LAMPsig

By George McKinney

Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time." -- Wikipedia

Using a web camera, the Adobe Flash player, and open-source tools, it is possible to generate animated 3D objects in real-time. This Augmented Reality presentation utilizes the Papervision3D project and the FLAR Toolkit. We will also address Collada, which originated from Sony, and Google Sketchup. These are two tools for generating 3D objects that are free.

General Electric corporation showcased Augmented Reality in a recent marketing campaign for its Smart Grid, renewable energy program. http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality

About George:
George McKinney is a web developer and marketing strategist with Hookstream.com. George enjoys manipulating bitmaps and coding assembly language. He received his MBA from the University of Southern California and his BA in History from Stanford University.

There will be no meeting in April. It appears all the major industry conferences are happening this weekend, and the Tom Bradley Center needed this time slot. We will resume our regular meeting on May 16th. Have a good weekend!

By Jorge Garifuna

Elgg is a white label, open source social networking platform. It offers blogging, networking, community, collecting of news using feeds aggregation and file sharing features. Everything can be shared among users with access controls and everything can be cataloged by tags as well.
Elgg was originally started by Ben Werdmuller and David Tosh, who subsequently founded Curverider in order to provide Elgg-related services. It has been under development since 2004.

Version 1.0 was released on August 18, 2008. This version was rewritten from scratch and included many powerful features including: a new data model; import / export; support for OpenDD) and more.

Jorge Garifuna is the CEO of Garinet Global Inc. which offers a multitude of Website services for organizations, businesses, entertainers and family members. Jorge joined LAMPsig at the end of last year and has added a new spark of enthusiasm to our group. He is quick to answer maillist questions or bring up new topics of interest to LAMP developers.

See you all at SCALE!

Magento is an Open Source e-commerce web application created by Varien, building on components of the Zend Framework. In addition to being open source, various commercial additions are available as well, from hosting plans to pre-built style templates. With Magento, you can get your e-commerce site up and running in minimal time. Magento also has integrated features reminiscent of modern e-commerce sites, including:
- Flexible Coupons (pricing rules) with ability to restrict to stores, customer groups, time period, products, and categories.
- Catalog Promotional Pricing by percentage or fixed amount with ability to restrict to stores, categories, products.
- Multi-Tier Pricing for quantity discounts.
- Bundled Products.
- Customer Group-specific pricing and group-specific tier pricing.
- Up-sells in Shopping Cart.
- Cross-sells on product pages.

This talk will go into the basics of installing Magento and getting a basic ecommerce site up in going in record time.