Brand killer

Un estudiante de la Universidad de Pensylvannia acaba de crera un app de realidad aumentada que bloquea cualquier tipo de publicidad que aparezca frente a nosotros. Como un AdBlock, pero para la vida real. Como diría mi abuelita: “Ya no queremos queso, sino salir de la ratonera”.

AdBlock Plus es una popular extensión para los navegadores como Chrome y Firefox que permite navegar la internet bloqueando la mayoría de los anuncios publicitarios…

Every day your eyeballs are assaulted by advertisements on your box of cereal, billboards, t-shirts, magazines, milk cartons, plastered on the side of buses, buildings, bananas, and written in the sky. [Reed], [Jonathan], [Tom], and [Alex] came up with a solution to this: a Brand Killer

that censors all the advertisements and brands you see every minute of every day. It’s a real-world adblock that you can build right now.The team’s system uses a custom head mounted display made from cardboard, goggles, a webcam, and a seven-inch display. The software for the system uses Python and OpenCV to monitor the images from the webcam, compares them against a list of brands and logos, and filters them out with an unobtrusive blur.Right now the system just has a few brands and logos that include Dr. Pepper, Hershey’s, McDonalds, Facebook, Starbucks, and clear evidence this was built at UPenn, Wawa and Tastykake. In the video below, the detection and tracking of these various brands is very good. The system is also stereoscopic, meaning this is wearable all day, every day, without a loss of depth perception…

http://bit.ly/1zBocXF

Brand killer

Google’s first banner

Lo que pensamos que nunca pasaría: Google puso un banner en su home. Y no cualquier banner, uno bastante grandesito. Claro, el banner anuncia uno de sus productos, la nueva tablet que acaban de sacar al mercado, pero el anuncio en su home llamó la atención mucho más que el producto por sí mismo. Such is life…

Having the cleanest homepage on the internet has often been attributed to much of Google’s early success. Before they were the search engine, they competed against Yahoo, Microsoft Live, Alta Vista, and other portal sites that had ads, news, and just about everything else that one could fit onto a single website. Google’s was clean back then and remains clean today.

Every now and then, they do some promotions. Today, they used the most visited page on the internet to display a simple message:

“The playground is open. The new $199 tablet from Google.”

The ad linked to a page that offered a special and showed a video that we highlighted for its cleverness late last month.

The video is below. It should be noted that Google’s style of non-advertising has been both successful as well as criticized in the past. Supporters say that the cleanliness of the homepage made the company successful. Detractors say that the days of wasting the most valuable space on the internet are over and Google can afford to use the space…

http://bit.ly/Q1Nag1 

Google’s first banner