Before heading down to ad:tech yesterday, I paused to wonder if it was worth it. All the conferences tend to look and sound the same. Rarely does a panel ever live up to the ‘tell me something I don’t know’ request that so many writers seek. Tales from the Bleeding Edge was different. It was the best panel I’ve been to in ages and Lori H. Schwartz, SVP and Director of Emerging Media at IPG Media Lab deserves kudos for putting together such a panel. The write-up alluded to all kinds of cool technologies, many of which were not touched upon, but the ones that were, were wonderful.

Bill Capodanno, Director of Digital Marcom Planning and Effectiveness, Microsoft led off with a brief discussion of Microsoft Surface. He asked how many people in the audience had heard of it and a majority had. He spoke about a brief video they did about Microsoft Surface as well as the parody that was produced. It is a very funny parody, well worth the watch.

I think it was Bill who used the phrase, ‘Conversational Marketing’. I think this is an important concept to unpack, so I’ll save that for a more meta-post about ad:tech. After Bill spoke, Marc Ruxin, SVP and Director of Digital Strategy at MCCANN Worldgroup spoke. At least I think he was the next speaker. Whoever it was didn’t show any neat technology. Instead they spoke about the importance of following "not yet ready to scale" technologies and the importance of failing as often as you succeed, because often the real discoveries are in the failures.

This was followed by Patrick Ream, VP of Marketing at Next IT Corporation. They produced the ‘avatar’ Sgt. Star for the U.S. Army recruiting effort. As a Second Life aficionado, I thought it was a bit of a stretch to call Sgt. Star an avatar. Sure, some of the natural language processing and the data gathered was interesting, but the panel was starting to lose my interest.

Next up was Larry Harris, President of Ansible Mobile. He spoke about mobile bar codes. The idea is that you take a picture of a mobile bar code with the camera that is part of your cell phone. The information gathered is then used in the cell phone for various purposes. As an example, you could have your contact information in a mobile bar code. When the bar code is scanned by the cell phone’s camera, the contact information could be stored in the cell phones address book. At a party, could wear name tags with their barcode on them and when the bar code is scanned, the persons website is displayed on the cell phone. The bar code could be an invisible water mark in a poster, and when the poster is photographed, a trailer for a movie or a track from a band could be downloaded. In addition options to buy tickets to special sneak previews and so on could be presented to the consumer.

Apparently, this technology is already available in 70% of the cell phones in Japan and is widely used. It seems to be used mostly in ‘smartphones’. I wondered what it would take to read mobile bar codes from my Motorola Razr. Has someone created an app that I can download and test things out? The Razr supports Java. What would it take to build a Java app like that? If it isn’t possible on the Razr, and for people with less powerful cell phones, would it be possible to set up a mobile bar code gateway. Take a picture of a mobile bar code. Send it to the gateway and get a text message back pointing to whatever information is sought.

It was a very interesting presentation and one that deserves a follow up post of its own, if I can find the time.

This presentation was followed by Karen Rostmeyer, Co-Founder of Dutch Umbrella. Dutch Umbrella is a very simple idea. In Holland, there are places where you can borrow a bicycle at specified locations, and drop it off at other specified locations. What if you made umbrellas available that way in shops in the United States. If it starts to rain, you simply duck into a local shop and borrow an umbrella from a ‘raindrop’ stand. You use it as you go about your day, and drop it off at some other ‘raindrop’ when you are done. The umbrella would feature logos of the various shops participating.

It is a brilliant idea. It gets people into the shops, which is always a big hurdle. It gets people to carry around advertisements for you. The question is, where is the bleeding edge technology in this. Well, marketing people want to track things and gather data. So, add an RFID tag. Dutch Umbrella is using a small RFID tag on the umbrellas, that has additional information directing people to their website and ‘pseudoblog’. Karen demonstrated the sort of data that they were gathering. It was what you expected about number of umbrellas picked up and dropped off. The business could then tell where its customers where coming from based on the information from the dropped off umbrellas. The RFID reader could scan a full umbrella stand in about 15 seconds. Future versions may include RFID readers in the stand to provide real time updates.

Following Karen, Oliver Barth, Pre Sales Director of Total Immersion spoke. He started off with a brief discussion of Augmented Reality. Essentially, augmented reality is capturing real life images and then augmenting them with three-dimensional models. As an example, he took a Lego box and placed it under the camera, on the monitors a three-dimensional model of the Lego when it was put together then appeared. He used a game controller to move the three dimensional model around the screen, during which time it interacted with objects on the table as viewed by the camera. It was very impressive.

These are tails from the bleeding edge, so it may be a while before I get a chance to work with some of these technologies, but I look forward to exploring these further as soon as possible. It will be especially interesting to see how data from some of these technologies can be used with the complex event processing technologies that we at Toomre Capital Markets are so interested in.

(Cross posted at Toomre Capital Markets)

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