Author Archives: Ana

Search engine for hashtags

This spiffy tool can come in quite handy on a few levels. First, it’s a great digital ethnography tool to see what people are saying about a brand across all social media destinations, what kind of content they are linking to it, and what’s the context of their mentions.

And second, it’s good ole fun, too.

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Hey look, your turkey is tweeting from the oven

In order to promote its embedded Java technology, Oracle created Turkey Tweeter, which is basically your bird status updating Twitter on how well it’s cooked. Oracle tech translates the bird’s temperature into tweets. Happy Thanksgiving.

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Pay in your fitting room, while still trying your clothes on

One more thing from the retail innovation folder: this one comes from H&M, in the form of LED screens outside its newly opened flagship on Times Square, and iPad stations in the fitting rooms in it. The store was opened last week by no one else but Lady Gaga herself, and in the event of the highly anticipated collaboration between H&M and Isabel Marant.

The lines in front of the store on the day of opening were insane, but luckily the checkouts in the fitting rooms reduced the lines in front of cash registers. That’s pretty neat, I’d love it if other stored offered this.

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Reserve & Pick-Up, by GAP

GAP has recently unveiled its “Reserve” program, allowing shoppers to reserve a piece of clothing online, and pick it up in store. Right now, the program is in its pilot stage, which means that only selected stores participate, but once it becomes a standard practice, it will be a successful way to counter the ever-growing practice of showrooming.

There is a ton of other benefits, too. The program reduces the risk of online shopping, which is still a factor in online purchases, despite numerous product exploration tools. Users can simply try on their selected item at a nearby store. The program also drives shoppers to store, where they will continue browsing, and very likely, add items to their purchase. Finally, there is a big element of exclusivity and good customer service. Reserve program, above all, makes things more seamless for the user - ensuring their brand affinity and loyalty.

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Multi-Pass may soon be coming to your town

Or, more precisely, in 2015. Multi-pass is the latest in the trend towards end user consolidation of services. From travel (Kayak) to banking (Coin), innovation revolves around aggregating multiple information streams into a sleek, clean, easy-to-use interface on the user end. In its best form, we are talking about reduction of complication, while keeping complexity of the system intact.

The idea behind Multi-pass is to fold in one single ticket your train, metro, bus, car parking and possibly air passes (think the Fifth Element situation). Everything that has to do with moving a person from point A to point B now is in a single ticket. The secret is in e-ink screen, that displays barcodes for relevant transportation operators to scan and let you go through.

Let’s just enjoy this idea for a moment before starting to think about all the challenges for privacy it brings.

The ultimate dream-comes-true-for-lazy-people-like-me app: Create recipes of the food that you already have

This app is pretty smart, and it comes from the “how to make people’s lives better in a way that makes sense and that doesn’t make them consume more stuff” department. Su Chef is an app that helps random/busy/untalented/uninterested food shoppers combine the random food they just purchased into something non-random, a.k.a. a meal.

At the core of the app is the filtering mechanism that scouts through millions of recipes by criteria of the available food, allergies that one may have, or a key ingredient. As always, systemic serendipity leads to learning, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the app gets to unlock some kitchen creativity even among the most disinterested users.

Get your Su Chef here.

Place Pins, for those who are into that

In other travel industry news, Pinterest decided that it’s time for geo-locating its pinboards. It works like this: with newly launched “place pins,” users can create boards around a specific location and add pins to them. Pins can include a map, photos, info, and whatever else a user decides it’s relevant. This is quite a nice addition to users’ online planning process, where quest for inspiration and location-related information beats all other steps in the funnel.

More interesting to me, however, are the partnership opportunities that place pins offer. As of now, Pinterest banded up with Foursquare to use its API (Foursuare allows users lists and also shows them on the map, but information is limited to photos and reviews) and Mapbox, which provided the maps.

In the works are partnerships with Disney, BBC Travel, Conde Nast Traveler and the load of other travel-related publications and hotels. Four Seasons, for example, has pulled its Foursquare reviews and photos and turned them into place pins for its “Gastronomic Travel” board. You can check it out here. Conde Nast traveler, on the other hand, pulls info directly from its magazine for its “Top 100 Hotels in the World” list.

Look Up, by British Airways

No matter how you call it, contextual or responsive or real-time, this idea is pretty fun. British Airways placed interactive billboards all around Piccadilly Circle with the intent that every time a BA plane flies over, a boy on the billboard will point to it. The billboards are enabled by “surveillance technology” which can accurately pinpoint the location of the plane.

Simple and entertaining, by Oglivy Group UK.

TOMS keeps caring

TOMS, one of this world’s most socially responsible and generous brands, keeps giving back. It recently launched TOMS’ Marketplace, a platform for budding socially conscious entrepreneurs to sell their products. The products range from accessories to jewelry and sports equipment, and marketplace visitors can browse the selection by the cause the company supports, by the region of the world it helps, by brand (all brands come with their stories), or simply by product category. Pretty amazing example of brand innovation.

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Michael Kors loves Instagram

Michael Kors loves Instagram so much that it became the first brand to advertise there. And Instagram loves it back. Barely a day and a half after debuting its sponsored pic (above), Kors’ Instagram account acquire about 34K new followers. After crunching some numbers, this means that a single sponsored post gained 16x more followers than a regular one.

This should be such a shocker, regarding the fact that sponsored posts are seen by people who do not already follow @michaelkors on Instagram so gaining followers is easier than exposing the already existing fan base to brand content, but there you have it.

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