Augmented Reality and Location Based Marketing : Cindy Krum talks about Mobile Marketing

Noted Mobile Evangelist Cindy Krum talks about Augmented Reality and Location based services for mobile phones. Read the full blog post at
http://www.instantetraining.com/blog/2010/10/mobile-seo-cindy-krum/

Bob Tripathi: Now I know there is a whole thing going on about augmented reality and a lot of people are trying some new stuff. What is augmented reality and what are its practical applications?

Cindy Krum: Augmented reality is something that people are doing on phones. It's a type of application that allows you to loop in the GPS in your phone and the video camera feature in your phone, and you can attach information to certain geo locations. Then when you hold your phone up, it knows what you're looking at, and it'll put metadata or information or anything on specific objects that you can see. So when you're over here you'll see some stuff and when you're over here and you see some stuff, you can click on it and get more information.

The best example is Wikitude, and this is one [application] where you can hold up your phone, pan around and see anything that has a Wikipedia entry on it. If you see something you're interested in, then you can click on it and get the Wikipedia entry on. [It's] very simple; well simple in concept, but difficult in execution unless you're really good at augmented reality development. It's really cool, especially things that are a type of search, because it's usually metadata that's very location specific. So local businesses, local points of interest, stuff like that.

Bob Tripathi: One of the things that are really getting a lot of attention is location services. Have you seen any trends or any companies that you like that are really doing the location services well? Like Foursquare or stuff like that?

Cindy Krum: Yeah, the important news here is that we've seen an upsurge in use of things like Gowalla, Foursquare and this behaviour where people will check in. Foursquare actually has a lot of information they capture on the back end, so it can be really useful to find out more about your customers that are in your stores; who they are, where they go next and where else they go, stuff like that. In comparison to other social networks, Foursquare and Gowalla are not very big, but Facebook is about to launch a check in feature. That's going to be very important. And they're supposedly going to have an API that other companies are going to be able to loop into, so that from your website they can check in via Facebook.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• mobile marketing
• augmented reality
• qr code
• location services
• mobile seo
• instant e training.com
• cindy krum
• bob tripathi