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UEFA has partnered with Orange to launch the official Euro 2012 football tournament mobile app. As well as regular news, video interviews, highlights and statistics, the app also features a ‘mobile fan kit’, including Photo Fun which lets users digitally apply fan face paint to a photo and share it with friends, as well as geolocation functionality and augmented reality maps to find their friends and the best places to watch games.

The move to put Wi-Fi on London Tube platforms and stations will massively enhance the power and potential of technologies like image recognition and augmented reality, says  Jess Butcher, CMO of AR outfit Blippar. ”These things didn’t work underground before, now they can in one of the most competitive advertising markets in the world.”

Starbucks’ love runneth over with coffee magic for Valentine’s Day. Thanks to a new mobile App Store app, users can scan special limited edition cups to fire up loving augmented reality features.

Virgin Media and content agency Redwood are rolling out a new customer magazine which will make heavy use of augmented reality in its editorial pages thanks to a Blippar app. The brand wants the mag to reflect encourage readers to explore its range of entertainment, broadband and mobile services.

Absolut has launched an augmented reality app to enable consumers to explore the unnecessary lengths it goes to, to make its vodka good. “Browse through the wheat fields of Southern Sweden and the one source where every drop of Absolut comes from,” says the brand.

Following in the footsteps of Premier League Manchester City, Championship football club Southampton is also making a play with augmented reality. Fans can download a mobile app developed by Blippar, point their smartphones at advertising banners in the city and access content on the club’s website.

Premier League football club Manchester City is developing its augmented reality season ticket programme to enable fans to use their tickets to communicate with each other and swap content. Man City introduced AR to its season tickets in July this year.

Hearst Magazines UK is partnering with Zappar to bring augmented reality to the December covers of Cosmopolitan, Company and Harper’s Bazaar.

For the latter, readers can watch a clip of the covershoot which took place at the Savoy Hotel earlier this year as part of a short film for Duran Duran directed by Jonas Akerlund, together with Swarovski.