Surely Disney can do better than this....?

 I just received an email from Disney, addressed to "Dear Family".  Not a great start is it.  The email itself consists of just a couple of large images, with all the text in the image, and with the main call to action to "Play the game.  Check out your personal code and see if you're a winner".  This takes you through to a massively underwhelming landing page, dominated by disney images, but with a small text box suggesting you can now get your code.  Usability is dreadful, design is poor and overall the experience leaves me feeling worse about Disney than when I started.  I am sure they will get a strong overall response to the campaign, sufficient to claim it as a success, simply due to the strength of people's affection for Disney, but I am sure that long term it is damaging to one of the most valuable and loved brands in the world. After the campaign, I am less likely to engage with any future communications from Disney, and certainly feel less inclined to visit Disneyland. Despite my click counting towards the success of the campaign, long term, the damage is done.

Augmented reality through mobile phones

Nokia has announced a new service now available on several of its existing phones - Nokia Point and Shoot. Although only in Beta, it seems to be going in the same direction as Google's mobile platforms on the G1 which support applications such as ShopSavvy and Wikitude, which allow images from the camera to be interpreted by the phone, combined with additional information such as location, and other internet content.

Increasingly, mobiles will allow us to interact intelligently with real world objects.  Snap the bus stop outside work, and you could be told when the next bus will be along to take you home. Snap the TV, and you could get a list of what is on and when, and what your friends are already watching (see my earlier post!). The opportunity to use your mobile phone as a means of identifying and interacting with the real world will create enormous opportunities in the coming years.

And as mobiles become more powerful, and more capable of interpreting images,  then how far can this capability be pushed?  What if your phone accurately interpret your voice, or even read lips.  Only a small leap forward from image recognition to simple movement recognition surely. There is a lot of work going on at the moment to remove the dependency on the keyboard as the main internet interface.  Lip reading would be an amazing way of allowing us to interact more naturally with the web....