Several leading Swiss daily newspapers: Blick, NZZ am Sonntag, Weltwoche or 20 Minuten have been offering their readers the possibility to use the Kooaba paperboy app since the beginning of the year.
And now it is the turn of their French-language counterparts of Le Matin Dimanche, La Tribune de Genève, 24 Heures and the Femina magazine (all of which belong to the Edipresse group) to adopt this original visual recognition system, starting the end of June.
The Kooaba Paperboy application, available on the iPhone and Androïd, enables the user to record newspaper pages, access the multimedia contents of an article or give a print ad a web add-on simply by photographing them with his smartphone.
Initially, the Edipresse newspapers will offer readers the option to photograph a printed page and access its digital version (PDF) which they can then store, send to a friend or index on their Facebook page. 
“All the newspaper pages become interactive, but the reader only downloads the page he has photographed. Taking a shot of one page does not mean downloading the whole newspaper free of charge”, says Marc Lamarche who is responsible for mobile services at Edipresse (photo). “The next step is to enrich selected articles with multimedia contents. We will probably start with a section of Le Matin Dimanche that is used to test new products. By taking a photo of the described product, readers will have access via the newspaper’s mobile site to more information, a video, etc.”
“Print’n’Mobile”: an advertising argument
This possibility to make the print edition interactive opens up new prospects for newspaper advertising. The Swiss publishers have decided to take a joint approach to promote this innovation. A wide-scale advertising campaign invites readers, in the ad pages distributed up to November in the newspapers and magazines, to use their mobiles to photograph these ads via the Kooaba application (ad page on the right) or to scan QR codes (ad page on the left). By reacting to these ads, the readers take part in a competition for shopping vouchers in the value of 130,000 Swiss francs. A dedicated Internet site (http://www.le-pouvoir-unique-d-une-annonce.ch) shows the images of the ads, how they work and the combination of the different QR and Kooaba technologies.
“Interactive print ads allow advertisers to track interactions on a continuous basis and so assess the various performances of his ads. User interacts with the advertiser to take advantage of commercial offers (couponing, sales, services) or contests and it’s also a powerful direct marketing tool as SMS and e-mail addresses can be collected” explained Marc Lamarche at the recent WAN-IFRA Mobile Day Conference.
The growing potential of image recognition
Set up in 2006, the young Swiss start-up Kooaba offers a unique service, acknowledged as such by the magazine “Red Herring” that ranked it in 2010 among the one hundred most innovative start-ups worldwide.
“In Switzerland, Kooaba Paperboy is among the most downloaded news application from the AppStore and we feel compelled to offer our newspapers from this application”, says Marc Lamarche. He emphasises also that it costs him nothing and that Kooaba takes the PDFs of the daily newspapers directly from the Edipresse server and prepares them for its application.
“The ideal way is to have a XML file, but we are accustomed to working with PDFs” says Herbert Bay, co-founder of Kooaba (photo left), “If the publishers want to introduce links to give their pages or an ad greater interactivity, they can do so by accessing our system via a browser".
"Each title uses us in accordance with the expectations of their readers. For example, NZZ has a reputation for offering articles that are full of analyses and background information, so that its readers are more likely to want to store certain pages to read them later on or to share good articles with other persons. The daily newspaper 20 Minutes is a typical example of a newspaper that would refer the reader to multimedia content, music or video on its mobile site, so that we are ideal for setting up this automatic gateway from print to the website. We also have a magazine that sells subscriptions; by taking a photo, the reader accesses the pay-for digital versions of the magazine”.
But Herbert Bay also adds that most titles choose to grant free access because the long-term objective is to increase the use of what he calls the “smart ads”: “For the advertisers, Kooaba allows them to do e-commerce from a simple newspaper ad. Our customers also include ad agencies that can offer the use of this technology in their campaigns. Kooaba can be used also to provide more information about a product. While developing our technology, we compiled a database on thousands of CDs, DVDs, books, etc.”
The young start up offers its technology free of charge to publishers and implements a policy of revenue sharing when Kooaba is used in a commercial context (extending advertising or subscriptions selling campaign).
