Looking Back At Our Highlights of 2015
January 8, 2016
Looking Back At Our Highlights of 2015
The new year is here, so it's a great time to look back on 2015 and check out some of the highlights on the Blippar blog in the last year. 2015 was a big year for Blippar as we continued to expand our footprint, including the acquisiton of Binocular and the launch of new products and applications.
2015 was also a big year for the Education team at Blippar, with a soft launch at the Bett Show in January before formally launching our strategy in September. Read all about the year for the Education team here.
There were so many great moments and blogs to choose from this year, so check out our collection of highlights below.
New Additions
Introducing Cardio VR, a Virtual Reality App for Google Cardboard
We're very excited to introduce a special project we've been working on behind the scenes: Cardio VR, a virtual reality (VR) application for Google Cardboard. This is our first foray in VR, and is part of a new R&D and innovation initiative we're starting called Blippar Lab.
Introducing Our Latest Acquisition: Binocular
We're very excited to welcome the newest member of the Blippar family, Binocular! Binocular is an Austin, Texas-based software startup that specializes in providing augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences for brands and consumers. The team has worked with and created apps for leading brands, and is best known for its creation of the Cannes Lions award-winning Glasses.com app.
Company News
We are delighted to announce Blippar’s latest $45 million funding round, financial support we shall leverage to expand our engineering team and extend the global reach of our visual browsing platform. The funding will further fuel our mission to build the first visual search engine for the entire physical world.
Blippar Ranks 19th On 2015 CNBC Disruptor 50
We were thrilled to be named ‘the London tech firm that’s hotter than Spotify’ by London’s Evening Standard this week, after CNBC placed us 19>th on their 2015 Disruptor 50 list among tech giants including Airbnb, Uber, Pinterest and Spotify.
Blippar Invests in Augmented Reality Display Pioneer WaveOptics
We are excited to announce our strategic investment in WaveOptics, a pioneer in augmented reality display technology. While Blippar’s unique visual browsing capabilities are already compatible with other wearable devices, this marks Blippar’s first financial investment in hardware or wearable technology. Investment terms are confidential.
Events
Advertising Week Panel Recap: Can Brands Create Pop Culture, Not Cultural Pollution?
On Tuesday, September 29, Blippar hosted a panel at Advertising Week in the prestigious NASDAQ office on Time Square. The panel answered the age-old question, "Can brands use technology and digital media to create pop culture, rather than cultural pollution?"
Cannes Lions: Blippar's Favorite (Unofficial) Bits of the Festival
Cannes Lions "International Festival of Creativity" is the Oscars of the advertising industry. Every summer, over one hot week in the sunny south of France, it brings together the biggest and best brands and creative agencies in the world, all of whom descend upon the city to showcase their finest work.
Blippar at SXStyle: Blippar Wristbands for SXSW's New Lifestyle Hub
Blippar’s SXSW footprint is bigger than ever this year, with one of our most exciting projects further cementing our role in the world of fashion. For SXSW 2015 we have partnered with Decoded Fashion – a forward-thinking company encouraging the fashion industry to use new technologies to accelerate innovation at the intersection of fashion and retail - to create blippable wristbands for entry to the Decoded Fashion Lounge within SXStyle, the Austin festival’s new lifestyle hub.
Culture, technology and entrepreneurship fused together in two intense days of debates, inspirational talks and lively panel discussions from technologist, leading cultural institutions and exciting entrepreneurs. Themes varied from: the importance of storytelling; emerging social enterprise models; culture and the digital economy; creative communities; and how to make memorable experiences (to name only a few!)
Blippar & The Royals
Bank Notes and Evening Standard Come to Life to Honor the Queen's Historic Achievement
This week we brought the Evening Standard’s “royal” editorial content and all Bank of England banknotes to life to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II becoming the nation’s longest serving monarch!
Prince William the Samurai! Duke of Cambridge Blipps Himself to Life in Tokyo
The Duke of Cambridge blipped an image of a samurai - which turned into an avatar samurai with his face on it - on Japanese TV this weekend, to the delight of a roomful of Tokyo schoolchildren.
Royal Blipp Commemorates Prince William & Kate's 2014 New York Visit
On Tuesday, 29 September 2015, Consul General Danny Lopez and Rish Mitra, our CEO, unveiled a special new addition to the British Residence in Manhattan. The customized, "blippable" portrait of Their Royal Highnesses The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge was adapted from a picture taken at Barclays Center during their December 2014 visit to New York.
We're very honoured to be working with The Royal British Legion's annual Poppy Appeal this month. The Poppy Appeal supports all current and former British military personnel, and their dependents.
Art & Social Causes
Priya's Shakti: How Murals, Comic Books and Blippar Are Tackling India's Gender-based Violence
"I was in Delhi when the horrible gang rape happened on a bus in 2012, and was involved the protests that followed,"" says Indian-American filmmaker Ram Devineni. "Like many people, I was horrified by what had happened and angered by the indifference exhibited by government authorities at every level. There was enormous outcry in particular from young adults and teenagers - both women and men."
New Ways to Experience Art - AR Technology for the Modern Artist
During the Romantic period of art, interaction was achieved with beautiful 2D paintings. Paintings told us stories of fevered love and beauty, stirring emotion and stimulating the onlooker’s mind. Now in the 21st Century artists tackle the problem of how to catch the attention of an audience who are continuously bombarded with a wide array of visual stimuli and distractions of the modern world.
Key Insights
GUEST BLOG: The World Bank is Expanding Print Towards a Better Teality
Augmented reality (AR) has proven to be a key asset for our role inside The World Bank’s Printing and Multimedia internal support services. It has opened a whole new space that enabled us to merge the worlds of printing and digital content into something unique and innovative.
Brands Must Learn from Customer Behavior Not Demographic Guesswork
Steadily, over the past decade, the measurability of digital media has revolutionised the advertising industry, as brands are no longer forced to make multi-million dollar decisions based on focus groups and engagement estimates. Brands are able to track digital engagement data in real-time and they have invested heavily in mapping this data across their different customer segments.
"AR So Soulful You Can Feel It": One Blippar Designer Looks to the Future
Imagine sitting in your living room gazing at the giant tree growing in front of you. It begins with a patch of grass on the floor, slowly spreading out to cover the whole carpet. As the grass spreads a small root starts to emerge from the centre. Your ceiling gradually turns a glorious summer blue while the root continues to grow at an incredible pace, creaking and snapping until the entire room is bursting at the seams with a mighty tree.
Forget About X, Y and Z: Welcome to Generation Curious
Curiosity defines people as creatively intelligent creatures. Every day we hunt, compare, learn and explore. We’re not taught curiosity, we’re born with it, and arguably it has placed us in our commanding position among other animals on earth.
Guest Blog: The Hershey Company Augmentes Candidate Engagement
The candidate experience at job fairs hasn’t changed much in the last 20 years. Booths have got bigger and are set up with a more creative use of space, but the concept is still the same: attendees line up, talk to a company representative for two or three minutes, then walk off with a paper brochure. If they’re lucky, they get a chance to be interviewed in a makeshift, curtain-walled office flanked by three other candidates doing exactly the same thing.
