With textual search and information now abundantly available to most people most of the time, the race is on to make instant visual search and information ubiquitous too. Any real world object (if not person) will soon be able to be ‘known’ by on-the-go consumers equipped with smartphones, which can be pointed at anything to retrieve/ find related information on a whim.
It took Shazam, one of the pioneers of POINT & KNOW technologies, over 10 years to create 1 billion audio ‘tags’, but it announced in February 2013 that its 300 million users were now generating 1 billion tags in 3 months. Behaviour change will happen very quickly, once brands stop getting excited about simply being able to push alerts and start thinking about the new potential capabilities, behaviours, interactions, platforms, tools and services that will be unlocked by wearable devices...
