5 Cool Things
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PlaceMe
I’ve written about the next wave of Social, Location, Mobile (SoLoMo) apps that came out of SXSWi12 before. They are ambient and uninitiated, unlike a Foursquare or a Facebook places, which require a user action to check in. Whilst Highlight, Glancee (who Facebook have just bought to help evolve their mobile offering) and Sonar all fit strongly in this category, nothing is quite as pervasive as PlaceMe – the first app that really brings the auto check to life. Instead of declaring yourself somewhere, PlaceMe is always on, recording and publishing where you are, wherever you go. Too much? Let the founder talk you through app and how it functions. It’s not worth sticking through the whole 30mins, but the demo is worth a watch. Whilst this is intrusion on an unprecedented level, the richness of personal data it gathers could inform targeting and personalisation in a much more meaningful way. For example, it could give you advance traffic warnings knowing that you take the same route back from work every week. |
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C&A Real World ‘likes’
There seems to be an increasing amount of instances in which we are seeing Digital and links to Social used to enhance the real world shopping experience. Whilst eCommerce now accounts for 17% of all retail spending in Britain (£68 billion), there will always be desire for the experience of shopping in its most traditional sense. Tactility is something the web can’t do. This will likely to lead to a trend toward physical locations becoming ‘premium’ spaces, and more functional goods slowly becoming items for delivery or collection only. C&A in Brazil have found a nice way to bring positive online sentiment in to their stores by displaying ‘likes’ for particular items of clothing on the hangers themselves. By posting photos on their FB page they are able to provide a real time feed of customer approval in their store, adding a previously absent layer of social context to the choosing and buying experience. |
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Nike Building Twist
The days when you could post a 3D Projection Mapping video to Youtube and expect it to fly are long gone – far too many brands jumped on the bandwagon and they became quite unremarkable when you were seeing three or four do the rounds every week. So, it’s good to see Nike pushing the boundaries of what can be done with the format. Building Twist is an interactive map designed to showcase the flexibility of their new running shoes: it invited people to literally twist a building using a shoe as the controller. It’s another manifestation of the Nike.jp Free Face campaign which asked people to emulate the flex of their trainers with facial expressions. |
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Adidas miCoach
‘Soccer is getting Smarter’, Adidas miCoach is a step above the now familiar Nike+. Through a range of sensors built into clothing, it is able to analyse and monitor the performance of players to a level of detail that was previously infeasible. The data gathered is then passed back in real time to a suite of apps that simply visualise it and present it in a way that allows managers to make quick and informed decisions and strategic changes. This is yet another example of how we are moving into a new data rich world where we become the owners and managers on the ever increasing amount of streams available to us. |
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The World’s Smallest Ikea – In a Banner
The age of cramming as much functionality as possible in to a banner seems bygone. It got to a point where Rich Media just became too Rich. So, it’s good see some creative innovation using the humble banner surface again. IKEA understand that their stores are colossal and at times their customers would have to cover some serious ground just to find a lampshade with a silly name. But they wanted to display their commitment to saving space, so they created the world’s smallest IKEA store in a banner, conveniently measuring 300 pixels by 250, customers can browse by department, find products and click buy. All within an MPU. |
