Layar Launches First Augmented Reality Content Store

You might be wondering whether "augmented reality" is a feature or a business model. Layar hopes to prove it can be a business model, by introducing an AR content store that allows publishers to offer AR experiences on multiple mobile platforms such as iPhone and Android.

The content store is seamlessly integrated into the Layar "Reality Browser", which is already used on more than 1.6 million mobile devices globally.

The Layar Payment Platform supports multiple payment providers and multiple currencies, ready to serve the different local markets.

Layar deals with legal, administrative and tax rules enabling the publisher to focus on their core activities. The first payment provider is PayPal, supporting payments to residents of United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. More countries, currencies, payment methods and payment providers will be added regularly, the company says.

Publishers can set up accounts at http://site.layar.com/create.

Among the developers that already have signed up are Berlitz City Guides, Mouse Reality for Disney World, UK Sold Prices and Disneyland and EyeTour.

UK sold prices allows users to check the latest UK residential sold price information while users are out and about.  Berlitz helps people experience the city’s highlights: the best attractions, coziest restaurants, most comfortable hotels, coolest places to shop and most fashionable nightlife.

Mouse Reality for Disney World and Disneyland helps users find and navigate all attractions, shows, shops, dinning, transportation, and more in Disneyland and Disney World.

EyeTour helps users explore Puerto using exclusive video content of historical sites, museums, restaurants, parks and more.

Looking ahead, the company believes it can use AR to create a business offering a marketplace for content, services and goods, says Raimo van der Klein, Layar CEO.

Publishers can start selling their content without upfront investments while Layar facilitates payments between the end-user and the publisher. Publishers receive 60 percent of the net proceeds.

Android users who are residents of United States, United Kingdom, Canada or Australia can start buying layers right now after installing the new version of the Layar Augmented Reality Browser. The iPhone update is soon to follow.

Layar describes itself as the world’s leading Augmented Reality Platform on mobile. The Layar Reality Browser currently has more than 1.6 million users and comes pre-installed on tens of millions of phones from leading handset manufacturers and carriers by the end of the year. Over 500 layers are developed by the global community of 3000 Layar publishers.

The free Layar Reality Browser is available on Android devices and iPhone 3GS.

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HTC Incredible Goes On Sale Today at Verizon Wireless

19% CAGR for Tablet Style PCs

Sales of slate-style tablet PCs will grow at a 19-percent compound annual growth rate through 2015, the same rate as smartphones, while Wi-Fi-equipped handsets will grow at about a 21 percent CAGR, say researchers at Coda Research Consultancy.

That forecast could be taken to mean either that the tablet, such as the Apple iPad, really will create a new segment of the consumer electronics market, or that it will cannibalize part of existing markets such as netbooks, notebooks or laptops, or that tablets. In the former case the tablet might replace some parts of the need for e-book readers and netbooks or notebooks; in the latter case the tablet will change the user interface from keys to touchpad.

To be sure, devices such as the iPad could succeed simply by rearranging existing demand. But Apple, for one, seems to have achieved its greatest success when it can create a whole new market or rearrange an existing market. The iPod created a new market, while the iPhone rearranged an existing market.

Coda researchers so far think tablet computers represent the emergence of a new market, and new behaviors.

Consumer usage will tend to be around content consumption rather than creation, and for accessing information. A greater proportion of slates will be shared across household members than notebooks currently are. It is possible, in other words, that although high-end slates might continue to be personal items, as are mobile phones, some lower-end slates might be more like remote controls, used by everybody in a household, and not "owned" by individuals.

Business uses also could arise in healthcare, education, field sales and services, real estate, the insurance industry, and industrial design, Coda believes.

The other likely avenue is use by traveling workers, for the same reason many people now claim they can travel without a PC, and simply use a smartphone. Though the iPad and other tablets will not likely replace the smartphone on trips, many could decide it works well enough to take along as a substitute for the PC, the iPod and the e-book reader.

Nokia to Introduce N8, Using New Version of Symbian

The Nokia N8, Nokia's latest smartphone, using the new Symbian 3 operating system, is designed to challenge the iPhone and BlackBerry at the high end of the market, where Nokia arguably has been struggling.

The Nokia N8 will be available in selected markets from the third quarter of 2010 and comes with an estimated price tag of €370 (about $493) before taxes and subsidies.

The Nokia N8 introduces a 12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, Xenon flash and a large sensor that rivals those found in compact digital cameras. Additionally, the Nokia N8 offers the ability to make HD-quality videos and edit them with an intuitive built-in editing suite.

Doubling as a portable entertainment center, people can enjoy HD-quality video with Dolby Digital Plus surround sound by plugging into their home theatre system. The Nokia N8 enables access to Web TV services that deliver programs, news and entertainment from channels like CNN, E! Entertainment, Paramount and National Geographic. Additional local Web TV content is also available from the Ovi Store.

Social networking also is featured. People can update their status, share location and photos, and view live feeds from Facebook and Twitter in a single app directly on the home screen. Calendar events from social networks can also be transferred to the device calendar.

The Nokia N8 comes with free global Ovi Maps walk and drive navigation, guiding people to places and points of interest in more than 70 countries worldwide.

Nokia has upgraded its Symbian software to make it more user friendly, a criticism of earlier versions of Symbian.

The Symbian 3 operating system supports features touchscreen commands such as multi-touch, flick scrolling and pinch-zoom, as well as faster multi-tasking, Nokia says.

Will Rogers Introduce Bundled Mobile Broadband Plans?

Canadian wireless provider Rogers apparently is considering giving customers a data plan that would let them use an iPad (or other similar devices) plus mobile phones, on a single access plan,  according to Electronista.

That's the sort of innovation in pricing plans and packaging that seems almost inevitable as people start using multiple wireless devices, and start to rebel against paying separate access fees for every single device they use, especially when some of those devices might not require much bandwidth, while others are used often enough to justify a typical $30 a month plan.

Observers often criticize mobile and other service providers for unimaginative thinking on such matters. Fair or not, one wonders what changes might be in store when fourth-generation Long Term Evolution networks start to enter their marketing phases.

So far, Clearwire has been more experimental than other leading mobile providers. To be fair, it isn't clear how much creativity actually can be brought to bear on the basic access service. But we ought to expect some changes as the types of devices benefiting from mobile access proliferate, and people start using multiple devices.

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Blockbuster Tries to Take Advantage of its 28-Day Release Window Advantage

We should soon see whether Blockbuster's 28-day earlier release window for new release DVDs confers any business advantage over other competitors in the space, especially Netflix and Redbox, as Blockbuster and its studio partners seem to think will be the case.

Blockbuster announced availability of the hit movie, "It's Complicated" from Blockbuster in stores, by mail, or digitally, a full four weeks before it will be available through some competitors.

Blockbuster's early advantage reflects its ongoing agreement with Universal Studios to provide customers with the opportunity to rent hit movies the day they are released. Blockbuster also has early availability of other box office hits like Sherlock Holmes and the highest grossing film of all-time, Avatar, as well as other upcoming new releases such as Tooth Fairy, Valentine's Day, and Invictus.

Blockbuster also has struck deals with mobile handset providers to put the "Blockbuster On Demand" app prominently on the main screens of about 60 models of Samsung Blu-ray Players, HDTVs, and Blu-ray Home Theater Systems, as well as on T-Mobile's HTC HD2.

Blockbuster is the only multichannel provider that has every hot new movie on the day of its release, it's just that simple. What we now shall see is whether that makes a material difference for Blockbuster. Release windows typically have been important in the movie distribution business, so some shift should be seen.

What do you Think of This Google Tablet?

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I don't know what you think, but this Android-powered tablet, if it winds up being a commercial product, does not seem to have the "wow" factor of the Apple iPad.

A Skirmish in the Apple-Google Fight

It's a small skirmish, but Android will be supporting Flash natively in version 2.2 of the operating system, though Google appears to think highly of HTML5 as well. Apple, of course, does not support Flash for the iPad.

Adobe demonstrated Flash running on Android about 10 months ago, it seems, and HTC devices do support Flash on at least some "Sense"-capable devices.

Putting Flash support into Android does not mean Google will not also support HTML5, but the decision seems at least partly a stake in the ground in the growing battle over video playback standards for the mobile Web.

Android Market Closes on 50,000 Apps

At this rate, it will not be long before the Android Market features 50,000 or so applications.

That's well behind Apple's total of about 150,000 apps, but Android is catching up pretty fast.

Would You Rather Have had the First iPod or $14,500?

“If you spent the money on an original iPod in 2001 on Apple stock ($499), you would have $14,513.78 today.” 


In part that's a commentary on Apple's soaring equity value;in part that's a clue about product pricing for device pricing. 


So the issue is whether the same choices exist today for the Apple iPad. Of course, 2001 was a good time to buy equities. 

Alcatel-Lucent Gets into Mobile Advertising Business

Alcatel-Lucent has created a white-label direct marketing platform called  "Optism" that is designed to help mobile operators create “media inventory” and provide advertisers with easy access to highly-targeted audiences.

Optism is not an ad network so much as an enabler of ad networks, since it is the mobile service providers who actually will retail the services, but Optism does create a permission and preference-based mobile marketing capability aggregated across multiple mobile operators.

Optism features a media arm that brokers relationships between mobile operators and advertisers, greatly simplifying the media selling process for aggregated operator inventory.

You might wonder whether Alcatel-Lucent now is competing with Google or Apple. It says it isn't, since Optism primarily aims to create direct marketing campaigns taking advantage of mobile communication features, such as text messaging.

It's an interesting approach to creating business-to-business revenue streams that are not directly dependent on end-user subscriptions. Available as a hosted and white-labled solution, Optism might be able to get economies of scale no single mobile operator could.


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Study Confirms: Wireless Cheaper than Fixed for Rural Broadband

Wireless infrastructure has significant cost advantages over wired access in reaching homes in rural areas, it is often the most efficient way to provide broadband access, says the Brattle Group. That will come as no surprise to anybody who ever has attempted to model the cost of building broadband access infrastructure

The Group's analysis suggests that the cost of bringing high-speed access to most rural counties is between $1,000 per household to $7,500 per household.

The bigger issue is the degree to which mobile broadband can be a viable subsitute for fixed broadband in urban areas where fixed access already is plentiful.

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Can a Device Save a Brand?

Okay, it is a dumb idea to think any mobile device can "save" a brand, unless that brand is Apple. But it isn't so far fetched to imagine ways to use an iPad as a virtual sales assistant or automated checkout device in some scenarios, as Hertz does in its rental return lines.

With its bigger screen, the iPad could be useful as a platform for social shopping. That can be done on PCs or  mobiles, but the portability and form factor is different from a netbook or laptop and screen size is a key difference from a mobile phone. One might argue the overall cost of creating an app and avoiding application-specific hardware are other advantages.

Conceivably it could replace kiosks or other digital signage approaches, especially where the attempt is to allow end users to imagine different products in different configurations, for example.

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iPad Users Watch a Lot of Video

Data from MeFeedia suggests the Apple iPad, on the market for just a few weeks, already is the fifth most-used mobile device, trailing the  iPhone, iPod Touch, SymbianOS, and Android in terms of unique users.

Based on its user data, MeFeedia says iPad users consume three times as many videos as PC-based Web users, up from the 2.5 times at launch. It appears iPad users also spend four times as much time watching videos as PC-based Web users.

Also, iPad users seem to consume five times as many videos as iPhone users do, MeFeedia says.

One might suggest that a lack of distractions accounts for the longer engagement time with video. One might also suggest the early adopters are more likely than the typical user to be heavy consumers of
media, games and video. It might also be the case that users are in an experimental phase, playing with the device to figure out what they can do with it, which might boost engagement on any number of levels.

Should those sorts of findings be confirmed as the device gets wider distribution past the early adopters, it would be safe to say that at least one of the iPad use modes is as a multimedia content device, in the same general class as an e-book reader, but with a focus on multimedia.

Should that be the case, the iPad might legitimately emerge as a showcase for video-based mobile advertising.

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Microsoft Sends Small Business to Alteva

Alteva, a provider of cloud-based unified communications solutions, is partnering with Microsoft and BroadSoft to provide a hosted Unified Communications solution to small businesses. Alteva has developed a way to interconnect its hosted voice and messaging services with Microsoft Communication Services product suite, including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Office Communications Server for both its small business and enterprise customers.

Alteva also has launched a Web store, where organizations with less than 25 users can easily select the right UC solution to suit their needs. Alteva has designed four different UC packages from which small businesses can choose from.

The "UC Complete" bundle supplies a fully-integrated, high-definition voice and unified communications solution priced from $38 per user, per month. Other packages are priced at $28 to $15 per user, per month.

Alteva also offers a la carte purchasing options for those who seek only to purchase Exchange email, OCS or Alteva's hosted VoIP.

Alteva says it is North America's largest provider of enterprise-class hosted VoIP, and provides hosted UC solutions to businesses in all 50 states and four continents.

Microsoft to Direct Small Businesses Seeking Unified Communications Solutions With VoIP Integration to Alteva