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Augmented reality has been touted as the "next big thing" for a while, yet mainstream success has proved elusive. So what can be done to turn it from a gimmick into a commercial necessity?Imagine being able to watch miniature versions of Kings of Leon or Lady Gaga play on a table right in front of your eyes.

One company - String, in partnership with tech firm Digicave - has developed and demonstrated a system that creates the impression of a 3D figure mapped onto, for example, a book shelf. Such technology opens up the possibility of having a pop star appear in your bedroom, performing as if they were on-stage.

The idea of augmented reality was first mooted as far back as in 1965, with Ivan Sutherland's now famous essay Augmented Reality: The Ultimate Display. In it, he said that "with appropriate programming… a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked," stating that digital handcuffs would be able to actually restrain users, and those shot by digital characters would be killed in real life.

a new study conducted and released by Latitude, a technology research consultancy, published in collaboration with ReadWriteWeb. The study’s main takeaway message: “kids are predicting that the future of media and technology lies in better integrating digital experiences with real-world places and activities. They’re also suggesting that more intuitive, human-like interactions with devices, such as those provided by fluid interfaces or robots, are a key area for development.”

Researchers scored the kids’ inventions on the presence of specific technology themes, such as type of interface, degree of interactivity, physical-digital convergence and user’s desired end-goal.

The Digital vs. Physical Divide is Disappearing: Children today don’t neatly divide their virtual interactions from their experiences of the “real world.” For them, these two realms continue to converge as technologies become more interactive, portable, connected and integrated.

E-readers are outpacing tablets by a rapidly widening margin, Pew said in a new study. After a brief amount of parity for the second half of the year, e-readers doubled from just over six percent ownership in the US last November to 12 percent this May. Outside of a brief spurt during the holidays, the growth of the iPad and other tablets kept the same pace and rose from five percent to eight in the same period.

Overlap between the two was significant: three percent had both. Nine percent of Americans have just an e-reader and no tablet, where only five percent have just a tablet.

In spite of the adoption, either category still trails well behind others, Pew says. Thanks to about ten years of Apple's own efforts with the iPod, 44 percent of the US has an MP3 player. More than half have a computer or a DVR, and 83 percent have cellphones. Notebook PCs are now virtually on par with desktops for popularity with just one point of difference between the two.

Turning to the crowd has proven pretty popular with security types. In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, recently began work on a prediction market aimed at forecasting computer security events. Darpa, the nerd cousin of Iarpa over at the Defense Department, tucked away some cash in its budget last year to farm intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data out to the crowd in search of better analysis. The Navy has even turned to crowdsourcing via online multiplayer games in order to hunt for better ideas against piracy.

Nuance Communications (NUAN) CEO Paul Ricci must have taken copious notes in class because his company's recent purchase of Swype has catapulted it from a voice recognition company to an input organization.

I think this is a big move for the company because it expands what it, as an entity, does.

To "swype," a person traces across keyboard letters in a continuous motion to comprise a word. Swype says its input method lets people do more than 40 words a minute, and says the application is meant to work across not just phones and tablets, but also game consoles, kiosks, televisions and other screens.

"It's a novel user interface that's got everyone interested," said Jay Wright, a senior director for Qualcomm focused on augmented reality.

The compass-based mapping feature you see now represents only the beginning of augmented reality's promise, Wright said. In an interview, he said the next generation of augmented reality will better integrate superimposed images with reality and work with a broader set of applications. He believes it represents an elegant way of marrying the tangibility of the physical world with information available in the digital world.

There are still technical hurdles to surpass. More phones are starting to use a 1-gigahertz processor or faster, which is recommended to handle such tasks. The computer vision, he said, needs to be improved to it can scan three-dimensional objects rather than just flat images, which he expects is the catalyst to opening up the feature.

Fujitsu Laboratories has developed speech interface technology that enables users to retrieve a variety of information by simply speaking into a smartphone, without having to look at the smartphone’s display.

After listening to a synthesized speech read the latest news and other information, users can articulate the information that they would like to learn more about. The software will then read details about the topic and other related information

In recent years, by employing devices to remotely access data centers, where an abundance of computing resources can be utilized, it has become possible to develop speech recognition and synthesis technologies that handle a larger lexicon than has previously been possible on stand-alone devices. This has led to high expectations for the delivery of new and innovative services.

Although Siri is limited in what it can do, what it does do, it does well. And based on my experiences with Siri so far, I think it illustrates what I think of as the “invisible interfaces” of future connected devices. Admittedly, that sound like a bold claim, but the reality is this: Thanks to the “Internet of Things,” more devices are gaining connectivity that makes them smarter and more useful. At the same time, computing interfaces haven’t changed all that much in the past several decades. They’re going to have to, however, as we can’t have a multitude of different interfaces across a myriad of connected devices in this new world.

The key for potential success here is in Siri’s uncanny ability to understand not just natural language input, but also context. This is great for smartphones where we have so much personal data such as contact names, addresses, phone numbers and digital music tracks. Even better is when Siri works with multiple apps or services on our handsets; tying them together through a simple command. “Remind me to take out the trash when I get home,” for example, leverages both the Reminders application and the integrated GPS radio of an iPhone.

“Close the windows and turn on the air conditioning if the outside temperature rises above 85 degrees,” could be a real-world example in just a few years time.

Young British teenagers would be less worried at being deprived of television than losing access to the internet or their mobile phones, as attachment to the medium slides among the young, according to new research from Ofcom.

On average, they watch 17 hours 37 minutes per week, up from 15 hours 37 minutes in 2007.Internet use has also become pervasive, with 95% of 12- to 15-year-olds having internet access at home through a computer. But the research by the communications watchdog also points to a "digital divide", in which only 80% of children in lower socioeconomic groups have access to the internet at home, compared to 98% in the richest ones.

The annual survey was carried out in spring with 1,717 in-home interviews, and focused on attitudes to communications technology by parents and children. It found that 28% of children aged 12 to 15 said they would most miss their mobile, and 25% would most miss the internet if deprived of them – compared to only 18% citing television. A year ago mobile was the most desired, while TV was level-pegging with the internet at 24%.

Used to be if spies wanted to eavesdrop, they planted a bug. These days, it's much easier. Because we all carry potential bugs in our pockets—smartphones. One team of researchers used an iPhone to track typing on a nearby computer keyboard with up to 80 percent accuracy.

The researchers designed a malicious app for the iPhone 4. When you place the phone near a keyboard, it exploits accelerometer and gyroscope data to sense vibrations as the victim types—detecting whether keystrokes come from the left or right side of the keyboard, and how near or far subsequent keys are from each other. Then, using that seismic fingerprint, the app checks a pre-created "vibrational" dictionary for the most likely words—a technique that works reliably on words of three letters or more.

Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia launched a new company today called Odiago, whose WibiData product utilizes Hadoop and HBase to let businesses make the most of online user data. The details around investors (Eric Schmidt, Mike Olson and SV Angel) and Bisciglia’s history at Cloudera and Google have made the rounds already, but what’s not as widely known is how WibiData actually works.

Here’s how Monash describes the essence of WibiData: WibiData is designed for management of, investigative analytics on, and operational analytics on consumer internet data, the main examples of which are web site traffic and personalization and their analogues for games and/or mobile devices. The core WibiData technology, built on HBase and Hadoop,* is a data management and analytic execution layer. That’s where the secret sauce resides. Also included are:

The number of mobile phone patent infringement cases filed in the US court system grew from 24 in 2006, to 84 in 2010, figures collected by Lex Machina, an intellectual property litigation data provider. That number is expected to grow to 97 cases this year, which would mark a four-fold increase in just half a decade. The rapid evolution and growth of the mobile phone industry is the underlying driving force of the rising patent wars. There are possibly over 250,000 active patents relating to a single smartphone, according to San Francisco-based patent aggregator and licensor RPX.

"The devices we used 10 years ago to make voice calls have become hand-held computers incorporating a vast array of software and hardware, which increases the breadth of patent exposure," said John Amster, chief executive of RPX.

The latest is a survey showing that IT professionals expect tablets to outnumber desktop machines in schools within the next five years.

The results, revealed by a Piper Jaffray analyst, point to the growing popularity of the iPad among technology directors at schools, all of whom are already testing and deploying the device on some level. The survey cited didn't have the biggest sample size (only 25 were polled), but the trend is consistent with other reports we've seen, and certainly Apple has been pushing the device for educational purposes.

Administering the devices from an IT standpoint can be challenging in a school environment, something that's already being felt in the enterprise market. It's an issue that school IT directors are already dealing with in school districts that hand out laptops to students.