Tech Brief
On Tech Brief today: Collapsing dimensions, cows coloured like ice cream and how much cash Google will give you.
• The walls separating the real and the virtual are getting thinner all the time. Now 7-Eleven has kicked another hole through to cyberspace by selling drinks and foods that can be used to unlock extras in games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars and YoVille. Get enough of the goodies and you can have a Neapolitan cow, coloured like the ice cream, on your virtual farm. Note, some restrictions apply:
"Players are limited to receiving 10 gifts per day through the 7-Eleven promotion. Any individual player may only own three of the 7-Eleven exclusive items. "
• More evidence that the dimensions are collapsing from Bruce Sterling, who considers what's coming in augmented reality. He writes at Wired about one design project that considers how the pavement might become the canvas for many kinds of digital extras. Doubtless it'll show up, ooh, any day now:
"It's so cute. I like practically everything about this. Nice punchy music, the interaction design is attractive... The gestural schtick is well thought-out, and I like the brief, ragged, nerdy-looking summer clothes on the actors... I'm even willing to forgive the rather horrid bent street-projected QWERTY keyboards."
• Metres are for wimps. GPS may be a modern wonder, but it only gets you close to where you want to be. Close, but no cigar. An upcoming $8bn (£5.6bn) upgrade to the system will see accuracy improve to centimetres, says the LA Times' WJ Hennigan:
"The new system is designed to pinpoint someone's location within an arm's length, compared with a margin of error of 20 feet or more today. With that kind of precision, a GPS-enabled mobile phone could guide you right to the front steps of Starbucks, rather than somewhere on the block."
• Google has ended speculation about how much cash it gives back through its AdSense programs via a blog post. This spells out who gets what and reveals that content publishers get 68% of the cash Google collects from ads it puts on their pages. Veteran Google-watcher John Battelle runs the numbers.
"This 68% split is relatively new. How do I know that? Well, as recently as two years ago, sources I know to be extremely reliable were actively negotiating with Google to get a 65% cut - less than what was announced today. So... you do the math."
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Links in full
• Alicia Ashby | Virtual Goods News | Zynga Kicks Off 7-Eleven Promotion
• Bruce Sterling | Beyond the Beyond | Augmented Reality: holographic design fiction
• William Hennigan | LA Times | GPS is getting an $8-billion upgrade
• John Battelle | Battelle Media | 68% of 85% is really 57.8%
