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One of the most popular ways people interact with augmented reality (AR) is through location-based mobile applications. By holding a phone up in their field of view, users can visualize nearby points-of-interest based on information taken from the phone's various sensors. Due to the limits of GPS, however, this type of experience is more difficult to reproduce in an indoor environment. Recently, however, Intel teamed up with AR vendors metaio to experiment with a solution to this challenge at the 2010 Intel Developer Forum (IDF).

Day 2 of Intel AppUp Elements 2010 included topics to help developers make money with apps, promote apps to increase success, and understand the continuously evolving apps ecosystem. Attendees also had access to Blackbelt level developers and Adobe AIR developers.

Let's take a closer look.

Day 1 of Intel AppUp Elements 2010 included the keynote followed by intimate talks focused on three core pillars: monetization, fragmentation, and visibility. App developers were presented with the Intel vision of the app marketplace today and the near future.

Let's take a closer look.

What do you get when you fill a room with developers, retro and modern gaming, Wil Wheaton (@wilw), and beverages? If you guessed a time portal to another dimension replete with plasma spewing monsters, adult language, adult situations, deep gamer sub-references and a barely PG-13 rating from the MPAA.... you might be close.

Tomorrow kicks off the post Intel Developer Forum (IDF) unconference known as Intel AppUp Elements 2010. Let's take a look at what to expect as ReadWriteHack covers this event.

Data centers consume massive amounts of electricity. A recent report by the Environmental Protection Agency states that data centers in the U.S. consume 1.5 percent of the country's total electrical consumption.

But its not just that data centers use a lot of energy. It's also about the cost of managing underutilized server environments that eat up a lot in heating and cooling costs.

During his company's annual developer conference, Intel CEO Paul Otellini today noted that his industry still hasn't managed to make it easy enough for consumers to move content seamlessly between devices. According to Otellini, as more and more devices are connected to the Internet, this capability will become increasingly important and something that consumers will soon demand. Content shifting allows users to start a movie on a TV, for example, and then continue to watch it on a PC or mobile phone.

Simplot Australia initially used VMware virtualization software and Intel hardare to create a test and development environment.

The wholly owned subsidiary of the J R Simplot Company saw the immediate benefits and has not looked back since.

Today, more than 60% of the IT infrastructure at Simplot Australia's corporate office has been virtualized.

VMworld set up a lab this year that ran a hybrid cloud.

The VMware team set up a data center at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco that connected to public clouds provided by Terremark in Miami, Florida and Verizon in Ashburn, Virginia.

Switch on a server and you've just doubled its cost. According to Gartner, between 2007 and 2012 most U.S. enterprise datacenters will spend as much on power and cooling as on the hardware itself.

Gartner predicts that energy costs for IT operations could also double by 2012 due to the volume of data that will flow through organizations and the expected increase in utilities.

The answer? Consolidate your servers and optimize them as best as possible.

Is a cloud utopia possible? The idea being that someday everything will be elastic. Services scale up and down based on usage. You would never have to worry about updating an application on your laptop. Security would be taken care of and devices would be smart enough to know what data to process and what should be rendered in the cloud.

Sure. We are already seeing some of these scenarios unfold. But it's not common. In reality, the builder has a big job ahead.

Intel is here at VMWorld with a message about how this plays out. In their view, as also illustrated on the Intel Cloud Builder site, it comes down to three factors. The cloud and correlating devices should be federated, automated and client-aware.