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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.

Spanish national newspaper El Periódico reports it’s starting a new campaign using Mobile Image Recognition technology developed by Catalan startup Daem Interactive.

A picture taken with a camera phone of a photo appearing in the newspaper will allow the user to access exclusive mobile contents including advertising using MMS. The new system, called “Cázalo” will be launched in tomorrow’s newspaper, promoted by Telefónica and McCann interactive agency.

The inaugural advertising campaign has an announcement related to FC Barcelona - Real Madrid match of tomorrow from the Professional Liga of Futbol (LFP), the user will, besides entering in a contest, receive a promotional video from the Spanish Footbal League. The cost of the MMS message will be 0.60 euros message.

Relative: read Kelly Goto’s excellent interview with Ignacio Mondine on gotomobile.com and watch the latest demo of Daem’s atomtag 3G software that recognizes my picture and leads you to m-trends.org mobile, now how cool is that!

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.

Last weeks’ MobileMonday Barcelona on Proximity Marketing was the occasion to get briefed on the present real-world cases of mobile technologies used in a physical context. FuturLink presented their (rather impressive) content delivery system based on Bluetooth access points; Media Contacts talked about tailoring content; and Nike related on their (mostly) good experience on using proximity marketing; finally Daem Interactive revealed their MMS image recognition solution.

(from left to right: Joan Grau, Media Contacts - David Masó, FuturLink - Miguel Sola, Daem Interactive - Paulino Moraleda, Brand Communications Manage, Nike)

Carles Fereiro from Barcelona Media did a great job while I was checking out Villes 2.0, an excellent initiative launched by FING, also founders of Mobile Monday Paris. I liked a lot the speakers’ box concept they introduced at BETC Euro RSCG, you can view some of this Paris trip picture here. Thanks to Marie, Daniel, Stephane and especially Véronique of the MoMoParis team for just being so wonderful

Fabien Girardin took some pictures of the MobileMonday Barcelona evening. Check out his blog used for his Ph.D. thesis on collaborative work in the context of mobile and ubiquitous environments.

From Fabien’s Flickr images (l-to-r): FuturLink’s Bluetooth Access Point, Nike’s proximity experiment on a big Christmas ad in Barcelona, Media Contacts’ new generations of content.

Subscribed MobileMonday Barcelona users can download the presentations of that evening in the subscribers profile page. There is a very interesting video demo available from Media Contacts bluetooth campaign with VolksWagen-EOS.

Next MoMoBCN event on December 4 has topic Mobile Social Networks. Head over for more details at MobileMonday Barcelona website.

Continuing with its monthly events, MobileMonday Barcelona announces its next event on “Proximity Marketing” that will take place on November 6. Kudoos to Carles from MoMoBCN partner Barcelona Media to get this interesting list of speakers together:

David Masó, CEO of Futurlink, one of our most popular and successful local start-ups will explain us about Futurlink’s experiences and future plans on proximity solutions.

Miguel Sola, Director of Daem Interactive, another Barcelona Start-up will present their latest products and services for marketing campaigns using mobile image recognition.

Joan Grau, Director of operations at Media Contacts, will explain us about implementing proximity marketing solutions, the challenges and opportunities from the demand side.

Paulino Moraleda, Brand Communications Manager for Nike, will share with us what a major brand sees in the value and potential of proximity solutions and what they can provide.

As usual, a networking party will follow the conference where participants will enjoy a glass of cava, the event takes place at the Auditorium of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

Attendance is free; all you need to do is register at www.mobilemondaybarcelona.com/subscribe to reserve one of the 150 seats available. Book early to avoid being left out!

19h30 Registration and Pre-Networking
20h00 Proximity Marketing
21h05 Cocktail and Networking Party
22h00 End

This event is sponsored by Media Contacts, CIDEM (Centre d’Innovació i Desenvolupament Empresarial of the Generalitat de Catalunya) and Barcelona Media.

I wanted to write this article before summer but workload took me until now to take some time to write some of my insights on this interesting subject, so here we go…

Up to now, most people in the industry used the bluetooth marketing term to name advertising and marketing campaigns made using Bluetooth on mobile phones. Before entering the real ubiquitous marketing era, I think the time is right to start using proximity marketing to define the new era we’re entering to start using more then just bluetooth for mobile marketing campaigns.

Wi-Fi, RFID, Ultra-Wideband (UWB), and Near Field Communication (NFC) will soon be used to send multimedia content to your mobile phone, together with other ubiquitous devices, supposing you want it of course. As of now, the mobile phone is the best positioned device for mobile marketing campaigns for it’s multifunctional use and it’s market penetration.

Let’s start what it’s all about with the definition at Wikipedia:

“Proximity marketing is the localised wireless distribution of advertising content associated with a particular place. Transmissions can be received by individuals in that location who wish to receive them and have the necessary equipment to do so. Distribution may be via a traditional localised broadcast, or more commonly is specifically targeted to devices known to be in a particular area.”

I would like to introduce you to qr-codes first since I’m sure they will become an inevitable part in the coming months/years of proximity marketing campaigns. Mobile barcode scanning, which is ubiquitous in Japan and Korea using technology, has never been introduced on a big scale outside of these countries. Japanese consumers are used to “clicking” on physical objects by reading special consumer barcodes. In US and Europe those campaigns are ready now to emerge…

For nitwits, using qr-codes with a mobile phone works like this: it works by reading a two-dimensional barcode called a “tag” that contains a URL Internet address. The user “scans” or clicks on the tag using their mobile camera phone running a qr-code reader software. The software decodes the URL automatically and delivers the user to the appropriate content. Metadata can be send additionally to know more about the user’s phone model, location, etc. This is essential to send back the right multimedia content to be displayed correctly to the user’s phone, whatever model he might use.

Most known qr-code companies are Shotcode and Semacode, check also Smartpox, Scanbuy and TagIt but I’m not going to focus on these companies and their products now. What interests me is the fact that big brands start using the available tools around, see also Shotcode’s latest Coca Cola Mexico launches 40 million Sprite bottles campaign.

Some other blogger collegues like Charlie have been writing on the subject, Yasmine who launched her inspiring neo-nomad - my body is a hypertext summer last year, and Kelly who wrote on qr-codes in America. I have been writing or reporting on proximity (bluetooth) marketing campaigns in advertising, politics, music/entertainment and sport.

In theory, it’s all about connecting the web (the platform) with the physical world through devices with the mobile as an obvious choice for users to compare and browse product catalogues, use recommender systems to discover and share opinions with other users. For the ones having browsed the mobile web, qr-codes are a great solution B2C solution to make this happen within the reach of one click + it combines triggering contextually relevant information, correctly displayed for the user with a business model that makes sense for the operators, brand advertisers, technology and service companies in-between…

The twist however to use qr-codes is that they need to be scanned and decoded, thus need a client software to be installed on the mobile. A Swiss company named Kaywa is simplifying the process with a public qr-code generator but also needs a reader to be downloaded to the phone. My guess is that as long as the qr-code client readers don’t get bundled on popular phone series with the big mobile device manufacturers, qr-codes have little chance to go mass-market just yet, retailers will need professional encoders and readers, adapted and compatible with their current systems before they will use it in their stores. Following the discussion on Bluetooth Marketing Revisited from Carlo last week, I agree with him and Tom that most campaigns have really poor usability and user experiences to now but there is some new stuff coming up…

Meanwhile here in Spain, brand advertisers and agencies are looking for new ways to create more compelling proximity marketing campaigns.

One of the tech companies, called Daem Interactive provides image recognition technology to identify the advertisements photographed by users and sends back related multimedia contents. The photographed pictures can be send to an MMS short code to trigger a URL, no decoder needed here - it could actually to send back a qr-code, but I think this is a different and much more fun way for the user to participate and attractive to create innovative marketing campaigns. I have been sceptical about the MMS-use but this seems to be finally solved by the operators now, so this opens a lot of new possibilities and perspectives. Check the picture below:

1. A user takes a picture of an advert and sends it via MMS or e-mail (works for all camera phones!)
2. Datacenter receives the image and the advert is recognized
3. Related multimedia contents are sent back to the user, the user receives the multimedia contents including: applications, ring-tones, video, games, screensavers..etc (example from Daem Interactive)

Another Spanish startup, called Futurlink is taking the challenge to take proximity marketing to it’s next level. FuturLink is a high-tech company oriented to develop and innovate wireless products and applications to interact with mobile phones in the proximity, using short range radio technologies like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, NFC, RFID or UWB. They developed access points that allow companies and public organizations to interact with the mobile phones of their customers within the company premises, and now also in shopping malls… All that tech in one box, get the picture?

Both companies will be presenting their latest stuff at next Mobile Monday Barcelona. Stay tuned!

(qr-code image above left by Semacode)