Thursday, June 17, 2010

Billboard yourself

Some nice real-world-diginess. Thanks Piero via Adverblog

Billboard Magazine video instalation from Marcos Kotlhar on Vimeo.


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Friday, June 11, 2010

Mobile charging wellies!



Thanks to a new prototype, powering up a cell phone can simply mean using heat from the feet. The catch is it takes a lot of walking.

European telecommunications company Orange is displaying a new phone-charging prototype in a pair of rubber boots. The company is unveiling a set of Wellington Boots that have a "power generating sole" that converts heat from the feet into electrical power to charge battery-powered handheld appliances.

The boots were created in collaboration with renewable energy experts GotWind. They came about through Orange's efforts to find alternative, sustainable and eco-friendly mobile phone charging technologies. The boots are debuting at the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, where patrons can check them out.

GotWind explains that the power is collected through a process called the "Seebeck" effect. Thermoelectric modules created from pairs of "p-type and n-type semiconductor materials" are located inside the power-generating sole. They form thermocouples that are connected to other thermocouples and placed between two thin ceramic wafers.

Heat from the feet are applied to the top side of the water and cold is applied to the bottom side from the cold of the ground, causing electricity to be generated.

The company states that 12 hours of stomping should produce enough power to charge a phone for an hour. Hotter feet mean more energy

Orange stated in a press release that the Orange Power Wellie follows other innovations created for use at the festival.
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Thursday, June 10, 2010

Whole Foods - Map of Local growers

Map of Local Growers


Whole Foods has recently developed this cool map of local growers and vendors. It is still a work in progress but well worth a look. Local partnerships are added all the time and some of Whole Foods' regions and stores aren’t represented yet. Users can search for locally grown producers near them or near a specific store. Check out their interactive local growers map.


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Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Online retail awards - finalists

OK, it's often the business, rather than the sexy end of digital, but it's where the ROI rubber hits the pixel road... and these guys are being recognised as getting it pretty right. Worth checking some of these out

Thanks Alf, courtesy of http://www.onlineretailer.net/

1. Best Pure-Play Online Retailer

This category is open to new and established pure-play online retailers without a physical store, who demonstrate best practice in merchandising, service, functionality and customer experience. Judging will be based not on overall size but on efficiency, ingenuity, dedication to customer experience and return on investment.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES

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2. Best Multichannel Retailer

Multichannel is open to retailers demonstrating best practice in integrating traditional retail with online retail in an innovative, effective way to grow the overall retail business. Judging will be based not on overall size but on efficiency, ingenuity, dedication to customer experience and return on investment.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES

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3. Best New Online Retailer

This award is for the best new start-up (launched post Jan 1, 2009), be it pure-play or multichannel, who demonstrates a sound, innovative and effective business strategy and a growing customer base.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES

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4. Best Use of Technology

For the online retailer who best utilises available technologies or proprietary systems that deliver improved efficiencies for the business, better customer experiences and valuable analytical data to continually improve.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES

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5. Most Innovative Online Retailer

We're looking for the most imaginative initiatives in the online retail space, whether that be in site design, usability, customer experience, service, fulfillment or any other area of the retail discipline. What we're looking for is something original, exciting and practical. Must be able to prove demonstrably how innovation has led to tangible, positive results.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES

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6. Best Online Retail Marketing Initiative

An award for the best online retail marketing initiative, via a single channel or an integrated campaign, such as email, mobile, social media, search, offline, live events or a combination of many. Must be able to show a link between the marketing initiative and increased traffic and sales.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES

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7. Best Customer Experience

Site usability, product and content, efficiency of delivery, customer service and marketing are among the factors that will be taken into consideration when judging the customer experience award, with contenders requiring high scores in all areas.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES

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8. Emerging Star

This is for the fast-thinking, entrepreneurial innovator (either individual or company) whose new ideas, approaches and strategies have had an impact on the industry in the last 12 months and will help influence the future of online retailing.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES

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9. Best Site Design

This award is for the best overall site design from an aesthetic, usability and technology perspective.

SHORTLISTED NOMINEES
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Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Around the World in 80 Days goes QR

Ha... love this so much. It's just so damn quirky, clunky, mixed up and obvious that it gives some real 'ye olde world' charm to digital. Even down to the awesome 'snuggiee-esque' infomercial. I'm ordering one right now. Thanks Mr McCrudden

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Friday, May 28, 2010

6 Smell Sensors That Are Changing the Internet of Things

Ok... been slack at sharing again, but here goes with some new verve!

Found this fascinating post on ReadWriteWeb a while back about Smell Sensors and there future role in the internet of things. The mind boggles.

Got any great ideas on what we could do marketing wise with say a smell-capable RFID? Maybe a Lynx campaign in their somewhere?

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Written by Deane Rimerman / May 19, 2010 3:00 PM / 4 Comments
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smell_sensors.jpgSensors that smell help save lives everyday. From cars that won't start because court-ordered breathalyzers smell alcohol in the operator's blood stream, to bomb-sniffing machines at the airport, to complex medical tests that analyze your breath - we are designing machines that smell to make the world a safer place.

Smell sensors are essential to the future of the Internet of Things. From RFID stickers capable of smelling food through the package and updating the food's status to the Web, to our next phone being a "smell phone", engineers are finding innovative ways to help protect our families from being exposed to toxic hazards.

  1. Breathalyzers

    2. Sensors that measure blood alcohol content by smelling your breath have been around since 1938 when a professor named Rolla Harger invented the Drunkometer. His success in marketing the device was due in part to his work with the National Safety Council to legislate alcohol limits - as well as legitimize his sensor data as evidence in a court of law. Today, the innovation that's occurring with these sensors is the dramatic decline in cost. So next time you want to know if you're legal to drive after you drink, you can just blow into a Mini-Key chain Breathalyser, a device that will set you back less than $10.

  2. Smell Sensors In Medicine

    3. In Israel, Russell Berrie of the Nanotechnology Institute at Technion developed a sensor that can verify lung cancer by smelling a patient's breath. The sensor searches 42 different lung cancer biomarkers, and is built out of nine cross-reactive chemiresistors. These resistors are built out of gold nanoparticles, each with different organic functionalities. A similar sensor from the same institute can be used to detect kidney disease sooner than traditional urine tests can. The research for that particular sensor system is titled Sniffing Chronic Renal Failure in Rat Model by an Array of Random Networks of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes.

  3. Smell Phones

    4. Michael Sailor, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at U.C. San Diego is working with startup Rhevision to develop a smelling device that will attach to your cell phone. The system is based on a camera that takes a picture of porous silicon. Each of these microscopic pores are individually shaped, or tuned, to change color when a specific chemical is encountered. Thanks to the current megapixel resolution of today's phone cameras you can take a single picture of these pores, or sensors, and load it to the Web where it can be analyzed in real time. One application would be that these smell phones could rapidly map out chemical spills and other exposure threats.

  4. RFID That Smells

    5. General Electric is currently testing RFID-configured smell sensors. These small stickers can not only detect the presence of hazardous waste, they can also detect and report food spoilage. One example is a milk carton with an RFID sticker attached to the outside. The sticker periodically smells the milk through the packaging, and as soon as the milk goes bad the RFID sends a wireless alert.

  5. Bomb Smelling Sensors

    6. Ion Mobility Spectrometry machines are currently the most common bomb-smelling sensors in U.S. airports. Austrian manufacturer Ionicon Analytik was recently featured in Scientific America because of its new Ionicon Analytik's Proton-Transfer-Reaction Mass Spectrometry (PTR-MS) machine. This machine is about the size of a refrigerator and is so sensitive that it can distinguish between molecules that are nearly identical. The device works by creating "protonated" water vapor, which is essentially water vapor with extra protons. Many organic compounds, including explosives, have an affinity to grab those extra protons and in turn become positive themselves.The positive ions produced can be extracted and analyzed to reveal their chemical composition.

  6. Non-Destructive Carbon Dating

    7. Traditional carbon dating methods required that a small piece of the object must be destroyed through burning. The carbon is then measured for age based on degeneration of the radioactive isotope Carbon 14. Yet with many artifacts the destruction of even small portions of it is sometimes prohibitive. A new non-destructive method allows the object to be placed a container that is filled with an electrically charged plasma gas similar to the plasma found in a high-definition TV. The plasma gently oxidizes the artifact, which will release trace amounts of carbon dioxide that can then be used for Carbon14-decay analysis.

These six ways are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's currently being developed. For example, perspective search service GlobalSpec lists thousands of companies designing gas and chemical sensors. How many of these sensors will one day generate data for the Web? If you have a sense of scenarios that will make this happen, please post your comments below.

Image by Patrick J. Lynch, medical illustrator
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Some great thinking on using search and content to DOMINATE

Thanks @Ben_Phillips

Converse Domaination from Ross Martin on Vimeo.

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