Last Monday June 21st I celebrated the official start of the summer with a visit to London, to attend the Facebook Developer Garage London (FDGL; #fdgl on Twitter) and the Meffys Award dinner and gala.

The FDGL was a great event, organized by the local London Facebook developer community, together with Christian Hernandez (@christianhern) from the Facebook EMEA and Developer team. Facebook is now focusing much more on areas outside of the US, so they decided to send an executive team over to attend this event including Joanna Shields, Mike Vernal, Ethan Beard and Mark Zuckerberg himself! The atmosphere was great and I got to meet many great companies and developers - and managed to talk with “Zuck” for a while about Layar. He was impressed by what we achieved in only one year!

We are thinking about how we can integrate Facebook and Layar in the best possible way - so that Layar users can share their activity on Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg indicated they are finishing designing their geo-location application and hope to offer it soon. Which is of course possibly also very exciting for Layar. Tweets about the event can be found here.

After the Facebook event I went to the Meffys Award dinner. The Meffys are the ‘Oscars’ of the mobile entertainment industry - awarded by the Mobile Entertainment Forum (MEF). This was a gala dinner - so unlike most geeky & startup events, people were wearing suits, tuxedo’s and cocktail dresses, and the dinner was held in a ballroom with chandeliers. Nice!

During the ceremony, 18 Meffys were awarded in categories such as ‘Best Music Service’, ‘Best Game’ and ‘Best Ad Campaign’. And guess what: Layar won the Meffy for ‘Technology Innovation’! This is a fantastic reward for Layar - showing that we have passed the ‘promising startup’ stage to become a mature business.

Rimma Perelmuter, MEF’s Executive Director, said “Congratulations to Layar on pioneering the field of augmented reality on mobile, which looks set to become a mass-market phenomenon.” Great, right?

The Meffys were by the way not the only award we received last week. Marc Rene Gardeya from Hoppala received the Autovision Innovation Award on behalf of Layar on June 16th. More information can be found on his blog.

Thanks all for a great event and great prizes,

Claire

By Daphne Channa Horn, @ikbendAF.

Wonder what happened? Here is the news roundup. Or go and watch the video’s of all the talks:

- Event Video 1: “Layar – The Who and the What”
- Event Video 2: The Attraction of the Experience & Distribution Deals
- Event Video 3: Immersive AR using Layar’s API
- Event Video 4: The Community Creating the New Medium
- Event Video 5: Lets Talk Product – Usage, Floaticons and Kooaba

This is the last video of Layar’s one year anniversary event. CEO Raimo van der Klein talks product. He discusses the latest usage statistics, introduces the latest addition to the Layar experience called Floaticons and announces the partnership with Kooaba.

See the whole news round-up from the anniversary event here.

Layar’s usage shows growth and maturity with 700K active users
In the last 6 months 1.6 million people used Layar at least once. The active user base amounts to 716.000 people who used Layar in the past 30 days. The Layar Reality Browser is moving from a cool application to show friends to an application that is a service of value in daily life.

More layers are being discovered with the content discovery mechanism called Stream. The addition of Stream to the Layar Reality Browser resulted in 40% of the users opening at least 3 layers, compared to 23% in previous versions.

Graph: Average amount of Layers opened by users

Layar adds AR messaging with cool 3D Floaticons
Today we announced that our users will be able to express themselves by placing objects in the mass medium of Augmented Reality. The first “species” of objects that come alive in Layar are animated 3D objects called Floaticons. Users express themselves and leave messages using Floaticons.

There are several series, such as Floatos Locos, Robots 3000, Classic Monsters, Sparkle & Shine and a special World Cup series representing all participating countries. Hundreds of these Floaticons will be made available for all types of messages.

To ensure that only relevant messages remain visible over time, we gave each Floaticon a limited lifespan, indicated as “health”. The health of a Floaticon can be prolonged by feeding it a cookie.

Floaticons are Layar’s first step into the business of Digital Goods. Next week we will make a beta client available to our developers. We expect to launch Floaticons to the public in July.

Introducing Layar Floaticons

Messaging with Layar Floaticons

Layar Floaticon Series

Kooaba announced as partner in Image Recognition
Image Recognition is a key part of the Augmented Reality roadmap. Layar will integrate the world of geo-located AR and image recognition into one compelling service.

Kooaba, a leading company in visual search, based in Zurich, Switzerland, will provide the technology. This capabitity opens up a world of new possibilities, including indoor usage and launching AR from a billboard, video or product. Expected launch is scheduled for Q4 2010.

Announcement video Kooaba

Video of the presentation by Claire Boonstra, co-founder & head of content & community, at the Layar NEXT Event, June 18th 2010. She talks about the milestones the Layar community has reached and the news big content partners like National Geographic and Quiznos.

Layer Partner Network member TAB World Media also took the stage as well as DnL Productions to talk about their successful business using Layar.

Layar Platform grows to 1.000 layers published, covering every country in the world
This week Layar reached three major milestones: 1.000 layers published, 3.000 layers in testing and 4.000 active developers. The platform growth has now accelerated to over 20% per month. These layers bring augmented content to every country in the world.

The Layar Partner Network, consisting of companies fully dedicated to developing layers, has grown to 20 members across the globe. The newest member, Dongyub Lee of DnL Productions in South-Korea explained on stage why his company chose to be fully committed to Layar with 4 dedicated developers and 3D artists.

The latest brand to announce their commitment to use Layar’s AR is National Geographic. At the event, Katie Juhl, Manager of Mobile at National Geographic shared how they will use Layar to provide better learning and travel experiences for their audience.

Katie Juhl, Manager of Mobile at National Geographic on using Layar to provide better learning experiences

Dirk Groten, CTO of Layar shared current and new features to create immersive Augmented Reality using the Layar API. This third event video from the 1 year anniversary event is especially interesting for publishers and game designers who are gearing up to explore the emerging mass medium of augmented reality.

In this presentation Dirk also explained what effect the operator campaigns with Layar using TV ads during prime time shows in the US had on the servers.