How Will "Augmented Reality" Affect Your Business? - John Sviokla

This post was co-authored with Anand Rao.

My colleague Anand and I think that augmented reality is going to be a big deal for businesses. What is it? It is the idea that locations, devices, even the human body will be "augmented" by linking and overlaying additional information on top of "regular" reality.

For example, this month's Esquire will have visual codes embedded in the text — even on the cover — which you can hold up to your computer's camera. The computer will read the codes, and take you to a video or other information linked to that magazine "location." Is this just a gimmick? After all, the physical magazine is a great way to create a link to more comprehensive content. The magazine cannot afford to put too much information between its covers, but it can put as many pointers as it wants to more content. This basic notion is very, very powerful. (See the great post on this topic by Gary Hayes which inspired our thinking.)

Anand and I think augmented reality will change at least the following five things:

1. The nature of advertising. We know that if you're an advertiser, you want to allow people to transact while their attention has been caught by your product or service. The beauty of augmented reality is that it allows any advertiser to bring the possibility to purchase much closer to the advertising stimulus. So, if I'm reading an interesting article in a magazine and there is an add with a visual code on it, I can then scan it with my BlackBerry or my iPhone and order it immediately.

2. The nature of location. The GPS revolution in cars has already created a low fidelity version of augmented reality by enabling maps in any car that wants them. You are already starting to see applications available on advanced phones that allow an individual to hold their phone up to a location so that the information about the location is overlayed on the screen:

Right now these are focused on tourism, but it does not take a lot of imagination to see that any sales or service force would love to be able to walk up to a building and understand the nature of the potential customers inside, or installed products to be serviced.

3. The nature of healthcare. One of the great problems with healthcare is the lack of information at the point of service. It is only a matter of time before you will have the option to link your medical information to you. There is cheap, available bio recognition technology which will allow someone to swipe their finger, or speak into their phone to identify themselves, and then to allow the doctor to have information available to them — just like Esquire allowed for the ads to be tagged to a page.

4. The nature of relationships. The next natural extension of Salesforce.com would be to have a person be able to either scan in a face (face recognition software is standard issue now with many photo products, including Apple's iPhoto) and then provide the salesperson with the best available background search on the individual whose information may be out on Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social networks. Also, if you are like my friend and Diamond Fellow Gordon Bell, who has taken his whole life digital (documented in his book Total Recall, which just came out), you can link any face to all you know about that person.

5. The nature of knowledge. Much of the knowledge we need to do our jobs is not available because we have a hard time getting access to it at the right time. BMW did a concept piece on augmented reality where a mechanic is replacing a fan while wearing special glasses which project the instructions onto the car as he looks at the engine compartment. Our understanding is that this is not operational, but something like it will come.

Why are we so bullish? The military has been augmenting the battlefield for some time, and now with advanced GPS devices, better telecommunications and hand-held devices that have enough display and computing power to make things interesting, we think we are at the beginning of a boom market in augmented reality. So the question becomes, is your firm thinking about how advertising, selling, products and service will change when you can overlay the right information, at the right time and in the right form — everywhere?

What do you think? Are we at the beginning of a revolution — or is augmented reality an idea that will always be in the near future, but never here?

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Six Social Media Trends for 2010 - Conversation Starter

In 2009 we saw exponential growth of social media. According to Nielsen Online, Twitter alone grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month. Meanwhile, Facebook continued to outpace MySpace. So what could social media look like in 2010? In 2010, social media will get even more popular, more mobile, and more exclusive — at least, that's my guess. What are the near-term trends we could see as soon as next year? In no particular order:

1. Social media begins to look less social
With groups, lists and niche networks becoming more popular, networks could begin to feel more "exclusive." Not everyone can fit on someone's newly created Twitter list and as networks begin to fill with noise, it's likely that user behavior such as "hiding" the hyperactive updaters that appear in your Facebook news feed may become more common. Perhaps it's not actually less social, but it might seem that way as we all come to terms with getting value out of our networks — while filtering out the clutter.

2. Corporations look to scale
There are relatively few big companies that have scaled social initiatives beyond one-off marketing or communications initiatives. Best Buy's Twelpforce leverages hundreds of employees who provide customer support on Twitter. The employees are managed through a custom built system that keeps track of who participates. This is a sign of things to come over the next year as more companies look to uncover cost savings or serve customers more effectively through leveraging social technology.

3. Social business becomes serious play
Relatively new networks such as Foursquare are touted for the focus on making networked activity local and mobile. However, it also has a game-like quality to it which brings out the competitor in the user. Participants are incentivized and rewarded through higher participation levels. And push technology is there to remind you that your friends are one step away from stealing your coveted "mayorship." As businesses look to incentivize activity within their internal or external networks, they may include carrots that encourage a bit of friendly competition.

4. Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced)
If the company you work for doesn't already have a social media policy in place with specific rules of engagement across multiple networks, it just might in the next year. From how to conduct yourself as an employee to what's considered competition, it's likely that you'll see something formalized about how the company views social media and your participation in it.

5. Mobile becomes a social media lifeline
With approximately 70 percent of organizations banning social networks and, simultaneously, sales of smartphones on the rise, it's likely that employees will seek to feed their social media addictions on their mobile devices. What used to be cigarette breaks could turn into "social media breaks" as long as there is a clear signal and IT isn't looking. As a result, we may see more and/or better mobile versions of our favorite social drug of choice.

6. Sharing no longer means e-mail
The New York Times iPhone application recently added sharing functionality which allows a user to easily broadcast an article across networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Many websites already support this functionality, but it's likely that we will see an increase in user behavior as it becomes more mainstream for people to share with networks what they used to do with e-mail lists. And content providers will be all too happy to help them distribute any way they choose.

These are a few emerging trends that come to my mind — I'm interested to hear what you think as well, so please weigh in with your own thoughts. Where do you see social media going next?

David Armano is part of the founding team at Dachis Group, an Austin based consultancy delivering social business design services. He is both an active practitioner and thinker in the worlds of digital marketing, experience design, and the social web. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/armano

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The Botox Effect: Five Ways to Cope with Online Silence - Conversation Starter

I met Jen, a beautiful young woman who had just been promoted to a senior creative role at a major consumer goods company, at a quintessentially New York cocktail party. She had a generous smile and animated way of speaking when she talked about her company and her job. Then she asked me about my job, and as I started talking, Jen's face fell flat and her sparkle faded. I panicked a little. Was my discussion of online strategy really that boring? I found myself rambling through a perplexing conversation that produced sparkle when she talked, but nothing when I did. I left the party baffled.

Months later, a mutual friend mentioned she had just returned from Jen's birthday party: her fortieth. "Jen is forty?" I asked, astonished. "Oh yeah," my friend assured me. "She's just a big Botox user."

Suddenly, the cocktail party made sense. Jen wasn't uninterested. She was cosmetically compromised, made passive by anti-aging injections.

In a way, your online audience is like a Botox user. Even if you have an enthusiastic audience for your blog, your Facebook page, or your Twitter feed, the enthusiasm is invisible.

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