The next time you visit a museum, your experience could be very different from what you expect. Technology has transformed the way we interact today, and some of the world’s biggest museums are experimenting with augmented reality to connect with the tech-savvy generation, to offer them a multi-sensory experience.

The Asian Civilization Museum in Singapore has a new iPhone app combining augmented reality and location-based gaming for its Terracotta Warriors exhibition. iPhone users can watch the museum exhibits come to life on their phone screen, engaging them in a more interesting way.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York City uses a free app called Explorer with free devices to demonstrate it. This app helps navigate the museum, acting as a personal guide for a custom tour, letting you choose the exhibits you want to see. The app also steers you in the right direction, enhancing the experience and providing information about each exhibit.

At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, media artists used augmented reality to create a show for the Conflux festival in October 2010. They used Layar, the augmented reality browser in a smartphone, to show visitors the museum’s galleries via the phone’s camera. The GPS and internet connection projected the virtual art on the camera’s image.

In Australia, the Powerhouse Museum has an augmented reality mobile app which pulls images from the museum’s Flickr archive and shows them through the Layar browser.

Apps combining augmented reality are poised to revolutionise visits to the museum in a futuristic way. The apps being experimented show how augmented reality can add a new dimension to audio guides. The visitor can see the original artist standing beside their creation and talking about it.  An example is artist Jan Rothuizen who had an augmented reality exhibition of his work at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

It is not just museums that are embracing augmented reality. Other cultural institutions use augmented reality to integrate digital content with the real world. With the Museum of London’s iPhone app, users can see the museum’s collection of archived photography on their phones based on their location and orientation.

One of the most interesting augmented reality museum apps is the one at The Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam which offers two versions of its tours, a real one and the second via an augmented reality app, using 3D augmented reality and Layar technology that describes the history about the various monuments in the city. It uses images, audio and other information and shows 3D models of future buildings and shows what they may look like in the future. Users found that while the human guide was attentive, the augmented reality app could provide more information, offering more flexibility according to the visitor’s individual preference.

According to ABI Research, about 6 million augmented reality apps were downloaded last year. This number is expected to reach 19 million downloads this year and about a billion by 2016.  It will be exciting to watch future trends and see how augmented reality enthralls museum visitors, while enabling museums present them with an unforgettable experience.

The Management World Africa 2011, organised by TM Forum, in September 2011 in Johannesburg, brought service providers together to get insight into running a service provider business in the communication industry. Naturally, at the forefront of the proceedings was a detailed discussion and review of Africa’s mobile industry, and the opportunities that exist in it.

One of the most exciting things about the African mobile market is the opportunity to explore and capture markets. Since many services are barely existent for most customers, this opens up the market for service providers who can make their offering available to the market. The chance for saturation always looms ahead, as with any market. The Africa mobile market is growing rapidly each year, and it is likely to get saturated in five or eight years. In such a market, only service providers who have a strong infrastructure and customer support system can hope to survive.

In a market that is slowly getting saturated, operators and service providers must not only focus on new customer acquisition, but also lure their competitor’s customers towards themselves. How successfully they do this will depend on their products, their innovativeness, their understanding of the customer and how they serve them. This is possible with a dynamic business operation supported by IT.

An innovative market

Africa has emerged as one of the most innovative markets and one prime example of this is the way the market has embraced mobile payments.  This was initiated by Kenya’s M-Pesa which will soon expand to Afghanistan and later to India. Africa’s opportunity is in reaching out to global markets where they can capture a significant market share. The Africa mobile market has grown at an unexpected rate. Although local companies like MTN have their share of the market, names like Etisalat and Vodafone, recognising its huge potential, are poised to grab theirs.To retain their market share, the local providers must find ways, and formulate strategies to tackle their challenges, since those outside of Africa already have the experience to do this.

What does the future hold?

For Africa, the impact of mobile phones is different than in other parts of the world. Mobile phones allow people to work remotely, enhance communication and also promote ecommerce to some extent. While some parts of Africa have no connectivity of any type, some parts depend on the mobile phone to get their news and entertainment, and use their mobile phone to interact and conduct business.

In such a scenario, the future looks attractive, and it is the service providers in this market who will make the difference. Africa’s mobile market’s growth drives mobile communication trends. Considering that the market is yet to reach saturation, there is a lot of scope for new subscribers. That, and mobile banking are the two exciting drivers inviting outside investment.

Although the future looks bright, there also exist challenges for service providers.  One is the low revenue per customer, and the tendency of a majority of people to be on prepaid tariff. This brings up a security issue for service providers. Therefore, it all boils down to innovative customer service, while keeping an eye on the competition to survive and thrive in this exciting market.

Users have begun to feel that Facebook, the 800-million-user network is not taking privacy seriously enough. The problem is in the way application developers can access information about Facebook users with the possibility of unauthorised password changes.  Considering the amount of time users spend interacting with their network on Facebook, this could snowball into major identity theft issues.

To filter and modify user information stored in the site’s database, Facebook applications employ FQL, a special query language, which is accessible to just about anyone. While extracting email addresses needs a unique API key, a lot of other private information can easily be accessed without these limitations. According to hackers, getting an API key is not rocket science. A programmer with bad intentions can get, and misuse, an API key easily for an app in development which can access a lot of data during this stage. But it seems that hackers do not have to go through the trouble to get an API key to get hold of sensitive data. All they have to do is install a legit app on their profile and use its key to query information with different IDs. This can access information shared by users within their friends’ network. Scary? Yes, very.

If you think Facebook’s security team would spot this misuse quickly, yes they would. But by this time, hackers would have already picked up what they want and disappeared. In spite of being notified about this, Facebook continues to claim that everything on the site is working as intended. Hackers, however, disagree since APIs can be queried directly. While application analysis based on velocity is fine for worms and malware, a hacker can easily attack a single user.

Facebook’s app platform has always posed security risk. Recently, IDG News Service reported that Antivirus vendor Trend Micro has detected a drive-by download attack on Facebook that used malicious advertisements to infect users with malware.  That it does not require user action renders it more dangerous.

In the last week of September 2011, Facebook made changes to the way information is stored on the site, following issues with users being tracked even after they signed out from the network.

Facebook also announced changes geared to increase interaction between users that took privacy and security to new levels.  This raises some serious concerns, naturally. According to Bitdefender, these are:

• Facebook’s smart lists will encourage users to share their info publicly, making it indexable laying it open to attack. Think 800 million users.
• Hijacked accounts are reported on Facebook all the time and now, there will be more spambots as well with the subscribers feature, just like Twitter. While Facebook is taking steps, security is not being adequately addressed.
• While the Facebook timeline is great in terms of usability, whatever a user shares on Facebook is there for the whole world to browse and see. This means friends, photos, places, and everything.
• Health information you share is set to public by default
• Widgets translate to spam and savvy developers know exactly what to do with them and social media scammers can easily exploit these.

How can you protect yourself on Facebook?

One simple way is to go to your account settings and manage your privacy, changing the default public setting on most features into how you want to share them. Be alert to what you “like” on Facebook. One common threat is “likejacking” which tricks users into posting status updates for pages unintentionally.  Facebook is a happy breeding ground for third-party app developers. Since Facebook cannot keep track of these, the onus of protection lies with the user. Security experts advise keeping your software up to date and disabling the Java plug-in from your browser since most attacks are Java based. Use antivirus programs that can scan web traffic and warn you of attacks.

At the time of writing this, Facebook is being investigated by the Irish data protection commissioner about the way it handles user data across Europe and the report will be available by the end of this year. The social networking giant is also under pressure in the US as the Federal Trade Commission might audit the website following complaints about privacy issues.