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It seems only yes­ter­day that I wrote my last post on QR Codes, but just checked and it was last Novem­ber and my god has a lot hap­pened! Maybe, just maybe, they’re catch­ing on.

Despite encour­ag­ing signs in 2010, there were many who just believed that QR Codes, or mobile bar codes, were purely an interim tech­nol­ogy wait­ing for the newer, funkier tech­nolo­gies such as NFC and aug­mented real­ity to get their act together and take over. But, as is the way, this hasn’t hap­pened yet. Sure, things have pro­gressed, but they still do not yet offer com­pelling rea­sons for mobile manufacturers/networks to make the invest­ment to uni­ver­sally include them. This is due to, amongst other things, some inter­op­er­abil­ity issues between Wik­i­tude and Layar tech­nol­ogy, the debate over user inter­faces and the pros and cons of real-time ver­sus cached data.

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For a long time now, the utopia for online dis­play adver­tis­ing has been to be as tar­geted and as cost-effective as search adver­tis­ing in order to claw back adver­tis­ing dol­lars. The jour­ney has been slow, ad net­works ini­tially helped scale online dis­play adver­tis­ing and pro­vided lay­ers of tar­get­ing tech­nolo­gies to make the cam­paigns more effec­tive. How­ever, pric­ing was based on arti­fi­cial flat fees and seg­ments that had been pre-set within the lim­its of indi­vid­ual ad net­works.

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We held another suc­cess­ful Hud­dle over at the Ban­ner offices yes­ter­day. The sub­ject was all things mobile. And, over the course of the next few blog posts, I’ll be tak­ing you through some of the insights from the var­i­ous speak­ers who gen­er­ously gave their time to make the after­noon such a suc­cess:

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• Simon Sil­vester – EVP Head of Plan­ning, Y&R EMEA
• Christina Carstensen – Direc­tor of Mobile Strat­egy, IDG
• Matt Findel-Hawkins – Sales Direc­tor, Nikkei BP Europe
• Mark Challi­nor – Direc­tor of Mobile, Tele­graph Media Group

Stick­ing with pre­dic­tions for the future from Edison’s insights last week, here are some more near-future articles.

From aug­mented music videos, to wear­able trans­porta­tion, in the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate (sic), it’s great to know there are peo­ple out there who still get paid to think out­side the box (also sic). Here are some of the results.

Acti­vate the Future

Thought Lead­er­ship. This is a phrase that gets thrown around more than the ubiq­ui­tous “cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate”, but what does it actu­ally mean?

Some com­pa­nies feel that thought lead­er­ship is throw­ing out a white paper, or a case study and watch­ing the col­lec­tive audi­ence nod their heads in approval and mar­vel at their insights.

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A year is a long time in social media. We held our first Social Media Hud­dle in Autumn 2009. Dur­ing the ses­sion, atten­dees learnt how Dell, IBM, Juniper and Salesforce.com were all using social media to drive mar­ket­ing success.

To see how social media has moved on, this year we’re host­ing a new hud­dle at the Ban­ner offices. In this information-packed after­noon, mar­keters will hear from senior tech­nol­ogy mar­keters and ven­dors about how they’re using social media to drive prov­able suc­cess for their brands in 2010 and beyond.

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At the Hud­dle you’ll discover:

• How to get the most from the avail­able media options

A num­ber of years ago, we had a com­pany off-site fea­tur­ing a trea­sure hunt as the pri­mary chal­lenge for the day. This involved teams of Ban­ner­ites zoom­ing around Lon­don in black cabs look­ing for the answers to a series of cryp­tic clues.

Whilst it was com­pet­i­tive and fun, that approach seems anti­quated by today’s stan­dards. For an agency whose rai­son d’être is to under­stand and use tech­nol­ogy bet­ter than any other agency, scrib­bling the answers onto bits of paper wasn’t really a good way of track­ing progress or edu­cat­ing our team on new tech­nolo­gies.

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Ever since we held the last (and first) Euro­pean Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit at Alti­tude last Novem­ber, we’ve had a thirst to do it all over again.

As part of the feed­back process on the last event, we asked what peo­ple thought of the day, the con­tent and speak­ers. We also asked what changes they’d like to see in the for­mat of the event in the future and what top­ics they’d like to see cov­ered.

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Unbe­liev­able I know. But check out the video below to get a glimpse of a future where you’ll be able to use a computer-based ‘sys­tem’ to access and read the news (well the future as seen from 1981 anyway).

I love the quote by one of the news­pa­per guys, “We don’t expect to make any money.”

Also, check out the home user’s modem with the rub­ber cups to put the phone hand­set into – the first modem I ever used was almost iden­ti­cal to this.

Those were the days.

Source: NOTCOT

Net­books are big news just now – the ball that ASUS set rolling with the eeeeeeeeeeepc has swept almost all the other lap­top man­u­fac­tur­ers along with it (as well as cre­at­ing a few new entrants along the way). With one notable excep­tion – Apple.

Steve Jobs has been quoted as say­ing that Apple will wait and see how the mar­ket devel­ops. In the mean­time we’ve seen new 17″ Mac­Book Pro’s announced – which are as about as un-netbooky as it’s pos­si­ble to get in a lap­top. Then there are the rather lovely new exter­nal screens to go along with the rather lovely Mac­Book Air – both of which our very own Rod Ban­ner has had grac­ing his desk in the office (ah the perks of being the Chair­man).

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Smash­ing Mag­a­zine has a round up of the lat­est think­ing on and pro­to­types for new user inter­faces. Some feel way out there (along with rocket boots and meals in pill form) oth­ers closer to home.

For me, the more suc­cess­ful inter­faces these days are the ones that min­imise the role of the device – that quite lit­er­ally nar­row the gap between the user and the infor­ma­tion they need. Adap­tive Path’s Aurora inter­face, part of an ini­tia­tive by Mozilla Labs, does this quite well in the way it uses rel­a­tive size and perspective/depth to show the most appro­pri­ate infor­ma­tion. How­ever, the stack­ing of infor­ma­tion around the frame and the new selec­tion tool feel too rooted in the old desk­top and mouse metaphor to really move things for­ward.

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