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Representing Layar at ISMAR 09

dirk — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:24:16 +0000

Layar is a young company. I’ve joined the company as CTO only 4 months ago. So the people in the world of Augmented Reality are entirely new to me and everyone at ISMAR was a new face. It’s funny to think that after 3 days of ISMAR I already feel part of the club! It’s a small world, so running around the Marriott hotel with a Layar badge quickly got me acquainted with almost everyone at ISMAR. Everyone knew Layar, many knew me by name and wanted to talk with me, showing how much the new startups of 2009 like Layar have captured the minds of people and given a new impulse to Augmented Reality as a whole. And many presentations started by mentioning Wikitude and Layar as the companies that created a paradigm shift in AR for 2009, moving it in the eyes of the general public away from the marker-based 3D football players that you could see last year.

Read more about ISMAR on the Layar blog.

MoMo#11: Visionary speakers on their vision of mobile

dirk — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:46:15 +0000

Last Monday, instead of spending the public holiday afternoon in a sunny park enjoying one of the many music festivals, I stayed inside the Rode Hoed to listen to some very famous speakers giving their vision on mobile. Two of them inspired me most: Andrew Gill and Robert Rice. On the mobile device as a means for personal advertising and for viewing the world with a 7th sense (or is it still 6th sense?).

The age of personal advertising

For Andrew Grill, it’s time to completely rethink the advertising space. Less is more from now on. It doesn’t make any sense that advertisers are still paying so much to reach millions of people who are just not listening.

If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face. And they’d be right about doing so.

I completely agree with Andrew when he says that the mobile phone is the ideal way to reach customers on a personal level. Basically this is the same message I stated at the previous MoMo: loyalty programs should be on your mobile phone rather than on a plastic card. But for many people in the advertising market it’s still hard to grasp when the number of customers you reach is so low compared to the numbers “reached” by a TV ad. 50% of 5000 is still less than 1% of 1 million. How can the value be so much higher then?

Andrew firmly believes that these 2500 potential customers reached via their mobile phone on their own request are much more valuable than the 10.000 potential customers who got the message via the TV ad. The chances that they end up buying a product are much higher: They actually asked for the information! And since you know them, you can also better adapt the offering to close the deal. You don’t know anything about the 10.000 people who show interest after seeing the ad on TV. You can’t even measure them.

So it’s time to think about the personal ad. The company that realizes that first and also knows how to fulfill Andrew’s 3P’s of mobile advertising (Permission, Privacy, Preference) will have huge success.

The age of augmented reality

Robert Rice has been in this field for the past 15 years. I think I started to hear about AR as a serious technology only about 3 years ago, before it was more science fiction to me. Now the first applications are actually live, it’s time to think about a future with AR.

Wikitude is a travel guide that tells you more about the building that you see right in front of you.
ING has an application to showing the nearest ATM superimposed on your screen when point the camera in various directions.
Layar will soon be launched for Android phones. It allows any company to superimpose locations on top of the screen. There are now layers for Funda and Hyves.

These are a few examples of what’s been developed the last couple of months and it’s starting to grow fast. So how will this evolve? Robert doesn’t want this to become another geek technology. His nightmare is if AR becomes associated with weird people with strange masks on their heads walking around and waving strangely with their hands. The masses would freak out! It has to become something natural, easy to use: Fashion items like sunglasses or a watch.

But above all, AR should add value to our lives. In Robert’s mind, it will become an essential intelligence that we’ll be able to use as our 7th sense: It will change everything: The way we interact with each other, the way we perceive our environment, the way we handle our privacy. Combine face recognition, all the information about someone available online and AR tools and you can start to get a glimpse of what this means in the social world…

Robert is optimistic about that new augmented reality, but also warns that it may be crushed if we do it the wrong way: complex technology, privacy issues, strange behaviour… It’s a thin line and easy to get wrong.

Feedback from customers

dirk — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:48:53 +0000

After launching a new product every company wants to know how the public reacts to their product. The essence of a satisfied customer is not only a good product, but probably more importantly good support for the product. A great online tool for customers to help each other and for companies to discuss with customers is getsatisfaction.

Small online startups don’t have the money to setup a call center for customer support. And yet many of them have a largely satisfied customer base. The reason is that they are very responsive online and that their customers help each other. By setting up an open platform for discussion, they allow customers to publicly discuss various problems and give feedback. Other users of the product can react, give advice and often even solve the problem before a staff member needs to intervene. Of course it is important that official staff participate in all discussions so that customers feel they are heard. But the time spent at resolving problems in such a collective environment is much less than when solving each problem individually.

Getsatisfaction.com, founded in 2007, is a service dedicated to offering an online customer support environment. It is set up to be as transparent as possible for everyone. Whether negative or positive, all feedback is viewable. Customers can second other people’s feedback so that the issues affecting most customers automatically show up at the top. For each topic a color indicates the status of the issue and how the company is responding to it. Green means there’s a solution, red that the problem wasn’t solved yet. Customers can also tell their mood (frustrated, happy, etc…) and give marks to products.

Using Getsatisfaction can be an extremely cost-efficient way to offer support to customers, while at the same time gathering a lot of feedback that would otherwise require costly surveys.

How Twitter spread the news about a plane crash

dirk — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:16:07 +0000

Today I was amazed by how the story about the plane crash at Schiphol evolved on the Internet. One of our colleagues was first to tell us about it, some 10 minutes after it happened. She was called by her boyfriend who works for the local TV here. The first thing I thought when I heard it was to check Twitter.

Yes, one of my Twitter friends @sgfwarnaars had already reported the crash and made reference to @nipp, who seemed to be twittering from the crash scene itself. Actually the first Twitter about the crash by @nipp was really a mere minute after it happened. When I checked his report, he had about 30 followers and was telling his first impressions. Of course I retweeted his report, as did many others.

Then I looked at twitterfall.com, where you can look at all tweets on a certain search term. The flow of tweets was rapidly increasing, reaching around 2 per second at some stage. This is when the news spread as a fire through the Internet.

I switched on the radio to get the latest information. But the tweets that were posted were more informative than the radio. The first photo was posted on twitpic.com, a service used to by twitter users to post photos as twitter itself can only hold text. One link after the other appeared on Twitter to new photos. Some were published on news sites like nu.nl and nos.nl, but only via Twitter was it possible to get a full view of the events unfolding.

Within one hour, @nipp had amassed some 350 followers. Two hours later, the tally was at 807. Being amongst one of the first to report the crash on Twitter, he started to get requests from many news agencies. At around 15:00, he was live on Radio 3FM. Later Al Jazeera called him.

At the same time another witness story started unfolding. @ansgarjohn was apparently on the scene just after the crash and actually rushed to the plane to offer his help. He reported briefly about his heroic efforts about an hour later on Twitter, with a last message saying “going to take a shower to get rid of blood and mud #schiphol”. Later, he got contacted by many news agencies, giving interviews on Radio 1 and on TV in Een Vandaag. Starting with some 5 followers, his tally is now 162.

Whilst there were many false items on Twitter, the errors were also corrected most quickly. When CNN started reporting about the crash of an Airbus 380 (sic), the Twitter community picked it up immediately and made many sarcastic comments about it. The report of zero dead (this came from a Turkish minister) was quickly followed by eye witnesses, including @nipp, saying this was not possible. It seems Twitter cannot be used to spread false news, as there will always be people to correct it.

Overall, it’s incredible how accurate the information is you get from Twitter, just filter out the few false alerts and keep looking at the tweets with the most re-tweets. Of course a lot of the news on Twitter was coming directly from new agencies, especially after about an hour. But the combination of all the news items gives an incredible detailed account of the events.

UPDATE (26/02/2009): More reports on how Twitter is changing the news gathering can be found on The Telegraph, ireport (here you can see how ’schiphol’ became the nr 1 ranked tag on Twitter yesterday) and NOS (in Dutch).