Blippar – The Future of Augmented Reality
“It’s not important to be smart. It’s about building relationships around you. It goes a long way in life if you actually truly care about your immediate environment and people who care about what you do.”
-- Ambarish Mitra, CEO and co-founder of Blippar on his success as an entrepreneur
Ambarish Mitra (Mitra), co-founded an augmented-reality advertising company called Blippar. As of 2015, it was a billion-dollar company, he had his photograph taken with the British royal family and his latest phone was personally delivered by Hugo Barra, Xiaomi’s vice president.
However it wasn’t smooth sailing from the start. Mitra moved to London from India, he had a couple of startups which didn’t succeed and he was almost bankrupt after the financial crisis in 2008. He chanced upon an idea as a joke and later converted it into Blippar. It was the case of grabbing the opportunity at the right time as Augmented Reality browsers had started becoming popular around that time in 2011. The smartphone technology had advanced and the increased spending on Research and Development as well as the increased investments had given rise to intelligent software. Blippar earned through partnerships with major advertisers, publishers and education companies. Consumer brands started experimenting with augmented reality (AR) and they signed on with companies like Blippar for increased customer engagement. In a span of 4 years, Blippar became one of the few British tech companies estimated to have a valuation over $ 1 billion.
Blippar was at a juncture where offers had started coming in and they had to make a decision whether to sell out to giants like Google and Microsoft or attempt to grow on their own. Experts felt that Augmented Reality browsers had failed to have a major impact on the everyday life of people.................
Background
Mitra grew up in a typical Indian middle-class family where education was the priority over wealth. His mother was a homemaker besides being a singer and a painter. His older sister too had similar interests and went to study arts in college. His father was an inventor who found a way to reuse coal slurry in a large Indian coal-mining town. He wanted that his son should follow his footsteps and study engineering. He also used to hand him copies of magazines like Forbes and Businessweek. Mitra, though not great at school was captivated by the internet..............
Living in the Slums
While living in the slums, he went door-to-door in the city selling magazine subscriptions during the day and at night, he worked in a tea stall. It fetched him around $1.50 a day. His only point of contact with his family was his sister; otherwise, he was on his own.............
A Topsy Turvy Ride
Mitra made money through the IPO and resigned shortly after, getting out just a year before the tech boom collapse. At the age of 20 he went to London enticed by the British life and culture. Immediately he started working at the Top Shop clothing store as a retail associate on Oxford Street. Later he also helped the British government to build its intranet besides trying his hands at a couple of startups. He founded a mobile insurance site called Swiftcover.com which was Britain’s first mobile car insurance. He also founded a mobile social media network called Stuck...........
Augmented Reality
In 2008, Gartner- the IT and technology research firm in its annual report titled, “Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies” mentioned augmented reality for the first time. In the report, Gartner anticipated that AR was “more than 10 years” from mainstream adoption.............
Blippar
Blippar was launched in 2011 in London by Ambarish Mitra, Omar Tayeb, Steve Spencer and Jess Butcher. It was like an advertising vehicle which brought products to life through its app. Blippar was the first visual discovery browser which used technology of augmented reality and image recognition to completely transform the way people connected with the world. Marketers had traditionally used QR (quick response) codes on products for years for consumers to get more information, but Blippar took it to the next level with content that was richer and more interactive..............
The Growth Story
Blippar chose the path of acquisitions to grow and the first acquisition of Blippar was done in June 2014 by purchasing Layar- a rival company. It was a Dutch company with a mobile browser called Layar. Based on the user’s location and field of view, data was laid on the camera view like a layer. Layar was an early mover in the augmented reality area, founded in 2009. The applications of its technology were used in advertising, mobile games and other areas. With the acquisition, the two startups could serve a wider audience by pooling together their publisher relationships, do more R&D and also move into areas like white-label services. Blippar’s core strength was high-end and large brands and publishers, whereas Layar’s targeted the market with lower budgets..............
Financials
Blippar made most of its money by selling augmented reality advertising to many brands like Nestle, Coca-Cola and Proctor & Gamble. Its revenues grew around 45% from £3.06m ($ 4.5 m) in its 2013 financial year to £4.46m ($ 6.7 m) in 2014. But Blippar recorded a loss of £4.96m ($ 7.5 m) in its financial year of 2014 compared to a net profit of £57.2k ($ 85k) the previous year. This was because it had tripled its headcount from 43 to 154 people in the expectation of future growth in the augmented reality (AR) technology market...............
Right Time to Sell Out?
AR browsers failed to have a major impact on the everyday life of not only the everyday people but even the true enthusiasts. There seemed to be a disconnect between the AR browsers and the people using their product. Even the review scores given by the users on app stores showed that their popularity was less and the reactions were generally extremes (Exhibit IV)............
The Road Ahead: Ambitious Plans
Blippar announced that it had in mind a very ambitious project called a “visual browser” to allow users to just look at an object through their phone and find out information about it. That object need not be specially tagged. That could be anything from a dog to an apple to the Eiffel Tower..............
Exhibits
Exhibit I: Using Blippar
Exhibit II: Awards Won by Blippar
Exhibit III: Financials of Blippar as on November 30th 2014
Exhibit IV: Blippar Ratings on Google Play Store in the Extremes
