the business.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

With our planned launch in time for Black History Month in February just around the corner, we’re down to nail-biting time here.

I’ve accumulated content about historical sites for six cities, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Phoenix, Richmond, Philadelphia and Boston. With the help of freelancers, whom I’m paying $1 per location they add, we’ll also have content for Charleston and Nashville. I’m excited to report that we are working with one of our fellow New Media Women Entrepreneurs awardees, NolaVie, to produce content for New Orleans.

Our original goal was to get both the iPhone app and the Layar version (for any smart phone user) up and running by the end of January. As predicted, our biggest delay was with development fixes.

Good news to report: The Layar app is ready to use! Just download the Layar browser on any smart phone and then search for Black History. The native iPhone app is still in testing and our work continues on a bug. Developers are still working on the augmented reality component. There may still be a slight delay after we submit the app to Apple for inclusion in the iTunes Store, just as there is for every app, so keep your fingers crossed.

On the sponsorship side, I’ve been reluctant to approach sponsors full force without a working prototype to show people. But of course, this remains my biggest concern. I want this to be a sustainable venture that will allow us to continue to develop the content beyond black history. Ideally, we’ll find a main national sponsor for the iPhone app. As a secondary stream, we’ll look to co-brand with tourism bureaus or local news providers in various cities. I’d like to figure out a relationship with the National Park Service to integrate content from its Freedom Trail.

In the meantime, we’re pressing ahead as February quickly approaches.

Friday, November 05, 2010

Call me a start-up junkie, but it is always exciting to see a project come together.

Six months ago, the Black History Mobile app idea was just that - an idea. What if I could use the Augmented Reality technology to guide people to places of interest and significance in black history in Washington, D.C., and other major U.S. cities? That was the premise. Today, I have the reality in my hand. Looking through the camera lens of my iPhone as I cruise around downtown and central Phoenix, I see a dozen or so significant moments of Arizona black history pop up.  There on the corner of 8th and Washington Streets is where a group of black Phoenicians in 1886 founded what would become Tanner A.M.E. Church back. And here, at Old Main on the Arizona State University campus, Benton James walked across the stage in 1924 to become the first African American to get a degree from this great institution. And right here at LoLo’s Chicken and Waffles, the app tells me I can dine like a Harlemite on some fine southern cuisine. And there in this urban neighborhood, cotton fields grew as late as the early 1970s.

Next week, while I am at the Women’s Entrepreneurs Summit, sponsored by J-Lab, I can’t wait to break out and test all of the augmented reality markers in Washington, D.C., that I’ve put together, from the hotel where Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote the “I Have a Dream” speech to the house where Benjamin O. Davis, the first black five-star general lived and raised the second black five-star general, Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., to the arsenal where the conspirators who plotted and carried out the Abraham Lincoln assassination were put to death by hanging.

Augmented Reality is a new technology that the media industry is only now beginning to tap.  One of my former New Media Innovation Lab students, Chris Cameron, who graduated from ASU in December 2009, just moved to Amsterdam to work for Layar, one of the main companies creating the tools to make Augmented Reality implementation easier. Just a year ago, we knew very little about AR in our lab, but Chris dove right in to figure out how we could make it work for journalism. Wikitude, the other major player in Augmented Reality, is making it easier to integrate into Word Press blogs. Think how easy it now is to have your blog postings pop up when users are viewing locations around town. Yep, that’s your restaurant review next to the new bistro or your warnings about the customer service at a local business.

Today, as I drive around Phoenix, my mind brims over with the possibilities of embedding information over physical places. While startups have done restaurant reviews and crime data, there are so many more obvious applications. Real estate listings that come alive as you drive past houses for sale. Details on what a homeowner will have for sale at that weekend’s garage sale. Info on the local school. Sweet.

The Black History Mobile app’s first phase will be ready for Beta release, following this month’s testing. The native iPhone app will follow.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Work on the Mobile Black History App is underway. I’ve partnered with a Boulder start-up called BloomWorlds to develop the augmented reality app that will guide users to interesting places in the nation’s capital where African American history took place. BloomWorlds’ founder Darrell Brogdon is a talented programmer who got his start at the company that became McAfee and then with Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life.  He’s done a number of iPhone apps, is a serial entrepreneur and, like me, a history buff.

I’m going through the often-tedious task of tracking down longitude and latitude for all of the notable (and not so well known but still significant) places where black history happened in D.C.  Aside from Google Earth and Wikipedia, if anybody knows of a better source for coordinates, please let me know.

We are still planning to have a working version ready in late fall and the app ready for a Black History Month 2011 debut.

At the same time, the New Media Innovation Lab - my fulltime gig—is working on several other mobile apps, so continuing to experiment with projects for Android, iPhone and iPad.