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Recommendation engines have changed the way we think about - and the way we purchase - music, movies, and books. Do you like the Beastie Boys' new album? Then check out Danger Mouse's latest. Do you like Guillermo del Toro films? Then be sure to watch Jean-Pierre Jeunet's movies.

However, there's been no comparable recommendation engine for works of art. If you like a particular Henri Matisse painting, there hasn't been a website for you to visit that will suggest other works by the artist or that will recommend other artists altogether.

But that's the aim of ArtFinder, a London-based startup that wants to help make it easier for people to find art that they love. Or rather, that's part of the aim.

When the iPhone 4 was introduced to the world earlier this month, we discussed how various additions might improve the user experience for mobile augmented reality (AR), including the forward-facing camera, the gyroscope and the high-resolution screen. The most important improvement, however, is the addition of live camera access, and metaio, one of the largest players in the AR space, has already taken advantage of the opportunity. Over the weekend, the iPhone version of the company's AR browser junaio was updated to support for live image tracking and recognition - a first for browsers on the iPhone.

As smartphone manufacturers improve on the hardware included in their devices, the possibilities for mobile app developers continue to expand. With the speedy new mobile processors and the high resolution cameras, image recognition apps have become very popular on smartphones, and companies like Occipital, makers of RedLaser on the iPhone, make it easy to embed barcode scanning technology into apps. For Android, however, there are fewer solutions, which is why ScanLife, developers of 2D barcode scanning technology, are providing an SDK for Android developers to leverage its scanning application.

OCR (optical character recognition) fans that are frustrated with the current offering of online services may be pleased to learn that Google Docs will now grab text from images and PDFs quickly and cost free. According to the blog Google Operating System, the new feature has quietly been pushed live by Google after several months of experimentation and development, but will it replace commercial software or online solutions?

Today in Amsterdam, popular augmented reality (AR) mobile browser maker Layar is celebrating the one year anniversary of its launch with an event called NEXT. In the company's brief lifetime, it has attracted millions of users to the Layar mobile application on Android and iPhone devices with its impressive catalog of layers. Today, the company made several announcements including additional international pre-load deals with handset manufacturers, new features for its browser, and partnerships with major brands.

When Apple announced iOS 4.0 earlier this year, some additions to the SDK (software development kit) caught the attention of augmented reality (AR) developers - specifically, open access to the phone's camera APIs. But with the introduction of the new hardware in the iPhone 4 made this past Monday, the possibilities for AR on the popular smartphone have skyrocketed. Today I had the opportunity to chat about the device's impact on AR with Stefan Misslinger, lead iPhone developer for metaio, one of the leading AR companies and makers of the mobile AR browser junaio.

We've all seen photos of ourselves in locations we can't quite remember. Often they're from exotic travels or from days long past. Regardless of the reason for your memory loss, IBM is working on a tool that can help. In collaboration with the European Union consortium, the company is testing SAPIR (Search in Audio-Visual Content Using Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval). The image matching search technology allows users to pull results from large collections of audio-visual content without using tags for search. Instead, users can upload images and match them to similar ones - perhaps even ones with signage and labels. The system analyzes everything from digital photographs, to sound files to video. From here it automatically indexes and ranks the media for retrieval.

According to a report on CNet, the next version of Google's Picasa Web Albums will go live at noon PST today. The central new feature of this version will be automated face recognition and tagging. In tandem with this update, Google will also launch a new version of Picasa, its desktop photo management software, which will also get a number of new features, including a movie maker mode, a retouch brush, and online synchronization with Picasa Web Albums.