Chris Nerney of Data Informed has reported on a new “augmented reality” app coming out of IBM. He writes, “Imagine being able to point your smartphone’s video camera at a store shelf and instantly get personalized, detailed information about the products on your device’s display screen. In a few months, some shoppers no longer will have to imagine this marriage of the Internet, data analytics, mobile technology and the physical spaces of a shopping aisle. IBM researchers at the company’s lab in Haifa, Israel, are developing an “augmented reality” mobile shopping application that should be offered by some supermarket chains to customers before the end of the year.” Read more

Sarah Mitroff of VentureBeat reports that Springpad, a digital notebook service that we have covered before, has released the latest version of their service for the web, iOS, and Android. Mitroff writes, “The new version is a major overhaul of the service and includes some Pinterest-inspired design elements. We all tend to save a lot of digital information these days; it’s one of the reasons Pinterest has become so popular. But before Pinterest’s time, Evernote and Springpad were competing to be the best digital notebook to save snapshots of webpages, notes, to-do lists, and anything else you want to remember later. Springpad has become outdated in recent years, with an almost cartoony-like interface.” Read more

Tom Cheredar of VentureBeat reports that Zite, a company that we have covered before, has added publisher sections to its digital magazine apps. Cheredar writes, ” Zite lets you build a custom digital magazine by pulling in shared links from bookmarking and social sites, such as Twitter, Google Reader, Delicious and Read It Later. It then builds a personalized selection of articles based on activity from your social profiles. Unlike most of its competitors, Zite learns your reading habits by giving you voting buttons for each piece of content. The idea is to give you more of what you actually want to see without having to disregard all the boring and/or uninteresting stuff.” Read more

A new article reports that Siri has found its first real competitor in Evi: “Evi, which went live on Monday evening, is not the creation of a Google or a Microsoft. It’s the brainchild of William Tunstall-Pedoe, a British start-up entrepreneur who until a few years back taught computer science at the country’s august Cambridge University. ‘Evi Lives!’, his start-up, True Knowledge, announced on its blog Monday evening, as the app first became available for download for iPhone and Android users. Within hours it had shot to being the top download in the lifestyle category of Apple’s App Store, crashing True Knowledge’s servers.” Read more

OpenWays has created a line of mobile apps that allow smart phones to be used as hotel room keys: “Mobile Key by OpenWays is the first and only ubiquitous mobile phone-based front-desk bypass solution that is truly deployable today and enables hotel guests to use any of the 5.8 billion cell phones worldwide as a room key. It is fully interoperable, carrier independent and highly secure. This self-service option is meeting guests’ demands for more service and it’s reducing hotels’ operating costs while building competitive advantages.” Read more

Semantic tech innovator Evri has launched a topic-based news discovery app for the iPad: “Evri says its iPad app is the first to offer topic-based news discovery, while competitors like Pulse and Flipboard focus more on collecting stories from specific news sources or your social networks… The iPad app makes finding interesting stories and trending topics easy, thanks to a technology that distills around 2.5 million topics from over 15,000 sources. It’s also easy to personalize, since the iPad app can connect to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. The Evri app will also recommend stories to you based on what you’ve read.” Read more

Locu, formerly known as Goodplates, has closed a seed funding round in which they raised $623,000. CEO Rene Reinsberg noted that investors were diverse and came from both the west and east coast: “That includes Boston angel investor and HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah (also an investor in Xconomy), as well as Factual CEO Gil Elbaz, Cloudera founder and chief scientist Jeff Hammerbacher, and Google engineering manager Bruno Bowden on the West Coast. Reinsberg says the startup, whose founding team is largely techies, used AngelList to find many of its seed investors.” Read more

Just in time for kickoff, Evri has announced “the launch of SportStream, a robust suite of sports applications for iPhone and Android devices, powered by the Evri platform. SportStream Football, which kicks off the SportStream app family prior to the start of the NFL season, is the first and only sports app in the marketplace to connect real-time push notifications with in-game commentary through social channels.” Read more

Gunther Sonnenfeld recently reported on a new semantic platform called Futureful. The platform “analyzes relevant information flows to open up the potential future around you. We use a combination of personal, social and contextual filters to understand interests, influences and intentions, and provide you with inspiring seeds to play with. Then it’s up to you to pick and choose, discover and share.” Read more

Springpad has launched a new semantically-powered app called Friends’ Stuff. The article states, “Rolling out over the next month, the social notebook is a unique way to discover and act on all the movies, television shows, books, music and places your friends recommend without worrying about saving it for later when they first mentioned it. The real-time web has moved beyond conversation to become a valuable source of useful information from the people you trust, but the problem is that it’s not readily available when you want or need it… The Friends’ Stuff social notebook makes it easy to see your friends’ likes and check-ins when you’re ready for their recommendations.” Read more