Blippar, the QR Killer?
The digital interactive print advert hasn’t been around for very long and during its short lifespan it’s been dominated by one thing: the QR Code. But that could be about to change. The QR Code finally has a challenger in the shape of Blippar, a new form of interactive advertising that is easier to use and is certainly a lot more attractive to look at than its rather ugly counterpart. Blippar essentially performs the same duty as a QR Code – point your smartphone at the ad and the ad will interact – but it has two major advantages. Firstly, it doesn’t require any kind of actual code. The whole advert is responsive, so the user doesn’t need to point at a certain space and the advertisers don’t need to add that little black and white code to their design. Secondly, the ad doesn’t just take you though to a website. It responds on the screen, with interactive elements popping up on your smartphone screen. Effectively it’s a site in its own right.
Ads from brands including Tesco and Omega have been rolled out in newspapers and magazines and they’re certainly impressive. Tesco’s ad highlights price drop offers, Omega’s allows the user to see how a watch would look on their wrist, while a promotion for the re-release of ‘Jurassic Park’ allows the reader to watch the trailer. Some don’t even need an advert. Point your phone at a Vimto bottle and Blippar will recognise the bottle’s shape and start interacting. Will these features be enough to make interactive advertising really take off? It’s certainly an encouraging development, but the technology still suffers from a lack of exposure that means it will be slow to take off – if indeed it takes off at all. As econsultancy notes two thirds of consumers don’t know even what a QR code is. As the technology matures though, Blippar is certainly the emerging app for brands to keep an eye on.
Stand out with Google
Google is making it easier for news organisations and websites to get content noticed in their search engine by launching a new ‘Standout’ feature that will attract the attentions of its spiders. According to Wired, Google will be putting special emphasis on their News service over the coming months and is hoping to enrich it by giving organisations the means to flag up “critical types of coverage: exceptional original reporting, deep investigative work, scoops and exclusives, and various special projects that quite clearly stand out”. This means that if CNN has just broken a significant piece of news or the BBC is featuring an in-depth investigation, they can simply include the special ‘Standout’ tag in the content’s header and Google will recognise it as significant and possibly display the article with a ‘Featured’ label on the Google News homepage.
Naturally there are limits. Google has made sure organisations can’t tag everything they post by adding a cap – only seven pieces of content a week can be ‘Standout’. If that limit is exceeded, the tagged content will be downgraded or simply ignored altogether. Google will also be encouraging organisations to ‘link’ to competitors’ content by allowing them to tag other companies’ stories. There will be no limit to the amount of competitors’ content you can tag and it’s likely a tag from someone else will be more valuable than a tag generated by you, thus making tag sharing beneficial. Journalism is a cut-throat world though, and whether this takes off remains to be seen.
Re-kindling the tablet wars
The latest threat to Apple’s dominance of the tablet platform has come from an unlikely source – not a tech company, but Amazon. Best known for selling books, DVDs and music, the retailer first took the plunge in the waters of technology a few years ago when they launched their e-book reader Kindle. The product was a huge success and now they’re hoping Kindle Fire is a similarly big hit. They’ve certainly got a mountain to climb to better the iPad, whose name is synonymous with portable computing, but the Amazon Kindle Fire has a couple of key advantages over its competitor. With its 7″ screen, it’s smaller and more portable than the iPad, and with its $199 retail price, it’s cheaper too. The device will run on Google’s Android operating system and use a new browser called ‘Amazon Silk’. Apple, we’re sure, will be watching with interest to see how their latest competitor fares…
If this then that
This is the simple but baffling but really quite simple mantra of ifttt, a way of coding that’s designed to make the internet so easy a child could use it. The plan is to reduce complex code and tech jargon to a simple command. Under this scheme, there’s a trigger (the ‘this’ of the above statement) and an action (the ‘that’), so as they explain on their website, iftt will allow you to state ‘If I tweet then create a status message on Facebook’. Along with Facebook and Twitter, multiple channels and apps such as Instagram can be incorporated, so if you were to take a photo using the Instagram app it can be automatically added to Dropbox. Further details can be found the ifttt.com website, and while its success is far from assured, it certainly has huge potential. If this can make the internet more accessible then that can only be a good thing (see what we did there!).
The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls
They’ve spent most of their lives in caves and museums, but now the Dead Sea Scrolls are coming to the internet, courtesy of Google. Earlier this week, the Search company put the ancient texts online in a searchable format, meaning they are now easily available for anyone in the world to browse through. “It’s taken 24 centuries, the work of archaeologists, scholars and historians, and the advent of the Internet to make the Dead Sea Scrolls accessible to anyone in the world,” Google said. “Today, as the new year approaches on the Hebrew calendar, we’re celebrating the launch of the Dead Sea Scrolls online; a project of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem powered by Google technology.” The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible dating back to between 150 BC and 70 AD. They were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in what is now named the West Bank.
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