Alibaba Backed Startup iStaging Launches VR Platform to Showcase Properties

Real estate-focused AR/VR company iStaging has released a comprehensive mobile-first solution for real estate agents to showcase properties in virtual reality. The product suite features a user-friendly 360-degree VR camera app as well as a cloud platform to upload and edit VR tours at an affordable price point.

A free version of the service is available to all users; and for any subscription to the paid plans, iStaging gives away a fisheye lens for free so that real estate agents can capture their listings in full 720° right from their own smartphones.

“Home buyers and real estate agents are demanding a better, more efficient way of discovering and showing properties,” says Kevin Basset, iStaging’s Head of Marketing. “Virtual tours help real estate agents and their clients make visiting and purchasing decisions much faster. Creating these tours usually requires expensive equipment and the help of a specialist. iStaging has worked hard to deliver a comprehensive mobile solution that costs only $9/month, hardware included.”

iStaging’s VR Cam is an app that makes shooting virtual tours of properties as easy as taking photos using a smartphone camera. Leveraging advanced image-processing technologies, the app enables the user to stand in the middle of a room, open the app, and capture high fidelity virtual tours in minutes.

Moreover, VR Cam is deeply integrated into iStaging’s online VR Editor for seamless editing and managing of the captured spaces. Immediately after uploading raw captures, agents can create comprehensive floorplan-driven virtual tours – LiveTours – and share them seamlessly via an instantly generated weblink or embed code for sharing via listing or homepage. Capturing and sharing immersive property tours has never been easier.

A lightweight version of the VR Maker platform is accessible for free, and for just $9/month users can have up to 10 LiveTours active simultaneously, customize the branding of their LiveTours, create accounts for their fellow agents, and leverage the complimentary fisheye lens to enhance their capturing experiences. Storage upgrades are also available for power users at $19/month for 25 active LiveTours or $39/month for 100 LiveTours. Sign ups are open from today here.

This VR Startup Facebook Acquired for $2 Billion is Facing Complete Shutdown

Oculus, a $2 billion acquisition that Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook made almost three years ago, has landed the global giant in a huge mess now. A while ago, popular video game publisher ZeniMax, which is best known in the market as the owner of Fallout and Skyrim developer Bethesda Softworks, filed a lawsuit against Oculus accusing it of using copyrighted ZeniMax technology without permission.

In the lawsuit, ZeniMax had accused that Palmer Luckey, the co-founder of the company, stole trade secrets from ZeniMax to build the company’s signature product, the Oculus Rift. It also accused video game design legend and former employee, John Carmack, of stealing trade secrets. ZeniMax argued in the court that Luckey didn't even have the skills and brains to design the Rift. The lawsuit was dragged on for quite a bit with shocking revelations and accusations being made by both the companies against each other. At one point, even Mark Zuckerberg was dragged into the case. One of the most shocking turning point in the case came when Carmack admitted to stealing code and documents from ZeniMax on his way out of the company.

Towards the end, the jury ruled that even though Oculus didn’t steal any trade secrets but its founders had surely violated a non-disclosure agreement and also was guilty of “false designation." On the whole, Oculus is on the hook for a whopping $300 million, Luckey for $50 million, and co-founder Brendan Iribe is on the hook for $150 million.

Experts claim that even though the amounts of this judgement are most likely to be reduced on appeal, but trouble is still not over for Oculus.

ZeniMax is now seeking an injunction to block sales of any product that make uses of their technology. It is important to note here that the technology has already been widely distributed to developers who were working on several games for Oculus products, and notably the most popular Oculus Rift. If and when the injunction is granted by the court, it will result in limiting the games available for the Rift to only a few, which could really burn a huge hole in the sales of a company whose sales figure are already on a downwards trend.

Now the main question is, whether Oculus will be able to survive the $500 million judgment and the injunction if it is granted. The word in the market is that ZeniMax is putting its pressure on forcing a settlement and ending Oculus and its founders appeal process as early as possible. Whatever may be the case, the road ahead for Oculus doesn't look so smooth either way.

Great News For Virtual Reality and Chatbot Startups

A recent report named "Virtual Experiences Can Replace Reality" published by global computer company Oracle has put forth some interesting research about the upcoming marketing trends we could see in the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) startups.

The report, which involved taking a survey of approximately 800 companies in total, states that 78 per cent of companies interviewed are considering to offer virtual reality experiences to their customers by the end of year 2020.

All thanks to the advancements made in the technology sector over the years, information is now available online 24x7, and various consumer behaviour reports have shown that people want to use the World Wide Web to keep themselves informed. According to Oracle's report, about 40 per cent of the companies surveyed stated that a vast majority of their customers prefer gathering the information for themselves rather than contacting the company directly. The only time they contact the company's customer service is when they're considering purchasing the product.

According to statistics highlighted by Oracle's report, while 78 per cent of companies are wanting to make use of the power of VR for its various communication benefits, about 38 per cent of the companies have already gone ahead and integrated this comparatively new technology into their businesses.

Apart from VR, the other comparatively newer technology that is talked about in the report is chatbots. According to statistics revealed by the report, about 80 per cent of the companies surveyed are interested in making use of chatbots within a period of next 4 years so as to take their customer service to another level.

Chatbots have been garnering a lot of interest since a last couple of years. It was only last year that Deloitte Digital had organised a "Chatbot s— Get Ready for the Next Digital Revolution” event in Milan, Italy. The event saw many companies coming together and extensively discussing their innovative chatbots ideas and the various contributions they have made to business till date. The event had in attendance some of the most important members of the Italian and foreign marketing scene, including biggies like Sky and Fiat.

The Investments in the Chatbots technology has been increasing at a rapid pace, especially since the time that chatbots became integrated with Facebook's Messenger. Within just a month after Facebook's announcement, the number of active chatbots on Messenger totalled to over an impressive 35,000.

Global tech giants like Microsoft, Oracle, Google, IBM and Twitter are swiftly pacing towards the future. There's a great probability that by the year 2020, the world might be able to witness some great innovations in the field of bettering communication between companies and their customers.

[Top Image: Shutterstock]

5 Notable Upcoming Changes in Tech World in 2017

When it comes to the tech world, each year the innovations get better than the previous ones. Considering we just closed our doors to 2016 so as to welcome new possibilities and opportunities in the year 2017, we at www.indianweb2.com decided to make a list of top 5 changes in the tech world that we can expect to witness this year.

1) Cyberspace Rises

This year will witness the creation of a new and separate cyberspace, courtesy mixed reality, augmented reality and virtual reality. Although the technologies have come a long way, they still have a long way to go and conquer. Many software platforms and games' engines now come with default support for Virtual reality.

While the great potential that the three technologies hold is not a secret anymore, but still their application is just limited to entertainment. This year could see them entering the business applications world and revolutionising it completely. The social media world could also go under a massive change with the user experience being as immersive as ever. Tech giants like Facebook, Google etc. investing huge monies in VR is not just a simple coincidence.

2) Internet of Things

While 2016 wasn't such a good year for IoT, 2017 could be the year that Internet of things realises its true potential and break the highly insecure tech image it acquired the previous year.

According to experts, by the year 2020, there will be 20 to 50 billion devices connected to the IoT. Since IoT industry is already a reality and not a newcomer anymore, we can expect it to conquer new heights this year. While the heavy industry and the farming industry has already discovered and accepted the great benefits of IoT, this year we could see IoT entering our office space and transforming it completely. For example, some companies are already working on the concept of digital ceilings wherein normal ceilings will transform into an intelligent data hub to increase productivity, cut down operating costs of the buildings and provide a more personalized environment to workers.

3) The End of the App World

Nowadays, there's an individual app for everything. From cab booking to hotel booking to ordering food, we have an individual app for everything, but this year could see all these apps being replaced by a single virtual assistant. These virtual assistants will be uniting the functionality of all the varying apps that we make use on a day-to-day basis within a device in a single user interface (UI).

4) The Business Revolution

The brand new world of technology isn't restricted just to consumer space, but it has also found a way into our workplace, similar to the way mobile phones, app stores and tablets did during the IT consumerization phase. Hence, companies need to take an action now or risk the fear of standing on the sidelines forever.

Companies will have to acknowledge the importance of new techs like AI, IoT, VR, AR etc. and start incorporating them in their daily functioning to keep at pace with the changing world.

5) AI for the Masses

Artificial Intelligence will see major growth this year and can be expected to make more and more contributions in the business world. Hyper intelligent virtual assistants, biometric security software and applications that will be fully able to understand human speech will now come at the forefront.

Microsoft has already made a free deep learning toolkit available on the popular code sharing site Github, which resonates with the company’s strategy to make Artificial Intelligence available to the general masses. Anyone can make use of the toolkit to develop smart apps that can learn from their interactions with humans and other computers.

AI can make the ideas of applications that that fully understand human speech, or security softwares that function on the basis of facial recognition soon become a reality. In fact, banks are already making use of chatbot applications to attend to common customer enquiries. This year, we could witness AI entering in almost every part of an organization.

10 Top Things in Tech This Week

Busy is the way a majority of the world is living nowadays. If you ended up missing up on your tech updates this week due to the busy life that you're living, here we're to bail you out and give you all the things you must know that happened in the tech sector this week.

1) Microsoft Joined Linux, Exactly 15 Years After Calling it a ‘Cancer’

Yes, this happened. A news that caused a major shock in the tech industry all around the world, tech giant Microsoft ended up joining forces with its once archenemy Linux. The news is particularly shocking because in the year 2001, Microsoft’s previous CEO Steve Ballmer Ballmer called Linux a cancer. He said, “Linux is cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.” But, now it seems, Microsoft has come a long way from this, under the leadership of its new CEO Satya Nadella.

2) Imperva Introduced an Anti-Mirai Tool That Makes Your IoT Device Hack Proof

Considering the havoc that Mirai, the malware, was causing, an anti-Mirai tool is a necessity that every IoT device owner was looking for since long. For the unaware, Mirai has be responsible for single-handedly causing one of the worst distributed denial of service (DDoS) cyberattacks that the world had experienced in the last few years, and it has now spread and infected internet-connected devices in over 177 countries all around the world.

Seeing this, Imperva decided to come to the rescue of IoT device owners and developed a way through which they could easily come to know if their IoT devices were vulnerable to malware like Mirai. The USP of the tool is, that you don't have to physically buy or install anything to use it — all that you have to do is to visit the scanner website on the IoT device that you want to check. The scanner meticulously analyses the IP address and smart products details used for internet access.

3) Happy Finish Launches AI Technology Prototype Ahead of Crowdfunding

This week saw Happy Finish, the company known for its VR content and global production studio, announcing the launch of its Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, Shoegazer.

The AI, which is currently in the proof of concept (PoC) stage for the fashion and retail industry, makes use of image recognition and transfer learning technologies to identify brands and models of trainers in real-time, that too with a remarkable 95% accuracy. In order to support the full launch of Shoegazer, the company, which is renowned for its work in virtual and augmented reality and boasts of an impressive portfolio of commercial VR and AR experiences, is also gearing up to embark on a capital fundraising round for a whopping £395,000.

4) Google Teams Up With Indian Govt. To Solve India’s Infamous Toilet Problem

India's toilet problem is famous all around the world. According to data, about 60 percent of the total population in the country still defecate and urinate in the open. Not only is this figure really sad for the country with the second largest population on Earth, but it is also leading to serious sanitation issues in the country.

While the governments over the years have been trying to tackle this problem in their own way, the Modi government has decided to take the help of tech giant Google to solve this problem. India’s Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) and Google have joined hands to give people in India a toilet serach or toilet locator facility, that will give them the power of searching for toilets within the Google Maps by typing relevant words in English or in their native language, like “toilet,” “lavatory,” “swachhata” and “shulabh.”

5) WhatsApp Rolls Out Video-Calling Feature

Finally, one of the most-used messaging app gave its users a feature they have been vying for a quite a long time-the power of video-calling. Starting now, people will no longer have to have a separate app for instant messaging and a separate app for video calling because Facebook owned WhatsApp will now be able to provide us the best of both worlds. However, However, so far the update has been only rolled out to Windows Phone users.

6) Snapchat’s Snap Inc Files for IPO

Starting its journey in 2012, Snapchat is being termed as one of the fastest growing company that the world has seen in the recent times. And now, Snap Inc, which is Snapchat’s parent company, has filed for an initial public offering (IPO).

According to reports, the company could go public by March next year, and will be valued at $20-$25 billion. This will make it one of the largest technology IPO since the Chinese e-commerce major Alibaba Group Holding Ltd’s went public two years ago valued at a whopping $170.9 billion.

7) Demonetisation Effect: Google India helps Indians find an ATM nearby

In order to help Indians who are now on the streets constantly looking for a functional ATM, a scenario which is almost similar to the ones being witnessed a few months ago during the peak of Pokémon Go popularity, tech giant Google has decided to help the common man in their this search.

Google India’s homepage now has a ‘Find an ATM near you’ link, which when clicked takes one to Google Maps with a list of ATMs marked their surrounding areas.

8) Apple Contemplating to Integrate Augmented Reality into iPhone Camera App

According to a report in the BusinessInsider, Apple’s much famous iPhone's camera app could soon come with Augmented Reality integration, which allow users to point their phone at a real-world object and have it be recognized. Interestingly, the AR mode in the app could also allow app to recognise faces and add filters to it, something very similar to what Snapchat currently does. In 2015, Apple had acquired FaceShift, a company that was working on such a technology.

Tim Cook's passion for virtual reality and augmented reality, and how much potential he sees in the these two emerging computer platforms isn't unknown. In an interview earlier in the year, he had said, "There's virtual reality and there's augmented reality - both of these are incredibly interesting. But my own view is that augmented reality is the larger of the two, probably by far."

9) US Researchers Develop an e-device that can Monitor Heart, Recognise Speech

Researchers from the University of Colorado-Boulder and Northwestern University in the US have successfully developed a tiny, soft and wearable acoustic sensor that has the ability to measure vibrations in the human body. In addition to this, it even allows monitoring of human heart health as well as recognises speech. The device, which weighs less than one-hundredth of an ounce, and resembles a band-aid, can be mounted on almost any surface of the human body.

10) Intel pledges $250 million for autonomous driving tech

Considering that autonomous driving was declared as one of the top 5 Hottest Emerging Technologies of the year 2016 by the World Economic Forum, it comes as no surprise that Intel Capital has pledged to invest $250 million in autonomous driving over the next two years. The announcement was made by company’s CEO, Brian Krzanich, at the recent held Los Angeles Auto Show‘s Automobility event.

OnePlus 3 to launch in VR in June this year

In no time OnePlus has been able to charm its ways into the hearts of smartphones users with their unique offerings. It was only last year that the company had come up with the virtual reality offering in its OnePlus 2, which ended up making it the talk of the town.

In order to repeat its last year magic, OnePlus has once again taken to the VR technology. The company is expected to launch virtual reality with its next-generation OnePlus 3, sometime in June this year. This week's starting saw an interesting announcement being made by OnePlus about its Loop VR Headset, which will be a commendable upgrade of its Google Cardboard-inspired VR that it had brought out in the market last year.

Built by AntVR, the visor-style Loop Virtual reality Headset does look like a massive improvement from OnePlus' 2015's Cardboard. Apparently, the company is contemplating extending its usage beyond the launch event.

People wanting to get their hands on the Loop VR Headset will have to register themselves for it on the official Amazon Loop VR page. According to information made available by the company, the Loop VR Headset will be available for sale in India on the e-commerce website, Amazon India on June 3, 2016 and June 7, 2016 from 12 PM onwards. The headset would be available for buying exclusively through the Amazon app, at a mind boggling price of Re 1, including shipping. Yes, you read it right. Divulging further details about the sale, the company revealed that it just had 30,000 units of the headset up for sale.

According to various rumours doing round the tech rumour mill, the OnePlus 3 headset could be considerably similar to the HTC One devices in the looks department and run on OxygenOS, which is apparently based on Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow. Having an attractive full-metal unibody, the phone is expected to have an alert slider, USB Type-C port and a fingerprint scanner. In addition to this, the 5.5-inch FullHD display will also reportedly come power packed with a 3,000mAh battery, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor and 32GB/64GB memory variants and 4GB/6GB RAM.

Soon A New Version of Youtube Just For Virtual Reality

YouTube, the video sharing website that came into our lives in the year 2005, seems to be always on its toes for providing its users with the best of the best experiences possible. This time, the company is working towards taking treating its users to a much better quality of virtual reality experience.

In order to achieve this, Google, the parent company behind YouTube, is in the midst of developing a standalone YouTube mobile application for the company's recently announced Android-based virtual reality platform, Daydream. Clay Bavor, Head of VR, Google was responsible for making this news reach thousands and thousands of virtual reality enthusiasts during Google's recently concluded and much talked about I/O Developer conference.According to Google, the yet-to-be launched application has been developed with the sole aim of providing YouTube users with a much more easier and immersive way of finding and experiencing the virtual reality content on the website.

The much anticipated app is expected to hit the markets only after Google is done with the launch of Daydream, its virtual reality platform. Some experts believe that they both can also be launched together in fall this year. Though the date hasn't been set yet, YouTube did provide its users a first look of the app, which by looks does seems promising and much, much more immersive than the website's currently existing virtual reality features.

Avid YouTube users and virtual reality fans might already be aware about the website's limited virtual reality support videos, but the new YouTube virtual reality app is going to take the limited features factor to unlimited as the app will also offer its users with an immersive browsing and searching interface. Along with this, it will also include the already famous and in use features such as playlists and voice search etc.

The tech giant, Google, has been slowly working on its mission to incorporate virtual reality-focused functionality into the YouTube application for over an year now with support for 3D audio, 360-degree video flats, general Google Cardboard support and stereoscopic video.

In a recently published blogpost, the company has also divulged the fact that it has been working with content partners such as Tastemade, NBA and BuzzFeed etc. in order to explore new and innovative ways of telling a story in virtual environments that will help in providing valuable lessons about the whole way in which viewers and creators interact with a virtual reality video.

In addition to this, the video-sharing website also shared its plans of bringing its Jump Virtual Reality camera program to its YouTube Spaces in Los Angeles and New York City. According to the company, it also working hard towards bringing it soon to all of its functional global locations.