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This website is an initiative of the award-winning Dutch company Infofilm. Infofilm is producer of digital media for museums: touch-screen apps, online collections, museum audio and video tours,  rfid-, wifi-, iphone-, ipod touch-applications, 2D and 3D animations, motion graphics, big screen presentations, cross media, etcetera.

Augmented reality can be a new feature for exposing cultural news and locations. Several companies are exploring this new technique: Layar, Wikitude. Junaio…

Layar is one of the augmented reality browsers for Android and iPhone. Soon on Nokia. This latest video shows daily scenario’s of how Layar is used: to find a place to eat, to get to know the city through history, to play games and to see which bands is playing where now. This video also premiers Floaticons, the cool 3D objects which we all can use to express ourselves in this new world of Augmented Reality.

Augmented Reality is the new emerging mass medium, for all to use, to experience and interact in.

Museummedia can help you implementing augmented reality.

An iPhone application that will provide information, ticketing and itineraries for the 40 most visited museums and sites in Italy is to be launched on 1 July.

Released by Italy’s Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (known in Italy as MiBAC), ‘i-MiBAC – Top 40′ is the first of a series of free apps produced by the Italian ministry dedicated to Italy’s heritage sites and museums.

In both English and Italian, it will initially be available for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, but will soon be made available for smartphones too.

Read more here.

Infofilm/Museummedia stelde enige tijd geleden voor om Foursquare in te zetten voor uw museum marketing.

Het Nationaal Historisch Museum is naar ons weten het eerste museum in Nederland die hiermee aan de slag gaat.

Tot en met 18 juli 2010 is in Arnhem de tentoonstelling Nieuwe Groeten Uit… te zien. Op 19 locaties in de stad hangen foto’s met daarop het beeld voor Nederland door Nederlanders. Bij de expositie maakten Hans Aarsman en Anna Woltz een mooi boek met foto’s uit de tentoonstelling en columns.

Bezoek je de tentoonstelling met een smartphone? Dan kun je meedoen via Foursquare, een razendsnel groeiend sociaal netwerk waarmee je andere gebruikers kunt laten weten waar je bent. Check in op minstens 8 locaties van de Nieuwe Groeten Uit… tentoonstelling en wie weet krijg jij het boek ter waarde van € 14,95 gratis thuisgestuurd.

Hoe werkt het?

1. Download Foursquare voor je iPhone, Android, Blackberry of andere telefoon.
2. Word vriend van het Nationaal Historisch Museum op Foursquare.
3. Check zo snel mogelijk in op minstens 8 locaties. (Download hier een flyer met alle locaties)
4. Zorg ervoor dat in je profiel op Foursquare bijvoorbeeld je Twitter- of Facebook-account zichtbaar is, zodat we contact met je kunnen opnemen.

We zijn nieuwsgierig naar de resultaten. Mail info en reacties naar info@museummedia.nl.

Some museums have a contest on Twitter. Twitter has published some useful guidelines for running contests:

• Discourage the creation of multiple accounts: If users make lots of accounts in order to enter a contest more than once, they’re liable to get all of their accounts suspended. Please be sure to include a rule stating that anyone found to use multiple accounts to enter will be ineligible.

• Discourage posting the same tweet over and over (and over) again: Posting duplicate, or near duplicate, updates or links is a violation of the Twitter Rules and jeopardizes search quality. Please don’t set rules to encourage lots of duplicate updates (like saying, “whoever retweets this the most wins”). Your contest could cause users to be automatically filtered out of Twitter search. Plus, instead of their followers seeing your cool contest, their followers might start getting annoyed by your contest. You might want to set a clear contest rule stating that multiple entries in a single day will not be accepted.

• Ask users to include an @reply to you in their update so you can see all the entries: When it comes to picking a winner, you’ll want to see all the contestants. If the updates include @username mention to you, you’ll be able to see all the updates in your Mentions timeline (see here for more information on replies and mentions). Just doing a public search may not show every single update, and some contestants may be filtered from search for quality.

• Encourage the use of topics relevant to the contest: You might decide to have users include relevant hashtag topics along with the updates (like #contest or #yourcompanyname). Keep in mind that hashtag topics need to be relevant to the update; encouraging users to add your hashtag to totally unrelated updates might cause them to violate the Twitter Rules.

Do you have some great ideas for contests?

Source: GIZMODO

Augmented reality might be the future, but my favorite application of it yet transports you far into past. StreetMuseum—an iPhone app from the Museum of London—overlays four hundred years of historic images on today’s city streets.

StreetMuseum makes creative use of Google Maps and geo-tagging to show users how London used to look. You can use it to check out pictures and info about nearby historic locations, which is has more of a straightforward walking tour feel. But the fun starts when you’re actually standing in front of a location in the database. That’s when the AR “3D view” kicks in, with views that may look something like this:

Even better: it’s free. Well played, Museum of London. Now let’s get a Manhattan version so I can reenact Gangs of New York on my way to work. [Museum of London via LikeCool]

Op het weblog van Erfgoed 2.0 is een blogpost (van 19 februari) aan Foursquare gewijd: http://erfgoed20.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/foursquare-ook-in-musea-in-nederland/ Tijdens Museums and the Web 2010 viel via twitter ook e.e.a. over foursquare te lezen. Als je zoekt op twitter naar Foursquare en Museum vind je al heel wat interessante links: http://bit.ly/95kCnl . Maar natuurlijk zijn ervaringen uit de eerste hand het best om te lezen.

Reactie op Lindkedin door Theo Meereboer founder / community manager at Erfgoed 2.0

This one looks good and works great:

Try your own website here.

Some provisions  should be made to insure that your users will have quick access to your content using the slower Internet connections provided by their phones.

A few ways to optimize your mobile website for the growing amount of traffic from smart phones. Of course before beginning work on the mobile version of your website you will want to take a look at the traffic that you are getting. Mobile traffic is a small portion of the Internets total traffic, a little more than 1%, yet it is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years. Now is a good time to look at how your site looks in mobile browsers to ensure future success.Lawrence Hall, community manager Go-gulf, provides web design and development solutions in Middle East.

Tips here: Best Practices for Mobile Optimization of your Blog | Blog Oh Blog.

Today the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SFMOMA announced its interactive Rooftop Garden App for iPad is now available on App Store. The app is an enhanced version of the Rooftop Garden App for iPhone and iPod Touch, a multimedia guide originally launched in January 2010 on the occasion of the museum’s 75th anniversary.

From the museum that brought visitors the very first handheld multimedia gallery tour back in 2001 comes a new way to explore modern and contemporary art. The Rooftop Garden App for iPad lets visitors get up close and personal with both the artworks and the careful planning that went into creating the entire Rooftop Sculpture Garden experience. It provides access to the garden from all angles, with commentary about the sculptures, an interview with the architects, plan drawings of the space, a musical response by saxophonist George Brooks, a video feature on the people behind the Rooftop Coffee Bar featuring Blue Bottle Coffee, and remarks from SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra on the finished space. The iPad app, in particular, has improved user-feedback capabilities for Twitter and makes other user’s Tweets visible, deepening the two-way communication between the museum and its global network of followers.

Read more SFMOMA Announces Interactive Rooftop Garden App for iPad.

The Rooftop Garden App for iPad is available for free from the App Store on iPad or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

This application is designed to enhance the visitor experience of Canada’s most visited Museum.

Two 40 minute audio tours are featured that provide a glimpse into Canada’s fascinating social history and highlight the history and contributions of the country’s First Peoples. The audio tours are enhanced with visuals.

Interactive floor maps help guide visitors through the four levels of this architectural gem. A calendar of events provides information on current exhibitions, IMAX© films and other programs. Useful information such as location, hours of operation, admission fees and amenities is also included.

This application and all content is a product of the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation in partnership with Tristan Interactive Inc.

This is a very readworthy post by Sue Bell Yank, Writer, Organizer, and Asst. Dir. of Academic Programs at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

“The upcoming American Association of Museums AAM conference happening here in Los Angeles in late May is called “Museums Without Borders” accompanied by some fuzzy language about “connection, community, cultural identity, and the power of the imagination,” but many of the actual session titles betray an overriding preoccupation: how to get new and younger audiences in interface with museums in innovative, user-generated, participatory ways.

The overwhelming consensus as evidenced by the alarming aging of audiences to traditional arts venues – like museums, the opera, performing arts is that younger generations of Americans eschew the largely passive role of audience, and demand participation from their art institutions.”

Read more here: Sue Bell Yank: How Art Museums are Striving to Stay Relevant for a New Generation.

The self-guided tour system in a museum or an art gallery usually provides only one-way information to the visitor. The visitor follows a pre-designed route guided by the system and cannot freely choose any exhibit for detail information. This kind of systems lacks an interaction mechanism with the visitor. This research aims at designing an environment that allows the visitor to freely select any interested exhibit and instantly share his/her note or remark about the exhibit with others through the Internet. The information not only can be accessed by other visitors, but also can be broadcasted through microblogging. In the Web 2.0 era, this word-of-mouth effect can be very helpful in promoting the exhibition. This paper presents a prototype system for such an environment. The system is realized by the RFID and mobile technologies. It is also useful in outdoor scenic sites, exhibition shows and even department stores for information sharing and advertisement.

via A mobile RFID-based tour system with instant microblogging | Mendeley.

In his blog Stanley A. Miller II has some inspiring ideas:
I’d like to see the system Foursquare uses to promote menu discounts and drink specials built out to route users to more in-depth editorial content. It’s a natural upgrade adding a lot of value, and the content providers getting their feet in the door first win another way to promote their Web sites.

For example, visitors checking into the Milwaukee Art Museum – or any other source of art in town – could be quickly linked to Art City, the definitive local arts blog written by Journal Sentinel critic Mary Louise Schumacher.

Or diners checking into the Iron Horse Hotel, Stack’d Burger Bar or A.J. Bombers – which already offer specials to Foursquare fans – could be directed to reviews from Journal Sentinel dining critic Carol Deptolla.

Checking into places can win virtual awards that Foursquare calls “badges,” and these also are a fun fit for Milwaukee. Players could unlock a “gallery night” badge for visiting 10 art spots during the event, or score a special Summerfest badge by visiting the festival several times during its 11-day run. And Visit Milwaukee could take a cue from Explore Chicago and sponsor a collection of tourism badges, starting with one for visiting the Bronze Fonz statue.

Stanley A. Miller II covers personal technology for the Journal Sentinel. Reach him at (414) 223-5162 or smiller@journalsentinel.com. He tweets @stanmiller.

Vincent Roman: Here are a bunch of different reasons why I think developing Web Apps for visitors is by are a superior model and strategy for museums in the long run:

• Maximum Accessibility & iPad Ready! – No stone unturned in ensuring that each and every visitor has full access to the same information.  Saves the need to special case for devices and provides a breadth of service.  The best thing about this is that you are now officially iPad ready if you have developed a web app.  No ifs, buts or maybes about it.
• Seamless Development – The fact that you are simply developing another web service means that, as a development team, you don’t need to add any new dimensions.  You can carry on developing within the structure of the existing web site.
• Development Costs – Because are developing for a platform which your existing development team are 90% familiar with you can ring fence and reduce the potential costs.  iPhone development would be much more costly and less penetrative in terms of ROI.
• Open Source – There is so much prior art in the field of web apps the ability to get from 0-60 mph in no time is exceedingly easy.  This helps with reduction fo dev time and costs.  It also means that museums can more readily share their experiences and though their sites can share a common structure, they don’t need to all be the same.
• Flash-Content – You can use flash as desired.  Sure it won’t work on iPhone etc, but you can easily take care of alternate content in these cases, as you would on any setup where you miss flash.
• Niche Sites & Testing Ideas - Due to the fact that rollout time and cost can be kept to a minimum, as well as the fact that barriers to entry are low, it is super easy to create new content for specific exhibitions or tie ups that a museum does.  Testing ideas is also a lot easy before full roll out, which ties in nicely with Jim Richardson’s beta museum.
• iPhone Interface – Despite building a web app, you can still create a standard iPhone like interface to your web app, using whatever graphics and combining them with JS.  Libraries are being built that will make this task a whole lot easier.
• Reliance on 3rd Party – Part of the issue I have with iPhone Apps is the reliance on the App Store, in the same way of rolling out an Air App you rely on getting a certificate for it.  Developing a browser friendly web app cuts out this “unknown” from the equation.  I suppose it is possible, being a cultural institution that the App Store might fast track your app approval, but this isn’t something one can expect, rely on, or anything else.
• API / Web Services – Any API structure you create to service your web app can easily be opened up and made public so that other people can do cool things with the data on their own web sites.

Read more: http://www.vincentroman.com/blog/mobile-sites-web-apps-for-museums/

Microsoft is planning to demonstrate this week at its employee-only Microsoft Research showcase in Redmond a project it is calling the “Mobile Surface.” Microsoft is briefing a few select press on some of its TechFest projects before the event begins. I wasn’t briefed; I just found the link for this while trolling around on the Microsoft Research site.

From a description of the Mobile Surface on the company’s Microsoft Research MSR Web site:“Our goal is to bring Microsoft Surface experience to mobile scenarios, and more importantly, to enable 3D interaction with mobile devices. We do research on how to transform any surface e.g., a coffee table or a piece of paper to Mobile Surface with a mobile device and a camera-projector system. Besides this, our work also includes how to get 3D object model in real-time, augmented reality and multiple-layer 3D information presentation.”

Read more Experience information: No Microsoft Surface available, then simply bring your own..

Today ReadWriteWeb is announcing our second event, the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010. It will take place May 7, 2010, in Mountain View, California.

The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit will be an exploration of the latest Mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications.

Here’s a sample of some of the topics:

• Geo-location services – what can you do using location as a platform?
• Commerce & Marketing – as more and more consumers use smartphones, how can businesses utilize this channel?
• Content, Publishing & Recommendations – the technologies and best practices.
• Mobile Social Networking – how to tap into communities on mobile devices.
• Internet of Things – the emerging opportunities from sensor and RFID data.
• Augmented Reality – the technology and business applications of AR.
• Native App vs. Browser Based – Including iPhone, Android, RIM, Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian.

Register here: The ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit.

Eric Schmidt presents Google’s vision of the mobile future at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain on Tuesday, February 16, 2010.

TEAM International recently co-developed iSBMNH, a free application available on the iTunes store. Now users can visit the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History in the comfort of their home.

iSBNature allows museum enthusiasts to access the museum’s website, displays multiple exhibits including butterflies alive and provides a detailed map of the museum. The following features are available for customer review: Santa Barbara’s famous Rattle Snake, Butterflies Alive, Musetube and the Ty Warner Sea Center. Musetube takes users to the museum link on YouTube and the rattle snake button takes them to the snake world and help discover different types of rattle snakes. Butterflies Alive is one of the current exhibitsat the museum, which includes pictures, names of various species and a brief history ofbutterflies along with an audio tour.

press release: Iphone Application Isbmnh Launched By Team International.

Join an elite group of leading thinkers and museum experts for an incisive and up-to-the-minute analysis of trends in uses of mobile devices by museum and science center audiences. Hear assessments of current systems and projections about future possibilities in terms of how social networking and mobility tools can help museums connect with their audiences, and how they can help enrich and extend the learning experience. A special focus will be on outreach efforts to under-served communities. Share your views and concerns to inform designers about what services are needed and what problems need solving.

On April 26-27, researchers, museum staff, and program developers will be gathering in New Brunswick, New Jersey. They will be taking an in-depth look at what the future holds in terms of mobile media devices and social networking applications in the museum setting. Presentations will include data-driven analyses of what is going on in the field and insightful distillations of museum experiences to date. Forecasts of trends and developments that are “just around the corner” will be offered. In addition to plenary talks, interactive sessions will be held to draw on “crowd-sourcing” of attendees to identify consensus views as well as important points of divergence. This event promises both unique perspectives about the principles that guide new social media applications as well as practical advice about how to integrate such systems into contemporary museum practices.

Read more: SocialMedia – Welcome. For any questions or more information on the conference, please contact: Ellen Lynch at elynch@lsc.org or 201-253-1245