What’s In Store for 2016?

It’s hard to believe we are already 12 days into 2016, but the beginning of a new year is the perfect opportunity to reflect on where we’ve been and look ahead at what’s to come. 2015 was a tremendous year for Blippar, from partnering with incredible brands to make everything from comic books to cereal boxes come to life, to growing our teams and unveiling the first steps towards our mission of making the entire world blippable.

And while we know exactly where we want to take our own technology and mission this year, it’s also fun to speculate about what else is going to happen over the next twelve months in all of our favorite industries, so we asked around our teams and what follows is what we see happening in 2016.

Machines Get Smarter

This year is going to be a big year for machine learning, deep learning and artificial intelligence, fueled by the launch of TensorFlow, Google’s open source software library, in November. The availability of the code driving this artificial intelligence coupled with the announcements by some big players of some AI based assistants (e.g. Google Now, Siri, Facebook M) means that we will see more and more products adapted to the technology.

Consequently, we are going to see the rise of robots entering our homes in the form of personal assistants who answer our phone calls and emails, and—no surprise here—as toys for children. Similarly, the open-sourcing of TensorFlow will also lead to an aggressive rise of facial recognition apps in the consumer space resulting in new legislation to protect the use of biometric data.

Augmented and Virtual Reality Become Increasingly Social

2016 is going to be the year that augmented reality and virtual reality become the new normal—an opinion we’ve already seen supported through our time at CES this year! More and more we are going to see both AR and VR used on social platforms through mobile technology.

AR in particular is going to see a lot of growth in the head-mounted wearable space—adding particular value in the enterprise and industrial spaces by increasing safety, output and/or accuracy of work performed. VR is going to see its first robust gaming system that can support third party games.

Mobile Apps Go Native as Visual Search Grows

Generally speaking, cell phone makers have basically run out of margins—there are more cell phones on this planet than there are actual people, and at this point the key differences between those phones are minimal. There is no more money to be made here.

In the months ahead, we will start to see the rise of native apps, which we will be paying for instead of paying for our phones. On those phone, the camera will be the tool that brings AR and VR into our day to day social lives. People will start to use AR as a social and sharing tool for person-to-person creative collaboration and communication. And thanks to our work here at Blippar, users will gain access to tools that enable a smartphone's camera to recognize all general objects in the physical world.

Advertising Creative and Programmatic Data Teams Join Forces

In the world of advertising technology, 2016 will be the year we hit the branded content tipping point. Brands are no longer going to care about how many views that may or may not have racked up on a YouTube video. This will partly be due to advancements we will see in programmatic technology and mobile ads. Data that has until now not been used very effectively (i.e., seeing ads for the shirt you already bought), will finally be used intelligently and will will finally come up to speed creatively.

This will be the year we truly see personalized creative and individualized data co-exist. As far as mobile ads are concerned, the coming months will see them becoming more impactful as they will no longer be just repurposed TV spots. Overall, 2016 is going to be the year that advertising looks less and less like the boxy web page margins of yore, and more like quality, impactful content.