Re-booting empty retail space

Empty retail space is the current look for most high streets. Pop-up shops can only fill so many vacant lets. I really like this new idea from RIBA. Multiple Installations combined into a kind of indoor sculpture park -but viewed from the pavement. True this one is not really taking on the empty spaces exclusively. But it did make me think about what would you do if you did co-ordinate all of a shopping centers empty lets into a single piece of shopper engagement

http://bit.ly/kDEVzb - Londonist.com

http://bit.ly/me9jZi - RIBA / Regent Street Project

also seen on http://philipslade.posterous.com duplicate but easyier to use (in a rush) platform



Win a job working at SaatchiX

At Saatchi & Saatchi X we’re giving grads the chance of a job.

 

All you have to do is tell us WHY you should have a job here - in 30 seconds...in a lift.

On April 8th, show up, bring your CV, take a number, join the queue and get ready to pitch to our leadership team in the lift at 80 Charlotte Street, London.

You’ve got 30 seconds to impress.

For the shortlisted candidates there’s boot camp and summer placements; then one of you will walk away with a job for at least a year (and a rather impressive story to tell your mates).

www.facebook.com/xliftpitch

Who are you trying to delight?

"Pleasing everyone with our work is impossible. It wastes the time of our best customers and annoys our staff. Forgive us for focusing on those we're trying to delight."

The math here is simple. As soon as you work hard to please everyone, you have no choice but to sand off the edges, pleasing some people less in order to please others a bit more. And it drives you crazy at the same time. - Seth Godin's blog

It is very easy to say in hindsight but why do we get sucked into briefs that are trying to be catch all, shouty messaging. The truth being any measurement that counts will be looking at a minority of shoppers who convert into advocates.



Bored of blogging yet?

It would appear the world is slowly getting bored of blogging. There have been a number of end of year reviews looking at this very issue.

The instant sharing of Twitter and the better designed Facebook wall seem to have taken the mainstream. Bloggers now are more likely to be specialist writers.

Certainly I feel blogged out, I have not been updating this page much these past months, a very busy new job hasn't helped. But wonder how the other part time bloggers will fair in 2011

"...Hints of that appear in the new Pew Internet report that finds that blogging by teenagers has fallen by half since 2006, and even young adults seem to be dropping the habit.

Few of the activities covered in this report have decreased in popularity for any age group, with the notable exception of blogging. Only half as many online teens work on their own blog as did in 2006, and Millennial generation adults ages 18 to 33 have also seen a modest decline — a development that may be related to the quickly growing popularity of social network sites.

At the same time, however, blogging’s popularity increased among most older generations, and as a result the rate of blogging for all online adults rose slightly overall from 11 percent in late 2008 to 14 percent in 2010.

Yet, while the act formally known as blogging seems to have peaked, internet users are doing blog-like things in other online spaces as they post updates about their lives, musings about the world, jokes, and links on social networking sites and micro-blogging sites such as Twitter..." By Ryan Singel Wired Nov 2010

Potentially an amazing opportunity for voice and motion control POS in store

Really innovative POS that you control with proximity body movements plus has face and voice recognition? Easy! hack the new Xbox Kinect games consol so it works on a laptop rather than a Xbox

I have become really interested by the hackers who in a matter of days have broken most of the code behind the new Kinect Xbox game system. Why have I come over all geek?

Well, it could mean in a matter of months time having a POS unit instore that recognizes your skin, hair or body type as you approach and changes accordingly, it would know if you were in a group or alone. You could interact with it simply by waving your hands or speaking.

You could even have shoppers do some action at fixture that is then downloaded straight to their Facebook account or mobile handset.

You could already build a POS unit to do all these things, but the cost of the components and time needed to test it all would be exorbitant. The Kinect unit is currently £129 in the UK, but likely to drop dramatically next year. Most hackers have got the units to work in a simple manner, in a few months time I'd expect pretty much all of the Kinect to be open. The possibilties of two kinects facing each other could deliver full 3D capture (see Oliver Kreylos video below)

Microsoft does not approve or support any of these hacks, but even Google’s offering prizes to coders who can break into the Kinect and produce secondary uses. YouTube has this weekend (14/11/10) seen loads of videos appear of Kinect hacks in action.

It might all seem a bit geeky (well, OK, it is) but subverting tech is a very fun way to gain knowledge and leap frog into rapid prototyping

Background links

http://bit.ly/c0Eaev = Adafruit.com, People behind first Kinect hack 4 days ago

http://bit.ly/aXOdIG = Matt Cutts blog, The guy behind Google’s hack-a-Kinect into a secondary use competition

http://bit.ly/9kDT8x = Oliver Kreylos Video of 3D image capture using a hacked Kinect

http://bit.ly/a7GAXh = Video of a Multi touch interface using a hacked Kinect

http://tisch.sourceforge.net = Open source code to download, so you can hack your very own Xbox Kinect – from the guy who built the motion control example shown.



The future of books prt 34.

It may be very difficult to make any money from books (outside of Hogwarts) but that's not stopping some stonking thinking about how interactions can change the reader experience. Does often, as here demand the use of an iPad**, strong wi-fi, time and a fully charged battery. But such details are not holding back innovations in narrative depiction. ** other tablet devices are available, but you knew that.

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

In praise of geotagging

 Eric Fischer has produced a series of simply stunning maps that chart the differences between tourist and locals in locations chosen to photograph. He has mapped a 50 of the worlds cities using geotags from Flickr and Picasa. Why? not sure, but they are a joy to behold and that's good enough for me, and yes you can zoom into see your own house! The full set is HERE seen via Trendland.net

  

Changing behaviours with fun.

Late last year VW ran The Fun Theory Award, one of the winners, a take on speed cameras, is a joy to behold 

"..Instead of using a speed camera to detect and fine speeders, a speed camera will register drivers who keep the legal speed limit and give them the chance to win a cash prize of SEK 20,000..."

(Thanks to Daniele Fiandaca on the Creativesocialblog for reminding me of it.)

Both the competition and the entries themselves, highlight the joy of random play. Humans get bored with process. We might not admit it, but everyone enjoys disruptive behaviours. The best uses of mobile platforms to innovate time saving do just that. You remember surprise not simply job done well.

Actually the other use of this appears to be to counter planned terrorist attacks. Begun in LAX and now rolling out is a software process called ARMOR that randomises the position of patrols and checkpoints within airports. By having armed secuirty popping up in random, places at random times.

"...Developed by computer scientists at the University of Southern California and believed to be the first program of its kind to be used at an airport, ARMOR aims to thwart terror plots during the early, surveillance phase. Typical plots start when would-be attackers begin watching their target "18 months to four years prior to an attack" to look for security weaknesses, says James Butts, deputy executive director of law enforcement at Los Angeles World Airports, which runs LAX and other city-owned airports. "Part of it is to look for patterns in the deployment of assets. We're trying to block the surveillance cycle...."

The more a process or service can surprise, randomly shock the more you'd remember/recommend it, However I do think my mate Jon's idea of minefield hop-scotch maybe going too far.

What to do about Nokia?

"..Nokia, the McDonalds of mobile phones.." Brian Barrett

Nokia World, London, has just finished, A good time to ponder; 'what the feck are Nokia doing??'

You could easily, If you were the new CEO Stephen Elop, just keep going. Nokia is the biggest global manufacturer of mobile phones. Outside of America it pretty much dominates each market it is in. Interbrand have just put them at number 8 in its list of 100 top global brands. 

But, as the McDonalds quote above points out. Nokia is a dull brand, standing for hum drum phones. Nokia is the go-to brand for a buttoned down version of someone else's smart idea.

Funnily enough in most markets, especially Europe, Nokia's marketing communication are innovative and eye catching. Pretty much everything the phones are not. HERE

Should Nokia change? McDonalds make a ton of money, with little concern over 'innovation' other than repurposing existing cultural trends. HERE

But Nokia are smart. Nokia is a technology company. The DNA of such bodies is innovation. Nokia must change. (like they used to) HERE

School of the obvious really but they need to be extraordinary rather than just 'good'. They could pick either Android or Windows platform and just nail the perfect bespoke device for that platform. Ultimate corperate sharing would be building the best, most open, open device for developers. Think about Foursquare, its fun and engaging, but pretty enclosed. Facebook Places on the other hand could be epic, we have not seen anything like the potential of this as developers haven't fully got to grips with it yet.

Don't listen to focus groups. Next step usage comes from being brave. I love the location features in OVi but it's like a collection of neat apps rather than a brand statement.

Nokia have the technology to do something truly mind-bending. Not in how you lay out the buttons but in the interface. How users emotions change when using a device is only just being touched on. The current LSE project Mappiness is the tiny tip of a huge iceberg. There isn't a device or platform hack yet, that can alter itself by the mood of the user. But thats what we do when we punch in requests. We change. (unlike Nokia)

Consumer happiness is driven by discovery, delight by surprise.

Location > Emotion > Function. 

I hate Powerpoint

No, let me correct that, I loath Powerpoint. Clunky, cumbersome, god awful, typographic inept child of a programme. There I now feel so much better. Actually type 'I hate powerpoint' into Google and see what happens!

Being a Mac fan boy does mean I can wallow in smugness and use Keynote MOST of the time. But when sharing a document amongst many or editing a third party set of slides I am forced into the nightmare that is Powerpoint.

Yup there are a bunch of online solutions, but none that have the slick interface tools of Keynote (or its creative abilities) 

 http://280slides.com is a neat hybrid of PPT and Keynote from a bunch of ex-Apple bods, works on & off-line so you can share a doc amongst chums during its creation and then export to PPT or pdf or Slideshare. Lacks the full creative capability of Keynote but as a user experiance it's still way better than Powerpoint.

On a completely different level is http://prezi.com which is frankly brilliant. There is a free version which automatically shares your slides with the web or a $59 version to keep your stuff secret. Which in itself is a very neat way of selling premium licenses. You do get a 30 day free trial of the enhanced version so its easy to get a feel for it.
Prezi is the kind of thing that would make planning documents really come alive, very visual and appears painfully easy to make a complex pitch understandable. Plus it has a 'Transformation Zebra' function, now how cool is that? 
One word of caution, they appear to have server issues (too many people are suddenly trying it out??) the site kept stopping today, check the blog for updates http://blog.prezi.com
Those awaiting slides from me (yes Sam, soon, soon.) just might be in for a treat if I can get my head around that Zebra thing.

 

 

Power of storytelling on Prezi

What new can you say about lager?

Stella Artois or wife beater to its fans. One of many standard lagers that have had to rely on great planning and outstanding creative to create its brand. Pretty much most lagers to most consumers are the same. The point of difference is simply how the consumer is currently feeling about the most recent ads or sponsorship. Stella has in the UK had the full gamut of award winning memorable and dull forgettable campaigns. Currently I feel much less connected to the brand than normal. The TV work grates, while the press and outdoor has design value charm, but I'm not grabbed by it. BUT when I was shown this US viral spot I was really bowled over by it. It has values, an idea and lovely execution. (more HERE) It says to me a modern product with traditions, that takes care over details and respects the past. All the things you would want a lager drinker to assume the liquid is made with. (dispite knowing deep down its made by robots in a dank industrial estate) Lager campaigns are hard BUT they mark out those agencies that try hard and those that just 'do enough' to get by.

Created by Mother. Directed by Malcolm Murray. More at both; http://theritualproject.com & http://uptherefilm.com

Cities at night

555 KUBIK | facade projection from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

555 KUBIK
"How it would be, if a house was dreaming"
The conception of this project consistently derives from its underlying architecture - the theoretic conception and visual pattern of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. The Basic idea of narration was to dissolve and break through the strict architecture of O. M. Ungers "Galerie der Gegenwart". Resultant permeabilty of the solid facade uncovers different interpretations of conception, geometry and aesthetics expressed through graphics and movement. A situation of reflexivity evolves - describing the constitution and spacious perception of this location by means of the building itself.
Production: http://www.urbanscreen.com
Art Direction: Daniel Rossa - http://www.rossarossa.de
Technical Director: Thorsten Bauer
3D Operator: David Starmann http://www.shineundsein.de
Sound Design : Jonas Wiese
 Realized with http://www.mxwendler.net mediaserver

I cannot believe I have not seen this before. Stunning animation and film merged into architecture. By Urban Screen. (facebook.com/urbanscreen) If this was linked to a 'like' feature from a mobile location app and projected onto a fashion store. You could see in real time what the customers inside are looking at and enjoying. There are so many things you could do with this. Does fly in the face of the issue of light pollution however as Wired reported in 2009 "....Astronomers are fed up. One fifth of the world’s population cannot see the Milky Way because street lamps and building lights are too bright. So scientists are mounting a new campaign, called Dark Skies Awareness....."

Frankly I love cities. More over I love cities at night. Man conquering darkness via artificial light is a bit of a primeval victory, but satisfying all the same. Maybe a 'light-up Friday' is the answer. Have a specific night for illumination japes once a week. Would give high-street retailers a 'third' time.

Recommendations

I really like what Hunch.com are doing with like/dislike algorithms. Did you know people who read Wired prefer red heads?? Hunch even have a free SWAG offer on for badges and stickers. neat bit of real world free love. There has to be a Foursquare or AR type location mash-up in there somehow.

What I am not liking is the Facebook recommendations of; Jeremy Clarkson and the BNP. What do they think  I have been browsing?????

A new bank brand?

If you were to start a new bank tomorrow what would its brand stand for? The first thought is anything but the new Metro bank that open in London last month. Well yes, that is rather brash especially its cheap looking Janet & John marketing (more on this in a later post)

Banking is one of the few sectors where we don’t get start-ups and new thinking very often. In Britain, the last new bank to open was over 100 years ago.

But a new bank? what would it stand for?

It should be taken as read that it would have a call centered that worked 24/7 and the online experience was pretty neat, but what else?

  • Pop-up Branches?
  • Augmented Reality affordability apps?
  • Multifunctional credit/cash/travel/ticketing cards?
  • Customisable visual branding?
  • Crowd-sourced products?
  • Run by rebels from the banking industry?
  • Owned by a mobile network operator?

The old ideas of trust and solidity died with the credit crunch. Brand bank now stands for incompetence, greed, and cheap jokes about bonus’s. How do you go back to the consumer and say your bank is not like the others and has something new to offer? 

There will always be a place for status, It would be hard to take on brands like Coutts without some kind of third party recommendation i.e.  Bank of Bill Gates

A fairshares policy might take you to the Peoples bank or a Mutual society approach but on its own that feels like it could end up like the 125% Northern Rock mortgages or the tatty Post Office branch experience.

The Service Bank, as NatWest see themselves. A fine marketing strategy if your branch & telesales personal can actually pull it off in person. But again the Halifax would claim to hold a similar position but the execution of this as brand communications I find hateful.

I like the idea of The Knowledge bank. Because unless you are a rate chaser, you do wish your bank brand to have a bigger pool of information than yourself on all matters financial. However for that knowledge to have value you would want it delivered in a 24/7 non-patronising easily accessible manner. 

mmm I’ve just invented First Direct.

The innovation bank, i.e. First Direct is a such a well documented case of getting a bank brand right. targeting, products, marketing and service. How would you launch something better?

You could go niche. Credit-suisse have a gay banking arm and there are female specific brands in both Austria and Canada. Extrabanca recently launched as a bank aimed directly at immigrants in Italy.

I do think there is a place for a new banking brand built on a broad plank of innovation. 

To open a new bank you actually need existing bankers, bit of a shame, but its the law. If we take as read trust is delivered by transparency of owners, backers and regulatory compliance. The very fact a group of banking professionals are starting again by building from scratch could be the sell.

I particularly like the attitude of a banking ‘breakaway’ in the style of a reinvention built on the distrust of the past.

But could you build a banks service just from existing technologies mashed together? well yes I think so.

Targeting would be all who seek banking services but are too busy to spend any real time managing the process. But as 90% of these are on Facebook. A simple incentivised survey targeted just a UK users between 25 and 55 would crowd-source what its services should be. The debate on what a bank should and could offer would also be stage one on the marketing campaign.

Investment strategy could be as simple as a copy of the constantly best performing investment banker in the city. Alphaclone.com is one such product that does just that. Instantly copying the strategies of the best performing stock combinations.

You would want the best minds at the bank looking at your savings and investments, not just the first guy that comes free. Spaarbod.nl currently does this in Holland. Where banks bid for consumers savings accounts.

I would want any credit cards or branded items to fit with my own style so customisable would be a cert like the Helsinki bank that offers personalised cards & banking products Flexicard.com.tr

You would want New Bank to combine as many services as possible either into an app on your phone or at the very least into a one card does all (inc. travel card functionality i.e. Barclays One Card)

My contact in the physical world need to be convenient to where I am at that moment. Mobile or pop-up banks could be the answer. The supermarkets will soon be offering 15min slots for home delivery, so why not on demand, in person banking? A pop-up shop style bank. located via users of Foursquare. A group of people all from one location i.e. an office block linked via Plancast could have there banking services delivered as they left for lunch.

Location is now featuring in existing banks marketing strategies like Barclays but new bank would have it as its foundation.

I would want heavyweight mobile support from any new bank. The Natwest app is a start. But augmented reality could deliver so much more. If I took a picture of a laptop I wanted to buy. I could be instantly shown the ways I could afford it and what my old ones worth. Something like Blippy or Swipely could also show who else has brought this and when.

Actually mentioning Blippy is a good point to talk about security. They had a breach early this year but showed a very deft and open hand in dealing with it HERE. The use of so much location information would demand class leading security as the New York Times tech editor found to his cost.

The online interface would save so much of my time if it consolidated all my spending & saving in one place. Mint in the states have a good dashboard effect for this, but I like the tonality of the Egg Money Manager.

So New Bank brand would be innovative, available and adaptable. 

But to gain customers and therefore enough profit to pay for the innovation at its heart it would need class leading marketing, that was as equally innovative, always on and adaptable as the products it sold.

Neat crowdsourcing research site

Frog design have a very neat idea in FrogMob. A crowdsourcing and results delivering site. Spanning just 7 days from call for research to synthesis. focused on visual story telling of an issue or service. Three projects have gone up so far, the latest on power. HERE I have seen similar projects flounder before on lack of uptake, but these guys have contributions from all over the globe, although so far I am the only one from London to take part in the power project. I would like to see more of these open source research projects. The more we know the better our judgement. 

We know where you live.

Location based apps have been much covered by the media of late. So it was with great interest that a recent Forrester research paper appears to have been used by sections of the media to play down the importance of location based services (LBS)

 I am one of those who takes the opposing view.

  • Location based apps, few people currently using them but;
  • Will be a key media channel for personalised marketing because;
  • 64% of UK pop has a social media profile of which a quarter access via there mobile
  • Hugely important for the development of augmented reality
  • Key for brands to experiment and understand now

I think location based apps are REALLY important. I think brands that get into and understand LBS now will have a clear march on those that don’t. The best analogy I found was looking at the stats on Facebook take up. The early days of Facebook was dominated by a manly male, degree educated, slightly geeky audience. Currently the users of LBS services like Foursquare fall directly into this category.

Most services are predominantly American like; Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, Brightkite, Loopt Foursquare as I said has a fair amount of UK users.

Stickybits I have written about before. Brilliant idea, waiting for a brand to have fun with it.

The technology of LBS services is not perfect (yet) only a few apps are available (yet) and only a few people in London, let alone the UK use it (yet) But thundering over the horizon is the prospect of a Facebook embedded location aware service that would reward users with points/status/prizes. Once launched this would see an avalanche of brands attempting, without really understanding, location based marketing.

The current small, London based audience, for LBS offers brands an amazing test bed of consumers eager to try out such functionality. What better way to hone the techniques of LBS and evaluate its effectiveness? Rather than going for broke in a very public way on mass-market platform like Facebook.

There are the beginnings of some pretty smart analysis tools like Perspectives from Awareness because the data is so rich I would expect many more, graphically gorgeous tools to emerge.

LBS offers international brands opportunities for loyalty schemes to directly migrate to peoples mobiles, but there is so much more to LBS than a Nectar card on steroids

LBS can deliver fun and information for consumers plus genuine relevant engagement for brands. What I am waiting for is my mobile to spring into life and do the following, simply by the geo-position of where I am standing

While in bar A being offered a drink by bar B due to crowds where I am. Plus because I have a loyalty bonus at bar C the offer relates to a drink I like. Then a taxi company offering a deal at closing time to take me to a particular club, which I had chosen to go to by the number and type of people already there. (also I’d checked the musical tastes of those people) When at the club being offered a discounted entry because I had been to a rival previously.

Then again, simply in a new restaurant being able to see what everyone else has ordered and what other restaurants they’ve been to before.

Location, location, location.

Now we have finally just about got over the Oh Wow of augmented reality (see this from Sept 2009)

Will real location finder / seeker apps make AR really useful? I do think so, I think people will stop talking about AR and start talking about the effect on there lives. Even the Guardian has been running stories about Foursquare. (HERE) The latter being a bit of a geek out for London users being so American focused. Facebook will, we are told, be launching location based functionality shortly. This will stops the geeks dead in there tracks and open up the 'I am here' function to the Farmville generation.

What does this mean for brands? I think it could mean a bit of a land grab in the physical world. Who owns the digital shadow of a public space like a park? If enough brand advocates 'check-in' within a public space, does it appear brand owned? Just as Foursquare exists for now as a bit of fun for those in the know, so a mass marketed version would lose all the honest 'trying it out' attitude and expose the many loop holes.  It is easy to see how the current location based Facebook app test for McDonald's in the States will gain popularity. Offering extra value to high frequency locations in exchange for personal information (that is opening your Facebook page on your mobile within 400 meters of a store)

I mentioned a brand physical 'owning' real geographical locations, simply by placing brand advocates within a given space linked via smart phone tech. The real creative is bit is the why would I? well just as the free coffee from McDonald's is driving digital world activity so a personality led digital brand could drive consumers to find comfort in finding a sense of ownership in a public place where they know fellow brand advocates share values. Not forgetting the human inface to all this is best delivered via AR, which by now no one will have noticed becasue they are getting frothy over location, location.