Colourful Tags - Another cool way to interact & engage customers

The future media is all about reaching, interacting and connecting with your customers in ways that excite and enrich customer experience. While there are numerous technologies and mechanisms by which businesses can interact with customers, the real challenge to marketeers has been in trying to find simple yet fun ways to allow customers to interact and engage traditional offline signage & advertisements such as billboards, banners, posters, print-ads etc.

Mobility has given marketeers a great opportunity to interact with customers. Already SMS short codes /messaging have been widely adopted by various tv shows such as American Idol to engage and interact with customers. Customers can send in their votes via texting to a short code displayed on the screen. Latest statistics have shown that over 100 million text messages were generated atthe last American Idol final candidate selection.

SMS messaging with short codes has now been seeping into mainstream signage. A few enterprising companies has begun to offer signs with sms short codes to which customers can text in to get further information. SMS short codes have also been used by traditional print media where the short codes are displayed on a print ad to which customers may text and get more detailed product information.

The problem with SMS short codes is two fold:
a) Customers have to text to a particular short code
b) They also have to text in a code and this code can be a long alphanumeric word. Frequently users can make typing errors which can cause some undue messaging.
c) Its a more time consuming. Perhaps some teenagers can text fairly quickly but it is a challenge for less dextrous people especially the older generation


Enter Tags.

Tags offer a fresh new way to interact with customers that relieves the user from remembering the sms short code and from texting. Something akin to bar codes, tags are 2 dimensinal pictorial codes that are placed on a product, sign, image etc. With a camera phone and a special application that users can download and install , the users can point the camera to the picture and take a snap shot. The image is then sent over the air to a server which filters the image and recognizes the 2-D pictorial code and subsequently returns back via sms message information associated with the tag.

2-D tags were originally introduced in the Japan and asia a a few years back. These 2D tags were black and while pictures usually small about a square inch or less. Recently microsoft introduced a new more cooler 2-D tags which are colorful and attractive to place in advertisements. Still in beta mode, these 2-D tags offer a great mechanism for retailers to embed in their product signs etc and engage their customers. These tags consist of small triangles arranged horizontally and vertically and in multiple color shades ( I think 4 colors) and uniquely describe a product. I suspect with numerous color combinations, you should be able to encode uniquely millions if not billions of product codes.

The technology behind this is equally impressive. The sophisticated technology powering Microsoft Tag, High Capacity Color Barcodes (HCCBs), was invented by Microsoft Research. It was designed from the ground up for maximum performance with the limited cameras on most mobile phones. Advanced image-processing techniques decode even out-of-focus barcode images, which means Microsoft Tag works with the fixed-focus camera lenses common in most mobile devices.

With a tag creation tool that you can access online at the microsoft's website, you can quickly create a tag and associate it with a url and some information. The tag can then be printed using a color printer and pasted to a product.

Very cool technology with endless possibilities.

Microsoft's Project Natal - A game changing technology for Advertising?

iMicrosoft's project Natal incorporating motion-sensing technology is poised to revolutionize the gaming industry. While Wii was a game changer in terms of introduing a new level of interactivity to gaming, Project Natal enable hands free control of objects giving users a level of interactivity that is truly something out of science fiction.

The technology that is added to Xbox has three components:

• Video camera that can track in real-time where you are and what you are doing
• An infrared monochrome camera that can detect depth and motion even in the dark
• A highly sensitive microphone that can detect voice commands that combined with acoustic software can detect sounds coming from a particular direction and so can isolate to a person in a group
• A host of sophisticated image and voice recognition software that can identify movements, gestures and voice commands to control and drive objects

I was bowled over by the short video clips demonstrating the technology. A boy enters the room and is at once detected by the entertainment system. He then begins to interact with the character in the game all without using any devices, just hand gestures and body movement.. Amazing...

Obviously aimed at the gaming/entertainment sector, this technology has at once incredible potential and uses in multiple industry sectors. For advertising, this offers a new level of interactivity to engage customers through say digital signage and kiosks to build brand presence. Furthermore, with its ability to track human joints, movements etc, we now have the ability to get further metrics regarding the person interacting with the signage/kiosk something that existing systems lack. Examples include, sex, height, shape of the person that can in turn be used to trigger the placement of appropriate products ( clothing sizes etc) to be displayed.

In addition to applications in marketing, this technology also can benefit the elderly and disabled people to enrich their lives. Imaging controlling various objects in the room such as opening doors, turning off/on various devices in the house through gestures and movement. The system can detect where you are and can potentially even be programmed to send alerts to 911 if the person has fallen down.

In short this technology has the potential of truly raising the bar in human machine interaction and I am looking forward to see its applications in a variety of areas..