Social Hallucinations

Ideas Beat Digital

I love this idea of low-tech augmented reality from Philips that came up from a simple consumer insight: Over 73% of Taiwanese men think that grooming is just about cleanness, preferring a clean-shaven look over any type of beard and stubbles.

How do you change the behavior than to create interest in grooming kits. No beard, no grooming.

Philips take on this is awesome; they have created "Low-tech Augmented Reality Mugs" to show any possible look the young guys can have when grooming. Simple. 

It proves that the great communication is not about "digital at heart" but about awesome ideas that address people needs and help them to make decision or have great experiences....and sometimes it may be that digital is perfect for this task, sometimes a simple mug is enough. 

 

 

The Evolution of TV Screen

The second screen experience is increasingly taking over the living rooms with more and more people expanding their passive TV viewing patters with tablets or phones. Microsoft is trying to fill the gap with Xbox SmarGlass. The whole idea is about enhancing the viewing experience, make it more interactive and interesting. Multiscreen experience represents a great opportunity for advertisers and it's going to be exciting to see how brands embrace this new behavior and deliver on it.

 

The Key to Success in Business

"Businesses operate in a world where so much is possible.

The successful ones are those which identify what is necessary."

John Dodds

The Timeline into Future

Future isn't easy to predict. Probably because we use what's known to create the future. Results can be somewhat entertaining. 

1920s,

1930s

1950s

1985

1993

2008

Enjoy!

hattip

Office nomads

The office. Walls, ceiling, windows (if you are lucky), tables, machines, people and noise. A place where you go to work. The church of work. Do we actually need the physical office as we know today?  How do office actually contributes to our performance and output of our work?

Don't get me wrong, I love my office and my colleagues. It is a great place to be, but like with most things in life, sometimes you need to get out to grasp a bit of fresh air, try something new and get inspired. People to collaborate with and machines to work on are to be found everywhere. Todays easiness of access allows us to create our office wherever we feel like, fuel our potential and can make us work in a new ways.

I am a big fan of working different places than your office but I hope Seth Godin isn't entirely right when saying "I think in ten years the TV show 'the Office' will be seen as a quaint antique.".

I believe the office and the community you build there are also very important part of your work life. Face time and the relationships you create contribute to your overall satisfaction, motivate and inspire you. So please, don't kill offices, just give people opportunities for being the office nomads and sit with laptop different and unexpected places. Make them go out. Changing the environment can fire some different neurons and bring astonishing results and discoveries. 

 

Music is an experience and TV is social

What I like most about the technology is the new communication opportunities it brings. Clever thinking and creating synergies between stuff we know and the new possibilities, makes the same old story sound a bit more  new and refreshing. The to good examples of this are Black Eyed Peas and German TV show Galileo.

Black Eyed Peas has developed an iphone app BEP360 to promote (sell) their new album and video.

BEP360 is an interactive music video that provides augment reality experience (you just need BEP album cover to activate it). There is also option that gives user tools to create photo session with the band and share it with other fans. Pretty cool way to activate music on other level than just traditional video. Hope to see more such an initiatives.

 

Another examples proves that TV can be social if you make an effort to provide viewers with the relevant tools. 

German TV show Galileo used augmented reality browser app Junaio to run an interactive quiz for their viewers. Viewers had to hold their phone cameras up to the TV screen and point them at the answer they wanted to select. Image recognition worked out which answer was being selected and a tap of the screen submitted it.Viewers received instant feedback whether their answer was right or wrong. The quiz activity was promoted before  and the whole activity seemed to be a success with an increase in TV show share among 14-49 year old viewers. 

Something that wil stick or rather one time phenomena. Time will tell. But there is no doubt that TV can be a social and engaging experience. 

You can see a video of the TV experiment (after an ad) here.

 

 

iPad magazine is not just a magazine

It is an iPad magazine. Sounds trivial but this is what most of publishers are missing while they launch pdf versions of magazines to read on ipad. iPad gives publishers the opportunities to provide people with an interesting and dynamic content, integrate brands and experiences. Still publishers stick to the old good formats and try to digitalize paper. It doesn't make easier to earn money.

I have been checking out a few magazines but none of them really impressed me until I stumbled upon Richard Branson's Project. What a great experience. It is a pleasure to see how the possibilities are exploited and deliver different forms of experience. Easiness of navigation, surprising possibilities to browse through content and of course interesting content. 

Well, but see for yourself here or download your own Project app ($2.99 for issue)

 

The Small (Commercial) Acts of Kindness

Doing good gets you attention and makes people smile. Nice idea from KLM. Also a nice example of how online and offline merge and create new brand experiences for people.

 

Utility = Laziness

In the world of information overflow and lack of time to process everything that hits us, this app may seem a great invention. TLDR is an online application that can turn long articles into short summaries. Just paste the URL of any article into TLDR.it and it will summarize the article for you.

Great utility tool. It may save you time...but it allows us to touch only the surface. Shallowness? Laziness? Can't we really find the time to read and explore in depth the issues that interest us? 

The utility tools seem so exciting as we believe they make life easier and faster...but aren't they make us lazier?

Via PSFK

The Art of Adaptation

How to catch people's attention and make them eat baby carrots? How do you make baby carrots cool? Well, the solution can be packaging them like junk food. You just need to adapt to people's needs and expectations. The question is whether the chips-like packaging will turn carrots into the new cool, people want to eat.

Packaging design by Crispin Porter + Bogusky

Via USA Today

Transforming the Space

Space is a precious commodity as we populate cities. The more people, the less square meters. Many people struggle today with the housing problems as their families grow. The problem seems to be very difficult to solve, unless you've met Gary Chang - the domestic transformer. He gives the real meaning to the expression "small is the new big" .

This is very inspiring video showing the process of how Gary Chang transformed his 344 sq. ft. apartment into 24 rooms residence. Such solutions will be unavoidable in the near future in majority of cities. Exploiting the space. Optimizing it and making it sustainable. After all we just don't need vast space to live in, what we need is the functionality of the domestic surroundings.

Improving the Shopping Experience

What do people want from brands? Utility and good experience. There is plenty of different services trying to deliver on it. Here is one fantastic example that integrates mobile device, check-in mechanics, coupons with the shopping experience - Shopkick. Shopkick is a hardware and application system to be installed in stores. It rewards people for just coming into the store, adds social sharing and customized offers overview to you while you are in the store. Judging from the video showing how the product works, Shopkick makes the whole coupon and check-in idea more social and more fun in relation to retail experience.

It opens the new opportunities for building loyalty and closer relationship between customer and retailers, where the latter one is not just products provider but improves the whole shopping experience.

Read the whole article and see the video on Techcrunch

 

Taming the City

The cities are growing. We get surrounded by the constructions of concrete, steal and glass. Urban landscape we learn to thrive in. Inhuman and cold. Unmoved and inflexible. Humans against concrete. The architecture is the form of culture that tames human lifestyle nominating the paths we should follow. It describes the boundaries of human movement. Pedestrian crossings, bicycle lanes, pavements, doors... The city can have a completely different meaning. Let's take freerunning - the way to tame the city. It is a take over of immovable urban space. Freerunning defines it in the new way, turning it into utility, challenging the way we move and live. 

Empathic Civilisation

Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society. Must see...two things may surprise you: there is no empathy in heaven and Bible was right - we are descendants of Adam and Eve. 

Via Johnnie Moore

Digital Crystal Ball

The future is the remix of the present. Great example of the evolution of present into future is this service called Recorded Future, which offers unique analysis tools to aggregate and organize past and present events, and provides a comprehensive outlook of the future. You can get insights into what's going to happen for only $149 a month. Exciting idea and cheap price for taking a look into the future.