This week, a new AR-centric social networking app launched, which will let users pull up their friends' profiles by pointing their smartphone camera at them. Called Octi, the app will let people make a personal profile by choosing photos, favorite songs from Spotify, fun links from YouTube, and sticker-like custom messages. Instead, they'll hover around you as a halo of thumbnail-sized icons whenever someone with the app on their phone points their camera at you. Octi uses facial recognition software to identify whether someone you point your camera at has a profile, and will automatically pull it up as an AR overlay if you're already connected as friends. The app will also let you add new friends by pointing your camera at someone and then send them a friend request, so long as they have a profile with Octi.

A new startup says it can make it easier for brands to ramp up the volume and quality of their content on social media, with the help of artificial intelligence. Justin Fuisz, who founded the interactive video ad startup Fuisz Video in 2013, is rolling out Octi, a video technology company designed to help marketers pull together video shot by teams on the ground at live events and use that content to populate their various social media feeds. Marketers these days have an ever-pressing need to produce more and more content for their social media channels. But feeding that beast often requires paying multiple agencies to crank out post after post--and the quality of such content can vary widely. Instead, Octi allows marketers to shoot videos using multiple cameras at the same time and then uses artificial intelligence to automatically produce a seamlessly edited single clip to be distributed on social media, according to Mr. Fuisz.