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Starting today, the Venetian-Palazzo Casino and Hotel (owned by The Las Vegas Sands Corp.) is beginning to employ an app technology by Meridian as their indoor navigation service of choice in order to help you get around their casino more efficiently. This new "wayfinding" technology will reside in the resort's new app called VP Pocket Concierge. I first covered Meridian back in March of 2011. At that time, the company (formerly called Spotlight Mobile) had just completed wayfinding pilots at Powell’s Books and the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Oregon. If you’ve never used the company's flagship app (also called Meridian), its main function is to let merchants or property owners create extremely granular, indoor maps of their stores or properties. This allows consumers to more easily find products or locations within that property, even though these locations could be off-the-grid with other typical GPS applications.

As I sit here with 75% of my laptop battery left, drenched in sweat, in a totally dark house, recapping my first Startup Weekend experience — unfortunately I am one of the last of the 500,000 central Ohioans affected by power outages due to last weekend's storms — I realize that I love the Startup Weekend concept. That concept, which we have covered before on several occasions, is simple: take a bunch of people with ideas and lock them into a room for 54 hours until the create something. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation funds a brilliant model. It gets people to do stuff, make stuff…a push to action. At a local level, I've seen enough success stories like Cannon.fm, Venueseen and Fundable emerge from the platform that I was intrigued to attend the event when it traveled to Columbus Ohio. I'm a big believer in rapid prototyping and I found that StartupWeekend is rapid prototyping for businesses.

Qualcomm announced an upgrade to their Vuforia Augmented Reality platform on Wednesday. Vuforia is a platform that focuses on using images as the "targets" to launch an AR experience, rather than requiring consumers to scan QR codes or other glyphs. So instead of scanning a barcode, you just scan a specific picture to start the AR experience on your mobile phone or tablet (it could launch a video, or a 3D model, etc.) There are many AR companies that employ this method of recognizing images. That is nothing new. The difference here is that the old version of Vuforia required the database of images that are the "targets" to be stored locally on the device running their software and therefore had a limited capacity of storage (around 80 images). This new system allows developers to continue using local app storage of image targets but they can also now implement programatic, API-based access to up to 1 million targets using a new cloud database system.

In an attempt to watch their development, I've been keeping tabs on a small Columbus OH startup called Cannon.fm. I first talked with them several weeks ago before their product launch, and have been interviewing them occasionally, to see how they are adapting, changing, improving, revising their business model and product. That product — a streaming radio iOS app called Cannon.fm that is specifically for local musicians — launched over the weekend. How is it working out? It's not perfect, I can't lie, but I am still loving it.

When it comes to Augmented Reality browsers on mobile devices, I always particularly liked Junaio (just one of the many AR tools created and maintained by Munich-based company Metaio). It's an especially appealing option since it's quite powerful, and has many, many content channels to choose from (a good side effect of their successful developer outreach - they have over 10,000 active content developers to date). I'll admit (and I've said this before) that while there are some great AR content choices in the app — like the Instagram channel where you can see local Instagram shots based on where they were tagged — I've always found the "channel" motif for organizing AR content clumsy and slightly confusing. That is until now.