Want to feel safe? Find out if you’re in a safe area with the SpotCrime layer. ReportSee created SpotCrime on the notion that information is power. Next to their website, they launched a paid layer with crime maps, showing crime incident data around you, like crime alerts and reports of shootings, robberies, assaults, thefts, burglaries, arsons and vandalism. We talked to Colin Drane from ReportSee to find out how we can feel safer by using the layer.

Why a Spotcrime layer? Colin: “The SpotCrime layer allows you to see an augmented reality view of the crimes that have happened in their current location. This allows them to be more aware of their surroundings and helps to prevent becoming a victim. This can be especially useful if you are on vacation in an area that you’ve never visited before. It’s important to know what’s going on around you, and to avoid unsafe areas when you can.” What can we user do with it? Colin: “Use the augmented reality view or the list view to learn about crimes in a certain radius around your location. If one of the crime icons is selected, you can read more specific details about the crime event and follow the link to the SpotCrime website.”

‘Why is it worth my $1.95?’ Colin: “It’s only a one time fee, after which you can use the layer at home and any place you travel and become knowledgeable about safe locations. You can’t put a price on peace of mind!” Other things you’d like to share? Colin: “Sign up for free email alerts at www.spotcrime.com”

The layer currently covers the 300 largest US cities, main cities in Canada and The Netherlands and London.

Over the past year, the Layar community has grown fast to over 3500 developers. The developers are important links in our ecosystem. To get the most out of the Layar community, we set up the ‘Layar Partner Network’ with the first draw of our most active developers, including:

Augment Reality	United Kingdom	http://www.augmentreality.co.uk
TAB worldmedia	The Netherlands	http://www.tabworldmedia.com
Muzar	The Netherlands	http://www.muzar.org
Hpsc	France	http://www.hpsc.fr
Elipse ad	Spain	http://www.elipsead.com
SystemK	Japan	http://www.systemk.co.jp
Winvolve	Canada	http://www.winvolve.com
Signo-Geo	Spain	http://www.signo-geo.com
Tall Games	Australia	http://www.tallgames.net
MOB	Australia	http://www.mob-labs.com
Total Design and Technology	United States	http://tdandt.com
Hoppala	Germany	http://www.hoppala.eu

The Layar Partner Network is a collaboration between developers and Layar, created to share knowledge, experiences, ideas and plans. By exchanging information and skills, we learn from each other and make the Augmented Reality opportunity grow. Through monthly webinars, the members of the Layar Partner Network keep in touch, and share the latest developments in the Layar field.

Members are admitted based on the conditions of being a developer that:

• is committed, passionate and involved with Layar


• has at least 1 published layer of high quality and 1 person fully dedicated to Layar development

After the first sessions with our Partner Network members, we decided to get more dedicated developers on board. The second draft includes so far:

Lost Boys Mobile	The Netherlands	http://lbi.lostboys.nl
Fabrique	The Netherlands	http://www.fabrique.nl
Teknograd AS	Sweden	http://www.teknograd.no
mobile breadCRUMBS	Germany	http://www.mcrumbs.com
The Virtual Public Art Project	International	www.virtualpublicartproject.com
C2K	The Netherlands	http://www.c2k.nl

Emmelien Kneppers, Strategy director Lost Boys Mobile: “We’re very pleased to be able to combine forces within the Layar Partner Network, because this will create new opportunities. Our work, which by definition is based on acting from strategy and user experience, is now extended with a new channel with a lot of potential for our customers- existing and new ones.”
(Lost Boys Mobile is a full service agency in Mobile, recently founded by LBi Lost Boys and Triple IT. Their official launch will be mid-June.)

If you’re a company looking for a skilled developer to create your layers, we can recommend the members of the Layar Partner Network. If you want to know more about the program or have specific questions, please contact maurice@layar.com.

Last week the first big Augmented Reality event took place at the Santa Clara Convention Center in the US. We were invited to speak in several slots. It was a great event organized by @comogard, @tishshute and @whurley. It was good to talk to all the others working hard to make the AR Mass medium emerge. Amazing to see what some are doing in the mapping and track field. The keynotes where inspiring. The one by Bruce Sterling is online as well as the one from Will Wright. Will Wright even mentions Layar in his Keynote (at minute 31). Hopefully the keynote by Jesse Schell will be online soon as that one was good and entertaining!

Here are the slides from the Layar ARE2010 main presentation, for the Business Model track, where we shared our vision on AR as a mass medium, our latest statistics, the 5 AR content categories we see emerging form the developer community, what types of product market fit we see developing and of course the latest release of the Layar Browser with Stream for real time location based search.

After first doing a very nice commercial promoting their droid phones Verizon now has made a very nice video where all is explained about the Layar Reality Browser.

Nice Video I just found on YouTube of a campaign from Volvo Cars with Layar. Very nice way to integrate Augmented Reality in a campaign.

Here is another clip associated to the Subject60 campaign.