Earlier this month, the Vodafone Institute hosted a one-day summit in Berlin called “digitising europe – Opportunities for the Next Generation,” which included interactive elements built with Layar’s Augmented Reality technology.

The goal of the event was to discuss and debate how the continued digitization of the business, work and education fields can spur growth in Europe, and featured a keynote by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The invite-only event featured 350 business leaders, politicians, innovators, entrepreneurs, academics and students.

Creative agency TRIAD, which was responsible for the organization and guest management of the event, made use of Layar to bring certain aspects of the event to life with AR. Attendees were surrounded with opportunities to experience AR from the very start as the event’s invitations featured scannable content.

Additionally, the event program, wall banners and table displays could be scanned with Layar to reveal extra content, including videos of speakers and social media links. TRIAD made a strong effort to inform attendees with multiple calls-to-action, including artwork on the invitation, program, attendee name tags, interactive displays and even a mention by the moderator during the event.

The widely read business magazine Inc., famous for its annual “Inc. 500” list of the fastest growing companies, has begun enhancing its pages with interactive print using the Layar Creator.

Inc. not only boasts a 700,000+ magazine circulation - it also has a bevy of digital content on its popular website and blogs, supplementing the material featured each month in the magazine. With the Layar Creator, Inc. is able to connect these two large markets, bringing the additional digital content to the printed page and to its massive reader audience.

“It’s all part of our effort to find new ways to tell the stories of entrepreneurs and, in ways that no one else can, to tackle the issues that matter most to them,” said Eric Schurenberg, editor-in-chief of Inc.

In the recently released June issue, readers can scan pages of the magazine to see video interviews with some of this year’s overachieving “30 Under 30” entrepreneurs, a welcome video from editor Eric Schurenberg, dynamic advertisements and more.

“Thanks to Layar, we are able to increase the engagement of our readers within editorial while taking advantage of new forms of mobile e-commerce with ads,” said John Tebeau, Publisher of Inc. “Integrating this technology into the pages of Inc. puts the magazine at the forefront of reader engagement opportunities – something that’s prized by both our readers and our marketing partners.”

The latest issue of Inc. is another fine example of how the Layar Creator is the perfect solution for bringing together the two worlds of print and digital. As the popularity of interactive print continues to grow, Inc. is helping lead the way amongst a growing list of U.S. magazines choosing Layar.

The following blogpost is from Claire Boonstra, co-founder and head of BizDev at Layar.

Recently, Layar has set its focus squarely on making print interactive with digital content by activating the pages of magazines, newspapers, flyers and posters with videos, links to websites and the ability to share to social networks.

In case you are not yet familiar with the possibilities of interactive print, have a look at some of our recent campaigns with VPRO, LINDA., What’s Next and vtwonen.

Interactive print creates a new business opportunity for organizations that use the paper medium, such as publishers, advertisers, and brands with their own catalogues. As these organizations define the business case for interactive print, a new demand for detailed metrics is emerging.

We have crafted a whitepaper, titled Layar shows significant reach, conversion and click-through rates from paper to digital content. In it we include the key metrics defining the market potential for interactive paper, gathered from both external research agencies and our own internal metrics.

We provide figures for how many people are…

• able to use Layar - The number of people who have a smartphone capable of running Layar.
• using Layar now - The number of people who have installed and use Layar.
• using Layar with print - The number of people using Layar to view content on a print publication, or as we’re calling it, “conversion.”
• using Layar to click through - The number of people clicking through to the digital content from the paper, also known as “click-through rate” or “CTR.”

Highlights of our research include:

• Depending on the region, 8% - 38% of the global population currently owns a smartphone capable of running Layar. This is expected to grow to as high as 60% by 2016.
• The Layar application leads the market with over 20 million installations and between 2 and 3 million users who open the application each month (active users). Other AR apps see lower penetration figures on both Android and iPhone platforms.
• Magazine and newspaper campaigns see roughly 1% of total readers interacting with digital content via Layar.
• Of all digital content displayed in print, roughly 20% are clicked through to the underlying action (e.g., video, web-shop, mobile site, Facebook page, etc.).

To learn more, download the full report and dive into the numbers!

There aren’t a lot of publicly available statistics on the use of mobile augmented reality, let alone its use with interactive print. There has been a lot of hype around the subject and it’s time to just talk numbers.

With this document, we are aiming to kick-start a discussion about metrics and results achieved both with AR and with interactive print. We would love to hear your questions and remarks, so please leave us a comment below!