Branded Video Content in marketing is increasingly relevant
Regardless of whether it’s on the train, at the airport or at home – the use of online videos on the most different screens is booming. Several studies have confirmed this rather subjective impression: video content is now very much the everyday norm for most users. According to PwC, in 2012 there were more than 53 million Internet users in Germany – 77% of whom watched online videos. A similar picture emerged from a representative study ordered by the German Digital Industry Association (BVDW). According to the Video Metrix from ComScore, in March 46.9 million Internet users in Germany had already viewed at least one video online. And the users are spending longer in front of their screens. According to ComScore the number of users of mobile videos was growing even faster, however. They show that in December there were 10 million mobile video viewers in Germany, an increase of 211%. At this point, we will see a short online video instead of a diagram.
Videos belong in the ‘Year of content‘ 2013 to the everyday surfing experience of users
Source: U.S. Digital Video Benchmark 2012, Adobe
Branded Content has increasing relevance in the Marketing Mix
No surprise that branded video content is also a hot topic in the marketing department. Several examples from big brands like Coca Cola, Jaguar, Red Bull or sportswear label DC Shoes show how quickly the right video content makes it possible not just to reach certain groups in the short-term but also to build up lasting customer and brand loyalty.
Of course there are also many studies which highlight the points of the company. McKinsey is predicting a budget increase of two billion euros for content marketing in Germany alone by 2015. And a current expert survey by the German Digital Industry Association (BVDW) concludes that moving images as well as professional videos will become increasingly important in the marketing mix in the next two years for advertising.
Nine of out of ten people asked give moving images as an advertising format in two years a high to very high importance / Source: BVDW, 2013
Great potential of moving images as well as professional video content
Source: BVDW, 2013
Conclusion: the role of online videos in digital marketing is undisputed today and all the signs point to further growth. The expert survey by the BDVW and other studies impressively demonstrate the increasing strategic relevance which moving images will have in the next two years, both for advertising and for video content. Yet brand investments still lag behind the use of online videos and their potential. Modern branding cannot avoid video content, however.
Case Study Jaguar: branded video content for the launch of the new F-type
It will finally be time on the 25th May. 52 years after the legendary E-type and an eight month long pre-launch phase, Jaguar is launching its new sports car with the F-type and is now putting all its energy into promoting it. Since the Indian parent group, Tata Motors bought Jaguar and Land Rover in 2008, many things have seemed possible, even an enormous marketing budget which should help win over new target groups and build new emotional connections with them. As there is no direct predecessor, Jaguar is estimating to get 80-90% new customers, according to the FAZ. They will have to invest 73,400€ for the entry-level variant V6 and up to 99,900€ for the V8 S top model.
Higher use of moving image content in marketing
In its launch strategy, Jaguar is focusing on a higher share online and on moving images: “We need moving images to show the qualities of the F-type”. This is how Jaguar marketing leader in Germany Brian Fousse explained to the industry journal horizont why there is a higher online share compared with that in print. Adrian Hallmark, Jaguar Global Brand Director, added, “It’s our goal to reach new target groups and to build an emotional connection with Jaguar and our first sports car in 52 years.”
Hollywood short film ‘Desire’
Jaguar has been promoting its new Hollywood short film in trailers and on its website since last autumn. The official premiere for ‘Desire‘ was celebrated at the Sundance London Festival in April. It’s an action film with Damian D. Lewis in car chases across the Chilean desert, a glamorous setting for the new sports car. Additionally, there are numerous making of films on the website and Facebook. This strategy isn’t really new but it’s spectacular. Back in 2001 (so before the age of YouTube), BMW was already using a similar concept with its series of short films ‘The Hire‘ but due to the then insufficient bandwidth, it had to use them on DVDs and in the cinema.
One Man. One Job.
Trailer and 13 minute short film Jaguar ‘Desire’ / directed by: Ridley Scott, main actor Golden Globe- and Emmy-award winner Damian Lewis, title song “Burning Desire” by Lana Del Rey
Advertising campaign ‘Your Turn’
A global advertising campaign will begin in mid-May. It is called ‘Your turn’ – and it invites potential new customers to experience the new sports car live. All communication channels will be used as the campaign is running on TV and in print, in cinemas as well as in digital, social and mobile sectors and, of course, as direct marketing. Here is the TV advert:
The focus of TV commercials ‘It’s your turn to discover it’: a long line of Jaguar fans are waiting for the chance to have a test drive.
Conclusion: this is a very promising revival for the classic British company on the road to modernization. The success of the new F-type in the hotly contested luxury car market is extremely important for Jaguar. A very large marketing budget has been allocated for this purpose – the highest yet in the company’s history. Jaguar is playing well on all channels but it also knows that it’s only possible to reach new target groups through innovative marketing and is therefore focusing primarily on digital and branded video content. These are two marketing components which are increasingly playing an important strategic role in many campaigns.
How are traders reacting to ever increasing e-commerce turnover?
E-commerce is gaining ever more of the market share: 33 billion € was made last year by online traders in Germany. Compared with last year, the market volume has increased by just under 15% – this is according to current figures from the new IFH industry report online trade. The share of online trade in the entire retail industry was just 3% in 2007, but this had already grown to 7.7% in 2012. Without the so-called Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) like, for example, groceries and body care products, online trade still made up 14.2% of the entire retail industry – and this share will grow even more in the future.
A chart in the new IFH industry report online trade shows which sectors are currently benefiting from the growth of e-commerce.
Digitalization of the in store experience
With the increased use of smartphones and tablets, the substitution effect will continue in the next few years and seriously affect fixed location traders. Modern technology can still be found in the few stores located in the town centre or in the big shopping centres. Yet new ideas are needed in order to make shopping in fixed location stores a special experience. New digital services are the key to success and could have a real effect on the way we shop. The digitalization of the in store experience will have an even bigger impact on sales than the question of how consumers made their latest purchases.
ECE is testing digital retail with ‘future labs’
An example of how the retail industry has reacted to this development is the ECE centre operator, an affiliate of the Otto group and a shopping mall pioneer since the mid-1960s. In March, two big shopping centres were opened, the Hamburg Alstetal shopping centre and the Limbecker Platz in Essen, the so-called ‘future labs’ in which digital and interactive shopping experiences will be tested. What will be tested here on around 130,000 square metres with 440 specialist shops is an interesting platform examining the reliability and customer acceptance of innovative everyday solutions. The test length of the ECE chain is 1.5 years and it will be continually customized: “Developments which customers like will be followed up and also used in other centres. Anything they don’t like will be removed from the program and replaced by new ideas,” said Henrie W. Kötter, managing director of the Center Management of the ECE.
Shopping in shopping malls as a ‘real’ experience, complemented in the future by the first digital retail approaches.
Source: ECE company brochure
The new technical service offers are spread out across the whole mall and range from a virtual orientation system to a wide range of social media links and even interactive play areas for children. The most striking feature is a 4x4m high ‘mall wall’, an interactive multimedia wall on which visitors can get fashion tips or AR animations via a touch screen. A further component in the strategy is an app for smartphones which locates customers and informs them personally of offers and events. The data is not just provided by single specialty shops but also by scouts who walk through the centre and share the information through an app. Also new is an info gate where customer service personnel answer visitor questions via a video screen.
Conclusion: The IFH report makes the increasing significance of e-commerce for the retail industry very clear and highlights how important it is for retail channels to use it. The mobile channel will be especially important since it brings together on- and offline purchases in fixed retail locations. The main driving force is the customer who uses the Internet whenever and wherever they like. The future labs are another interesting example of how traders have taken up the idea of the multichannel and how they are looking into innovative approaches such as mobile couponing or indoor mapping and how customers react to them. There are not yet many examples in Germany of how fixed location and mobile shopping can be optimized and how the different target groups can be brought together.
Will messaging apps be the social networks of the smartphone age?
It is already common knowledge that Instant Messaging is the main competition for the traditional SMS. For the first time in 2012, more short messages were sent via messaging apps than with SMS: according to a study by the market research company Informa, in 2012, WhatsApp & Co. sent 19.1 billion messages. There were 17.6 billion SMS. Analysts are predicting a further increase by the end of 2013: by then there should be twice as many messages sent via Messenger than with a mobile phone – that is 41 billion Instant Messages compared with 19.5 billion SMS. The number of SMS users worldwide with around 3.5 billion is, however, still much higher than that of the Instant Messaging users (around 586 million). SMS can be sent and received worldwide, regardless of the mobile brand or Internet connection.
It is not yet common knowledge that Instant Messaging is increasingly putting the ‘traditional’ desktop based social networks under pressure. While Facebook, for example, is increasingly considered as the established social network (a good reason for many young people to stay away), messaging apps are booming worldwide. Their advantages from the user’s point of view are that they are easy to use, don’t use advertising and the messages, photos and videos stay private.
Sequoia Capital Partner Aaref Hilaly
makes the point in an interview in Techcrunch Disrupt – and whoever has observed the communication patterns of teenagers will agree.
“To us, they’re a pretty significant change. We see a company like WhatsApp as reimagining the social network. And the way I think about it is: What’s your real social graph? Is it the people you communicate with and spend time with, or is it the 100 people you barely know on Facebook? We think it’s pretty clearly the first of those, and that’s what mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp capture.”
Techcrunch Disrupt: Sequoia Capital Partner Aaref Hilaly talks about the current boom in messaging app start-ups
The fragmented market of the messaging apps
The market is still not yet dominated by a single provider like Facebook but is very fragmented. The disadvantage compared to SMS is the Lock-In effect – users of different apps cannot communicate with one another.
After the Facebook Messenger with 56 million active users , the best known provider around here is WhatsApp, started in 2009 and profitable since 2011. According to their own reports, the app is now ‘bigger than Twitter’ with more than 200 million MAUs, over 8 million inbound and 12 million outbound messages per day.
The chat apps are even booming in Asia. One of the heavyweights is Line, the messenger app of the South Korean Naver Corp, which has over 100 million users and is also profitable. Both have very different sales approaches: in contrast to WhatsApp, Line is free of charge to use and focuses on in-app purchases like emoticons, stickers and virtual goods. Line’s South Korean competitor, KakaoTalk,
founded in 2010 and equally successful in Asia with over 80 million users, generated a turnover of 45 million US$ and with it a profit of 7 million US$. WeChat, China’s contribution to the boom of the chat apps, is talking of 300 million users in less than two years but the profitability still lags behind.
In Canada there is KiK (50 million users), in the USA there is now MessageMe, an app which was downloaded more than one million times within a week. The German mobile phone companies are gradually catching up and are now starting a messaging service with Joyn. Along with that, there are also many more, mostly regional apps.
MessageMe and Line – two examples of the many competitors in the race for social media.
Conclusion: Mobile messaging has become established within a very short time and is now a part of everyday life for the younger generation. The mobile chat apps will not replace either SMS in the near future – the use of smartphones, especially in developing countries is not yet wide enough – or existing social networks like Facebook, Twitter & Co but they will change the world of social networks. Being online everywhere and all the time means that communication should be fast and easy too. This is exactly what messaging apps are offering, in spite of their different concepts and sales approaches. The market is developing very quickly and the most exciting questions will be: which provider will succeed in bridging the geographical gap? And will there be a ‘global winner’?
The most valuable social media brands of 2013
Together they have a market value of 200 billion US$ and an increase in value compared to last year of 59%. An impressive amount for the newly established Top 30 of the most valuable social media brands worldwide. The Top 10 alone has an accumulated value of around 145 billion US$. Unsurprisingly, Facebook occupies first place with a market value of 34 billion US$, followed by YouTube (27 billion US$) and Twitter (24 billion US$). These are the findings of a global study presented by the brand evaluation company BV4, together with the special Social Media Management department of the HWZ Hochschule für Wirtschaft Zürich and which has analyzed the 30 strongest social networks and their market values.
The Top 10 most valuable social media brands together have a market value of 145 billion US$
Source: HWZ, University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration, und BV4, both in Zurich
Social Media Brands from China with impressive growth
Some interesting details are presented: although the famous triad from the USA still dominated the rankings, in fourth to sixth place are the Chinese social media platforms Qzone (16.3 billion US$/ +45% YoY), Tencent Weibo (10 billion US$/ +184%) and Sina Weibo (9.7 billion US$/ +143%). Their growth is based principally on the rapid boom in the number of Internet users in China. The biggest winner compared to last year is, however, Google+ with an impressive increase in value of over 300% with 5.9 billion US$. The search engine giant climbed from place 23 to place 9 as well as in various marketing plans.
Increased importance of social media
For market values there is no hard currency. The evaluation criteria and calculation models differ, as do the nominal evaluations. Nevertheless, a comparison of the HWZ Social Media Rankings, in which the market value of a social network corresponds to its income and which can be generated in the future, with the leading market rankings, “Best Global Brands 2012” of the consulting firm Interbrand and “BrandZ”-Ranking” of the market research company Millward-Brown, is interesting. These studies are useful for orientation and classification which can be recognized over the years through changes in a brand or between brands in a particular area as well as shifts between the different areas.
(Just) for comparison: according to the Interbrand lists, Coca-Cola and Apple are the two most valuable companies worldwide with a market value of 77.8, respectively 76.6 billion US$. With a market value of 34 billion US$, Facebook would be ranked as a newcomer in eighth place (according to the Interbrand ranking, FB is in 69th place with 5.4 billion US$ – the values increased, however in 2012). On the factually higher Millward Brown ranking of 2012, Apple (182 billion) is ahead of IBM (116 billion) – here, Facebook jumped to 19th place with a market value of 33.2 billion US$. Facebook was also ranked in the same place with its HWZ market value of 34 billion. In spite of the different results, the lists show one thing very clearly: not just how important technology brands like Apple or Google have become through digitalization, but also how the same is true of social networks.
Conclusion: the figures show that social media is not just a passing phase. Even if the valuation may appear inflated in individual cases, the enormous growth in market values reflects the massive structural change in the communications sector. The newly established social networks have spread rapidly worldwide in the last few years and are very much a part of daily life. The importance of brand value rankings has also increased significantly in the past few years. It is still the brands which are adding value to companies.
Digital, Social & Mobile: for the first time Coca Cola has a purely digital campaign’ The AHH-Effect’
The Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh-effect – what does a mouthful of Coca-Cola taste like? What does it feel like? And how can we describe this feeling? Coke as the ultimate refreshment – this is what the soft drinks producer wishes to communicate with its latest campaign, ‘The Ahh-effect’. This is based on 61 websites whose URLs are differentiated by the number of ‘aitches’: www.ahh.com, www.ahhh.com, www.ahhhh.com and so on. Each URL should offer a new experience and a ‘digital snack’. For example, this could be short games, funny videos or animations, but also a journey back in time into the history of the Coke bottle. The reference to the brand is important – as it is with the game ‘Guide the Bubble’ in which air bubbles in a glass filled with Coke have to be protected from ice cubes and straws which are added. ‘Happy Dance’ leads the way to the Happiness Factory. There are now 17 URLs with 61 planned altogether.
Digital snacks for teenagers on their number 1 digital device, the smartphone
Ahh-Effect – an important building block in the content strategy 2020
The company is talking about its first purely digital campaign. And it is targeting teenagers whose attention span is becoming ever shorter and who get most of their content on their smartphones. With advertising on Facebook, Twitter (and as an offline element on Coke bottles), young people should start to notice the campaign in the coming weeks and are invited to come up with their own ‘snacks’. The best ones will be selected and integrated. A permanent Site-Reporting System picks out good and bad running gimmicks. The long-term campaign will be optimized and continually modified: “We fully expect to end up in a completely different place compared to where we started.”
The online magazine is also replacing the existing Corporate Website in Germany
How serious Coca-Cola is about changing its paradigms was also shown after the relaunch of the US company website last November which is with Germany the first country organisation which has also replaced its existing concept of a Corporate Website with an online magazine. ‘Journey’ includes sections on happiness, entertainment, society, brands, companies and myths. It also shows how important content marketing will be in future marketing for the soft drinks producer.
The first country organisation to relaunch its homepage: A magazine instead of the traditional Corporate Site
Source: Coca-Cola Journey
Conclusion: successful brands need innovations. The campaign is an important step for the company in bringing new life to its Content-Strategy 2020: “Digital, social & mobile are re-writing the rules of marketing. We can no longer have a one-way brand to fan communications – instead the brand must facilitate true fan experiences to drive engagement,” said Pio Schunker, Senior VP Integrated Marketing Communications. This can be taken as a foregone conclusion since the race for interesting content is really getting going.
Case Study Visual Social Media: marketing with Instagram
Surely but slowly, the big international brands are distancing themselves from social media campaigns focusing only on one network. Big brands are increasingly moving over to Instagram, a photo sharing app used to take pictures on the smartphone, then add filters and share them with friends and the Instagram community. This is simple and really interesting as it uses the emotional power of pictures in a similar way to Pinterest. In fact it is so interesting that the start-up founded in 2010 was bought last year by Facebook for a billion dollars, Facebook’s biggest investment up to now.
According to a current study by Simply Measured, 59% of the Top 100 Interbrand Brands have their own Instagram accounts. And according to company reports they are now able to reach over 100 million users. In comparison: Twitter broke the 200 million mark at the end of 2012 after six years. In the meantime, Instagram can be found on the Web with its own website, and although no photos can be uploaded there, a photostream is easier to view there than on a mobile phone. This once again makes it a most interesting platform for brands to use. This is how Starbucks, a front runner in the integration of innovative platforms, has gained 1.2 million followers for its Instagram channel up to now; MTV currently has 1.4 million and is the brand with the biggest appeal on Instagram.
How many of the Top 100 Brands are using the respective social networks?
Source: Simply Measured, 2013
The following examples from very different brands demonstrate how they are integrating Instagram into the marketing mix.
#Fiestagram: awareness of the introduction of the Ford Fiesta
Already at the start of 2012, the media innovator Ford was using visual social media with its ‘Fiestagram’, in order to generate interest in the new Ford Fiesta. ‘Fiestagram’ was the first Instagram campaign from a big brand; with a relatively simple idea of a new platform, a photo competition, Ford was able to reach a relatively small but important target group of the ‘early adopters’ and amateur photographers with whom the photo sharing app was already popular. During the seven-week campaign, around 16,000 photos were posted. At the same time, the campaign attracted great interest on Facebook and Twitter as many users also posted and tweeted their pictures there.
#Tag the Weather: sales push of Gillette Venus razors
Even Procter&Gamble used the power of images for Gillette Venus in Sweden. The long Swedish winter isn’t a very appealing time for women there to shave their legs. An Instagram campaign was intended to put an end to the sales slump. Users could post their Swedish winter pictures and the ‘sun jury’ of fashion bloggers from Miami, Rio and Sydney chose the best photo each day. The result: brand interaction and sales figures increased (+570% more online sales through cooperation with an e-Commerce platform).
#Airmax: mobile sale of Nike Airmax shoes
Nike, with around 1.3 million followers, is also one of the biggest brands on Instagram and celebrated gaining one million followers to its @Nike accounts with a 24-hour event. Now the sports manufacturer wants to boost sales of its individualized Airmax shoes with an Instagram campaign and a Microsite. Users can take inspiration from their Instagram photos to create their own personal shoe designs. The site takes the photo to find a colour scheme for the shoe which corresponds to the background of the picture. The shoe can then be shared on all platforms and also be bought on the mobile site.
#rededitionplease: Red Bull broadens content marketing about pictures
For the launch of Red Bull Editions in the UK, fans of the energy drink should link their photos with the Instagram account @RedBullUK. The Action Red Bull Editions is running until the end of May. In connection with the colours of the new Red Bull Editions, the photos should be in red, blue or silver and marked with the corresponding hash tags #rededitionplease, #silvereditionplease as well as #blueeditionplease. The winning photos will then be presented offline on billboards in five English cities.
#CaptureEuphoria: Ben&Jerry’s new interpretation of traditional printed advertising
Ice cream lovers could mark their portraits with the hash tag #Capture Euphoria and upload them onto Instagram. Ben&Jerry’s selected photos were then printed onto advertising posters or flyers and distributed in their respective areas where neighbors and friends were looking out for them. This was a campaign which humorously combined on- and offline with one another (which wouldn’t work over here – those chosen for their pictures knew nothing about it). It also underlines a central market value of the company: the closeness to the target group.
Conclusion: along with Facebook and Twitter, the top brands are increasingly integrating other social networks into their marketing. Instagram is one of the platforms currently benefiting from this. As the examples show, visual social media is still in its infancy; all the presented campaigns (except Nike) use competitions which choose the best photos and the first-mover image of the app in order to generate publicity. It’s about creating a buzz via hash tags. However, in time the campaigns will become more professional. The unbeatable advantage of the photo sharing app is its mobile aspect.
You cannot say it enough: the question of whether this platform will be successful or not for companies is not important. In order to keep up with the increasingly complex social web phenomenon, it’s essential to be strategically well-placed. If it’s about seeing if and how social media or a particular platform can bring any added value, depending on the target or target group, this question can result in very different answers.
Bike-sharing-systems: Traditional bike rental goes digital
Even the traditional bike rental is no exception. It is an interesting example for the change of distribution channels as part of the digitalization. Classic offline distribution channels are thereby challenged by innovative online versions. Where there were good hotels in a holiday area or local bike shops just around the corner, which provided bikes for their guests, nowadays one can find bike-sharing-systems (BSS) almost in every city. You can rent and return bikes automatically. These BSS are not only widely spread in Europe, but also in Japan and China. The US, being a classic car driving country, still needs to catch up on it. However, especially in the US there are currently new interesting models being developed. These are based on social networks and mobile technology. There is a list of BSS´s worldwide on the Bike-Sharing Worldmap.
Germany: GPS technology at Call a Bike
The pioneering Call a Bike is a bike rental system in several German cities that is operated by Deutsche Bahn subsidiary DB-Rent. There are different versions of the system and not every location has the same system. Though, every registered customer can rent a bike in any participating city at the applying terms for each city. It was started in 2002 and even though it was derided by traffic experts back then, nowadays it is an important part of the public and resource saving mobility concept. A new GPS technology on bikes in Cologne and Munich simplifies the return of the bikes. According to DB, the system recognizes the location automatically as soon as the bike is locked and the lock button is bolted. Competitor nextbike, which was started ten years ago as well and is available in 30 cities as well as internationally, offers a similar concept.
Competitor nextbike: More and more bike rentals are made via smartphones.
Whether it is ‘Share Economy’, ‘Peer-to-Peer’ or ‘Collaborative Consumption’: Sharing is in fashion. It doesn´t matter whether it is the organization of everyday mobility, leisure time, on holiday or in business, people tend to share, swap, rent or hire out more often. In 2011 the Time Magazine has already voted this concept to be one of the ten greatest ideas to change the world. New business models, which are especially based on trust, are being developed. A lot of these models are not new, but they experience a comeback thanks to mobile devices and social networks, Smartphones are increasingly used to organize everyday life.
USA: Peer-to-Peer Bikesharing with Spinlister
Apart from CarSharing, the private sharing of bikes are more and more brought into focus of business formations in the area of mobility concepts. Parallel to an ‘AirBnB-for-x’ solution, the start-up Spinlister, offers a platform for private users to lend their bikes to other users. Spinlister, founded in May 2011 and shortly renamed to Liquid in October 2012, get started anew with a fresh management. Users can offer their own bikes for hiring out on this platform. I.e. if you are in a different city you can borrow someone else´s bike. Spinlister keeps 17.5% of the lending fees. The only flaw: Unfortunately, there is no app (yet) that would make the system available to mobile users as well. The social features could be optimized as well. Competitor GoVelo solves this problem in a more charming way; but even GoVelo is still in a preliminary stage. Here, users can not only open the bike via a smartphone app.
An ‘AirBnB’ model for bikes: Spinlister as a platform for bike enthusiasts with a social added value
Conclusion: Professionalized by mobile technology and social networks, the classic bike rental experiences a tipping point and comes to be part of the collaborative mobility concepts. P2P Bike Sharing business models like Spinlister are still niche trades and concentrate on a smaller community. However, they can still become serious competitors for Bike Sharing providers like Call a Bike, if they concentrate on different target-group-specific rudiments. There is one thing all examples have in common: Digitalization and mobilization don’t spare the good old bike. For everyone who organizes their mobility via their smartphones, this kind of apps shouldn’t be missed.
The ‘Google Glass collective’: strong venture capital partnerships aim at changing paradigms on the mobile Web
Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Google Ventures – three illustrious names on the venture capital scene. And all three see the new Google glasses as more than just an experiment. The common goal of the recently announced partnership ‘The Glass Collective‘: through investment in the promising developments of the glasses’ eco system, Google Glass should replace Apple’s iPhone as the ultimate innovation. Behind this lies the belief that as an AR-interface for mobile Internet, the new Glass will be as revolutionary as the introduction of the browser or the development of the smartphone. “The same way the browser was a window to the Internet, Glass is a whole new window to the Internet and reality,” Andreessen said in a statement to Forbes. The venture capitalists wanted to offer developers an incentive to develop applications, to bring new ideas and implement further projects.
The Glass collective with Marc Andreessen, Bill Maris and John Doerr: “Yep. That’s the future!”
Source: Google Ventures Blog
Always be online hands free – with Google’s new AR-Data Glass every user can enrich reality by accessing additional information: directions or navigation data can be blended into the field of vision in the Glass, photos and videos are opened on voice command or shared with friends without needing to use an additional device. The first Glass should be sent out to Beta testers this month. However, even before a prototype is on the market, there is already quite a buzz. Due to the far reaching technological implications, the project has attracted a lot of criticism worldwide, particularly from data protectionists who fear that wearers will access their information unnoticed and save it onto the firm’s own server. A video already gives the future users a first few glimpses:
Google shows how it feels to see the world through the Data Glass in this video
Conclusion: a fascinating project. Even though the road to mass production is still a long way off, glasses, watches and other portable small computers, the so-called ‘Wearables’, represent a new mobile technology era. With an early start, a strong marketing campaign that stands out and now the backing of financially secure investors, Google has gained a time advantage over Apple and Samsung in order to build up a creative development community around its project. On the other hand, there is the question of how to break into the mainstream: how much will the Glass change our everyday lives, what real advantage will it bring? Here the developers and their applications come into play, like with Apple’s iPhone and its App Store. This is a clever move by Google to mark out its claim well in time and in great style.
