Coming soon: The Touchless Touch Screen?

Qualcom acquiring IP from Gesture Tek to integrate on Snapdragon. (WARNING: High amounts of sarcasm)

Engadget reported today via Phone Scoop that Qualcomm is acquiring some gesture recognition assets from Gesture Tek. I'm not sure just how to feel about this. I have my own slightly jaded view of Gesture Tek and their camera-based gesture recognition technology from a past life, but maybe Qualcomm has an idea here that could be more than an evolution but maybe, just maybe, a revolution? Hmmm.

First: Personal history and common sense

To begin with, I have experienced product organizations before that, for some inexplicable reason, were stuck on the whole Gesture Tek technology and were convinced that gesture gaming was going to be a great selling point for mobile phones. Never mind the inferior and inconsistent technology that was GT at the time, let's assume instead that it was actually a capable implementation. Embedding proprietary technology into a platform and locking yourselves into custom built games with limited possibilities, at an outrageously high development price, is just not sound business. But there were, and still are, even more fundamental reasons why gesture gaming just doesn't fly on mobile - and why I have doubts about camera-based gesture technology on portable devices as a whole.

Game play: My first experience with GT was at a time when 3.5" displays were considered large. Even so, and even with today's larger screens, the distance required for the front-facing camera to be effective for gesture recognition was about.. oh… one to two meters. Now think about it for a second folks. How well would you see the 3.5" display of your mobile phone at that distance? Well enough to accurately play a boxing, basketball or ping-pong game on your mobile? You decide.

Camera requirement: Playing a gesture recognition game requires a front-facing camera and lots of room. Not just that,

Connected devices poised to disrupt TV advertising

Last autumn I was making a presentation to the Nordic Telecom Summit entitled "Web, Mobile & Entertainment Industries - Lost In Translation?" The context was how these converging industries, made up of creatives, rights holders, hardware manufacturers, internet entrepreneurs, all have different business models and vocabularies that makes it very difficult for them to understand each other and find, and negotiate, successful partnerships. I presented that the future was more about strategic partnerships and the challenge would be for each of these player to identify what their benefits are to each other when meeting the future. I'll expand on those thoughts in more detail another time but one of the main take-aways was that, in the next five years, the battle will be fought on connected devices and especially on connected televisions. I stand by this today and believe that those brands with a combination of products and platforms that allows them to have there fingers in every slice of the pie, are the ones poised for success (see below). Why else would rumors abound about an Apple Television (not the Apple TV box). Steve and Co. are well aware of where they need to be and it is one hardware area they are lacking. A companion box just isn't enough. 

So that said, you can tell I believe that connected televisions are well positioned to disrupt the traditional TV advertising model. A recent piece by Ryan Lawler at GigaOm supports my theory. He opens his piece by pointing out that Linear TV represents $160 billion advertising spend worldwide, and IP-delivered video measures up to a measly $5.4 billion (measly was my attempt at irony). What's important, and interesting, is that the number of connected devices is growing rapidly and these connected devices (televisions included) offer TV-sized reach combined with all of the interactivity, web analytics and targeting possibilities that advertisers expect from web video ads. This market is only going to grow. Success will depend on how well advertisers can engage their customers via these devices and new forms of digital adverts will emerge. What would be cool is interaction where apps for various devices/platforms could be downloaded directly to my TV and cloud synced over shared wifi. A "get the app now" interactive advert for connected Tv's. See? It wasn't that hard.