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.”

Marketers fail to deliver real-time customer-targeted brand experiences

Increased consumer demand for more personalized and relevant brand experiences has made customer segmentation and targeting an imperative for companies.

According to a November 2011 survey from Acxiom andDIGIDAY, though the majority of US advertisers and agencies were able to identify and segment their customer base, few were capable of doing so in a way that delivers a personalized experience in real time and across multiple channels.

More than half (58%) of advertisers and 39% of agencies said they were able to track and segment their best customers. However, agencies were more than twice as likely (12%) to be able to incorporate both online and offline data into the segmentation process, compared to just 5% of advertisers capable of this more advanced approach.

By segmenting customers, brands can create the more personalized, relevant experience that consumers now demand—especially from retailers. April 2011 data from the e-tailing group and MyBuys showed 50% of US cross-channel shoppers expect to be offered promotions or merchandise that reflect their past online shopping behavior and purchases. More importantly, 46% of shoppers reportedly would buy more from retailers that personalized the shopping experience across channels.

To accomplish the goal of delivering a truly personalized experience in real time, brands must be able to track activity throughout the customer lifecycle and act on this data immediately across channels. But Acxiom and DIGIDAY found advertisers and agencies have yet to make this work—though many are well on their way.

Less than a third of agencies and 37% of advertisers said they had neither the capability to deliver real-time, personalized customer experiences nor to do so across channels, though nearly half of advertisers and 28% of agencies had the ability to at least perform one of these two tasks.

In December 2011, the Winterberry Group and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) found many marketers hoped to do better in the coming year. Most marketers worldwide planned to focus more closely on customer behavior analysis, and offer optimization and cross-channel touchpoint optimization—tactics required to meet the goal delivering real-time experiences to customers across channels.

Corporate subscribers have access to all eMarketer analyst reports, articles, data and more. Join the over 750 companies already benefiting from eMarketer’s approach. Learn more.

Check out today’s other articles, “Super Bowl Viewers Had Smartphones Firmly in Hand” and “Social Network Users in Brazil, China More Likely to Engage with Brands Online .”

The average auto refractor–that clunky-looking device eye doctors use to pinpoint your prescription–weighs about 40 pounds, costs $10,000, and is virtually impossible to find in a rural village in the developing world. As a result, some half a billion people are living with vision problems, which make it tough to read and work.

Ramesh Raskar knew fixing this problem would be tricky. It required a new way of thinking about eye tests–and a new kind of device, one powerful enough to support high-resolution visuals, cheap enough to scale, and simple enough to be used by just about anyone. The MIT professor briefly toyed with stand-alone options, which were complicated and costly. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out an unexpected savior: his iPhone.

“The displays had gotten so good, thanks to people wanting to watch episodes of Lost in high definition,” Raskar recalls. “I was immediately energized.”

By creating an app and attachment for the popular smartphone, Raskar could tap into a huge existing user base and skirt millions in distribution and manufacturing costs. The result: a plastic clip-on eyepiece that uses an on-screen visual test to determine a patient’s “refractive error” (a number doctors then use to dole out prescriptions). When his startup, EyeNetra, begins market testing later this year in Brazil, India, and Mexico–and eventually in the U.S.–its tech will deliver all the functionality of an optometrist’s costly machine for less than $30.

What Dr. Smartphone can do for you

Click to enlarge 

This is the thrilling, disruptive potential of “mHealth,” the rapidly growing business of using mobile technology in health care. Leveraging the wonders of a device that’s fast becoming ubiquitous–two in three people worldwide own a cell phone–a new generation of startups is building apps and add-ons that make your handheld work like high-end medical equipment. Except it’s cheaper, sleeker, and a lot more versatile. “It’s like the human body has developed a new organ,” says Raja Rajamannar, chief innovation officer at Humana. Smartphones can already track calories burned and miles run, and measure sleep patterns. By 2013, they’ll be detecting erratic heartbeats, monitoring tremors from Parkinson’s disease, and even alerting you when it’s prime time to make a baby.

At stake is the future of health care–and a share of the $273 billion medical-device industry, which is dominated by the likes of GE and Philips. Although today’s mHealth market barely tops $2 billion, experts predict that number will skyrocket over the next decade as smartphones get smarter and patients lose, well, patience with the high costs and hassles of health care. “Why prescribe a $1,000 test in the hospital when all you need is a heart rate?” asks Leslie Saxon, a cardiologist who heads the University of Southern California’s Center for Body Computing. With inexpensive new technology, she notes, “I could tell a patient to go to the drugstore and buy an ECG [electrocardiogram] sensor for her phone.”

But can we really trust our phones to dispense medical data? That’s the question facing the FDA, which has spent the past year or so putting pioneering mHealth products through rigorous evaluations. “We had to show that our phone-computing platform and display quality were on par with existing devices,” says Sailesh Chutani, CEO of Mobisante, whose ultrasound attachment was sanctioned in January–after about a year of costly back-and-forth. With this first wave of devices approved and a mobile-specific set of guidelines to be finalized later this year, the FDA expects to streamline its approval process, which should juice the mHealth market. “Regulatory clarity almost always drives investment–provided it’s not a big, clear no,” says Joseph Smith, who helps run the West Wireless Health Institute.

Whether these tools actually make us any healthier, however, will depend on how we use them. Given the ability to record our snacks, thoughts, naps, movements, and more, “we will be overwhelmed with data,” warns John Moore, a lead researcher in the New Media Medicine group at the MIT Media Lab. “We need a holistic vision to make it all meaningful and motivating.” Among other advances, that vision will require a seamless flow of data across myriad devices and platforms–think how the MP3 format transformed the music industry–and a physicians’ movement to adopt electronic medical records. (Right now, only a third of them have.) And even then, there’s no guarantee these tools will change behavior. Will we stop eating sugary foods? Or, as Smith wonders, will we just be staring curiously at “phones that show glucose readings in three colors”? Corporate titans are racing to find out. Johnson & Johnson, the world’s largest medical-device maker, recently invested in sleep-monitoring technology from Zeo, a Massachusetts-based startup. Best Buy is funding earbuds that can monitor your heart rate. AT&T helped seed an employee-wellness program with WellDoc, whose apps help users manage diabetes, among other conditions. And Qualcomm, the renowned chipmaker, just launched a subsidiary that’s helping to develop all kinds of mHealth devices. “Will this nascent technology attract consumers, health-care providers, and health-care payers?” says Don Jones, a VP at Qualcomm. “The entire world is keeping its fingers crossed.”

Anatomy Of A Handheld Hospital

1 Processor that can power a pacemaker
Smartphones run superfast (in excess of 1 GHz) without consuming much power, much like top-notch pacemakers and cardiac defibrillators.

2 Display that can assess an ultrasound
The iPhone 4S’s resolution (300 pixels per inch) is on par with most hospital-grade ultrasound monitors, and small screen size won’t matter once projection tech takes off.

3 Camera that can capture cells
The HD video camera, which shoots 30 frames per second, is more advanced than some of the ones in colonoscopes, which doctors use to seek out potentially cancerous tissue.

4 Accelerometer that can guide physical therapy
The three-axis accelerometer captures the same subtle movements–tilts, shocks, rotations–as APDM motion sensors, which are used to monitor patients’ Parkinson’s disease and help them through physical therapy.

5 Microphone that can hear your heart
Because of its flat-frequency response rate–which drastically reduces noise distortion–a smartphone mic (with help from an amplifying attachment) can detect a heartbeat almost as well as a $500 electronic stethoscope.

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.

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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.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/167765/google-mobile-devices-influence-purchases.html?utm_source=pulsenews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed:%20online-media-daily%20(MediaPost%20|%20Online%20Media%20Daily)#ixzz1mNp3boCT

Our two cents:

Read full post on Marketing Charts

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

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.

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.