mobile

The last couple of weeks have been a bit crazy so I haven't been able to blog as much as I like. Apart from Open Publish there have been some other things going on - including two events around mobile technology.

AIMIA ran an event on augmented reality. There were four speakers:

• Jason Collins from Alcatel-Lucent demoed some work with Georgia Tech. Live magazine ads & posters that cameras can recognise and then trigger content on your phone such as video.
• The next dude might have been either Adam Dunne or Peter Bray -pretty sure it was the former. Stuff on QR codes & Telstra. QR codes make the world clickable - a hyperlink on every surface.
• Viveka Weiley talked about the AR toolkit and some other stuff. VW obviously knows a lot but had some difficulty articulating that.
• Aaron Stafford from Adelaide talked about wearable computing & the Hand of God. Aaron was pretty blunt about the current user experience offered (it's a bit shaky and the equipment is a pain) but there are some obvious applications - augmented gaming, real estate & construction, etc.

The second event was Mobile Monday (which was bloody packed). Two pressos here:

• Xumii - a mobile social network site aggregator aimed at Gen Ys. Interesting tool but I suspect there is a low barrier to entry for this kind of product and they are still in beta.
  
• Justin Baird from Google. This was the headline act and a bit of a let-down. We learnt that mobile will be big (no **** sherlock) and that Google have some creepy ads for SMS Search. Android looks like it might have some cool stuff in it but that's all for the geeks really.

So two main takeaways from these:

• Expect to see QR codes everywhere before the end of the year. Also expect to see QR spam/junk data and marketing successes & failures (success uncorrelated to spend) in the same timeframe.
• Expect to see a plethora of mobile social networking technology - most of it aimed at teenagers. The first generation will simply be aggregators - then the next generation will start introducing rich media & location-based services.

Oh and I'll be getting an iPhone in a few months but I'm waiting for the data plans to sort themselves out first.