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Layar presented at Google’s Zeitgeist and got advice from Tim Berners-Lee

By Maarten on May 19th 2010

Zeitgeist is an event organized by Google for executives and CEO’s of major companies. It inspires, provides insights and shows what’s coming.

Major speakers took the stage. These included amongst others: Nobel peace price winner Desmond Tutu, London Mayor Boris Johnson, inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, Don Tapscott, writer of Wikinomics and many others.

Layar was invited too, to attend, to demo … and to present.

Below is the video set to start with the Layar presentation by Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, co-founder of Layar, sharing the vision that Augmented Reality is an emerging mass medium. The presentation is about 10 minutes.

Maarten makes the case for Augmented Reality being an emerging mass medium by drawing parallels to how the web emerged in the early 1990’s. The web we have come to know well, which use daily. The web which is a mass medium and a mass market.

To explain Augmented Reality on the Layar platform Maarten shared examples in the four main content categories:
- “Where is”: Layers telling you where is an house for sell, an ATM, etc
- Live and dynamic data: Layers about whom tweeted here, which plane is flying there.
- Insight: Layers that help you understand and gain insight, like the Berlin wall layer
- Games & experiences: Layers which are games like the Splinter cell prequel or the Beatles tour.

The first screenshots of Layar’s latest product – Layar Stream – were premiered during the presentation. As well as the new Layar video (soon on this blog).

In then panel discussion that followed Tim Berners-Lee asked what was going to happen with the over abundance of POI’s and layer clutter which will happen when more and more people are using and publishing in AR. He also wondered if this clutter wont be mostly ads.

The answer to this is Layar Stream, the search and discovery service for Augmented Reality which will provide a stream of relevant augmented objects around the user. When these objects are never interacted with, are never seen, they will not pop up in Stream. Similar to what happens on the web. A web page which is not linked to will not show up in Google’s results. As for ads: push systems will not work. Pull systems will.

See the video, set to start at the relevant moment, for the detailed answer.

Advice from Tim Berners-Lee
At the end of the session Maarten asked Tim Berners-Lee what his advice was for a start up like Layar who is leading the pack in building the new mass medium of Augmented Reality. It came down to this:
- Keep going
- Look and learn from others, but don’t over theorize, learn yet keep doing it
- Make sure to build on existing platforms, become a platform and enable other platforms

The video is set to start at the relevant moment:

Bonus: the advice from Larry Page and Eric Schmidt
After the panel Google founder Larry Page and Google CEO Eric Schmidt came on stage for a question and answer session. They also got the question what their advice for Layar is. Their answer was short and smart:

“Make your products work very well, develop a culture focused on the user and iterate quickly”.

It was great to participate in the Google Zeitgeist event. Great to meet all the people and great to share the dream.

4 comments

  • By Layar presented at Google’s Zeitgeist and got advice from Tim Berners-Lee | Augmented Reality on May 20th 2010 at 3:12 am

    [...] View full post on Augmented Reality Browser: Layar [...]

  • By Sarah Manz on May 20th 2010 at 8:52 am

    Thought that Claire is the responsible person for Layar’s presentation, marketing and PR stuff. But on the real important events, she is most time replaced by her male partners.
    Hope that I’m paranoid and this just happens by accident…

  • By MixedRealities :: Changing the way we interact with the world on May 20th 2010 at 10:47 pm

    [...] tip to the Layar blog where I found the [...]

  • By Claire Boonstra (Layar) on June 9th 2010 at 5:01 pm

    @Sarah Manz Yes, you’re being paranoid. And sorry I missed this reaction, otherways I would have replied much earlier!

    Maarten is in fact responsible for marketing and PR; I’m responsible for content & community (the Layar ecosystem) and Raimo for the product and vision. We divide all speaking opportunities equally and always make sure that the right person is representing Layar. For content events (with brands, agencies and developers) this is always me – and there are so many of them that I’m the one doing most of the speaking nowadays.

    For events like Zeitgeist, it was obvious that Maarten would be the one to attend and speak. He has known Tim Berners-Lee and other internet-guru’s already for years and he’s the one with experience in this field – not me.

    At the ARE event last week in Sta Clara, Maarten and I would have been going together and each of us would do two presentations. However, due to a family emergency (father hospitalized far away from home) I could not make it and was very happy that Maarten was willing to do all the hard work by himself. As I would do exactly the same if he would find himself in a similar situation.

    In fact, I’m being asked to speak a lot – more than Raimo and Maarten – often because I am one of the only women in this field :-)

    But we have to turn down a lot of these speaking opportunities – or else we would only be speaking instead of building a world class brand, platform and product!

    Hope this clarifies. We are a very balanced team and there is gender issue whatsoever!

    Claire

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