Media Dojo

Hope everyone had a good new year….back online with mobile and cloud computing posts.

I’m kicking off the new year with the mobile AR report for GigaOm Pro. This was a bear because the sector remains very raw, with the first consumer applications having launched only in the past year—barely. Right now, the action in the sector revolves around getting better location accuracy as well as improving the performance of mobile AR browsers for iPhone, Android and certain flavors of Symbian and WinMo. Make no mistake, mobile AR is another battle between Apple and Google for real estate. In the case of mobile AR, the ultimate real estate play is in the location data and metadata that can be annotated with media, advertisements, maps and host of other digital bling.

My personal opinion on mobile AR? Very experimental and raw so make sure that whatever media or marketing budget you put into it is clearly marked EXPERIMENTAL. That said, if mobile AR pops as a consumer app, it will have a huge effect on mobile search because it obviates a lot of need for keywords and other parts of the fixed web we’re trying to shoehorn into mobile. Small wonder then that the Android universe and Google are looking very close at mobile AR. We’ll know a lot more by summer. In the meantime, I want to thank the mobile AR interviews for this piece including Layar, Metaio, Mobilizy and Zehnder. Keep an eye on these guys.

The report is over at GigaOm Pro.

Here’s the official summary:

Mobile augmented reality (AR) brings computer-generated multimedia into an end-user’s literal field of vision. It merges real-time digital information with the user’s perceptions of his or her immediate physical surroundings. The mobile AR user simultaneously experiences physical reality and digital media consumption. This report looks at the growing mobile AR ecosystem, from the technologies and trends supporting its development to the applications, players, and business models driving innovation. The report includes a forecast for the number of mobile AR–capable devices, summarizes existing revenue forecasts for the nascent market, and leverages three in-depth case studies to demonstrate the intersections between markets, technologies, and companies in emerging applications.

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