Category: Apps

AR technology is being used to help to encourage children to make smarter eating choices.

Encouraging kids to eat their vegetables can be a challenging activity for parents and other child guardians, but a new effort using augmented reality technology has now been designed to help in this effort.

The use of technology through smartphones may hold the answer to making healthful eating more appealing.

A company called Powerful Plants is now providing fun and educational options that are designed to help to show kids that they can eat in a way that promotes a healthy body, while having a good time and enjoying themselves. This company goes above and beyond the simple sale of products that are interesting to kids. The packaging for those products is enhanced with augmented reality technology to help to make things even more exciting.

When viewed through an augmented reality app, the packets show vegetable characters that appear to come to life.

The Powerful Plants products, themselves, are seed packets that give kids what they need to be able to grow their own veggies in their own containers or backyards. Each packet comes with a character printed on it. When viewed through an AR mobile app, the cartoon character appears to come to life, moving around and talking.

The AR cartoon character provides the child with a number of fun facts about the specific type of plant that they will be growing, and that they will one day be eating. This provides the child with an education about the plant and the healthy food, in a way that is fascinating and fun for the0The combination of education and mobile technology has been increasing in popularity. Equally, a growing number of toys have been including mobile features as well as augmented reality, with companies including large brands and tiny one-product businesses working the tech into their offerings. In the case of Powerful Plants, they have managed to use this opportunity for both education and for play in order to make sure that the kid has fun, but will also take important information with them that will hopefully promote nutritious eating throughout their lifetimes.

The results of a recent market analysis has shown that different regions and platforms see different spend rates.

Mobile advertising is taking off in virtually every market around the world, but the operating system that is targeted seems to have a considerable impact on the amount of spending that is being invested into that particular channel.

The results of a recent mobile marketing analysis has revealed that Android currently leads the way.

When it comes to impressions over mobile advertising, Android is the current winner, with 62.7 percent of the global market during the fourth quarter. Comparatively, that same figure was only 37.7 percent during the same quarter in 2013, which shows a massive shift in dominance in that area. These stats were cited by eMarketer, as per the data that was collected by the Opera Mediaworks mobile ad platform.

Apple’s mobile advertising share over iOS fell substantially to 27.2 percent from having been 43.4 percent the year before.

Still, while impressions may have fallen considerably over iOS, Apple still maintains dominance in another area of mobile marketing. That is in the revenue generated through that channel. In fact, iOS represented 51.7 percent of the global mobile ad revenue during last year’s final quarter. Comparatively, Android held 41.2 percent of the market, which isn’t too shabby, but that is clearly notably lower than Apple’s percentage.

Still, the trend does show that even in revenues, Apple slipped, while Android climbed. The year before, in terms of mobile ad revenues, iOS had held a 55.7 percent share in the last quarter, while Android had only 37.7 percent.

Among the explanations for this mobile advertising trend is that iOS remains a more powerful force in developed markets, where the ad spend is higher. Therefore, while Android may have held onto 84.4 percent of the smartphone shipments in last year’s third quarter (says IDC data), the notably smaller 11.7 percent share held by iOS happens to be located primarily in a part of the world where the ad spending is notably higher. This means that every iOS device presents a bigger mobile ad spend than each individual Android mobile gadget.