This is part one of our coverage of the Mobile Retail Summit – covering the first section of the day, The Future. You can read part one, On Device, here, part two, on Driving Footfall, here, and part three, on In-Store, here.

Opening with a demonstration from Blippars Jess Butcher, talking through the Blippar platform and using case studies including Cadburys, Waitrose, and Nestlé. The presentation highlighted how Augmented Reality can act as a “game changer” for tracking interaction with brands – using the example of Nuts Magazines recent Interactive Issue, which was used by 15 per cent of the circulation, and blipped 250,000 times. Perhaps more important were the detailed analytics it delivered – showing where and when readers read the magazine, and which pages they interacted with.

After Justin Coward from Global Bays talk on queue-busting solutions and Jake Mazan from Vouchercloud, who provided us with the final look into the future of mobile marketing in retail – no pressure, then. “When technology is useful, older people will adopt it”, Mazan said – apparently the over-50 market love mobile coupons.

For our final panel of the day, the Alternative Views on the Mobile Future, we drew together four of the industrys deepest thinkers – Russell Buckley; Jonathan MacDonald; Helen Keegan, and Nic Newman – to ask just one question: “How much will the inside of shops change in the next five years, and beyond?” The answers varied from a digital divide within retailers – those willing to experiment and those who refuse to evolve – to use of digital display banners, and an added pre-order step before customers visit stores, and technology was discussed from digital display banners to 3D printers.

Thats it for the 2012 Mobile Retail Summit. Thank you to everyone who attended, spoke or exhibited at the event, and to those that have been keeping the #mretailsummit hashtag alive and interesting all day.