Augmented reality – flash in the pan or here to stay?

You may have noticed an Augmented Reality gold rush over the past few months. Brands are taking an increasing interest and agencies are coming up with lots of clever and inventive ways with which to utilise the technology.

But the question remains, is AR worth all this interest?

Revolution Magazine's top ten augmented campaigns reveals some pretty cool and (whisper it) really rather useful applications. It seems we’ve got over the gimmicky ‘let’s just do something in AR’ phase, with the Glasses Direct specs simulator being a particularly smart use of the technology.

For me though, the best uses of AR come not sat at your home or office PC, but rather when you’re out and about in the real world. Mobile AR applications allow you to enhance the world around you, providing real-time information via a hugely appropriate interface – the space you’re looking into. A great example of this is the Yelp Monocle i-phone app.

Now arguably it’s just as easy to be directed to your nearest restaurant via a good old fashioned ‘online map’ – but the theory is sound. Contextual AR makes a lot of sense.

What this kind of mobile AR application really reminds me of is Nokia’s Point and Find service. Point and Find recognises objects in real time via your camera phone and automatically links you to relevant web content. Combining services like Point and Find with AR seems like a particularly logical way to go. Especially when you think where it could lead...


So imagine it's 2012 and you're at a conference with lots of people you don’t know but should probably be talking to. You open up your camera phone, scan the room and are given a brief bio of each of the people in the room as you move over them. The app knows your profile and from this has deduced that there are two people in the room you must get to know. Two big AR arrows point them out to you. Genius.

Anyway, I digress. Is AR here to stay? Yes. But, to my mind, primarily as a way to enhance the world around you in clever and ultimately very useful ways.

In the mean time I’m off to talk to someone about my new Conference Mate™ Augmented Reality app. Anyone fancy investing?

Throw away your A to Z

You’ll never be lost in London again with the introduction of this new app for the iPhone - Acrossair’s ‘Nearest Tube’. Using the camera and touch screen, the iPhone’s internal compass and GPS will direct you to the nearest tube and show you how far away it is.

‘Nearest Tube’ really comes to life when you hold the iPhone up in front of you – it uses augmented reality to layer the lines on top of the image shown through the camera. It’s a great invention and fantastic if you’re wandering around London by foot.

Twitter: What's the bl**dy point? Part two.

What more can twitter do for your brand?

6. Brands can engage in a real two-way conversation with their customers – brands have the potential to listen to the buzz about their brand in the Twitter-sphere, simply by searching for their keywords and thus actively and instantly respond to their consumers and react instantly.

Search for you brand using Twitter and listen to the noise.

7. Build a reputation for your brand by following potential customers and journalists that write about your space.

8. Lead generation.

One question though that still remains as to how do I know who is interesting and worth following? Time is money and all that and I don’t want to listen to people waffling all day (I have Facebook for that). I'm currently trialling MrTweet...so watch this space on my thoughts.

But so far for me it has been a bit of random luck finding people. One simple way Twitter could make spreading the word much faster is by making it easier to search for people and categories. So far, it’s been a bit of a treasure hunt. Although I hear on the twitter blog that there might be progress.
So to get you started - here’s some Twitter voices we are following who we think have something good to say about digital or do digital good:
@BBCdigital
@BarrackObama
@russelldavies
@kevinrose
@BrandRepublic

You got any better twitterers to share?

Hayley

Twitter: What's the bl**dy point?

I have to admit, I did nearly give up with Twitter. I thought it was a geek world full of self-indulgent Facebook feeds. But what kept me going was not only characteristic sheer pigheadedness but also the fact that it’s full of early adopters (yes, geeks) who tend to be the type of people to talk about the industry stuff I want to know first. And the more I’ve started using it, the more benefits I can see.

So I’m sold….can I take you to the Twitter-side?

1. It’s not Facebook status feeds - Twitter is not full of self-indulgent Facebook-esque feeds. It’s all about knowledge sharing – so for you that means industry and brand knowledge building.

2. Keeps you ahead of the competition - by following the leading commentators and ordinary folk alike people are actively sharing industry information and news before it hits the regular media in nice dinky bite size pieces and links. Which makes you look clever in front of your clients and colleagues when you share a nice ‘new’ idea.

3. Networking – you don’t have to be mates with someone to stalk them now! Twitter allows you to follow who you like and it’s up to them if they want to follow you back or just ignore your noise – but quite often people will return the favour and engage in dialogue.

4. Profile raising – if enough people start following you and your ramblings, you can go from zero to hero and you’ll be a keynote speaker at FOWA in no time.

5. Easier than you thought - If you down load a Twitter firefox add on – it makes it really simple and quick to up-date and follow feeds. No more logging into a distracting webpage all the time. Try this: >https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5081

Hayley

Friday night emails will never be the same!

Today Google announcesa potential saviour from those drunken moments of madness after a night of beers, spirits and other stimulants. Active during prime hours of risk (Friday and Saturday evenings), Google mail will present you with a series of simple mathematical tests that you need to (correctly) answer before the email is sent. Added to this challenge, these simple sums have to be completed within a time limit!

Jon Perlow, a Gmail engineer who created the software, announced the new product on Google's Gmail blog, explaining that he himself had sent some unfortunate late-night emails.

He said: "Sometimes I send messages I shouldn't send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late-night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together."

"Gmail can't always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we're launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help.

"Hopefully Mail Goggles will prevent many of you out there from sending messages you wish you hadn't. Like that late-night memo -- I mean mission statement -- to the entire firm."

Gmail users can set Mail Goggles to activate at any time they feel they might need protection.

So sit back, relax, have an extra pint, with the knowledge that now, your letter telling the boss where to stick his job or that email to the ex telling them they should really stop being the idiot and get a life are risks you dont have to worry about any more.....

Google release 'Chrome' browser

Google today announced that it is launching Chrome, its own open-source browser. Their thinking behind the new browser is that the internet is used much differently to how it used to be. People use the web for content-(and processor-) rich media like video and interactive Flash, and older browsers simply can't keep up. They are unstable and crash, or incompatible.



Chrome aims to solve the problem by using independent tabs as a means of viewing content. So if one tab overloads and crashes, Chrome will just close that tab, not crash completely. The user will also be able to see all processes and plugins that are running on a page, and be able to see which tabs are using up the most CPU.



While these advances sound excellent, it will be interesting to see how Chrome fares in terms of compliance with web design standards such as CSS, java and other plugins. I'm also a little wary of switching over to tabbed browsing - I've been a committed 'window opener' ever since I started using the web and it will be a hard habit to break.

Further reading:
Wikipedia
Google comic

The Digital Nomad gets a new toy (that lasts just that bit longer)

"I want all-day computing (wherever I am!)"
As connectivity and mobility have evolved over the last few years, a new working segment has emerged, known as the Digital Nomad. Their working space, although still with some roots in the office space, has grown into more of a virtual one. Security, VPN and connectivity technologies have all had major investment in recent years, with impressive results, however, the item that is most crucial to our work, our laptop, has always fallen at the hurdle of having a reasonable lifetime away from a power source or plug socket!

Even with more plug sockets being made available to our Digital Nomads in their virtual workspace (you can even get these on trains), we still end up playing the laptop version of Russian roulette as the figures drop on the power-source indicator (has anyone really managed to squeeze the last amp/volt out of their machine without some critical data loss?)

Today, Dell has announced its latest range of Lattitude laptops, claiming a battery-busting 19 hours of cable-free computing (thats your average day in advertising!). In a market that's expected to tip sales figures of around 1 billion over the next five years, the question is "could this be the next 'big' thing' that hardware manufacturers will be jumping on?" (over and above the current "how slim can we make it" and "how fast it is" sales pitches) to beat their competitors off the knees of the Digital Nomad?

Dell clearly considers this to be a coup for them, investing almost 2 years of research (they say almost 1 million man hours!) to get to the point where the cost to produce allows them to sell the new Lattitude computers for between $800-1400.

They have certainly been thinking a little more out of the box (or perhaps in this instance, 'away from the lap') realising that more mobile means more likely to lose their hallowed machine. They claim almost 17,000 machines were lost or left away from the office last year, and to try and resolve the nightmare of losing your laptop, they're adding more security with biometric scanning and the ability to trace and disable your machine if lost or stolen!

That old devil Six Degrees of Freedom!

For a good while now, I've always wondered how the theory of Six Degrees of Separation has been affected (or perhaps evolved) into a lesser figure through the explosion of social networking and our predilection of lowering barriers to making friends within the online space.

For those, like myself who considered this to be a reasonably recent theory, it actually goes way back (pre-interweb) to the late 60's and some research by Stanley Milgram and Jeffrey Travers, who engaged in a study where people were asked to send a letter (via acquaintances) to a Boston stockbroker. Of the 300 or so letter chains that were sent, the average number of separation degrees was 6.2!






















Rather than changing this figure (one would initially consider it being lowered), the internet has merely gone to validate (beyond doubt), that the theory is correct and that we are all connected in this way.

Probably the most conclusive research recently undertaken was using online chat, where Microsoft researchers studied the addresses of 30bn instant messages sent during a single month in 2006 through their instant messaging application....a more planetary research piece than the localised one carried out 40 or so years previously!

So with this theory well and truly validated, we really can say "It's a small world".

Brand Wars: The battle for the Best Brand

Today, it was announced that Microsoft has finally been ousted from the top spot for the UK's top consumer brand by Google.

In the survey, run by the Centre for Brand Analysis, across an audience of 2,200 consumers, the search engine moves up two places, knocking Microsoft from the top spot and Mercedes into 3rd place, adding to the momentum already gained by Google, in an earlier research piece where they were named 'Strongest Brand' in the Superbrands survey (2008).

The BBC was the highest ranked UK brand (4th), BA (5th), Royal Doulton (6th).

One of the interesting trends from this latest research was that none of the UK's supermarkets made it into the top 100. Tesco dropped from 230th to 301st, Sainbury's fell to 232nd and Asda dropped 253 places.

Disparity also reigned amongst the more premium food brands with M&S in at 17th place and Waitrose down at 179th!

Shifting from anecdotal to factual..Google research on organic vs PPC!

Today, Google revealed its first piece of major research on the value to a brand of balancing search results real-estate between Organic and PPC.

For some years now, I've listened to the sales banter from those organisations that make their business from both natural and paid-for search, convincing me that balancing can only be a good thing. Anecdotal stories about seeing a brand on both left and right hand areas of the screen and eyetracker visualisations showing me where my eyes apparently go still had the fundamental flaw that this is the obvious explanation from someone who made money out of selling me both services! These latest findings start (in some way) to shift from the anecdotal to the data-factual.

Run across their European sites, the research showed that coming top of organic listings raised purchase consideration of a brand by 4% and exposure to a listing in the top paid position (with no organic listing on the page) increased purchase consideration by 20%. Combining both a high-ranking natural listing and paid for, raised purchase consideration by 22% and, according to this first batch of research, this trend is seen across most verticals and all markets.

The cynic in me still has lots of questions, however, it's a great start and one backed by numbers not the sales targets...I wait with baited breath!

Google gets Flashy

Google announced on their official blog that they will finally be able to index flash sites.

This is great news for companies looking to get a little more search engine coverage from their Rich Media websites, and hey, it's only taken them 12 years!

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html