Agora Media Group Innovation Blog

Due to increasing interest in Augmented Reality, the creative question rises where Augmented Reality can benefit the user?
Theoretically, all is ‘reality’ and all can be augmented with meta-data, but what are the fields that will benefit most?
If one reads the articles and watches the videos on Youtube, one cannot deny the futurisic and science fictional touch that Augmented Reality brings along and fires up creativity and innovativity.

In this article we set out a list of Augmented Reality applications which in some cases are already prototyped, investigated or in use.
This list is probably far from complete, please do complement!

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An interesting perspective in this article by the ScienceDaily.
The perspective is derived from:

In the past, watching TV was a social activity that brought people together. The whole family watched the same program on the same TV set, and when people went to work the next day they could be fairly sure that most other people had also seen the same program. This is no longer the case. What once brought us together is now a source of fragmentation. Most families have several TVs, and they sit in different rooms and view different programs — if they watch TV at all. What’s more, the channel offerings have become so large and varied that few programs qualify as shared topics in the lunchroom at work.

From a conservative and traditional point of view, where Family was a true cornerstone of the society, this would absolutely be valid.
In the increasing individualistic society, where global is the new local, where modularity of daily life decides what activities to perform, Family as a starting point is not the most valid one to analyse if the social aspect of TV viewing is dissapearing.
I believe that it’s not dissapearing, but there’s a shift in the type of people with whom is being socialized during watching TV or any other digital activity. I add this explicitely, because digital activities are activities which were not diffused or even available a decade ago. The enabler is technological and the further increase of socializing the television activity will become clear the coming three years.
Not Family, but complete strangers, digital friends are becoming the new Family when it comes to many daily activities. Modularity is also partially causing this, which drives people to tune in with other people with the same need at that point of time, qualitatively increasing the spent time due to the aligned interest.

Social TV is in its infancy, systems do already exist which enable the Social TV experience. The fact that the technology exists, does not mean people will adapt or change their habbits. Perceived risks are too high for older generations, to change from a passive activity to a more interactive digital activity. Generation Z will organically adapt these new activities and socialize with their new digital Families.

In what ways do you think the technology will change the socializing aspect in comparison with the pre-digital era?

Google’s patent “Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising” which has been granted on January the 7th, 2010 has the following abstract:

Techniques for identifying groups of features in an online geographic view of a real property and replacing and/or augmenting the groups of features with advertisement information are described. The techniques include providing a geographic view of a property within an online property management system, identifying a region of interest in the geographic view, analyzing the geographic view to locate one or more promotional features within the geographic view positioned upon a real property region, providing a user-selectable link associated with the region of interest in the geographic view, receiving a request for the region of interest in the geographic view via the user-selectable link, receiving data to alter at least one of the behavior or the appearance of the region of interest, storing the data in association with the geographic view, and updating the region of interest within the geographic view based upon the received data.

This technology will make it possible to identify billboards, posters and buildings on its mapping services like Street View to replace old advertising on those objects with new adverts.
Furthermore, the patent refers to auctioning advertising spaces based on contextually relevant matches. Would Google permit competitors to bid on competitive real-estate and advertise there?

This technology certainly sounds interesting, augmenting static content with dynamic advertising. Depending on the integration of such advertising in Street View it might perfectly blend in and be an organic experience with content which might actually be useful for the user, being it up to date.
Think of the many opportunities, cinemas can refresh their billboard on Street View real-time and showing what movie is being shown at that point of time or that evening.

This does remind me of in-game advertising, making use of billboards, posters and so on in games and offering advertising opportunities in surroundings and experiences which users do not find artificial or disturbing.

What do you think the opportunities of this kind of advertising will be?

Gartner predicts that mobile will overtake the PC’s as Web access device.
There will be 1.82 billion mobile devices (smartphones and browser equipped phones), and 1,78 bilion PC’s.

Three important issues are raised in the article by MediaPost on the Gartner research.

1. Most companies have not optimized their websites for the Mobile Web. To have a good presence on the Mobile Web, an adjusted website for the device must be set in place.

2. Context will be key for mobile just as search engines are for the Web. The context will be able to service the user personalized relevant content (in time).

3. Search engines were based upon pulling information to users at their request, mobile on the other hand will be able to prepopulate or push information on unique aspects as the context, the person and content wanted at that point of time.

As outlined in my article “Mobile Marketing moving to centre of the Marketing Strategy?” , companies need to start thinking about any implications the Mobile Web might have for their business and target groups. Fast consecutive occuring life-cycles will make it much more difficult to intervene when the mobile has come to its peak of importance.
A technology like Augmented Reality, which is going to grow the coming years, will even grow further by this, where it could be possible that Proximity Marketing will have a second more contextually relevant chance. Read my article “Mobile Augmented Reality boosting Proximity Marketing” on this subject.
Last but not least, this could impact media convergence as well, where TV, PC and Mobile will blend into new cross-media experiences which shall depend much on Mobile as well.

What implications do you foresee?

The concept Augmented ID by TAT is presented last July to the public.
What it basically does is visualizing digital entitities which you encounter in real life. The facial recognition software is developed by Polar Rose and in combination with a mobile, you’ll be able to get information on people around you.
There’s a catch though, people who want to be discovered by Augmented ID, have to set up an account and create their profiles personalized per social network and content.

It isn’t that difficult to take this kind of application to the next level and be able to recognize faces (and objects) based upon the many images stored online.
This might sound futuristic, but most-probably not extremely difficult to develop when technologies are ready for it.

This brings us to the following, should we question privacy concerns when it applies humans?
In the current concept, a person needs to sign up, giving permission to be found.
What implications will come forth from real-time facial recognition?

The possible applications of real-time object recognition are endless, what about being able to shop for an object which passes along, sufficing impulse and desire?

This is a great example how Google Wave can contribute to collaboration in a new, faster, near real-time way, a perfect Enterprise 2.0 example!
Most of the examples I’ve seen is a replacement of a communication tool, be it an IM, email or social network. Of course that’s good, but it’s substitional, whilst this example is incremental. It enhances communication and collaboration speeding and simplifying the modelling experiences for SAP.

As explained on the SAP Community Network, Gravity is:
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That is what Adam Hartung proclaims in an article on Forbes.

Customers are often locked in your solution and proposition and customers often don’t advice beyond short term business tactics and enhancements which are advantageous for their needs.
The two examples given in the article are clear that customers have other objectives than the suppliers, and this difference can be fatal when it comes to adapting and thriving in fast-changing environments.

Mr. Hartung concludes the focus on competitors instead of customers, nicely in two paragraphs:

To succeed you have to obsess about competitors. And not just about traditional ones, but about fringe ones as well. What customers won’t tell you, the market will, through competitive activity.[...]

[...]Leaders can move beyond surviving and enter the world of thriving only if they obsess about their competition. Watch the competitors that grow, and watch the competitors that don’t grow, and understand why. Look at how customers behave, not at what they say, and see what tests they are undertaking with competitors–especially with fringe competitors with alternative solutions. See what revenues are shifting to other, often emerging, competitors, even if they’re very small. If you want to remain viable, your competition will give you more insight than all the strategic customer councils in the world.

Both groups represent different goals, competitive intelligence is much more suitable for moulding and planning long term strategies than customers can provide you.
Closely watching the competitors is an objective way of analysis, where self-preservation -by customers- is not the first key-objective and peril.
Acquired customers are a great source when it comes to retention, product enhancement, customer satisfaction and so on.
It’s a refinement that concerns internal versus external, short-term versus long-term.
In the end it all revolves around customers, be it yours or someone else’s that will give you -by action- the intelligence to thrive.

What’s your opinion, is it all wrong or subject to refinement?

That is what Chitter.tv is offering people. Right now it’s in beta, but you can sign in with your Twitter account.
Watching TV becomes interactive, from a passive modus, you are now able to interact in real-time with other watchers who happen to consume the same content at that time.

Right now TV and Twitter are two major activities, TV is being consumed more and more in combination with other activities like Internet, radio and so on. Combining these two is bound to trigger interest from users, companies and the market in understanding the converging phenomenon and how users will intertwine the two.
At this point, some of the channels which can be watched on Chitter.tv are: MTV, Fox News, Sky News, Bloomberg, but also channels like Classic.fm TV, RaiNews, RTL-Z, Humor-TV and AT5.
Depending on your interest it certainly has its charms to engage with current watchers and talk about the live seen content, it feels odd, but that has to grow on you.

This is just a beta version, but many features can be thought up which will add value and experience to Chitter.tv, probably initial experiences and opinions are awaited till further development is undertaken.
It’s not possible to scroll down the list of tweets or directly interact with another user. From a commercial point of view all kinds of interactive commerce can be implemented to convert impulses and enthausiasts.

Interesting to see where this will head to, the perceived risk is low, so many will at least test this, how many will experience this as a added-value service and convergence?
What’s your opinion?

Information asymmetry is as an unequality in information, knowledge, expertise, network -etc-, which creates an imbalance where a company can make better decisions than another company.

Asymmetric information imbalances have always been competitive advantages -in any way expressed- for companies’ existences.
The Web’s transparency is changing this for good and worse.

The increasing tranparency of the Web certainly has challenges for companies to keep its advantages over others. Publicly available information which is accessible to anyone is the prime challenge.
The information widely available applicates to competitive intelligence, information on products and services, information on brands, information with regard to target groups, which all can be used to enhance -both- the internal and external processes of businesses.
Web 2.0 forces companies to be open, to be transparent towards the market and the players/customers. If this isn’t done, the consequences might be even worse, due to the co-involvement consumers demand in transactions.

Though, paradoxically, if processes are enhanced and adapted to the opportunities that Web 2.0 offers, bigger asymmetric information imbalance  and competitive advantages can be created!
Think of all the information available on social networks, bookmarking sites, Wikipedia’s, blogs, microblogs which can be used to create or enhance business and further increase the asymmetry. Networks of people or companies always have existed which added value to the competitive advantage of business, but the easier access to all this information is being facilitated by the Web, forcing companies to extract intelligence from it easier, faster and with more accuracy.

Because information is out in the open, companies need to be able to learn and adapt faster than their competitors. This is the skill that can be mastered. Learning curves will follow each other quicker, advantages don’t remain as long anymore and information overload is all around us.
Overcome the challenges of the Web’s transparency but at the same way, alter the company to new levels with help of its transparency.

How do you think the Web can contribute to information asymmetry?

This is great news for the industry, a technology and platform that services online media content to a large amount of devices from any manufacturer.
Another step towards media and device convergence!

Press release taken from the DivX website:

DivX Launches New Internet TV Platform to Redefine the Future of Entertainment
DivX TV(TM) Receives Widespread Support from Consumer Electronics Companies and Content Providers

LAS VEGAS, Jan 06, 2010 /PRNewswire via COMTEX News Network/ — DivX, Inc. (Nasdaq: DIVX), a leading digital media company, today announced the launch of DivX TV(TM), a comprehensive embedded Internet TV platform that provides access to a diverse line-up of online media content streamed directly to any connected device from any manufacturer.

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