Topic
Google to Sell Heads-Up Display Glasses by Year’s End
Source: New York Times, NICK BILTON | February 21, 2012
People who constantly reach into a pocket to check a smartphone for bits of information will soon have another option: a pair of Google-made glasses that will be able to stream information to the wearer’s eyeballs in real time.
According to several Google employees familiar with the project who asked not to be named, the glasses will go on sale to the public by the end of the year. These people said they are expected “to cost around the price of current smartphones,” or $250 to $600.
The people familiar with the Google glasses said they would be Android-based, and will include a small screen that will sit a few inches from someone’s eye. They will also have a 3G or 4G data connection and a number of sensors including motion and GPS.
A Google spokesman declined to comment on the project.
Seth Weintraub, a blogger for 9 to 5 Google, who first wrote about theglasses project in December, and then discovered more information about them this month, also said the glasses would be Android-based and cited a source that described their look as that of a pair of Oakley Thumps.
They will also have a unique navigation system. “The navigation system currently used is a head tilting to scroll and click,” Mr. Weintraub wrote this month. “We are told it is very quick to learn and once the user is adept at navigation, it becomes second nature and almost indistinguishable to outside users.”
The glasses will have a low-resolution built-in camera that will be able to monitor the world in real time and overlay information about locations, surrounding buildings and friends who might be nearby, according to the Google employees. The glasses are not designed to be worn constantly — although Google expects some of the nerdiest users will wear them a lot — but will be more like smartphones, used when needed.
Internally, the Google X team has been actively discussing the privacy implications of the glasses and the company wants to ensure that people know if they are being recorded by someone wearing a pair of glasses with a built-in camera.
The project is currently being built in the Google X offices, a secretive laboratory near Google’s main campus that is charged with working on robots, space elevators and dozens of other futuristic projects.
One of the key people involved with the glasses is Steve Lee, a Google engineer and creator of the Google mapping software, Latitude. As a result of Mr. Lee’s involvement, location information will be paramount in the first version released to the public, several people who have seen the glasses said. The other key leader on the glasses project is Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, who is currently spending most of his time in the Google X labs.
One Google employee said the glasses would tap into a number of Google software products that are currently available and in use today, but will display the information in an augmented reality view, rather than as a Web browser page like those that people see on smartphones.
The glasses will send data to the cloud and then use things like Google Latitude to share location, Google Goggles to search images and figure out what is being looked at, and Google Maps to show other things nearby, the Google employee said. “You will be able to check in to locations with your friends through the glasses,” they added.
Everyone I spoke with who was familiar with the project repeatedly said that Google was not thinking about potential business models with the new glasses. Instead, they said, Google sees the project as an experiment that anyone will be able to join. If consumers take to the glasses when they are released later this year, then Google will explore possible revenue streams.
As I noted in a Disruptions column last year, Apple engineers are also exploring wearable computing, but the company is taking a different route, focusing on computers that strap around someone’s wrist.
Last week The San Jose Mercury News discovered plans by Google to build a $120 million electronics testing facility that will be involved in testing “precision optical technology.”
Integrated Marketing on a Shoestring Budget
Advertisers now expect each integrated marketing campaign to stand out, be attention getting, relevant to their audience, perceived as cutting edge and able to drive action or response all with the same campaign. I have heard it called a tactic, sometimes amarketing strategy, depending how well fleshed out the plan is, but there is a low-cost way of bridging the gap between print and digital and shows your customers that you are making an effort to communicate with them in the mediums preferred by them. Try using a QR code on your branded materials. QR codes are a good way of involving consumers by making an ad interactive. At the very least it will achieve more recognition of the advertisement and more traffic to the website or wherever the link of the QR code leads to.
QR codes took over NYC in June of 2010 when the Thompson Reuters Building began putting QR codes on the face of the building in Times Square so passersbys could use their smart phone barcode scanning app to scan the QR codes — which were featured in an animated sequence on the buidling from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. When scanning the QR codes, it lead to information relating to specific agencies including 311, NYC Department of Transportation, NYCulture Calendar, NYC Business Express and City of New York Parks and Recreation.
Dubai is dedicating the entire exterior of one of their newest hotels to the movie industry,The CODE UNIQUE HOTEL athttp://holtermanndesign.com/blog/qr-code-unique-hotel-dubai-studio-city/. The entire exterior of the building is a huge QR code. Reality is that the use of QR codes need not be on such a grand scale to be effective. Each anticipated result would drive different implementations.
Macy’s Fall Backstage – QR Code Campaign – Scan for a chance to win a $500 Shopping Spree is their latest integrated marketing campaign. They’ve integrated social media, video, mobile, and the “What’s in it for me” factor is a chance to win a $500 Shopping Spree. What more could you ask for in an integrated marketing campaign that has customer interaction?
We know you can buy awareness and customer interaction, even results with bold tactics. You can test and prove that you can get increased attention and greater customer intimacy on a shoestring, if you have good knowledge of the product, audience and market by linking the web with your ad or direct response piece with a QR code, keeping your message and offer relevant and monitoring the result.
We know that timeliness is key in advertising and direct response. So offer something to your prospects that they want or need, tell them the offer won’t last forever and make sure that you give them the opportunity to respond via the medium that they find most comfortable to use by employing even just one integrated marketing tactic, using a QR code. It makes it just a bit more convenient for your audience just that much easier for your customers to reach out to you. See a video on Macy’s backstage pass campaign using QR and SMS.
Mobile Devices Influence Purchases
Our two cents:
As a retailer you are constantly being tasked with deciding on which mobile technologies to invest in and what kind of overall customer experience to create. When in doubt, our advice is to focus on creating a great research experience, the last touchpoint before the purchase. Sure, there are all sorts of shiny new technologies that vendors will claim add to bottom line sales. But those technologies often suffer from low adoption rates and we know that almost everybody is using their phones to research product information. So make sure that your mobile website and all supporting tactics, e.g., Search, SMS etc., allow the customer to easily research products.
Source: Online Media Daily Mark Walsh, Yesterday, 3:22 PM
New findings from Google suggest that consumers are using smartphones, tablets and desktop computers throughout the purchase process. Based on research conducted with Ipsos, Google found that people use smartphones in particular at different points as they move toward a purchase.
Nearly half (46%), for instance, said they researched an item on their smartphone before going to a store buy it. And 37% researched an item on their phone before buying it online. Four in 10 people who use their mobile phones to shop said they had made a purchase through the device itself.
While people use all three devices- — phone, tablet and PC — to research purchases, some activities are more popular on specific devices. Tablet owners, for instance, read product reviews and looked for product information more from their tablet devices than from their PCs or smartphones (77% compared to 67% and 70%, respectively).
Consumers favored smartphones for contacting a retailer. That’s a natural outgrowth of the ability to make a call directly, as well as retail sites and ads including click-to-call buttons. At the same time, people preferred PCs for comparing prices and looking for discounts and promotions by a fairly wide margin (roughly 20 percentage points).
That indicates that consumers are mostly checking prices and deals before even leaving the house, rather than waiting to do so in-store via mobile. When it came to comparing product information, however, tablets came out slightly ahead of PCs and smartphones — at 65% to 60% and 61%, respectively.
The study suggests that people are relying on mobile devices more for shopping. Among consumers who used their devices to shop last year, 80% of smartphone shoppers and 70% of tablet users said they used their device more frequently this year.
The Google/Ipsos results were based on a pair of surveys — one involving 615 U.S. holiday season shoppers who made a purchase in at least one of 13 retail categories and another of the same size composed of mobile and desktop consumers who made retail purchases across the same range of categories.
Social Media Excites Marketers, but Doesn’t Yet Generate Revenue
Our two cents:
There are two very important points in this post. The first is the underlying principle that all marketing initiatives, regardless of channel need to support the overall business goals of a company. Period. While many marketers love to hide behind this word “engagement“, we find this word to be at times nebulous and lacking of real metrics. The second important point is the trend of social campaigns outpacing the measurement of the campaigns themselves. Lest we forget, in marketing what get’s measured gets funded. Therefore, it’s important to align these marketing campaigns to the appropriate set of goals.
Why “Want” & “Own” might be the most important Actions coming to Facebook
Source: Social Beat, January 18, 2012 | Jolie O’Dell
Facebook is bringing a boatload of apps and actions onto the social network. Now, instead of just “Liking” something, you can say you read it, listened to it, or watched it, all through your favorite web and mobile apps.
While a huge number of these semantically linked verbs, called Actions, are going to be appearing in various places around Facebook and Facebook-connected websites, two Actions might be more commercially significant than the rest: “Want” and “Own.” Because, if you follow the money, these two actions are most closely linked to Facebook’s main source of revenue, its advertising real estate and targeting.
For the past few years, companies have been attempting to make the most, capitalistically speaking, from Facebook’s vast, interconnected social graph. The Open Graph (including Facebook Connect and the now-ubiquitous Like button) further brings brands and products into the social web of people, much to the delight of marketers and e-commerce companies.
Facebook announced major Open Graph changes in the works at its developer conference last year. While Actions were a part of that preview, the company’s first launches around the evolution of Open Graph were all about music — both sharing the music you’re into and listening along with friends.
“This [release] is really heavily about shopping,” said Payvment CEO Christian Taylor, who told us that some Actions announced today might end up be far more important than the already ubiquitous “Like” button.
“Wanting,” “Owning,” & buying on Facebook
Payvment is one of the leading enablers of “f-commerce,” or retail and commerce occurring on and around Facebook. This company developed with Facebook and has been using “Want” and “Own” buttons for several months.
In the image on the left, you can see Payvment’s buttons in action.
“The Open Graph has been around for two years, but it was really based on the Like button, which never really worked for shopping,” Taylor told VentureBeat in an interview yesterday.
“It really doesn’t mean anything to anybody. So to help people understand their relationship to product, we created a Want button… and an Own button.”
When users click the “Want” and “Own” buttons, it triggers Facebook to update dynamic lists related to those terms. For the “Want” button, the result is a sort of real-time wishlist; the “Own” button acts almost as a catalog tool for a digital closet that’s linked to a real-world collection of items. Several other shopping and fashion apps are using similar Actions, as well, and all to the same general effect.
These buttons are very obviously linked to reality-based purchasing intention and purchase patterns — not just what people are idly talking about on the Internet, but what they’ve actually put down money for in the recent past and what their acquisitive aspirations are.
Understanding the semantic web of information between people and the things they buy can give analysts and marketers deep information on relationships between people and purchases. That information can be used to better target advertising and influence consumers’ decisions, opinions, aspirations, and attitudes.
Best of all for Payvment and Facebook merchants and brands, Taylor said, consumers are actually using the buttons.
“In our testing, more people used it than we ever thought would,” he said. “We’ve been testing this for the past two months. It shocked us, how many people went around collecting the things they love and have.”
As consumers click around the web, indicating what they want and own, their Facebook profiles are updated accordingly — not in the public-facing Timeline, but in deep-dive sections of the profile. “You get to see what other people’s interests are, what they own,” said Taylor.
Wish Lists and Want Button Coming to Facebook
Source: Ina Steiner EcommerceBytes.com September 23, 2011
Facebook users will soon have access to shopping “wish lists” and “want” buttons. Payvment, one of the first developers to offer Facebook storefronts back in 2009, said it would integrate with the new just-announced functionality so that sellers can increase visibility for popular products. The new features will help online sellers by getting shoppers to share their products on the social networking site.
Facebook will allow developers to customize the actions within their app and the News Feed story generated by each action. Payvment’s integration will offer sellers an increase in visibility for the products that shoppers want, own and like and will make the News Feed experience more relevant and meaningful for shoppers and their friends.
When a user clicks a Payvment “Want” button, Facebook will add the item to their Wish List on their profile and will display a News Feed Story on that user’s wall that reads, “Jane wants a Falling Waters Mini Fountain at the Shopping Mall on Facebook,” for example.
According to Payvment, this also enables conversations and comments made on Payvment to be customized to drive more social discovery, such as “Jim reviewed” or “Jane loved” a particular product.
Payvment plans to customize the Wish List feature to enable creation of wedding and baby registries, holiday and birthday wish lists and more. And, no doubt, other storefront providers and retailers will follow their lead.
Retailers’ Apps Must Decide Strategy: Enrich Or Engage
Source: Online Media Daily, Mark Walsh, Feb 9, 2012, 5:57 PM
Most retailers have stumbled out of the gate when it comes to mobile strategy, creating weak, fragmented apps and mobile properties in their haste to gain a foothold in the mobile space. The problem is that companies have focused on the means — mobile — at the expense of the end — transactions and customer engagement, according to a new report from digital consulting firm Altimeter Group.
The key for retailers going mobile is to figure out which of those two goals — sales or building customer relations — is their main objective, and then build applications accordingly. While the report warns against rushing headlong into mobile development, it underscores that smartphones are rapidly turning consumers into mobile shoppers.
The average smartphone user spends over an hour a day interacting with the device, and one of the top three activities is shopping. “Smartphone users expect to be able to turn to their devices for every informational need and have it met immediately. When shopping, this means finding the quickest route to products and pricing,” states the study authored by Altimeter mobile analyst Chris Silva.
The report specifically pointed to apps by Abercrombie & Fitch and Longhorn Steakhouse as examples of offerings that are long on design and mobile tricks (3D graphics and motion-based effects) but short on utility and shopping-centric tools. Conversely, brands such as Starbucks and Best Buy have developed apps that aim to solve customer problems, like cutting in-store wait times or making product information widely available.
Altimeter boils down what approach retailers should take in mobile to two basic options: enrich or engage. The former is a strategy focused on driving transactions and measured in overall purchases, purchase size or frequency, and same-store metrics.
The other is geared toward building brand affinity. “The focus is on bringing shoppers closer to the brand to drive interaction — not just spend,” the report states.
Altimeter identified four types of apps that successfully either enrich or engage consumers: informational, buy/ship, multichannel “lite” and multichannel “heavy.” The first refers to apps designed to enrich the experience by providing information on retail outlets, high-level and non-product-specific information. Brands with apps in this category include Century 21, Hilton Hotels and Toyota.
Buy/Ship apps allow buyers to look up products and purchases for later offline home delivery. This is the most common type of app, and strong brands in this area include Amazon, Wine.com and Zappos.
Multichannel apps are designed to assist in-store shoppers, with “heavy” ones allowing deeper interaction and the option of purchasing products through the app. In addition to Starbucks and Best Buy, the two multichannel categories include apps from Walmart and Walgreens.
Are QR codes replacing SMS?
Our two cents:
The short answer is no, despite the fact that some brands are seeing QR codes outperform the typical SMS call to action. The simple fact is that QR code adoption is still relatively low, ~14% in the U.S. Therefore, you’re starting with a smaller pool of people to begin with. We see SMS as still being the best all-around mobile tactic for creating customer loyalty, as many customers use it to sign up for coupons, alerts, etc. This is especially important for brands that target mainstream demographics, e.g., Moms 25-44 with an HHI of $75k or less. It’s common for this demographic to under-index on QR codes, but overindex on SMS and MMS. So at the end of the day, it really comes down to figuring out who your customer and defining their mobile behavior, instead of blindly following tech trends.
