Idea: Someone should acquire Layar; Microsoft, Nokia and Samsung come to mind
By Dusan Belic on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 10:24 AM PST In Ideas and rants, Services
You’ve probably heard about Layar and their augmented reality service/platform. We covered them for quite a few times on IntoMobile. The company has a compelling and super-interesting offering, and will probably be one of the leading augmented reality service providers in the future, aside from Google (NSDQ: GOOG). In that sense, I find them to be an interesting company to acquire.
I believe there are three companies that could benefit from having Layar’s technology (and people) under its belt:
- Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) – they certainly want to compete with Google and at the moment I don’t see them succeeding in the long-run.
- Nokia (NYSE: NOK) – same goes here. And it’s about time for Nokia to start thinking beyond its incumbent platforms to expand elsewhere.
- Samsung – which us the weakest of the three companies when it comes to services. Adding AR in to the mix could definitely make their bada platform a winner.
Other potential buyers could include LG, Motorola (NYSE: MOT) and maybe even Dell, a new player in the mobile world.
Earlier I suggested someone should acquire GyPSii. Maybe the ideal thing would be to buy both companies and merge their respective technologies in something that would create the “mobile location augmented reality social network.” Of course, a shorter name is a must in order to sell such a service. 
As a sidenote, another augmented reality company that’s worth watching is metaio which makes the junaio platform, and has just opened it up.
Any thoughts?
Interesting thought!
One simple question though – what do you think will be the the single biggest use of an AR app like Layar?
In its current form, I found its utterly unusable and can’t imagine that it would be of any use unless the positioning tech improves drastically. Till than, am afraid, this might have a great technical novelty about it, from a user perspective, it is useless.
All that Layar has managed to do well (better than other AR apps) is to create a good sized developer community around it. That I guess – should anyways not be difficult for the companies you talk about. What is most difficult is to figure out a good use for such technology.
Layar is a lot of hype but adds very little real value. Holding the camera up to find interesting locations is silly and unintuitive. It all reminds too much of hypes like Second Life. Investers are smart and probably see that this bubble that will burst quickly.
Layar is like Second Life: a lot of hype and forgotten next year. Investers are smart enough to see that they don’t offer real value and have no chance to make serious revenue.
I do not agree about it. I do agree investors are smart, but so is Gooogle. Why would they invest in their street view if they don’t believe there’s money to be made here.
Why would anyone acquire GyPSii? Massive capital investments wasted on a photo geo tagging site. Can’t even search any really meaning? No tie to what is in the photo and what is searched. No value, no real business model, and a company that would have a massive exit price tag for the equity investors to get a return (over 40M euro raised). Not to mention what they have could be built with half a dozen good engineers, not the 100 odd employees they have across many countries burning massive amounts of cash.