You might not love Ikea’s furniture, but you can’t deny that Ikea’s marketing strategy is nothing but brilliant: a cutting-edge blend of mobile, emerging technologies and social media.

Mobile Augmented Reality App
You see something, you like it. You don’t buy it! Why? The most common reason is that you can’t picture it in your own house. Visual memory is not a common talent, planning by the sheer power of imagination is even rarer.

The Ikea mobile application, dubbed Portable Interior Planner, is your new bionic eye. With a very clean and easy-to-use interface, it gives customers the ability to see exactly how the new designs will look in their home. And to do this, it uses mobile augmented reality features.

Here’s how it works:

• The application has images of the new PS line. Choose a product, select “Take a Picture” and aim the camera of the phone where you’re planning to place the new piece of furniture.
• When you do so, the piece of furniture is superimposed on top of the room viewed through the camera. Furniture pieces are also scaled to size, so that the proportions of the piece are not distorted.By using keys on the handset, you can move the piece of furniture in different directions.
• Once you’re happy with the result, you can use the camera to take a picture of the scene. The photo can either be saved on the phone, or sent via MMS directly from within the application.

For the German launch of the PS line, Ikea distributed the mobile application in three ways:

1. In-store through posters urging customers to send a free text message to receive a link to download the application.
2. On the Ikea website
3. Through Bluetooth pillars installed in certain stores.

Mobile Coupons and Loyalty Programs
How do you keep customers informed, improve their lifetime value and loyalty? Run a monthly contest, offer something valuable as a prize, get your customers to opt-in, and then form a community of loyal members who recieve exclusive promos.

That’s the gist of Ikea’s Seattle store marketing strategy in the last six months: consumers can enter for a chance to win the $500 Ikea gift card by texting the keyword “winner” to an Ikea short code.  When they first do so, they’re asked to enroll in Ikea Mobile, the retailer’s free program that provides alerts and special deals. Every month Ikea texts its members a coupon code, which they can redeem to the Mobile kiosk at the Seattle store.
Guess a number of redemptions? More than 15,000 to date!

Facebook Photo Tagging Contest

The story has gone viral and is already a social media case study!

Advertising agency Forsman and Bodenfors was engaged by Ikea, to create a special launch campaign for a new store in Malmo. The agency created a Facebook profile for the store manager, Gordon Gustavsson. Over a two-week period, it uploaded images from of Ikea showrooms to his Facebook photo album, and the first person to tag their name to a product in the pictures, won it.

Pure creative genius at work!

Music and Innovation hardly get together and, when they do, the War of the Roses is a more likely scenario than Star Trek. Not always though.

Augmented Reality might be a peaceful exception. A new wave of music videos is indeed emerging, with the promise to enable new creative ways for artists to interact with their fans.

The first experiment carries the signature of an artist known for his love story with new media, John Mayer.  His new music video “Heartbreak Warfare,” from the upcoming Battle Studies album, makes use of augmented reality technologies and is now live on his website.  Fans with a webcam can experience the new video by downloading an AR icon from the site and lining it up with their webcam or opening it on a mobile phone. Once the computer acknowledges the marker, the video will start playing with the user inside the background!

Check Mayer’s proud interview with Wired for some backstage intelligence.

Next up is an Australian band, Lost Valentinos, who is using AR in a very different way. Each band member was shot while performing the song on its own, then matched with a marker. Now it’s totally up to their fans to compose their own videoclip.

Unlike the broadcast era, AR doesn’t require multi-million dollar budgets. The only challenge is to how creative and engaging you want to be.

It’s been a week dense of potentially game-changing facts for the mobile industry.

MOBILE AUGMENTED REALITY BECOMES MORE REAL

Until now, the development of mobile augmented reality apps for the Iphone has been hindered by Apple’s decision to keep the API for the analysis of live-streaming private.

The Game Changers: Visual Media Lab at Ben Gurion University and HIT Lab NZ.

The scientists from the two computer teams have released a software  that lets anyone perform on-the-fly analysis of live streaming video on the iPhone and they have made it public through AR specialist GamesAlFresco.

In the meantime, enjoy the debut of new mobile AR apps:

• Layar, now on the Iphone AppStore.
• Urbanspoon, which added an augmented reality view.
• Lodestone AR Compass, a browser for the outdoors, now available for the iPhone.

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SMARTPHONES WAR: THE DROID

A recent report from Canalys shows that Apple’s share of the US smartphone market in the second quarter was 23 percent, that’s a 16 percent jump from the same period a year-ago and representing an astounding 365 percent increase year to year.

The Game Changers: Google Android.

Google, Verizon and Motorola have joined forces against the Iphone monopoly. What’s been saluted as the anti-Iphone is a phone that will run on Android, have real multitasking capabilities, a real keyboard and use the Verizon network.

In the meantime, enjoy the first screenshots of Android 2.0. Boy Genius Report has an early build of Android 2.0 installed and offers a bunch of first looks.  The contact integration with Facebook and the unified Inbox suggest some similarities to the webOS Synergy feature of the Palm Pre. BGR also sees native Exchange integration. And a new Car Home shortcut gathers activities you’d likely do while driving — voice commands, getting directions and more.

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LOCATION-BASED SERVICES MEET PROXIMITY MARKETING

Proximity marketing done right is a tough nut to crack. Many have tried and failed.

The Game Changer: FourSquare

FourSquare is playfully showing to the world that proximity marketing can really do the magic: creating a service that has value for both the end-user and the advertisers/venues. The AdSense of 2010 is going to be mobile and location-driven. The keyword based advertising is not here to stay, as we know it.

According to TheNextWeb FourSquare will soon be available “everywhere”.

In the meantime, enjoy the video of  FourSquare founder checking with an Oyster card, showing the potential of the social game, when combined with RFID. Expect more to come in terms of proximity marketing via the mobile social game that is taking the world by storm.

FourTap – Checking in to Foursquare using an Oystercard from danw on Vimeo.

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MOBILE BROADCASTING
The plague of the mobile world is fragmentation. You can’t scale a business if you’re not open and if there is no standard.

The Game Changer: A standard!

Finally, the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) unanimously agreed on the final mobile broadcast TV standard, the ATSC A/153 Mobile DTV Vestigial Side Band (VSB). In other words, you might “soon” be able to enjoy some mobile TV time.

Augmented Reality  technologies spilled sci-fi fantasies into real life. Mobile Augmented Reality is pushing the envelope, by allowing virtual worlds to creep into the physical environment that surrounds us and “alter” it.

Hand from Above provides an artistic example of what is to come. Inspired by Land of the Giants and Goliath, it shows pedestrians at the mercy of a giant deity who in real-time tickles, stretches or removes them. Hands from Above is a joint project, between the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology, FACT, and Liverpool City Council for BBC Big Screen Liverpool and the Live Sites Network.

Hand from Above from Chris O’Shea on Vimeo.

Mobile Augmented Reality is still in its infancy, but it is clear that it is creating a radically new way to organize and interact with information. ”In the future, we see augmented reality as a component of any kind of digital media interaction,” said Mobilizy’s co-CEO, Alexander Igelsboeck, at the EmTech@MIT session.

New AR apps have been released this week. Here’s a selection.

TAG: MOBILE AUGMENTED REALITY
-Bionic Eye now available on the Iphone
In July it was launched under the name of Nearest Subway. Now the app is called Bionic Eye and is available for Iphone 3GS users, for $1. It works anywhere in the US, and you can buy add-ons for the subway of New York, Washington and Chicago from within the app. As you scan your surroundings, the app updates in real time and shows you where things are. Moving the iPhone to a horizontal position, it will show you a list.

-Robotvision
The iPhone AR app finds nearby Tweets, geo-tagged Flickr photos and places of interest. It is powered by Bing and uses Yelp and Citysearch for users’ reviews on restaurants and businesses. When you point your iPhone 3GS towards the ground, the Robotvision app creates a map view of your location and displays restaurant and business locations as pins on the map. When you find something interesting, you can get reviews of the business, the address and even make a phone call, just by tapping the place that interests you. Robotvision is available for $0.99 on the AppStore.

-Layar Enhances Augmented Reality Browser Platform With 3D Capabilities
Layar, one of the earliest and highest-profile augmented reality browsers for mobile devices, announced that it will soon add 3D capabilities to its Android tools, allowing developers to offer new levels of immersive experiences. The release is expected for November.

-Cheap Gas
When you enable the “Cyborg” mode, as you aim the phone in the direction of different gas stations, the Cheap Gas app will show prices of gas at those stations hovering in the air.  By tapping on the one that interests you, it will show the details about that gas station and allow you to get directions.

-Insqribe Mobile Marketing with AR
Insqribe has released an Augmented Reality (AR) version of their real-time proximity based marketing platform. I’d be very interested in seeing how brands get involved into AR advertising.

TAG: Twitter

-Flyar - Twitter with an AR Twist
YDreams, a Portuguese company, has released an AR twitter product called Flyar for your PC. It works as a screensaver: look at your screen as if it where a mirror and see floating birds chirping your twitter feeds out. Move them away through gestures and enjoy.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Bionic Eye: Augmented iPhone Awesomeness Now Available (wired.com)
• Bing Comes To The iPhone Via Robotvision (techcrunch.com)

Is AR going to set the foundations for a world full of possibilites or is it an ambiguous technology that is going to feed the next Big Brother?

Take a look….

-Facebook and Augmented Reality: Heaven or Hell?  by Mikiane.

Mobile Mixed Reality by the Nokia Research Center- via IntoMobile.  Research paper available in PDF.

Mobile services without location are similar to a car without the engine. You end-up with web-like clones: dating, games, news, etc. No offense to any of the players in the space. But it just tastes as a surrogate. Not surprisingly eMarketer labels m-commerce as a business in its infancy.

Unlocking the potential of location-based services means cracking the nut of mobile as a revenue machine. Like AdSense, it’s a mixing of what’s potentially useful for a consumer with a way to make money for advertisers.

Technological and privacy limitations have hindered the development of location –based services for the past 10 years. The “We’re not there yet!” phrase has indeed become industry cliché.

But things have been changing and a few interesting trends have emerged in the last few months.

What didn’t work

Pure location-based social networks: Brightkite, Google Latitude and Loopt. Turns out that just sharing your location with strangers or Gmail contacts is intriguing only for a small audience.

What could have worked

Dodgeball, but it was too early for its time.

What looks promising

Proximity marketing with a twist of engagement.

One bright execution is Foursquare that has been taking the early adopters’ sphere by storm, after its SXSW debut. Suddenly it doesn’t seem egotistical to broadcast your activities because it’s now part of a game.

Foursquare, founded by the very same men behind Dodgeball, Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, pairs location based services with social game play. The game rewards you with points and badges for checking in at bars and restaurants, and lets you compete with friends. If any of your friends check in, you get the alert through a push notification: a compelling (read “irresistible”) reminder that you should check in as well, which generates a ripple effect and keeps fueling the addiction to the game.

The most coveted title is that of “mayor” of a venue, which happens when you visit a place more than anyone else in the past 60 days.

In less than 6 months, FourSquare has succeeded where others failed: being a local directory that combines mobile, location-awareness, and the ability to sort data by distance and social relevance. Users get addicted and retailers have new engaging ways to attract them. So far the involvement of retailers has been spontaneous and user-initiated: bars and restaurants have started creating special promos for “mayors” and FourSquare pros. Destination Bar in New York’s East Village and Marsh Cafe in San Francisco offer free drinks to the “mayor,” and Southside Coffee in Brooklyn listed the “mayor” on a chalkboard outside.

Unlike Yelp, FourSquare has the advantage of offering retailers the ability to track the exact foot traffic driven by FourSquare, whereas the review site only measures a small percentage of it (the elite of the reviewers).

Most of the FourSquare users are on the iPhone.  But, as of yesterday there is also an Android app and more are in the pipeline.

It’s no surprise that blogs such as Mashable have called Foursquare “The Next Twitter” and TechCrunch believes in Foursquare’s “ Business Potential of Location-Based Services.”

Being able to connect web advertising, recommendations, and social media buzz to an actual person walking into your store has long been the holy grail of the advertising world.  The main challenge that FourSquare faces now is how to scale its business and start offering venues and retailers flexible tools to promote themselves and track the success of their initiatives.

What else is next?

1) The “Social Location” Era

The cat is finally out of the bag: Facebook wants to win the mobile advertising dollars. Yesterday it announced its partnership with Nokia to introduce lifecasting with Ovi, enabling users to publish their location and status updates directly to their Facebook account from the homescreen of their mobile device.

See the opportunity for advertisers to revamp their Facebook Fan Pages with something far more lucrative ? Facebook knows better and today it made another major step by announcing the availability of its Facebook Connect API for the mobile-web.

2)Local Deal Finders

Here’s a nice example of what’s coming. Mastercard “Priceless Picks“, a dynamic, social app which uses your location to show the nearest ‘priceless’ deals that other consumers have pointed out.

3) Mobile Search with a Twist

The space is a very competitive one with 800-pound gorillas as Google and Nokia and smaller startups like Geodelic, Dopplr and NearbyNow, who claims that iPhone shoppers average 6 to 8 percent conversion to purchase, with most of those purchases going to local stores.

A couple of interesting new entries:

-GetFugu – The debut is scheduled for next week at GigaOM’s Mobilize 09. On that occasion, GetFugu will demo something that on paper looks unique and intruiguing from both a end-user and the retailers perspective : a service with four options, “See It,” vision recognition (ARL) “Say It,” voice recognition (VRL) “Find It,” location recognition (GRL)and “Get It,” Hot-Spotting services.

In the words of Rich Jenkins, the Company’s Co-Founder: “With GetFugu, you can take a photo of a logo on your sneaker, or a store window, and it’ll take you wherever the company wants you to go, whether it’s to its website or to a coupon. Or you can access the brand by voice, saying ‘Coca Cola,’ and it’ll take you right there. The third dimension is hotspotting where once you go into one of these brands, you see a pair of Gap jeans you like on the video, you press the screen on the pair of jeans you like and it gives you the ability to buy those jeans, pay for it, select the color and size and 3 days later you have it in your home.”

In addition you can also earn cash with a GetFugu debit card which rewards loyal customers.

-Aloqa - Yesterday, Aloqa partnered with SkyhookWireless, an early entrant in the space with a proprietary hybrid positioning system that combines the benefits of GPS, Wi-Fi positioning and cell-tower triangulation. The partnership will allow Aloqa to offer a mobile service that proactively notifies users of interesting places, events, and more in and around close proximity.

4) Augmented Reality

As predicted , AR is taking the mobile world by storm. As soon as the new iPhone SDK will be available, expect your augmented reality applications to tell you what you are looking for and where to find it.  All nearby restaurants, bars, and cafes will be reviewed and their menus easily available at your fingertips.  Detailed sales information for all books, dvds, and videogames will be available.

A sneak peak at what’s coming is now available through the Yelp new iPhone app and on Android phones with Layar.

5) Nokia Point&Find

The platform, in its beta, uses real-time image processing to recognize real-world objects in a Nokia database of virtually tagged items using the phone’s camera, Internet connection, and GPS data. Think of this platform, combined with the new Ovi-Facebook lifecasting possibilities…

6) Twitter?

With its upcoming geo-location API and business analytics, it is definitely a potential disruptor in this scene.

Stay tuned for more!!

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Recommended Readings

Pantyhose and Oranges (Some Thoughts on Foursquare and User Engagement)

Foursquare Shows The Business Potential Of Location-Based Services

Why Yelp (…and Every Single Retail Establishment) Should Support Foursquare

Foursquare as a Mobile, Social, Content Platform

]]> http://snowcrashing.com/2009/09/03/are-we-there-yet/feed/ 5 http://snowcrashing.com/2009/07/19/youre-not-a-sci-fi-nerd-anymore/ http://snowcrashing.com/2009/07/19/youre-not-a-sci-fi-nerd-anymore/#comments Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:34:47 +0000 Antonella Stellacci http://snowcrashing.com/?p=351

There’s a fascinating new trend in the mobile application space: Augmented Reality.

The technology, which superimposes graphics and information on live camera feeds, is not new, but the newest generation of smartphones are about to make it mainstream.

So what is Augmented Reality and what’s the big deal? AR is a graphics-oriented technology that blends sounds, haptics, and even smell to the natural world. So for example picture yourself using your cell phone to view the real world through its camera lens and while doing so, being able to interact with it. How? You could get twitts of the people all around you or the playlists and music streams of your neighborhood or see who built that statue that you’re staring at…

Now stop dreaming, you’re not a sci-fi nerd anymore! This is happening now…And Augmented Reality App space can already count on big investors.

USC and Nokia have partner to work on the next frontier of AR. “While there is no limit on future applications for augmented reality experiences on mobile devices, the enabling technologies behind complex augmented reality are still in the research stages,” said USC professor Ulrich Neumann of the Computer Science Department in the Viterbi School of Engineering. 

Apple too has patented its own AR technology for mobiles. And a new breed of start-ups is betting on the future of AR for mobile devices.

Dutch start-up SPRXmobile, is one of them. Its cell phone browser Layar, is an app for Android phones that provides information about points of interest as you’re seeing them: real estate listings, job posts and reviews.

Unfortunately you can not get this app on your iPhones or in the US. Apple resistance to making its live video feed API public, has hindered the roll-out of Layar and many similar AR apps on the mainstream iPhone platform. A few companies have  protested and signed a petition.

The revolution that AR can usher has not been stopped though, and sooner or later we will start interacting in a totally different way: with content, with the environment that surrounds us, with brands. As an artist you could offer apps to interact during your live gigs (sell your music or send a personal playlist or card to your fans with links to videos or to your site).As a end-user you could point to a movie poster and download reviews, find the closest theater, buy a ticket, maybe get one for free with a 3D coupon on your phone, and that is what Nokia’s Point and Find will soon allow you to do. As a retailer or brand you could offer information and promotions when they are most relevant (in-store and on-pack like Lego’s digital box); learning could become pervasive instead of compartmentalized into the books experience…

Watch these videos for some amazing inspiration and start getting ready for a new era….

Nearest Tube

The first version of the app, which has already been submitted to Apple, will cost $1.79 per city and will support two U.S. cities to start — New York and San Francisco. Apps for London, Tokyo and Berlin have also been submitted.

TwittARound

You hold the phone in front of you and then get a view of tweets based on their location data — as long as the user has decided to share that information. TwittARound isn’t available on the App Store yet

Virtual Graffiti

Amazing 3-D mapping application today that captures the real world and then lets artists draw graffiti all over it. Check VentureBeat coverage for more details.

TAT Augmented ID

This utilizes facial recognition software (supplied by Polar Rose) to visualize the digital identities of those around you.

Zagat

The latest application from NRU and Zagat for Android phones that finds restaurants and bars near you.

Wikitude

Austrian company Mobilizy launched Wikitude, an augmented reality browser based on the Android platform using information from Wikipedia, user-generated recommendations from Qype and the photo-sharing community Panoramio. It is a travel guide that can annotate landmarks and mountains.

At Wimbledon this year, Mobilizy worked with I.B.M. to develop an application for the T-Mobile G1 phone that displayed real-time information about matches in progress, as well as dining and transportation options for fans.

Recommended Readings

Game Alfresco Blog

Kicking Reality Up A Notch – NYT

Startups looking to make money by enhancing reality- VentureBeat

The Experience Revolution: How Augmented Reality is about to change how you live, advertise and brand- Simon Mainwaring

Augmented Reality On iphone Delayed, But Hardly Prevented – ThinkArtificially

AR Consortium