In an interview with the Guardian, George Harrison's son Dhani even suggested that rights owners create their own Beatles-specific independent music store to sell the remastered versions. If Yoko is right about the catalogue making it to iTunes, it will be interesting to see the pricing negotiated on this epic release.

(via Latitude's FriendFeed page)

Wikitude represents perhaps the first stage of what is possible with AR. Microsoft recently released a video that shows other future scenarios for AR:

(via Literanista)

Microsoft's Surface app, released in May 2007, is a pointer to this future.

There are many potential scenarios for AR. A popular one is doing your grocery shopping and checking information on your mobile phone (or AR glasses!) about price, specials, reviews, comparisons with competing products, etc. With the rise of RFID chips and technology such as that being developed by Microsoft, this type of scenario isn't too far away.

Another interesting consideration is that social software will have a big role to play in future AR apps. For example when walking down the street, you could use your mobile phone to point to a restaurant, and overlaid on a photo of the restaurant would be customer reviews, recommendations, and other relevant user generated data. (inspiration from Rafael Torres)

Let us know other apps that are doing interesting things with AR technology mixed with the Internet. And of course we'd love to hear about your favorite future AR scenarios!

For more on this topic, read Alex Iskold's post from July 1007 Digital Life vs Life Digital: Our Inevitable Digital Future and Marshall Kirkpatrick's from March 2008 User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload.

You have to appreciate E's creative URL - it's memorable, but also makes you curious. E? What's E?, you wonder. When I first encountered the URL, it was in a tweet which read "I'm now using E to add friends to my Twitter account. More info on http://hellomynameise.com." Did I click though? You bet.

"E," as it turns out, is a new spin on digital contact exchange. Instead of using paper business cards, you use your phone to exchange data. At first, you may think that sounds very much like mobile contact service Dropcard, but it's not. The only similarity between E and Dropcard is that they both allow you to customize your profile online and share it with others, but the similarities end there.

To use Dropcard, you either text or use a mobile app which emails your contact info to the person you just met. With E, you go to a mobile web URL that lets you exchange a passcode with your new contact. The passcode is simply a five-digit code which is entered into the mobile web app itself. They show your theirs, you show them yours...that sort of thing. Once connected, you don't receive an email message with their contact info like with Dropcard. E goes a step further and actually adds that contact to all the services you've already integrated with E.

Service Integration

At the moment, E allows you to integrate Twitter, PICNIC (a network for the PICNIC conference), and Soocial. However, Delicious, European social portal Netlog, and LastFM are listed as coming soon. After you integrate these services with E, when you add a contact they're immediately added to all those other web services, too. And thanks to Soocial, an address book solution, E contact info can also synchronize with your email address book in Gmail, Highrise, your OSX address book, or the address book on your phone itself.

Barriers To Adoption

E faces one of the typical problems that many web 2.0 startups do - they don't work for you until a lot of people are using it. Just because you have a profile on E, that doesn't mean that those you meet do. And unlike a service like Dropcard, there isn't a way to use E without the other person's involvement.

In addition to the service itself, the developers of E came up with a crazy but interesting idea for a hardware device called the "Connector." With this device, you can exchange contact info with others just by touching the two connectors together. While gadget junkies and shiny object collectors may find this device appealing, it could easily remain a niche gadget that ends up sitting on the shelf next to your Chumby and Nazbaztag. To cross the adoption barrier, those at E would be smart to sponsor events where everyone gets a Connector at registration. After a few high-profile events, they would have industry movers and shakers on board, and that's always a good place to start. Sponsoring events may be just what the company is planning, though, since their site mentions that the "Connector will be released at large events in the near future."

Will It Work?

At present, the E service is very basic. Twitter integration is the only service of note that works yet. (Soocial looks great, but is in private beta). The profiles themselves are also not as flexible as those with Dropcard are. You can easily add and remove services with Dropcard, but with E, I wasn't even able to add a second company that represents my second job. The services section of the web site is confusing - it doesn't allow you to do anything more than customize which services are connected. The actual profile information is entered under "Settings," so you can't specify that only personal contacts get your home address, for example. It appears to be all-or-nothing.

E still has far to go to become a truly successful digital contact exchange service, but at least they're trying something different. Because they operate via mobile URL, not an app specific to any one device, they're better positioned for more universal adoption that a service that designates itself as iPhone-only, for example.

The service is in private beta testing now, but you have the opportunity to make an impassioned plea as to why they should invite you on the signup page here. (If you get in, feel free to add me: 17975.)

Check out the video below to see E in action:

Hello, my name is E from Renato Valdés Olmos on Vimeo.

What might be the most surprising reveal to come out of this report are the locations of the most digitally savvy cities in the U.S. Austin, Texas was number one, where 12% of the surveyed respondents were classified as being digitally savvy - nearly twice as likely as the national average. San Francisco, on the other hand, only came in at #10, beat out by other California cities like San Diego and Sacramento, as well as other large U.S. cities like Las Vegas (#2), New York (#9), and D.C. (#5), among others.

Who They Are

Additionally, the report found that the Digitally Savvy were a luxury-oriented group - more likely to own second homes, shop in high-end stores, travel more often, and drive expensive cars. This is probably due to the fact that they were 132% more likely to have a household income of $150K or more. They also skewed towards being young (77% under 44) and male (56%).

These figures also seem to jive with the earlier reports on today's iPhone owners. Like this "Digitally Savvy" group, iPhone owners were also richer than average - 40% higher than the U.S. median.

Both groups tend to be early adopters of new technology, mainly because they can afford to do so. Unlike the general population, who needs to wait for prices to come down before purchasing newer technology, this group has no problem dropping hundreds of dollars to obtain the latest gadget.

Looking Beyond the Digitally Savvy

According to Gary Meo, SVP, Print and Digital Media Services at Scarborough Research, this is an important group to monitor because their shopping patterns could "presage behaviors of consumers across the country."

While that may be true to a point, simply watching the behaviors of a group of rich, predominantly male, young adults for the latest trends would be mean missing out on other important trends that could also be capitalized on by those looking to tap into the currently unmet needs of a particular group. This is how the Wii became a big hit, for example - by introducing a platform for casual gaming that didn't focus on primarily guy-centric, intensive, and often violent titles.

If the technology industry was to look beyond the early adopters - a group clearly not representative of the whole population - would there be an opportunity here as well to come up with the next new revolutionary idea or service? Unfortunately, we may not know, as a good portion of the industry itself is the early adopter crowd, developing for the early adopter crowd, blogging about the early adopter crowd, and selling to the early adopter crowd. In fact, the apps that have broken through and gone on to mainstream success have some decidedly un-early adopter-like features - like MySpace with its cut-and-paste HTML backgrounds or Facebook's lack of RSS for the News Feeds. In fact, it seems that the key for mainstream success is to not cater solely to the most digitally savvy of users, after all.

Image credits: Fast Hands by laffy4k; Steve Jobs by DuneChaser

So clearly, there is a lot of data out there to be stored. And the vast majority of that data isn't printed -- it is being stored digitally and created on computers via email, forums, social networks, blog posts, video sharing, bookmarking, chat, etc. A lot of that data isn't necessarily something we need to save (who needs an archive of every email I send to my mom, for example?), but what of the data that we do want to keep for the future? The posts on this blog, or thoughtful debates taking place on forums, or breaking news videos published on YouTube, for example.

The Internet is very transient in nature, things often move at a breakneck pace. The main page of a blog like ReadWriteWeb might change 10-15 times in a day. The main page of CNN.com might change far more than that. How do we archive information when the technology to read it, and indeed the information itself, changes so fast?

About 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson sold his personal library of 6,000 books to the Library of Congress. About 150 years ago, more than half were destroyed in a fire. But today, all 6,000 of them have been recovered or recreated and will go on display at the LoC. Now we're living in the so-called information age, where almost a gigabyte of new data is being created each year for every man, woman, and child on earth. But what's going to happen it to it all 250 years from now? "Is digital content too ephemeral to last?" wondered Leland Rucker. Will digital information have the same lifespan as printed books?

We'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter, so please let us know in the comments what you think the future holds for the massive flood of information we're creating today.