Last week I gave a presentation at the MWG Congress in The Netherlands. The topic of the event was Experimentation. Personally I don’t believe in experimentation. In this incredible dynamic market, where there is no status quo anymore, one needs to have clear intentions.. During my presentation I used the metaphor of trying to lift one’s leg.. I asked the audience to try to lift their left leg.. Everybody reacted by lifting there leg.. I explained that they raised there leg and did not TRY to raise their leg.

Trying is nothing. You either do or you don’t!

Below you see the presentation and an interview(in dutch) by Ronnie Overgoor touching the topics of the presentation.

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And we made them do it.

In Dutch its called the ING Wegwijzer. With the app you can find ATMs in the Netherlands. The coolest view is the camera view. You hold the phone in front of you. The Camera ’sees’ what direction you are looking at and on the view screen this image is enhanced with ATM’s that are there. It works in any direction.

With the App all ATM’s are findable. The ING ones have their own logo. Also there is a Map and Satellite view:

..

Its done with the software from Mobilizy in Austria. They started it all with Wikitude.

It was great getting this off the ground and working with Mobilizy and with ING Bank. I wonder what’s next…

[UPDATE]
ING sent out a press release with video (in Dutch):

Some more press:

• SpringWise: ING application for G1 phone uses camera & compass to point out nearest ATM
• Bright: Android-app toont pinautomaten
• Marketingfacts: ING introduceert ATM Locator met Augmented Reality
• Gvenk Daily: Aflevering 168
• DutchCowboys: ING als eerste merk op de Google telefoon met unieke app
• Nu Zakelijk: G1 telefoon vindt dichtstbijzijnde geldautomaat

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Picture from Annejan

On january 8th we organised the biggest Android Dev Camp in the world. 250 people participated at the event. During this event we announced a Dev Challenge. Developers had 2,5 weeks time to submit their Android application. In the end we received 22 working Android applications. WHOHHOOOO! We did not expect such a big turnout. I was also a jurymember and saw all the 22 applications. The submitted apps can be categorised in 4 segments: Tools, Loc. based services, Games and Messaging.

Anyway yesterday(Feb. 29th) the winners were announced. All winners got a G1 and will be part of T-Mobile’s advertising campaign around the launch of G1.

1st Prize Metermaid:

Additional prize: Ticket to Silicon Valley

Martin Koel and Alida Roskam

Category: Tool

Usecase: Making parking at parkingmeters easier and quicker.

How does it work: It basically makes composing an SMS for your parkingservice easier by bookmarking.

Uniqueness: Makes use of all existing parkingservices. You can bookmark license plates and locations.

Gigfinder Roeland Landegent and Mark Bekkers:

Mapbased Gigfinder. Uses the GPS function in the phone. Gets gigs from Last.fm. When you find a nice Gig. You can find your way towards it with Google Maps.

Backchannel Eelco Lempsink:

This service blew me away. It uses ZeroConf to set up a wifi chatroom. You just need to enter a name and start chatting in the wifi hotspot you are in. everybody else in the hotspot that has this application open can receives your messages. Eelco just needs to figure out how to position and brand his service

Treasuremytext Paul Stringer:

Tresuremytext saves your sms messages to web automatically. Very handy if you treasure your messages. Watch out that you dont publish your messages accidently on the treasuremytext website. The whole sign-up procedure is still too complicated. Katie was happy with the price

Nukaart Sander Stefann, Arjen Haayman and Max Dammers

Nukaart shows all articles from nu.nl on a map. It has a great graphical user interface. It already an existing on the web ported to Android

Check Android Market on your G1 for the apps.

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Our core business is innovation. Doing new things that we see as promising. Things like Context Services and Augmented Reality that we envision as adding to the world in the future. And making that happen now. Wikitude does that now.

While forging these new paths you get used spearheading them. To be the first in one way or the other. Its part of the kick. But once in a while you see someone way ahead of you. Off in the distance on the same path and with a clearer view. Jyri did that. Verner and Joe too.

This weekend we saw Robert Rice of Neogence in this post.

At Ugotrade, Tish Shute posted an AR overview and an interview with Robert Rice. Go to the source and read it. Print it. Share it. Its long and worth it. It will help you shape your opinion and understand Augmented Reality and Virtual Worlds like SL. You will get a sense of the state of Augmented Reality.

For us this post is great because it is so ahead yet on the same path we are on with Zcapes. Zcapes is at the foothold of Augmented Reality. Zcapes will be a base of content to build your augmented real world. Its a start of something very big. And that big thing is what Robert Rice seems to be building at Neogence: An immersive mobile augmented reality platform with tools, sdk, and infrastructure plus applications. Looking forward to that.

image from Ugotrade

Tip of the hat to Tim Oreilly’s tweet.

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Watch the Android Develeopment Camp Amsterdam live recorded stream here. It was a great event, full, inspiring and great networking.

Hear people from Wikitude (at 00:16 and my Fav), PicSsay (at 00:45), Twitli (at @00:57) and ShopSavvy (at 1:27) talk about their apps. Its one big stream, quality is not high but doable. Please skip me set the stream up in the first 10 minutes of the video…

Live TV : Ustream

SPRX initiative, organized together with:
Peter Robinett - @pr1001 - http://www.bubblefoundry.com/
Yuri van Geest - @vangeest - http://yuri.typepad.com/
Martijn Pannevis - @panman - http://martijnpannevis.nl/
Maarten den Braber - @mdbraber - http://maartendenbraber.com/

And thanks to MoMo Amsterdam, T-mobile and Google.

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Useless but fun

Via Bruce, who wonders what happens when snow crashes.

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I have the G1 now for a week. It is a good phone which is still very new. This means that it doesn’t have the 10.000 apps like the iphone. Yet it already does some amazing things apart from seamless Gmail, Google Calander & Talk integration. The application that I keep going back to is Wikitude.

Wikitude is projects wikipedia location data on your screen on the camera input. You hold the camera level in front of you and see the world through its lens. Wikitude projects wiki data over it. As you turn the phone around you see the different points of interested projected in the screen. It a simple idea but very powerful. Here is the developer demoing their product:

My next tourist guide is in my phone. When I arrive I just hold my phone up and see what’s up, superimposed on the camera image.

It a good start. Its in the same category as Point and Find from Nokia. Here is Scobeizer checking it out. Point and Find works with image recognition instead of looking up data based on a GPS position like Wikitude. Point and Find is a QR-code like application. It scans an image and the get an action from it. Yet it can ’scan’ any image, even your house, and then go to your private website.

Both are examples of combining the real world with the virtual world. It will make the webbrowser based internet look very old.

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