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For all of our Canadian Layar users, you’ll be excited to hear that we’ve recently opened a Canadian office in Toronto. The office will be run by Nigel Newton, Layar’s newly hired Country Manager for Canada.

The Canadian market has seen exceptional growth for us in recent months with nearly 1 million downloads of the Layar App and 1,000 users of the Layar Creator. Brands like Readers Digest, Nissan and Glacier Media have already begun using Layar to add interactivity to magazines, newspapers and other content in Canada to increase reader engagement and boost advertising revenue.

We’ve selected Nigel Newton from the Layar Partner Network to lead our market development in Canada. Newton introduced interactive print to the mainstream Canadian media in 2012 while leading innovative newspaper advertising projects with Postmedia, Canada’s largest publisher of English language newspapers. In 2012, Newton was also involved in organizing our Activate Print Toronto seminar with the Dutch Embassy. He has proven to be an expert on interactive print.

As interactive print continues to grow worldwide, we are very excited to continue our expansion into the North American market, but best of all is how our Toronto office will better serve our users and customers in Canada and North America.

Nigel’s expertise and proximity to the Canadian market provides easier access to our wealth of knowledge, insights and services, including our Campaign Review Service. This all-new service gives you opportunity to take your campaigns to the next level. Click here to learn more.

Depending on where you live, if you’ve ever wanted to hear from the founders of Layar up close and in person, this week is a good chance to do just that! This week, both Maarten Lens-FitzGerald and Raimo van der Klein will be speaking at events in both Europe and North America.

Tuesday and Wednesday this week is the third annual Augmented Reality Event in Santa Clara, California. Maarten will be making his third appearance at the event, and will be presenting in the business track about the augmented reality market.

Maarten’s talk, dubbed “Where the Money Is,” will be an overview of lessons learned by Layar as we strive to make our technology ubiquitous, secure a strong hold in existing revenue streams and make money for ourselves.

“It is about what lies beyond today’s AR with geolocation, games, 3D campaigns, animation, etc.,” says Maarten about his talk.

You’ll also be able to watch a demo of a new product coming soon from Layar which aims to achieve these goals. The talk is at 10am on Tuesday, May 8th at ARE2012 at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

As for Raimo, he’ll be much closer to home at Mobile Convention Amsterdam (MCA). After a highly successful sequel event last year with over 800 visitors, MCA is back again for the third time to bring together the best and brightest in the mobile world in Northern Europe.

On Tuesday, May 8th, Raimo will be speaking with Anita de Beijl, marketing manager for Sanoma Media’s vtwonen. You may remember our project with vtwonen not long ago in which they used Layar to enhance the pages of their magalogue with extra content and direct buy buttons.

Anita and Raimo will discuss the process of partnering up to create this project and the results of the experiment. You can see the discussion live tomorrow at 12:45pm in the Media & Publishing track at MCA.