Blip­par, the Lon­don-head­quar­tered aug­ment­ed-real­i­ty mobile adver­tis­ing start­up which opened its first US office in New York last year, has just launched a major update that soups up its speed and brings addi­tion­al social shar­ing fea­tures for its users.

Faster and more share­able 

Launched in Lon­don in Novem­ber 2010, Blippar’s approach to mobile adver­tis­ing is as unique as it is addic­tive. That bot­tle of ketchup might look unre­mark­able to the naked eye but if it car­ries a Blip­par tag, a smart device will see much, much more (pro­vid­ed it’s got the Blip­par app, of course). The smart­phone will quick­ly reveal a raft of extra con­tent like coupons, pro­mo­tions, recipe ideas and much else besides. Just about every­one work­ing in mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies would agree that that’s  pret­ty darned cool.

CEO Rish Mitra says that the new update has made the recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy 10 per­cent quick­er. But the brands Blip­par works with are almost cer­tain­ly going to love the new social shar­ing fea­ture the most. Until the update, the only way for a Blip­par user to like or fol­low a brand was by track­ing its social media pages on Face­book or Twit­ter. But now, they can use their own social media accounts to spread the word, which is like­ly to ensure that Blip­par con­tent goes viral.

Users can now also see at a glance which Blip­pable con­tent is trend­ing thanks to the update, which means that they don’t even have to be in the prox­im­i­ty of a Blip­par tag on a real-world item to find out what’s up and what’s down.

Onwards and upwards 

Brands will also ben­e­fit from deep­er ana­lyt­ics. They pre­vi­ous­ly got data like loca­tion, in-app inter­ac­tions and the over­all num­ber of blips, but now they’re going to get anonymized demo­graph­ic data too, cour­tesy of the new Face­book and Twit­ter integration.

A mea­sure of its suc­cess in the world of mobile adver­tis­ing lies in the fact that by Feb­ru­ary 2011, just three months after launch, Blip­pable became cash pos­i­tive and hasn’t slipped into neg­a­tive ter­ri­to­ry since. But accord­ing to Mitra, it’s now also “a strong lead veloc­i­ty and over 70 per­cent client reten­tion as a busi­ness prov­ing val­ue of the medium.”

And there’s more: the UI has been over­hauled to include 3D mod­el­ing across each of the OS’s (Android, iOS and Black­Ber­ry Z10).