Blippar 2014: A year in highlights

As years go, 2014 was a pretty good one for Blippar. Over the past 12 months we have grown enormously as a team, opening several new offices around the world and acquiring Layar, another terrific player within the augmented reality space. Where Blippar was a family of four in 2011, we now comprise over 180 people in 11 offices spread across three continents.

We hung interactive art in a Dutch palace, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and on street corners across the United States. Our CEO met with British royalty. We launched our DIY tool Blippbuilder… and then gave it a huge refurbishment. We worked with the world’s biggest brands and media owners to create unforgettable interactive mobile experiences for a user base that now, post-Layar acquisition, tops 50 million.

And the best news? We’re only just getting started. But before we tell you about all the exciting developments you can expect from us this year, take a look at some of Blippar’s 2014 highlights…

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January

The year began well when Blippar was predicted to be one of the top packaging trends of 2014 – a prediction we did our level best to uphold: 12 months later, over 2 billion products are blippable globally. Our CEO and co-founder Ambarish, below, also offered Venture Beat his own predictions for what the augmented reality industry would look like by the end of 2014, and he was spot-on with them.

February

By February we were celebrating the official launch of our DIY self-publishing tool Blippbuilder, thereby empowering all brands, media outlets and creative agencies to create their own interactive AR experiences for their own customers. On Valentine’s Day we made all London Oyster travel cards blippable, transforming them into animated, musical love poems to Transport For London, below. And we also teamed up with Pepsi in the United States to launch a Super Bowl blipp on all their soft drink cans. Score.

March

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in March our CEO Ambarish took the stage to give the world its first demonstration of what an augmented reality application looks like on Google Glass. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, several members of the Blippar team headed to Austin, Texas, for SXSW festival, taking with them boxes of fire-breathing dragon tattoos and interactive blippable drinks coasters, below.

April

Blippar teams from all over the world united in April for an enormous team-building weekend in Surrey, England, below, to learn more about the origins of the Blippar story. Over lunch in the same pub in which the concept for Blippar was founded - The Black Swan, Cobham - co-founders Ambarish Mitra and Omar Tayeb recounted the tale in which Ambarish suggested, jokingly, ‘bringing the Queen to life off a £20 note’ to get the barman’s attention… and how a few weeks later Omar showed him a newly invented mobile application that made the very joke possible.

May

Great news for gaming fans arrived in May, when we built more games for Google Glass using our augmented reality and gesture-recognition technologies, which we demoed at Augmented World Expo, below, bringing true AR gaming to wearables. Later that month our CEO made a comment during a Qualcomm Ventures event about the importance of building a strong team, remarking ‘you cannot fire a missile from a kayak, you need a warship’, hinting at a big event on the horizon…

June

A momentous Blippar milestone took place in June, when we announced our acquisition of Layar, a phenomenal augmented reality company based in Amsterdam. Our combined user base of over 50m makes Blippar the world’s largest AR platform. We also completed one of our first projects within the education sector: making GCSE maths textbooks blippable.

July

Barely a month after adding to the Blippar family through our Layar acquisition, we decided to expand even further in July, opening a brand new Chicago base and then moving the New York team to new premises: a larger office with a roof terrace, below.

August

We celebrated Blippar’s third birthday with some terrific media and culture campaigns, including our first project with Conde Nast fashion bible Vogue, in which we enabled VOGUE Germany to turn their magazine interactive, below – and a collaboration with Art Everywhere US, an extraordinary initiative bringing timeless (and blippable) works of art to the streets of the United States.

September

September proved a terrific month for exciting Blippar campaigns. Not only did we refresh our campaign with Coca-Cola and Spotify in the UK, but we also produced our best AR game yet - for Disney Star Wars Rebels, below. Play it yourself here!

October

Life at Blippar didn’t slow down towards the end of the year - it sped up. We opened our first Asian office, in Delhi, India. We also gave our DIY platform Blippbuilder a complete refurbishment, making it even easier for clients to create their own AR experiences. October was also a big month for blippable artwork: in Holland we enriched an exhibition in the Royal Palace Amsterdam with interactivity (to be blipped by King Willem-Alexander), while in America we took part in REMIX festival, hanging our blippable Art Everywhere posters in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, below.

November

Alongside the official launch of Blippar Turkey, in November we also worked with Priya’s Shakti, an innovative Indian social impact multimedia project, using interactive comic books and murals to speak out against sexual violence against women, below.

December

Seeing out 2014 in regal fashion, Ambarish met with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge – Prince William, below, and Kate Middleton – at two private events in New York, giving them a demo of the Blippar app and receiving the royal thumbs up from both. And to wish all Blippar fans a happy holiday season, we created a blippable card featuring a virtual snowman. Print out the card, colour in the snowman and blipp to see him spring to life.

2015…

You can expect plenty surprises to emerge from Blippar Towers over the next 12 months. It promises to be a fantastic year; let’s make it even better than the last one.

Happy 2015!