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(on 2D-Barcodes and Image Recognition)

After a long summer break, the MobileMonday Global Summit and the Mercè festivities, MobileMonday Barcelona is back for a new and exciting season of 1st Monday of the month regulars on mobile innovation. Starting next Monday, October 1st on “Next Generation Mobile Marketing” (2D-Barcodes / Image Recognition).

The first event of the new 2007-2008 season brings together an explosive cocktail of some of the hottest start-ups in Europe on the Next Generation Mobile Marketing topic, including Dennis Hettema from Shotcode (Sweden), Roger Fisher from Kaywa (Switzerland) and Ignacio Mondine from Daem Interactive (Spain). The topic will be introduced and moderated by Raimo van der Klein coming over from Amsterdam.

Raimo will talk about the the two worlds of Mobile Phones (The Wand and The Crystal Ball) and the way information (content) is provisioned to the mobile phone and the change from Push Marketing to Pull Marketing (Marketing as a service) and will share various examples of innovate ways how information can be delivered to the mobile phone. A perfect start for a new season it looks to me. If you feel the same, please subscribe and confirm your event participation, seats are limited as always, don’t wait last minute to confirm!

All details on speakers, timing and location at MobileMonday Barcelona website.

NOTE: picture by Leonard Low under Creative Common license.

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The 3GSM World Congress gives you a good overview of where the actual market is today - still a lot like last year - it looked at first sight… Some interesting movement could definately be ’seen’ in the mobile image recognition space.

Image recognition should not be confused with barcode scanning and QR-code technology though they are somewhere historically related of course, I wrote some of my views on this before here. Image recognition technology goes one step further in the sense that it doesn’t need a seperate application to be downloaded, or a decoder to decode, or a seperate ‘recognizable’ product code to be printed, and works - at its best - on most camera phones.

Some examples I saw during 3GSM were Global Peer Award jury winner Realeyes 3D (France) and finalists UpCode (Finland) and Tagit (Singapore), showing at the same time that real innovation can come from any corner of the world.

Since Google bought Neven Vision last summer and the attention visual search provider Riya got last year, the time seems right to bring image recognition commercially to mobile phones. One of the most interesting demo’s I saw during the exhibition was at the stand of Alcatel-Lucent: opening a video call, pointing your camera to a magazine ad connected your phone to your TV set over a 3G connection to be able to discover or store additional services to be viewed at home, dig?

Image recognition technology has some obvious advantages additionally to 2D-Barcodes like QR Codes or Datamatrix:

• They are graphically richer and more appealing, they can contain any logo or personalised image. Adding one to your blog, publication or advertisement might be less esthetically obtrusive than chaotic black and white codes, makes them ideally for next-generation mobile marketing campaigns.
• Unlike 2Dcodes, individual tags are easy to remember because they are images, not secretive machine only readable bar-codes.
• The Augmented Reality interaction paradigm makes it easier and more appealing for the user, your phone becomes like a sort of “magic lens”.
• Contextual menus can pop out of the tags: look up in wikipedia, listen to contents recoded, add contents to that tag…..it´s object hyperlinking or the mobile read-write web!

Daem Interactive had another interesting demo running with some logo’s and my face (!), pointing a cameraphone to it over a 3G connection connected the user immediately to m-trends.org mobile, very cool!

Ignacio from DAEM showed me this demo the first time in July last year, some might have seen the demo before at Under The Radar or MobileMonday Paris, now Ignacio gave me finally a go to blog this ‘atom3g’ demo of their patented application. Check it out, some of the coolest stuff around!

More insights on 3GSM later here.

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