No, the dragons in my life aren’t named Mike Arrington, although we did have a fun little debate over on Techcrunch the other day.

When I visited Munich I dropped by Metaio’s headquarters where they showed me their latest augmented reality prototype, which puts a virtual character onto a building. You can see it for yourself.

This was just a little fun in the snow, but later this week Metaio will put its augmented reality expertise to work on a major sporting event. More on that when the embargo ends.

Hope you enjoy this video from the snow of Munich. Damn it was cold! 🙂

OK, the Quora thing distracted me a bit from learning about new startups. So, while I’m still answering questions on Quora (with a twist, see if you can spot it) let’s get back into it. Interesting that lots of other startups are asking me to check their “QA” sites out. One I’ve been liking a lot is Namesake, but I don’t want to cause the bad feelings there that I did with Quora, so will be less hypish with that service.

Anyway, look at two companies I interviewed recently. The first, Rypple, helps companies review their employees much better by doing reviews ongoing and not forcing a “big annual review.” Watch the video with Rypple’s CEO, where he explains why it’s so special. There’s a longer article, along with an option of a shorter video, over on Rackspace’s Building43 site.

The second, Simian, is for creative people and agencies and is a new kind of project management system. I recently met with the team and they showed me what makes it great for creatives.

Hope you enjoy this look at these two interesting companies. Simian launched today, too.

Tomorrow I’ll be heading to Geneva, Switzerland, to attend the LIFT Conference and also to see a bunch more startups. If you want to meet up there, send me email at scobleizer@gmail.com