Come hear me talk augmented reality on April 20th

csi-talkThe nice folks at refreshevents.ca have asked me to take part in their speaker series at their April event (20th of April at the CSI in Toronto). Here’s what I’ll be talking about:

Tom Purves, “How ‘Augmented Reality’ and the Mobile Web Changes Everything”

Mobile broadband access and ever-smarter phones are shaking the internet out its lofty cloud and bringing the web into the real world. As a result, the old “real world”, and many old ideas and many old business models will be running out of places to hide from the pervasive influence of the net.

Meanwhile, each of our smart phones are in many ways even better than the old clunky tools we used to use to surf the net. Our mobile devices are not only connected but, also bristling with sensors like radios, cameras, microphones, GPS etc. that can directly perceive and interact with the world around you. We’re reaching a point where it’s theoretically possible to point that device at almost anything: a landmark, a product on a store shelf, your friends or a crowd of people; and draw from the cloud and your social graph as much, or perhaps more, relevant information than you ever wanted to know. Oh, and the cloud will be watching you and whatever’s around you as well.

In the new augmented reality, the web surfs you.

The goal of this talk will be to provide you with a fast paced overview of what this new “augmented” reality will mean for how we socialize, for how we sell and market physical products, for architecture, for media and entertainment, for public policy, crime, privacy and, as well, few early signals for what might be the new killer apps.

Tickets went up this morning, it’s a free event, but the venue is small so as of this moment there’s only a handful left. If you would like to but can’t make, I will also be slidesharing the slides afterwards.

The eventbrite registration link is here: StayFresh07: Tom Purves

Photo credit: Kieran Huggins

UPDATE: Is now sold out

Posted in Archive, Augmented Reality, events | 3 Comments

How the mobile web and “augmented reality” changes retail forever

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At South by southwest interactive this week (SXSW) a huge theme was “augmented reality” the idea of, Amazon-app style, pointing your phone at any product to get more information -or a better price- online. We’re getting to a world where holding a mobile device means all of the potential knowledge and intelligence of the cloud is now in your hand as well, everywhere you go. “The web” is no longer separate place or channel we go to visit at home through our computers. The web and the real world are rapidly converging. It’s now just up to us to design the apps, and interactions to make that useful.

What was clear is that brands have a long way to go yet to figure out what to do with or what retailing models will work in this new “augmented” reality. Consumers may beat the brands at the game using their devices and information advantage to arbitrage themselves consistently better deals.

To compete as a retailer, someone mentioned the idea that physical stores just become “really expensive websites” that help brands build relationship with consumers seamlessly across both physical and virtual channels.

This is a problem for retailing models like malls, which typically take a slice of retailer sales. Now the interests of retail merchants and their landlords may be mis-aligned as a consumer may go to the apple store just to see and touch the product, make use of the genius bar, but then spend their money on apple through the internet channel, or post-sale through itunes etc.

It’s another problem of misaligned interests for merchants if physical retailers are franchises that don’t have piece of the revenues from online sales.

Apple (no surprise) is a good example of a merchant that will do well do well in the hybrid cross-channel retailing environment.

Some other merchants that compete just on product and price without specific competitive advantages are going to get killed.

Posted in Archive, Augmented Reality, conferences, dead media, design, future, sxsw | 1 Comment

PROTIP #67 For Social Media Marketers:

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Tom Purves’ Protip #67 for social media marketing:

    STEP 1: Make a product actually worth talking about.

    STEP 2: See step 1.

    STEP 3: There is no step 3.

Originally tweeted, reblogged here for posterity.

Posted in Archive, Uncategorized | 2 Comments