VR Days 2017 Amsterdam

After last year’s success, Amsterdam became VR Days home again. This year, the event took place in Amsterdam’s iconic Vondelpark Pavilion. The event ran November 3rd-6th with about 60 exhibiting companies and multiple-panel speakers.

From the conference,  we want to highlight some of the top stories of companies successfully pioneering VR experiences, advertising, and video. Meet Capitola VR and Mediamonks.

Capitola VR is an Amsterdam based  VR & AR production agency. They showcased one successful example in advertising: Doritos VR Battle, a game for the HTC VIVE. Capitola was responsible for concept, design & development. The promo video got viral over 1 million views within a week. In Doritos VR Battle, you can Find your way through a dark universe and use weapons to battle the enemy. This highly interactive VR game based on movement and agility skills is a prime example of taking a known brand to a  new era of the consumer experience.

Mediamonks is a global creative production team who turn ideas, strategy, and IP into award-winning campaigns, film, content, products, and platform. They walked thru three of their projects:

Expedia 360º is an incredible video which let the users experience Australia in 360º. From the cliffs of Tasmania down into the ocean's depths.

Toyota's "The Impossible Quest" 360º VR experience. The project debuted on ThechCrunch disrupt.

Etihad Airways project is a 360º virtual reality film that follows Nicole Kidman on a flight from New York to Abu Dhabi.

We interviewed Dann Kip, a passionate top supporter, and organizer of VR days. He explained VR Day's mission. "We are building bridges to inspire: from fine arts to finance, from psychology to porn, theater, tech, game, and politics." Their goal is to create a multidisciplinary cocktail at VR Days Europe." They put together different people with diverse backgrounds to share knowledge.

Spotlight is proud to have participated in this event to stay ahead of the pace of innovation.

Introducing Pepper Bot

Spotlight just announced their new crowdfunding campaign for Pepper chat-bot.

Pepper’s mission is to help mom and pop restaurants get wifi connected and get a digital presence to be discovered by relevant customers.

Rather than losing time searching, Pepper will notify you about nearby places, coupons and events in real time via chat. Nearby friends will also be notified to join in.

How  Pepper Learns!

Pepper uses the user location, time of day, consumer habits and preferences to update itself and make the most relevant real-time suggestions.

How It Works

Pepper searches hundreds of nearby places and compares them real time to setup and outing with nearby friends

Benefits

Pepper will set up a welcome message offering free wifi showing contextual coupons or specials at the time of arrival.

Pepper will track user traffic at restaurants using a tracking device.

Pepper will help create smart and targeted marketing campaigns based on demographic and visit behavior.

The Pre-Launch

The pre-launch will kick off a College Ambassador Program. This will be promoted at a pilot set of Universities where Pepper will organize seasonal events and increase adoption. The pilot will also include 6 restaurants in the bay area associated with the founder’s teams very own O’neils Irish bar and partnering vendors .

180 restaurants across 6 cities will be connected.  Our partner team includes Zenreach, Groupon, yelp, Foursquare, Eventbrite, Ticketmaster, facebook, and google among others.

To Support the Campaign Click Here

Future plans of Pokémon Go - TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016

John Hanke at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, 2016/09/13

A few days ago John Hanke announced that his team is going to bring their game Pokémon Go on other mobile platforms, which are interesting in terms of both gameplay and mobility.

Let’s remember that Pokémon Go earned numerous records during July 2016. It became the most downloaded app during the first week and was the first to reach 50 million Google Play downloads, it also was the fastest to ear 500 million dollars in revenue.

Hanke said that their mission as a company was to evangelize the concept of playing games outside, real world games. Apple Watch was said to be a great vehicle for that, especially complimenting the new Apple smartwatch handware, which includes a standalone GPS and waterproofing, among other things.

But he also pointed out that if other devices come on the market with high level of mobility and interesting for gameplay, they would be also looking for supporting them.

Hanke confirmed that Pokémon Go is likely to come to Android Wear.

Pokémon Go has become too much popular to be limited to only one wearable platform and it was expectable to hear that the company would work on an Android Wear app in future or with other devices.

The latest results of September show that its paying population dropped 79 percent, even though it is the most profitable mobile game ever. Still, the question remains whether Pokémon Go will eventually become a fad, but Hanke is not worried about any downturn.

The next focus of the game will be put on events which will feature the release of new Pokémon and the battles between players.

No indication of when these upcoming features would occur was announced. According to Hakne’s words now the minimum viable product is out in the market, it’s really just the “tip of an iceberg” in terms of where the team wants to take the game.

The only thing we can do right now is to expect to see many new and interesting things in Pokémon Go in future.

Chat Bots IA & Messaging - Mobile Beat 2016 - San Francisco, CA

The opportunity
Big companies have tried to take the AI challenge with products like Google Now, Cortana and Alexa. The challenge is now different. There is a need to diversify the game plan, chat-bots don’t have to know it all, they just have to know enough about a specific topic or industry. Examples:

Poncho the weather cat is an expert of weather information.  100% chance of rain Thursday afternoon? (left)

Redfoo former singer of well-known band LMFAO is now reaching out to his fans via his new chatbot. This solves for a lot of direct communication to reach the masses while learning trends of questions from individual users. His bot knows his tour dates location and any personal question normally buried in his bio.(right)

Bots are awesome assistants, once they learn the common behavior of the users. For example, Mezi is learning in only 6 months.

The chatbot hype 2016

Chatbot hype went recently through the roof when Telegram  launched their full-scale API.The chatbots will talk to you send emojis, stickers, and funny cat pictures etc. However, they do a lot more than that. They learn your behavior and everything they can to sell you the most relevant products they promote.

“Science fiction is here!!,  Can bots analyze people’s behavior and learn from it ??”

A couple big players

Google Allo learns overtime to make conversations easier, funner and meaningful. Allo learns about your communication style and it recommends smart reply when people send photos to you. Google Duo’s ‘knock knock’ feature brings a video feed of the caller prior to even answering. This brings emotions and unique information about the intention of the user. These are AI advancements certainly bring a new work of opportunities for chat bots and use cases that evolve the world.

What’s Next..

We anticipate a plethora of innovation coming our way. Spotlight studio from Silicon Valley is promoting OUT app and AI bot called Pepper. Your personal assistant to go out. It learns your schedule, preferences and friends locations and aggregates nearby coupons to get you closer to your friend. Check it out and Meet Pepper.

https://www.facebook.com/Out-App-1593266137651203/?fref=ts 

Tilt

Mountain View CA May 10, 2016

Google’s newest breakthrough on virtual reality lets you paint in 3d space with VR.  Tilt Brush lets you paint in 3D space with virtual reality. Unleash your creativity with three-dimensional brush strokes, stars, light, and even fire. Your room is your canvas. Your palette is your imagination. The possibilities are endless.

Why this is impressive?

Tilt enables users to paint in 3d brush strokes Artist can walk around their immersive space and can explore their creativity with different styles and star shapes.What a powerful tools for architects and designers.

Among features it allows to save a snapshot of a creation, use a color picker. Select themes like space, pedestal and stars. It also has a mirror mode. Is that great?

See it in Action!

Google also picked up Thrive Audio, a company born out of the School of Engineering in Dublin’s Trinity College, specializing in positional audio.

Google hasn’t confirmed, but it is expected that they’re interested in integrating Thrive into the Cardboard SDK such that all developers will have access to high-quality positional audio.

Last year, Oculus pulled a similar move after announcing it would license RealSpace 3D Audio from VisiSonics.

Where to find it?

Tilt is available on steam right now for 29.99 : http://www.tiltbrush.com/ for the HTC Vibe:

Find more at: @GoogleVR, +GoogleVR

Thank you

References: http://www.tiltbrush.com/

Armando

Meet Watson

IBM

Mountain View CA, April 9th 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_cqBP08yuA

Watson is IBM’s cognitive computer. Watson understands natural language processing and is able to data mine facts and conclusions from over a billion of documents and big data.

Rather than force humans to think like a computer, Watson talks in human terms

How Watson learns!

Watson answers questions. Watson is able to learn on subjects and automatically update itself once information is published.

How he works?

Watson searches millions of documents to find thousands of possible answers. It then collects evidence and uses an algorithm to evaluate the quality of the evidence.

Can technology think? Watson can..

Watson already uses this common curating approach to answering questions about many topics like cancer, leukemia, drugs development, metallurgy and law.

It uses sources from all the information produced by humans for other humans to use like literature, articles, news and  posts and blogs and tweets.

Watson has high linguistics abilities that have not been seen before. It scores the body of data to learn and provided informed decisions and scale its expertise. Watson already shares expertise from fields as diverse as law, medicine, and even cooking

Watson  learns, adapts and keeps getting smarter with age just like we do.

Watson API

Now that you know about all this, what would you do with Watson?

Armando

Hands Free!!

Bierhaus March 19, 2016 Castro Street , Mountain View CA

powered by Google

Hello peeps, so I was in Mountain View and as I walked into a bar, I found a couple of ladies who were handing over a promotional flier for hands free app.

What is ‘Hands free’?

Hands Free is a new trial app from Google that allows you to make in-store payments without ever reaching for your phone or wallet.They  are currently running a limited public pilot in a small number of stores in the South Bay.

So here is an app that allows users to pay ‘hands free’? That’s right: it doesn’t even require you to pull out your phone.

How does it work?

The Hands Free app uses Bluetooth low energy, WiFi, location services, and other sensors on your phone to detect whether you are near a participating store. This enables you to pay hands-free, without fumbling with your phone or opening the Hands Free app.

When you are ready to pay at a store, simply tell the cashier “I'll pay with Google”. The cashier confirms your identity, using your initials and the photo you added to your Hands Free profile.

This technology detects the phone as the user walks into the business. In this case I visited bierha.us in Mountain View and to my pleasant surprise here was the experience.

All I did:

1. I downloaded the app
2. I went to the cashier and they asked my initials
3. They  already knew in their system that it was me based on my profile picture

The future is here

Looks like what we have seen in Sci fi movies is already becoming a reality. Look at 2002 Tom Cruise’s Minority Report where a similar concept was delivered.

Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bXJ_obaiYQ

Here is some pictures of my visit..