Someone in the office (naming no names) showed me a ‘chilling’ story on The Sun’s website this week. Amazingly it seemed, a random punter had taken a photo of a ghostly figure in the mirror of their hotel room. My God, maybe ghosts really do exist…

I had a closer look at the picture though and couldn’t help thinking that the ‘ghost’ looked a bit familiar.

In fact, it looked a hell of a lot like a ghost that features in an iPhone app I downloaded recently called ‘Ghost Capture’. It allows users to choose from a range of ghostly supernatural figures and then insert them into any photo they’ve taken on their iPhone, allowing them to scare the crap out of unsuspecting photo subjects – perfect for winding up your Mum.

If you look at the screenshots in the review of the app in the app store, you can quite clearly see the ‘ghost’ that appears in The Sun’s picture (top right, third row down) and here’s another picture featuring her made using the app.

Either The Sun has been genuinely duped by a mischievous punter, or they were having a bit of a slow news day and fancied giving Ramada Jarvis hotels a bit of a plug on the back of a tenuous story. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and plump for the former.

Unbelievably though, when I had a quick look on their site I found another very similar story from February of this year. Look closely at the ‘ghost’ from that story and then at the line of ghosts on the fourth row down of ghost capture. Spot any similarities?! They even had the front to ask the bloke who claims to have taken the picture to hold up a crappy phone (not an iPhone) to try and cover their tracks.

Clearly this isn’t journalism at its finest, I just can’t believe they had the cheek to pull the same thing twice at the expense of their users. At least a few of the comments at the bottom of February’s ’story’ show that not everyone was fooled.

News International (who own The Sun and The Times newspapers) is planning to introduce a paywall to its timesonline.co.uk website in June on the back of Rupert Murdoch’s assertion that users will be willing to pay for quality content. If he’s planning to roll this paywall strategy out to thesun.co.uk as many are predicting, he may need to take a hard look at the quality of its content first.

Acrossair is one of the first augmented reality applications to go live on the iPhone AppStore. Using the phone’s video function, the application shows Londoners where the nearest tube stations are in relation to their location. The app tells you how far away (in kilometers) you are from the station, as well as what lines operate out of the station.

Click here to see the app in action.

This is an excellent example of adding utility to augmented reality (AR). Although AR has been around for over a year it has recently become very popular in marketing communications for a number of brands. The danger of such popular technologies is ‘bandwagoning,’ where marketers create applications which serve no real purpose other than to appear current.