Rating: To blipp, or not to blipp – is that the question?
Talk about dark horses. What blippar is doing with its free image-recognition app for smartphones is amazing. GoMo News recently chatted with Jessica Butcher, marketing and founding director with blippar, at a recent DTI sponsored pre-MWC 2012 event. She begged us not to primarily refer to the product as offering augmented reality (AR) but there are tremendous close parallels. Anyway, it turns out that blippar won the first prize in the UK Startup competition run by UKTI and will now represent Britain at CES 2012. It also recently secured seed investment from Qualcomm Ventures. Ms Butcher’s desire to see the word ‘blipp’ enter the English language as a common noun just might succeed.What jogged GoMo News‘ memory about meeting blippar was the fact that we’d tried to download the Android version of this app, only to be told that it wasn’t compatible with any of our devices.
GoMo News actually bothers to check these things – unlike the vast majority of our rivals.
Ms Butcher informs us that, “We’ve removed the beta version from the Android Market in the short term with a view towards re-launching it pre MWC.”
Reading between the lines, the released Android version was very much a ‘beta’ (as it was indeed described ) and this was attracting too many adverse comments. Never mind, because we saw the iOS version working and it was very impressive.
Effectively what the blippar app does is recognise a specific graphic/image and then reveal the existence of addtional content to the handset owner who has just ‘blipped’ it.
As Ms Butcher explains, “The blipp provides a really nice way to capture a consumer’s spontaneous interest in an iconic creative and convert it instantaneously into a more engaging, brand experience.”
In GoMo News‘ case, we spotted that a story in the Sunday Times’ Ingear supplement had been blipped. The story was about the eye-controlled game – Tobii Eyeasteroids.
All you had to do was launch the blippar app on your smartphone and point its camera at the text and associated graphic in the story. It should then launch an associated video.
Significantly there appears to be a blippar produced in association with ‘Coppafeel.org‘ which features a lady’s bosoms in 3D as part of a campaign to promote breast cancer awareness.
Sadly, only those with iOS devices will be able to point their smartphones at the screen to view the additional content.
