Influx

Summer is here and that usually means Starbucks is looking to push something cool. This year, to help them make that happen, they are enlisting some help from some pretty interesting technology.

They have a scavenger hunt promotion going on , the difference is that you “hunt” using your mobile phone.

The game asks you three trivia questions a week and you have to answer the questions using the camera on your mobile phone. Starbucks are using some clever technology (“intelligent image recognition”) to make sure the pictures match the answers to the clues.

The technology has been developed by Mobot who experimented with their software with the experimental game superstarglobal. The idea is that players printed stickers of themselves and then put them up around the city; the objective was to capture as many stickers as you could from different players.

There are dozens of potential applications of this technology.

Influx expects to see brands starting to use this more; there will be more games applications like Starbucks is using, but we also predict other brands will start to use it to bring more interactivity to their out-of-home and even print advertising.