According to a press release, Verizon and Snap, Inc., the creator of Snapchat, have teamed up to create new augmented reality (AR) tools and experiences.
The deal gives Snap access to 5G test equipment in Verizon’s labs, which the company can use to create and test boundary-pushing AR experiences that take full advantage of 5G speeds. Snap will also have its software preloaded on some Verizon 5G phones. This will likely lead to a large influx of new customers for Snap, and help it cement its spot in the AR race. Verizon, in turn, will have premium sponsorship placements in Snap Originals.
“5G will change the way people live, work and play and we’re partnering with leading companies like Snap Inc. to create unique experiences and new offerings,” said Frank Boulben, Senior Vice President of Marketing & Products, Verizon Consumer Group. “Our strategy is to partner with the best brands to ensure our customers have exclusive access to cutting edge technology and services. Our 5G Ultra Wideband technology should change the way mobile users forever experience places and events, evolving the way they see the world.”
“Major advances in high-bandwidth experiences are fueling the future of augmented reality,” said Jared Grusd, Chief Strategy Officer, Snap Inc. “We are thrilled to partner with Verizon to move the industry forward through the development of creative and innovative 5G experiences on Snapchat.”
Snap will also benefit from the many live events Verizon sponsors and hosts, providing AR experiences and introducing countless event-goers to the benefits of AR. Verizon alluded to the possibility by highlighting the potential “opportunities to experience live events in new ways through Snapchat.”
This new partnership highlights the importance of the technology to old and new companies alike.
Digital marketing is now firmly embedded in our day-to-day lives; we start our day with newsletters and check our Facebook before bed. Its influence will continue to grow in 2019, and new advertising trends built on today’s digital innovations will grow along with it. It’s your job to learn to distinguish them and adapt your marketing strategy accordingly.
Here are four digital marketing trends to watch out for in 2019:
Snack Ads
Most people prefer watching videos over reading, which would explain why marketers are producing more video content. While video has madedigital avertising more dynamic, it’s also caused consumers’ already short attention to become even shorter. Luckily, snack ads are enough to keep your target audience engaged. As the name implies, these ads can be likened to snacks, something easy to digest but filling. These videos ads are less than 10 seconds long; they’re short enough to keep people interested while still getting a brand’s message across.
Consumers will be seeing more of these short ads in 2019. Youtube is already pioneering snack ads, and Fox Networks Group will reportedly follow in its footsteps by incorporating them in their linear programs and streaming services.
Voice Search
The coming years will see a deeper interaction between people, devices and applications.Researchers have forecasted that by 2020, 30 percent of web searches will be conducted without even touching the screen. Half of these searches will be done via voice commands.
It’s easy to see why voice search will play a vital role in our daily lives. Using voice to search and ask questions will elevate multi-tasking to new levels. For instance, you can do your shopping while cooking. A lot of people also find speaking to be quicker than typing. Domino’s Pizza is already using voice search technology, with customers being able to order their pizzas through Alexa.
With Google, Amazon, and Apple continuously working on improving their voice assistants, and more people expected to use smart speakers, your brand should make full use of this medium by producing relevant audio content.
Micro-moments
People are spending more than three hours a day on their smartphones, and it’s changing the way companies are trying to get the customers’ attention. The deluge of content and videos mean that brands should be able to deliver their message quickly and in an interesting way, and all in a matter of seconds. This new consumer behavior is what Google has termed “micro-moments.”
Image source: Google
Customers generally have four such moments – “I want to go,” “I want to know,” “I want to do,” and “I want to buy.” For instance, a customer is trying to decide where to eat and wants to know which restaurant is nearby.Brands can take advantage of this micro-moment by being able to provide the customers with the information they need. A Business Page on Google can help since you will appear on “Near Me” searches. Companies should also make sure they’re on platforms where customers search for information, like Amazon, Google Maps, or YouTube.
Augmented Reality
Virtual and augmented reality technology has given consumers something they want—the opportunity to be engaged in a brand’s message. A number of businesses have already embraced VR and AR’s ability to boost brand awareness and sell products. IKEA is a good example. The company’s shopping app gave prospective clients the chance to try out different design solutions before making a purchase.
Image source: YouTube
Social media platforms like Snapchat have also shown that augmented reality can expand a brand’s marketing reach and improve their interactions with customers. Snapchat’s facial and geo filter features quickly developed a following and helped the company, secure sponsors. 2019 will see AR and VR becoming a common marketing tool for companies, especially since the virtual and augmented reality markets are expected to hit $298 billion or more by 2023.
There are still several weeks left in 2018. That’s more than enough time to future-proof your brand. Take stock of these fast-rising digital marketing trends and develop a good strategy that incorporates them in your marketing plan.
The co-founder & CEO of augmented reality platform company Blippar, Ambarish Mitra, told an audience at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal that within 5-7 years AR will be as ubiquitous as the Internet itself.
When you see the world with your eyes and through the eyes of a camera and something is recognized for the camera and you see some content that appears in the field of view, that is augmented reality. It is the enhancement of reality. Do not confuse it with virtual reality. Virtual reality has almost nothing to do with your immediate reality, it’s almost like escaping from reality.
It’s important to note why this industry is really relevant. Computers themselves are continuously evolving. You can see in the very early days it was all about the touchpad and the keyboard and it wasn’t a very natural behavior. Then the whole AI wave came along. What’s the role of AI? Besides artificial intelligence, I always call it IA, which is intelligent assistance. It’s here to serve us. We are not here to serve the AI.
Then touch, which is a very human function, touch computing came into play. In 2010 we saw the first birth of natural language processing. We humans talk and we want the computers to talk back at us. Then the final frontier which is vision. Vision is very important because vision is a large part of what makes us human. A lot of our cognition growing up comes from this sense which we call eyesight. Computers will one day, and beginning to already, will see and understand the world. Computer vision is very relevant.
AI and AR are Deeply Linked
We are already starting to see how computers are beginning to understand. It’s a very important branch of artificial intelligence and in a way augmented reality and AI has been positioned as very separate industries, but they’re very deeply linked. Augmented reality cannot scale until computers understand reality. It’s not just about gimmicky dinosaurs walking down a path. At one point we will see almost the entire Internet transform into an AR medium where everything in the field of view could come to life. It’s very relevant. You may not realize that even though the history of the Internet has been very words driven where you type some words and you get a response, but there are so many so many things in your everyday life which you cannot describe with words.
The next generation of computing is massively going to be vision based. AR promises to be a very lucrative industry because it is connected to the world we see and also a lot more possibilities with devices. Almost everybody has some form of an AR device because you have a camera on your phone. VR is an incredible and equally promising industry but still is a slightly niche utility because of how it moves you away from scaling or moving around the wider world.
This is the famous Gartner hype cycle which it has been applied to augmented reality as well. We started Blippar literally when it was in the very very earth early stages innovation trigger. We’ve actually been through the whole peak of inflicted expectations. We’ve raised a bunch of money and now it’s reaching a point where AR is under the scrutiny of whether it is going to deliver on its true potential.
AR Will Be as Ubiquitous as the Internet
The timing is great, five of the world’s biggest companies, not just in tech but the most valuable companies have invested in augmented reality. We are predicting that from five to seven years down the line it is really ready to be comparable and as ubiquitous as the Internet is today.
Facebook has launched an ad-based platform on AR. Snapchat has the famous face filters and of course, now Google with ARCore and Apple with ARKit are supporting the medium and making their phones compatible with it. So we believe AR is already having a positive impact.
About Blippar
Blippar is a seven-year-old British company operating out of Silicon Valley, New York, and London. Our mission was to create this ubiquitous AR platform which works on any camera device and brings the world to life. It’s been incredible the last two years with several large players coming into AR. It’s really validated the space.
Adobe’s Scott Belsky says that augmented reality will be as big or bigger than the Web itself. “Augmented reality, to me, is the next major medium,” says Belsky. “I actually would go on the record saying that I think someday AR will be as big, if not bigger, than the Web because it will literally be everywhere.”
Scott Belsky was recently interviewed on CXOTalk with Michael Krigsman about AI and AR and how it will impact the customer experience (video below):
The Age of Artificial Intelligence
This is probably the most exciting part of my job is thinking about these future mediums. Everyone is going to have to take them into consideration. If those terms sounded new to any of your viewers, it’s a problem, and for a few reasons.
On the AI side, every company has a lot of data on its customers that they need to use to make the customer experience better. Customers are going to stop being forgiving of presumptuous defaults that don’t work for them, of questions that they should know the answer to already.
In the Age of AI, Customers Will Expect Personalization
Customers are going to expect a personalized experience because we’re in the age of AI. That starts with instrumenting your services and products to start collecting the right data. Then it means hiring a team that can understand and starts to extrapolate some lessons from that data. Then it also means designing products to take it into account, which is personalization.
It’s a real vector of the future. I think that companies are going to start competing on the data that they have to enable a better customer experience for their customers. I think that every company, especially big ones if they don’t start to leverage their understanding of their customers, they will be trampled by those that can. We can talk more about that.
Augmented Reality Will Be Bigger than the Web
Augmented reality, to me, is the next major medium. I actually would go on the record saying that I think someday AR will be as big, if not bigger, than the Web because it will literally be everywhere. It will be a layer on everything we see. We will walk down the street, and we will know who we know was everywhere and what their ratings were. Yelp will come alive to us, right? Directions will be transformed. There will be LinkedIn bubbles over everyone’s heads. You’ll have this amazing amount of knowledge and insight about everyone in every room you enter.
Then, if you take those glasses off or whatever you’re looking through, you’ll feel somewhat dumb. You’re like be like, “Oh, my goodness. I don’t know my connections to anyone around here. I don’t know. There’s nothing left for me here. There are no remnants from when I was here last and my old notes.” You’ll want to put it back on. That is this future world.
At Adobe, we think about the fact that that world will be very dry if it isn’t rich with creativity and content. That’s why we’re very focused on the future of augmented reality from the creative tooling and marketing analytics perspective.
Expectation That We Can Talk to Any App or Device
Let’s talk about Voice for a moment. I think we’re going to have an expectation that we can talk to any application or device that is in our lives and ask simple questions and get very, very quick answers. Look no further than anyone who has young kids. They can’t necessarily navigate to a song on Spotify on a phone or whatever, but they can ask for the song from Alexa, and they can use that all day. It’s very, very, very powerful. [There’s] a lot of design implications for voice interfaces as well, and that’s why these new mediums are super exciting, ripe with challenges, but everyone has to start thinking about them.
eBay has now made it easier for sellers to ship their items by using augmented reality to pick the right USPS box, the company announced in a Monday press release.
Using Google’s ARCore platform on Android, eBay leverages motion tracking and environmental recognition to help sellers superimpose virtual shipping boxes of various sizes over a physical product.
Aside from accurate sizing, the new AR feature will help sellers quickly compute for actual shipping costs, as well as save time from having to test boxes at the post office.
The new feature can be found in the “Selling” part of your eBay account. To try it, tap on “Will it Fit?” option on your smartphone. You’ll then have to place your item on a flat, non-reflective surface, say a wooden tabletop, for the AR to work.
Next, tap on your item to place the virtual box over it, then aim the smartphone camera around it to map the surrounding area. You can move around the box and look from all angles to see if the product sticks out while adding room for padding. Once you’ve picked the box, you’re now ready to ship out the item.
Sellers on eBay ship billions of items annually, so any innovation that simplifies the shipping process will likely be well-received.
“By coupling Google’s ARCore platform with premiere AR technology built at eBay, we are continuing to make the selling experience more seamless,” James Meeks, eBay mobile head, pointed out. “This technology is just one example of the types of innovation we’re working on to transform eBay. It demonstrates our continual innovation on behalf our sellers to help them save time and remove barriers.”
However, the AR feature of the updated eBay app is currently only available on a few Android ARCore-compatible devices in the US. There are plans to eventually extend the feature to iOS devices, but no timetable has been set yet.
eBay is on a quest to make shopping more interactive and enjoyable by incorporating augmented reality into the buying process. The company has even tapped the services of expert data scientist Jan Pedersen to ensure that they’re on the right track.
In a bid to provide their clients with a better shopping experience, eBay is reportedly developing an augmented reality kit that will help customers see the product better and make shopping more dynamic. For instance, the AR kit can help drivers check how a particular tire design will look on their vehicles. It could also assist women to look at a dress or an appliance with a more critical eye. Shoppers can also use the kit to check what size box they will need for their purchases.
eBay is currently on a roll, with a holiday quarter that saw a 10 percent increase in its merchandise volume of $24.4 billion. The season also saw around 170 million shoppers using the platform. The company wants to continue that success and is seeking to convince investors that they can also go up against a giant like Amazon. Jeff Bezos’ company is currently dominating the market with its same-day delivery system.
Amazon might be the king of logistics, but as eBay CEO Devin Wenig told investors at a recent technology conference, it’s not the only thing that’s important. According to Wenig, price and inventory are also critical.
eBay is known for offering one-of-a-kind products at affordable prices, but the company is also looking to improve its inventory. To that end, it is planning to add more clothing and home products to attract women and young consumers. At the moment, the retail giant’s base is geared towards older men.
Mohan Patt, the company’s vice president of buyer experiences, revealed that eBay is pushing to maintain its growth and is looking toenhance its artificial intelligence to further improve what customers will be offered. The company aims to expand its reach beyond shoppers who already know what they’re looking for to people who are browsing the different product categories, seeking inspiration.
This is where artificial intelligence and date will come in. According to Patt, this personalization will be the key to getting consumers to purchase items they didn’t know they wanted.
To ensure that the company’s vision for customization and a more engaging shopping experience goes off without a hitch, eBay hasengaged the services of Jan Pedersen. The renowned data scientist will be at the helm of the eCommerce leader’s AI endeavors.
Wenig describes Pedersen as “a true pioneer” and said he joins the company at a crucial time when AI is “capable of transforming personalized, immersive shopping experiences.”
Pedersen and his team will be responsible for developing eBay’s strategy and technology that will be used to better interact with customers.
Microsoft revealed that its next-generation Hololens will pack quite a punch. Scheduled for a 2019 release, the new gadget will arrive with an all-new, more powerful artificial intelligence (AI) chip.
Augmented reality (AR) technology has been steadily gaining ground in recent years. Among its most recent successes is in the gaming industry, where Niantic Lab’s AR mobile game Pokemon Go became a huge success, dominating the gaming charts in 2016.
However, Microsoft is betting that, aside from gaming, the AR technology will have more practical applications in the real world. Thus, the software giant introduced the Hololens, a pair of AR smart glasses that can be programmed to assist users in a variety of tasks such as guiding tourists who are unfamiliar with a city, fixing engines, and even surgical operations using visualization tools.
At the heart of the Hololens 2 is a new AI chip that will power the new device. According to Time, the coprocessor’s main task is to run deep neural networks, a process that parallels how the actual human brain works. The more powerful processor enables the new device to handle large amounts of data that one can expect to come from an ever-changing world at lightning fast speeds.
No Lag Time
Users of this new device will benefit greatly from its upgraded AI chip. The dedicated processor will ensure that the upcoming gadget will process data in real time without any lag, a necessary quality especially in systems that require split-second decisions like driving.
According to ARN, another advantage is that with the new AI chip in place, the Hololens 2 can be self-contained. Simply put, since the device has its own CPU, it is basically untethered and will not have to depend on a PC or a cloud service to function.
This advantage is highlighted by Tirias Research’s Jim McGregor in a Seattle Times report. “For an autonomous car, you can’t afford the time to send it back to the cloud to make the decisions to avoid the crash, to avoid hitting a person.”
Many critics viewed Google Glass as an expensive failure in the consumer market soon after the product launched in February of 2013. The lack of practicality coupled with its hefty $1,500 price tag rendered it unfavorable to the public.
In a sad 2015 announcement, Google shut down the Google Glass website, leaving users with a short thanks for “exploring with us” and later promised that “the journey doesn’t end here.” Since the product was taken off the market, Google Glass Explorers’ Edition remained low key.
However, despite pulling the product from the public market, Alphabet continued to supply Google Glass to US companies including, GE, Boeing, DHL, and AGCO. The pair of trendy glasses slowly found its calling in the enterprise market.
In the hands of AGCO, Google Glass was able to reduce production times by 25 percent, while healthcare professionals found that using the product reduced paperwork loads by 20 percent. As a result, doctors were able to spend 50 percent more time with patients. Meanwhile, DHL also shared their improved working experience with Google Glass, claiming that they were able to increase supply chain efficiency by 15 percent.
After making improvements to the Glass design and hardware, Alphabet X–Google’s “Moonshot” research and development subsidiary– reintroduced the eyewear with the name Glass Enterprise Edition. This latest version of Glass is easy to detach which makes it more shareable and affordable when deployed to different industries. It includes an impressive updated camera module with an improved resolution from 5 megapixels to 8. The new device also boasts a longer battery life, coupled with a powerful processor and an improved user interface.
With GEE, it seems that Google has learned from the short comings of its once experimental Glass product and invested in a field where the device isn’t a mere trendy accessory, but a tool representing innovation and advancement in many fields.
Mobile printing startup Prynt has unveiled their latest gadget that can print colored photos in just 30 seconds, and makes use of augmented reality to produce “moving” pictures.
The gadget is certainly cool, but don’t expect to get high-quality images. The printing quality of the gadget is reportedly pedestrian and doesn’t even match up to photos from Polariod. However, the faster printing speed, easy functionality, as well as better connectivity to iPhones, make it a good buy compared to most Bluetooth mobile printers.
Here’s how it works: when the users choose an image from their iPhone to print, the application will upload a clip from the Live Photo—or the Boomerang app from Instagram—to the cloud. After they scan the static image using the Prynt app, the video will be superimposed on top.
Prynt co-founder Clément Perrotsaid, “It’s the best of both worlds. You get something that is tangible, unique, but you also have a sense of the context of what happened at that time.”
“Here’s a way to capture all of that and put it into something that people would look back at. If it stays on their phone, you don’t necessarily look at it again,” he added.
A mobile printer is not exactlynew, considering that Polaroid has its own Insta-film technology, apart from its own mobile photo printer. HP also has the Sprocket (which sells for about $130).
Perrot hopes that the new technology will encourage people to print their most precious photos. While the convenience of camera phones allows people to take as many pictures as they want, they rarely go through the photos after uploading them on social media. In most instances, they just delete the photos after sharing them on Facebook or Instagram.
Perrot stated that this is what Prynt is trying to fill with its mobile printer. The nostalgia that physical photos possess, where “you can touch something and go back to it.”
For now, the Prynt app is only available for the iPhone. However, an app dedicated for Android will be launched later this year. The app uses inkless paper from Zink, which can be activated using heat.
The Prynt pocket printer sells for $138 on Amazon. Users will have to buy another pack for the sheets of paper to be fed into the device. One pack with 40 sheets will cost $20.
When it comes to digital marketing, content is still king. Content marketing comprised 20.3% of the digital marketing techniques implemented so far in 2017, although big data (crunching numbers to reveal buying patterns, for instance) is quickly gaining a foothold in online commerce.
The point is, businesses that still do not see the significance of digital marketing to boost their presence and revenue will end up being left behind by the competition.
According to a report fromStatista, digital ad spending in the U.S. is expected to grow to $118 billion in 2020 from just a shade under $60 billion in 2015. That’s more than double in just five years. In the global scale, the amount is expected to reach over $250 billion by 2018.
Here are just five of the digital marketing trends to watch for this year:
1. AR & VR Technology
The potential of augmented reality and virtual reality in business applications has never been more promising. After the gaming industry latched on to the new technology to enhance the user experience for gamers, developers have released apps that can help boost businesses. For instance, architects can make use of AR to give clients a virtual tour of what the finished product would be like. In digital marketing, businesses can exploit VR to help customers get a better picture of their vision more than any other type of messaging could.
2. Live Videos
Facebook Live and Snapchat Videos are just some of the platforms that can be exploited by digital marketers. Video content will dominate the scene in the next few years with Cisco predicting that 80% of consumer internet traffic by 2020 will be cornered by videos. Meanwhile, Facebook Live is growing 94% each year in the U.S. with eight billion views daily.
Facebook was embroiled in a scandal when its video platform was used to broadcast several violent attacks, which prompted founder Mark Zuckerberg to announce the hiring of 3,000 more people to police the platform of any offensive content.
3. Apps for Data Visualization
Applications like Data Hero, Tableau, Dygraphs, and Visual.ly have been helping digital marketers package big data for easy consumption not just for businesses but the consumers as well. This is not exactly a new trend. However, for this year, it’s projected that businesses will make sure to exert more effort in using these tools to interpret the facts and figures at their disposal.
4. Viral Videos Won’t Go Away Anytime Soon
Last year, Samsung was the big winner after three of its video ads went viral. By December 2016, they already had almost 500 million views total. Viral marketing will continue to be an effective tool for brand recall. Google’s new updates, particularly on placing more importance on the social status for ranking, will really benefit businesses that invest in quality content. The downside is the short lifespan of viral video marketing. The trick is when to increase engagement, boost traffic, and convert them into income before interest wanes.
5. Content With Short Shelf Life
Businesses might dismiss expiring content as an effective means to build on the brand. After all, Facebook Stories or Instagram Stories only stay for about 24 hours before they are no longer seen again. Of course, this concept was copied from Snapchat, which has a similar feature. Digital marketers arebasically exploiting the “fear of missing out,” which is human nature. Nobody likes to be the odd man out when everybody is talking about the latest video or when they grab the latest product, which is the reason why Kylie lip products sell like hotcakes even if they don’t really offer anything new.
Mark Zuckerberg says that virtual reality will be the most social platform that ever existed. Zuckerberg hosted an in-person Q&A in Rome, Italy Friday when he focused in on virtual reality when asked if Facebook change our lives as much as Pokemon Go. “The real reason I came to Rome was to find some rare Pokemon,” Zuckerberg replied. “In all seriousness, I think that virtual reality and augmented reality are going to be the most social platform that has ever existed.”
Last year Facebook paid $2 billion for crowd-funded Oculus Rift in order to enter the space running. “Oculus’s mission is to enable you to experience the impossible,” proclaimed Zuckerberg when announcing this acquisition. “Their technology opens up the possibility of completely new kinds of experiences.”
Clearly, Zuckerberg sees VR as a huge boon for social but even more for advertising where it is believed to have great potential. According to research by Digi-Capital augmented reality and Virtual Reality are predicted to be a $150 billion industry by 2020. That’s why so many companies are focusing on VR and AR including Google.
“This is why advertisers are so interested in VR,” said Aaron Luber who is in charge of Google and YouTube partnerships. “Emotion sells products much more than utility and that reality positions Virtual Reality as a game changer in the advertising industry.”
Facebook recently bought another small VR startup called Two Big Ears, which helps bring an immersive audio experience into VR and AR. Facebook is calling it the Facebook 360 Spatial Workstation which can be downloaded for free.
“If you think about the history of computing every 10 or 15 years a big new computing platform comes along,” Zuckerberg added. “We had desktop computers, then browsers and the internet, now we have mobile phones and each one is better than the one before it, but what we have now is not the end of the line. We are going to get to a point in 5-10 years that we are all using augmented or virtual reality.”
Zuckerberg explained how virtual reality makes you feel like you are really there or “present” as he put it. “If you look at a photo or a video on a screen, TV, computer or phone and you are trying to get your mind set in this perspective as if you were there,” he said. “You see the photo and you are trying to imagine what it’s like to be there. Virtual reality is different, because it’s programmed to work exactly the way that your brain does. When you look at it you feel like you are in that place, like you are present and you are trying to convince yourself that you aren’t actually there because if you look around what you are seeing feels like the real world.”
He sees a future that is vastly improved socially because VR will make the social experience feel like reality. “You can imagine in the future you are going to feel like you are right there with another person who couldn’t actually be with you,” says Zuckerberg. “I think about my family when I’m not there such as my daughter who is in California right now. I miss her and to really feel like I am there right now would be a really powerful experience that I would want to have.”
He noted the differences between virtual reality where you feel completely immersed and augmented reality where you are adding virtual elements onto the world. Zuckerberg predicts that AR will come to mobile phones first “before we get some kind of smart glasses that overlay stuff on the world.” He says that we going to see more apps like Pokemon Go and that Facebook itself tested a form of AR with its Masquerade Filter that was test launched at the Olympics in Brazil and in Canada, where people could support their country by putting face paint on.
“I feel there are going to be a bunch of tools like that overlay real things from the world on top of your experience and help you share things that we are going to see soon,” says Zuckerberg.
“We believe retail is at a tipping point,” said Robert Peck of SunTrust Robinson Humphrey in a note to clients. “E-Retailers are leveraging new capabilities in old business models to expand existing and new markets like apparel, grocery and personal care, where e-Commerce had only limited penetration till now.” According to BusinessInsider, Peck calls it “E-commerce 2.0.”
Shopping online is growing fast, but still only represents a fraction of total shopping dollars, just under 8%, according to US Census data.
As of the first quarter 2016, the total amount of retail spending online (ecommerce) was $92.8 billion, which was only 7.8% of all retail sales. Ecommerce is in its infancy, which means that there are huge opportunities ahead, not just for the types of Amazon, but for small merchants and startups as well.
Worldwide retail sales, including in-store and internet purchases, surpassed $22 trillion in 2015, up 5.6% from 2014, according to a study by eMarketer. They say that retail ecommerce sales, those purchased over the internet, will make up 7.4% of the total retail market worldwide, or $1.671 trillion. By 2019, that share will jump to $3.578 trillion, yet retail ecommerce will still only account for 12.8% of all retail purchases.
Even though the internet and technology is the source of major disruption for retailers, brick and mortar is alive and well for the foreseeable future.
The study says that retail ecommerce sales are accelerating faster than previously anticipated and will jump 25.1% year on year in 2015. “Online sales growth will outpace brick-and-mortar sales growth by a more than 3-to-1 margin over our forecast period,” the report predicts.
Amazon Reshaping Ecommerce
Amazon recently passed Facebook to become the the fourth-largest US company based on stock market value. By 2020 analysts Rob Sanderson, Managing Director, Senior Research Analyst at MKM Partners, predicts that Amazon will be the largest US company by 2020.
“Amazon has a significant position in two of the largest secular growth opportunities there are,” Sanderson told Barron’s recently. What he was referring to were online retail and cloud computing.
As I said during my keynote @SohnConf, $AMZN is the most durable business in the world. $3T here we come…ps, you’re welcome.
Venture capitalist and part owner of the Golden State Warriors Chamath Palihapitiya of Social Capital said to a crowd at the Sohn Investment Conference recently that Amazon will be a $3 trillion dollar company within 10 years, almost ten times more than its current $366 billion market cap.
“Consider Amazon’s potential in retailing, said a Barron’s post. “It holds a 35% to 40% share of U.S. e-commerce, on its way to 50% by 2018, according to estimates from Doug Anmuth at JPMorgan published last month. And e-commerce is just 11% to 12% of U.S. retail, not counting gas, food and cars, on its way to more than 30% eventually, and 14% by 2018, according to Anmuth. In other words, Amazon is securing a quickly growing slice of a quickly growing pie.”
Internet Is Crushing Department Stores
There is one simple truth, internet retail is booming while brick & mortar department stores are in a free fall. The chart below from Standard Chartered Research tells the story
“U.S. private consumption has shown ongoing resilience,” says a note from Standard Chartered Plc via Bloomberg, “but this macro story masks sizeable divergence at the micro level, and this explains the wide interpretation of ‘how’s the U.S. consumer doing?’ The micro story is characterized by a parabolic rise in internet sales at the expense of ‘bricks and mortar’ stores, particularly department stores.”
The above stat isn’t as bad as you think considering that every department store also has an online presence and are working hard grow that aspect of their business. But even with that department stores are struggling online. “Digital sales continued strong, still growing double digits, but it too grew less rapidly than anticipated,” said Macy’s Chief Financial Officer Karen Hoguet during their May earnings call (PDF).
Internet business guru and financial analyst Robert Peck sees a shift in online shopping toward specialty boutiques and well run mom & pop stores. He says that as the internet generation grew up they don’t have reservations against online shopping like their parents did.
Presumably, one of the main drivers of online shoppers to Amazon was a belief that you wouldn’t get ripped off or have your credit card info passed around. This fear has dissipated over time but is completely non-existent with those that grew up with the internet.
Online Retail Will Diminish Need for Offline Stores
The Ovis report sees an “increasingly fragmented physical footprint,” with branded products moving to the internet. “Demand for large-footprint physical retail space will continue to fall,” says the report.
“Physical retail will still exist, but it will need a good reason to exist.” according to Dunkin’ Brands quoted in the Ovis report. The report portends that most new retail businesses will start online and later add some physical retail for showcasing products. They note that this is already the case in furniture. Retail will only play a supporting role in the future with new online retail stores in order to add trust with customers.
Existing pure-play online retailers will also continue to create physical locations, primarily to “enhance fulfillment and customer service.” They believe that much of this will take the form of the “click-and-collect models” which are common with UK retailers. “The UK today is the most advanced market for click-and-collect models, examples of which include ASOS and Boots, and eBay and Argos, a partnership that started in the UK and has been extended to Ireland,” says the report.
Click and collect is where the shopping is done online, but the items are physically picked up by the consumer at a fulfillment center or a retailer. Walmart in the US is one of the largest retailers offering this service.
According to the 2016 eCommerce Trends Report by Absolunete, an eCommerce agency based in Canada, depending on the types of products sold and the retailer’s network of physical stores, the proportion of consumers who prefer to pick up their purchase in store can reach up to 40%.
“Better still: offering customers the option to “Purchase & Pick-Up” often increases the average purchase value,” says the Absolunete report. “That’s right: 7% of customers who pick up their purchase in-store increase their spending while they’re on site (7% as measured in net sales). In Canada, where the prohibitive cost of residential shipping is an important challenge (the opposite is true in the U.S., where residential shipping is extremely inexpensive.), Purchase & Pick-Up becomes a win-win proposition!”
Absolunete says that “Purchase & Pick-Up” has advantages to the retailer:
Increasing net sales once the consumers is at the store picking up their online order.
Increasing conversion rates by making it easy for consumers to get their merchandise.
Decreasing return due to in-store exchange options.
Decreasing shipping costs and thereby increasing profit margins.
“We expect further partnerships to be made in order to allow Internet-based retailers to build up physical collection points,” states the Ovis report. “We also foresee noncompeting physical retailers collaborating to allow the collection of each other’s products in each other’s stores. This will allow them to maintain a virtual geographic presence despite the need to reduce their own physical store networks.”
From a showroom perspective, Amazon Books is a good example, where it has physical samples of not just popular books but all of Amazon’s products such as the Kindle, Echo and Kindle Fire tablets.
“The already blurred lines between physical-heritage retailers and Internet-heritage retailers will have been eradicated by 2026,” predicts the Ovis report. “The former will continue to reduce the amount of physical space they hold, switching their investment emphases online, while the latter will invest further in establishing physical presences to support the showcasing of brand and private-label products. While the large pure-play Internet retail brands will survive, the term pure play will be rendered obsolete.”
In-Store Digital
The Absolunete report predicts the rise of what it calls “in-store digital”, where consumers make online purchases while inside the physical store. Technology will be used to improve the customer experience and to make it a personal by “integrated gathering that allows retailers to better understand customers and customer behavior.”
The report suggest that it is increasingly common to see in-store advertising screens and tablets, enabling the consumer to search for products and to make online purchases while in the store, presumably of products that aren’t available in the store itself. “Going forward, customization tools and possibilities will go even further to improve customer experience. Paper posters and printed displays, for example, are being replaced by connected kiosks and displays which allow real-time, contextually-relevant messages to be displayed.”
Absolunete one interesting example by Rebecca Minkoff, partnering with Magento and eBay to create a Smart Dressing Room. They say that the system tracks what customers try on at the store and the sizes tried and what they buy and don’t buy. The store uses this data to send updates to the shopper if an item tried on is now available in her size or color. There are many more customization option being experimented with that may be available in the future. They say, “Think of it as cookies (like in your browser) that follow you around in the real world.”
“Engagement with the technology in Minkoff stores has been greater than expected,” said David Geisinger, who was previously eBay’s head of retail and mobile innovation but now is with Magento Commerce. “Engagement is on the customer’s terms, which I think is key, because it’s not intrusive.”
Technology is the Driving Force
eBay is in full preparation for the next commerce revolution and believes the heart of it is technological advancements coming together to reshape online selling. eBay CEO Devin Wenig believes that it is these innovations that will create an enormous opportunity for companies that are prepared to take advantage of them. And eBay is battle ready to just that, for years now seeing itself as both a great technology company… and a great ecommerce company too.
“We have seen the pace of tech innovation advance significantly — in artificial intelligence, cloud computing and virtual reality, all of which have the potential to reshape global technology dramatically in the next few years,” commented Wenig in a company announcement last week. “We are building eBay to be a vibrant and dynamic global technology leader for years to come, and we are starting to see results.”
“Everything we’ve done so far has been about positioning eBay for a future we can see advancing quickly towards us, in which innovations in technology platforms have the power to dramatically reshape the commerce experience,” Wenig says.
“We are entering what we call the Age of Everywhere — the profusion of cloud-connected devices that will bring the Internet to you, globalize the market, and make things faster and more on-demand,” said Wenig.
A report by Ovum, The Future of E-commerce: The Road to 2026 (PDF), predicts that over the next ten years instant gratification, powered by technology, will be a driving force in ecommerce. The report concludes that online retail today is “largely driven by price and convenience”, but by 2026 consumer expectations of the “ecommerce experience” will change dramatically.
“The desire for instant access and fast turnaround, 24/7, will be the norm by 2026, driven in particular by millennials (born approximately 1980–95) and also by Generation Z consumers (born
approximately 1996–2010),” the report says. “Generation Z are digital natives to the power of 10, with technology use their second nature. These generations are constantly connected and inhabit an online environment where events happen in real time without them having to wait, and where social media enables them to dictate terms.”
By 2026 the report predicts that consumer expectations will force online retailers to vastly improve customer support, will have to live up to expectations on the goods or services being delivered and shoppers will expect free delivery anytime and anywhere.
“Smartphone penetration is reaching new heights around the globe, and we are fast approaching the point where being an internet user means being a smartphone user,” commented Felim McGrath, who is the Trends Manager at GlobalWebIndex, in a blog post presenting the report. “This means that mobiles have the potential to become essential online commerce devices.”
McGrath backed up his comment with examples of how in Asia people are just as likely to shop online with their smartphones as they are a desktop computer. “Last month, close to half of South Koreans used their mobile to shop online,” he said. “And in China, mobile commerce has become the norm, with consumers now almost as likely to complete a purchase online via their mobile as via a laptop/PC.”
McGrath says that even though most consumers in Europe and North America are not mobile shoppers at these levels yet, it’s only a matter of time before they are.
The Ovis Report thinks that the trend toward more powerful smartphones with larger screens will help drive ecommerce and that retailers are optimizine the shopping experience for mobile. “Together, these developments are turning the smartphone into a platform that can support the whole shopping journey, from product search and discovery, to comparisons, recommendations,
and payments,” says the report.
The report notes that Android will continue to dominate iOS and that competition for payment systems won’t just be between Apple and Android, but will include multiple payments sytems on the the Android platform.
Social Media is a Key Driver of Ecommerce
Felim McGrath also believes that social media will be a driving force encouraging online shopping. He says that one third of the world’s population is now on social media, which is up an astounding 10% over last year.
“With such a significant amount of online time devoted to social media, there’s clear potential not only for advertising and marketing via social networks, but also for directly monetising users via ‘social commerce’,” said McGrath. “The last year has seen some of the world’s biggest social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest, testing or introducing integrated commerce options, acting as the middle-men between buyers and brands. The networks themselves have a clear interest in pushing this trend, both to increase engagement with their platforms and to open up healthy new revenue streams.”
The research from GWI shows that consumers are now becoming brand aware because of social media and are also using it to research products. McGrath sees this as an important step to using social to complete purchases. “Social commerce has a bright future,” says McGrath.
The Ovum report also predicts that the need for people to document their experiences on social media will motivate retailers to “increasingly align not only their brands but also the
shopping experience itself to this consumer desire for encounters worth sharing.”
“This can already be seen with the emerging trend for integrating social media with in-store retail, with the aim of creating socially driven shopping experiences,” the report notes. “In 2015, Victoria’s Secret encouraged shoppers to take selfies in front of displays and show them to sales assistants in return for a free gift – and hopefully share their selfies/experiences with friends.”
“Any doubters about social media’s powerful role in converting prospects into customers need to immediately re-evaluate their position,” notes the Absolunete report. “Like, now. Though their pure conversion rates are lower than those of organic results or Email, they are powerful tools that promote brand loyalty and are a great way to share the brand’s values. Through community-logic, social media is a valuable resource to convert curious prospects into new customers.”
According to Absolunete, with good social media management online stores can generate results that are sometimes superior to search marketing strategies such as Google Adwords. Social platforms such as Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter are working to enhance their value to online retailers by adding functionalities that will guide the shopper towards a products pages with goal to convert their users into online retail customers.
“You may have noticed more and more “direct purchase” options popping up on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and most notably Facebook, which is responsible for 64% of social sales worldwide,” noted the report. “Retailers need to move quickly to capitalize on this; once the big, established eCommerce players will have fully implemented these tools, it’s going to be a lot harder – and more expensive – to stand out.”
On Instagram, for instance, you can now go directly from a picture to a product page which are being used by brands such as Banana Republic via StylePick. What’s more, celebrity endorsers are now being used by brands in this process leveraging their huge numbers of followers to create commerce.
93% of Pinterest users have bought something online in the last 6 months, according to Absolunete. They also note that Pinterest is the source of 16% of all social sales, with their “Rich Pins” allowing retailers to fully integrate online stores and automatically synchronizing product pages with the products “Pin”. J. Crew, Gap and Nordstrom all utilize this effective Pinterest ecommerce motivator.
Ecommerce while Messaging
Another emerging trend is the integration of ecommerce into messaging apps, which is already happening in Asia. McGrath notes that Line and WeChat have already integrated multiple commerce features and other “opportunities for monetization.” He believes this revenue opportunity is the “inspiration” behind Facebook’s move to make Messenger a separate app and their motivation to focus on messaging so aggressively. Indeed they are very focused on messaging, having paid $22 billion for WhatsApp in 2014, a startup that only had revenues $10.2 million in the year before its acquisition.
Again, Asia shows the way forward here. Messaging apps like Line and WeChat have pushed beyond simple chat apps to integrate a broad range of commerce options and opportunities for monetization, forming the clear inspiration for Facebook’s recent development of Messenger Platform. All these developments mean that social commerce has a bright future.
Artificial intelligence also plays a role in messaging. “During this time, we’ve seen artificial intelligence reach an inflection point,” Wenig said. “This innovation is already beginning to take hold of the messaging space with the arrival of conversational assistants. Artificial intelligence has the potential to bring an era of deep personalization to the commerce space.
VR, AR and Wearable Devices
“Due to the proliferation of wearable devices and technology, smart TVs, connected cars and household appliances, beacons, and other technologies, the consumer journey in 2026 will increasingly look like a pretzel that twists, turns and loops back on itself,” noted the Ovum study. “Consumers can start and end their shopping experiences on a mobile platform, in store or online. It is a fluid movement that by 2026 will be even harder for retailers to keep up with or predict because it will include a growing number of devices and touchpoints.
It is key for retailers to not only keep track of consumers across many devices and touchpoints, but to also accurately measure where sales are coming from. This will require retailers and their advertising partners to build to significantly improve ad tracking technology.
One of the key drivers of wearable technology is virtual reality and augmented reality. “Virtual and augmented reality will be the next platform revolution,” says Wenig. “This is already prevalent in the gaming world, but it has the potential to be far more disruptive.”
The Ovum report predicts that by 2026 consumers will expect a more “real” shopping experience which will mean an integration of augmented reality into online stores. Consumers will expect an an “event experience” that will rival walking into a brick and mortar store.
“This will translate into interactive, highly engaging online and real-world retail environments where augmented reality (AR) plays a key role,” the report says. “The provision of distinct and tangible shopping experiences, online and real-world, will become a key means to enhance and differentiate a brand’s value proposition.”
One of the key drivers for augmented reality being used by online stores is increasing the conversion rate. Generally, retailers do much better when a consumer walks into their physical store locations compared with internet shopping, because there is no human connection.
Epson’s Moverio smart glasses are one solution for retailers, where an online shopper can click the the “GoInStore” button and a sales associate at the physical store will walk the customer through high value products with wearing the smart glasses. Clicking the button initiates a two way voice call and a one way video stream of whatever the sales person is looking at.
Luxury car dealer Amari in the UK uses the glasses to show off their extremely expensive cars to online prospects. “Our sales team know every single detail of these cars, even to the level of knowing the tyre pressures,” said Sheikh Amari, CEO of Amari SuperCars in an Internet Retailing post. “This knowledge is difficult to bring across online and we have been looking for ways to bring our expertise into the online environment.”
“This new technology enables our customers to travel to our showroom in real-time and experience the cars remotely – giving us a competitive edge and the ability to close sales quicker, providing our customers a totally unique, convenient and trusted car buying experience,” said Amari. “Our customers – who include investors and collectors – are very busy people, based all around the world, who typically know what they want but often have to rely solely on the pictures that are on the website.”
Facebook’s annual f8 developers conference just kicked off, and in the keynote CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that spherical (360 degree) videos are coming to your Facebook News Feed.
We already know that video is becoming a more widely used media on Facebook. Recently, Facebook revealed that the number of video posts per person had increased 75 percent globally and a whopping 94 percent in the US. At today’s conference, Zuckerberg said that there are over three billion video views a day on Facebook. That’s pretty mind-blowing.
Zuckerberg also talked about the future of content on Facebook. Five years ago, he said, most of the stuff you saw on Facebook was text – status updates and wall posts. Now it’s photos. Soon, it’ll be video, he said. And further down the line he thinks it’ll be virtual and augmented reality.
I guess Zuckerberg is trying to hasten that future scenario, and adding cool new 360-degree videos to the news feed is a small first step
These 360-degree videos are filmed with rigs that sport 24 cameras at once, providing the viewer the chance to not only see all angles of a shot, but also participate and choose how they move about the space. Here’s an example:
According to Zuckerberg, Facebook is bringing spherical video to the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and is currently “experimenting with live spherical video.”
Google has acquired Quest Visual, the company behind the app Word Lens, which lets you point your smartphone at words in the real world and have them translated via augmented reality.
I doubt I’m the first to make the connection, but this reminds me of They Live a bit. Especially when you combine it with something like Google Glass.
With Word Lens, we’ve seen the beginnings of what’s possible when we harness the power of mobile devices to “see the world in your language.”
By joining Google, we can incorporate Quest Visual’s technology into Google Translate’s broad language coverage and translation capabilities in the future.
As a thank you to everybody who supported us on our journey, we’ve made both the app and the language packs free to download for a limited time while we transition to Google.
As 9to5Mac notes, the app was recently featured prominently in an iPhone ad.
Just over one year ago Google’s Niantic Labs revealed Ingress, an augmented reality (AR) game created to experiment with the possibilities of a multiplayer game set in the real world but with a layer of virtual game poured over it. Though the game wasn’t a smash hit it did open up possibilities for AR and mobile gaming. Now, Niantic Labs is involved in another AR game project.
Titled Endgame, the new AR game is a collaborative marketing effort surrounding the upcoming novel Endgame: The Calling. The novel is being written by James Frey, the author infamous for exaggerating his exploits in his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. The book is the first in a trilogy to be penned by Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton.
HarperCollins Publishers, Full Fathom Five, and Niantic Labs are all collaborating on the marketing effort behind Endgame. The campaign will use Niantic’s AR game, short stories, YouTube, search, maps, and social media in a single augmented reality game/puzzle complete with prizes.
Clues to the puzzles will be hidden in the Endgame novels and players will need to gather all of the clues to have a chance at winning what HarperCollins is calling “major” prizes for each book. The prize for Endgame: The Calling is a “quantity of gold” that one player will have the chance to retrieve. The player who first finds the key for the gold’s case will claim his or her prize live on YouTube.
“James has a great vision for telling stories in an integrated way across books, film, social media, and mobile games,” said John Hanke, VP of Product at Niantic. “We are delighted to bring our technology and expertise to bear on a project that is helping to define the future of entertainment.”
As the wearable computing industry begins to ramp up this year, Google and other companies already have their sights set on connected eyewear. Devices such as Google Glass are expected to make up a large part of the consumer device market in the coming decade, but the technology could also prove very useful to the enterprise sector as well.
Market research firm Gartner this week suggested that augmented reality (AR) technology could soon become an important tool for businesses. The implication is that businesses could use AR tech to improve internal communication and collaboration while also speeding up workflows and training.
AR technology could enable businesses to create enhanced spaces, where their physical infrastructure is combined with a layer of the virtual. The applications for AR could be used to supplement employees’ environmental awareness, as well as provide instant access to information for quicker decision-making. In other words, AR could potentially make nearly everything in a business context more efficient.
“Augmented reality is the real-time use of information in the form of text, graphics, audio and other virtual enhancements integrated with real-world objects,” said Tuong Huy Nguyen, principal research analyst at Gartner. “AR leverages and optimizes the use of other technologies such as mobility, location, 3D content management and imaging and recognition. It is especially useful in the mobile environment because it enhances the user’s senses via digital instruments to allow faster responses or decision-making.”
Though AR could potentially have office applications, Gartner believes that the most useful applications for AR technology will come for workers who are more often away from desks, or those that need two hands to work. Surgeons and hospitals in general are an obvious target market for AR, and Google Glass has already been used during at least one surgery. Workers who are often without quick access to information, or who are unable to collaborate in person may also benefit heavily from the technology.
The new 2014 IKEA catalog app is debuting a new augmented reality feature that lets users see how certain pieces of furniture will look in their homes. All you have to do is scan one of the select item pages, throw your catalog on the floor and use your mobile device to project an image of what it will look like in your space.
“The 2014 IKEA catalogue gives you the ability to place virtual furniture in your own home with the help of augmented reality. Unlock the feature by scanning selected pages in the 2014 printed IKEA catalogue with the IKEA catalogue application (available for iOS and Android) or by browsing the pages in the digital 2014 IKEA catalogue on your smartphone or tablet. Then simply place the printed IKEA catalogue where you want to put the furniture in your room, choose a product from a selection of the IKEA range and see how it will look in your home!” says IKEA.
Now this is pretty cool. Check it out in action:
IKEA first started to experiment with augmented reality with last year’s catalog app, allowing users to unlock expanded content with their devices. But the ability to see products in your living spaces is entirely new for the Swedish furniture company, and it’s sure to make die-hard IKEA fanatics pretty happy.
You can grab the new 2014 IKEA catalog app on both iOS and Android.
Google Glass is still in its infancy, but there’s already a lot of awesome apps available for the hardware. Unfortunately, there’s a definite lack of games for the hardware despite Google Glass lending itself to augmented reality gaming. One development team is fixing that, however, with it’s own take on Battleship.
Det Ansinn revealed over the weekend that his team at BrickSimple is currently working on a game called GlassBattle. It’s a simplistic take on Battleship where two players wearing Glass compete head-to-head in turn-based battles. Here are the full details:
GlassBattle is a two-player Google Glass game implemented using the Mirror API. It provides turn-based gameplay with synchronous updates over the Internet. This isn’t a mock-up or concept. It’s a fully functional glassware application.
Note: Due to Mirror API quota limitations, we can’t yet share this app with a wider audience. Under the current quota, we can accommodate only a few players per day. As soon as the quota gets lifted, we will open up the gates. Thank you for your patience!
It’s a little simple, sure, but it’s all about baby steps at this point. We’re still years away from the kind of stuff that we saw in concept videos last year, but it’s coming sooner or later.
The PlayStation 4 will have a new PlayStation Eye camera available alongside it at launch. Sony hasn’t really advertised it much outside of the PlayStation 4 reveal in February though. During E3, however, it did create a small video to show off some of the cool things it has planned for the new PlayStation Eye.
Sony calls it the Playroom and it’s more like an interactive toy. The controller and the camera work hand-in-hand to create an AR experience not unlike what Sony is doing now on the PS3 with Wonderbook and Move. It’s just that the power of the PS4 lets Sony be just a little more creative in its efforts.
Like most other PlayStation Eye “games,” I can see myself playing around this for a few minutes and conclude that it’s super charming. Outside of that, it’s just a nice tech demo that showcases some of the tech that’s available to PS4 gamers. It will be interesting, however, to see what Sony does with the new PlayStation Eye further in the PS4’s lifespan and if it will create anything like Wonderbook for it.
The new PlayStation Eye will be available this holiday season alongside the PS4.
Google Glass is now in the hands of developers, and they’re already doing some pretty amazing (and scary) things with the technology. What will it look like a year from now, however, when it’s in the hands of consumers? What will it look like five years from now? One design firm has an idea.
Playground Inc, a digital creative agency, has released a video with a few predictions of what will be in the next major iteration of Google Glass:
It seems strange that the designers predict Google Glass having a 911 app, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Having someone not only to talk to, but also see, would go a long way in calming people down during an emergency.
That particular example aside, the rest of the video presents some incredibly compelling ideas that would turn Glass from a device for pasty white nerds into a mass consumer device that fulfills any and all needs. I’m particularly fond of the example where one uses Glass to keep a running tally of how much groceries are going to cost while shopping.
A Google Glass ban has been on the minds of some people as stories begin to emerge of establishments saying they will bar customers from wearing Google’s new tech inside. Those are just stories from a small number of businesses though? Is there any chance that Google Glass could be banned on a much larger scale?
A recent petition on the White House’s We the People Web site is asking the administration to ban Google Glass until certain privacy concerns can be addressed. The petition has only received 30 signatures so far though. If there’s wide-spread fear of Google Glass, it’s not being voiced here.
Of course, it doesn’t mean that anti-Glass advocates are small in numbers. In recent months, a Web site called “Stop the Cyborgs” was created to collect all stories on the technology while providing interesting commentary on the future of personal surveillance and privacy. That being said, the group is adamant that it does not hate Google and that it does not want to ban Glass. Instead, the group says that it wants to “encourage individual people to think about the impact of new technologies, to set bounds on how technologies are used proactively, and negotiate their relationship with the future.”
Besides people getting a laugh out of white dudes looking really nerdy wearing Glass, most seem to be of the above opinion. Google Glass isn’t an evil that needs to be eradicated, but rather something that people should just be aware of. Glass opens up a lot of new possibilities, but some of those possibilities can be rather scary. Is the risk worth it? It’s best to let the market decide that.
AR Will Be as Ubiquitous as the Internet 
