The vending machine industry seems to be taking a cue from Web commerce— finding opportunity in mitigating fuel costs, offering an array of new, weird products, and taking credit cards.
A piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning profiles a group of entrepreneurs who are building a new vending industry by outfitting machines with high-tech features, and filling them with prescription drugs, electronics, art and even live bait.
In Morgantown, Pennsylvania, a city that has several of these “live bait” machines, customers were skeptical at first, but now appreciate that the machine saves them a 20-mile trip to the nearest bait shop. The live night crawlers (sandwiched between the minnows and the mealworms) cost $3.50 a dozen or $6 for 24.
In other places, InstyMeds Corp. machines are popping up to dispense prescription medicine with similar ease. The meds are electronically linked to a doctor’s computer system and use a unique patient code to validate each patient’s identity and prescription. InstyMeds has 200 machines in 24 states and has dispensed 1.5 million prescriptions since the machines began operating in 2007. Walgreens created a similar innovation a few years ago: in-store kiosks that let customers quickly refill prescriptions (See our essay about it in the Game Changers report).
Whether they realize it or not, these services are taking a tip from the Web’s playbook: Usefulness is best achieved by thinking about everything as user experience.
Food and fuel costs have increased, traditional snacks are under assault for being unhealthy, and with offices downsized people take fewer breaks and eat at their desks. They also carry less cash on them. #Useful: The troupe of vending machine entrepreneurs are levering these factors to guide new user experiences.
Our London MD Ije Nwokorie is speaking at The Economist’s #TechFrontiers conference tomorrow! Sessions will be broadcast live from 9.00am GMT and will be available to view at your leisure thereafter. Register here to watch the free live stream.
Other speakers include:
Chairman: Tom Standage, Digital Editor, The Economist
Vint Cerf, Vice-president and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google
Bran Ferren, Co-founder, Co-chairman and Chief Creative Officer, Applied Minds
Charles Leadbeater, a leading authority on innovation and creativity
Aleks Krotoski, Technology Academic and Freelance Journalist
Eric Rosenbaum, Doctoral student, Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT Media Lab
David Morris, Senior Vice-president, Head of Mobile Payment Development, Visa
Sir John Hegarty, Founder, Bogle Bartle Hegarty
JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist, salesforce.com
Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice, London Business School
Click here to visit the Technology Frontiers homepage.
You know the little kick of dopamine you get whenever your phone buzzes with a new text message? Imagine what it would be like if you were the thing buzzing. In the future, a magnetic marking on your arm, stomach, finger or fingernail might be able to alert you to a new text message, call, calendar alert or low battery warning.
According to Digital Spy, Nokia is filing a patent for a new “vibrating magnetic tattoo” that will do just that—an interesting project among a growing number of investigations into “haptic” (or touch) feedback in mobile devices.
Their patent application details stamping or spraying “ferromagnetic” material onto your skin and then linking it to your phone. Based on your phone’s commands, the material would vibrate with “one short pulse, multiple short pulses, few long pulses… strong pulses, weak pulses and so on,” according to the filing.
Cambridge-based Zoran Radivojevic and Piers Andrew are the inventors, along with Finland-based Jarkko Saunamaki and Tapani Jokinen.
There’s obvious value in creating #useful experiences that enrich customers’ lives, and being the first in your sector to do it. But is this truly useful? Similarly to the “Face Unlock” system in Google’s latest Android operating system, your magnet tattoo could be used as an identity check, like a magnetic fingerprint. In a very noisy place, where you risk not hearing your phone, this technology would certainly make you aware of it. In quiet places, it could also be less disturbing than the sound of your phone vibrating.
Of course, once you tell your friends about your new magnetic tattoo, ignoring their calls will become all the more incriminating.
What do you think? A #useful innovation or an uncomfortable intrusion?
I talked last week at the annual conference of the Independent Publishers Guild. It was a beautiful spring day in the English Cotswolds, but this was an industry getting together in the eye of a storm. As one speaker said, ‘we’re not even sure whether we’re in intensive care or not.’
Famously, this is an old-fashioned, tweedy industry, yet the conference room last week was full of quiet radicals too. Most notably Faber and Faber, who are so digital (and ironic) these days that they’ve set up an ‘analogue group’ to make physical books extra-beautiful for those who don’t want the digital alternative.
The main issue for these, and all other publishers, is that digital is making traditional publishers irrelevant. Increasingly, writers don’t need them. In 2009, 76% of all books released were self-published. And readers don’t need them. In the old days, the publisher’s job was to get its books into bookshops. Nowadays, many of us by-pass the bookshops and buy online.
The only hope for publishers is to find a new way to be useful to both writers and readers. For writers, facing a world where in theory there are 5.7 billion readers, publishers need to be the online market-finder. Writers want to know: who shares my interests? and how could my stuff be better and reach more people? And for readers, facing a choice of 129 million books in the world (all of them, we’re promised, on Google Books by the end of the decade), publishers need to be the content-finder. Readers want to know: what’s out there that fits my particular interests? And what new interests can you point me at? For both writers and readers, publishers can be an invaluable guide.
Traditionally, publishers put all their energies into retailers (not readers). Now they know they must get interested in readers, and the talk at IPG was about building communities of readers. Which is right, to a point – and certainly special interest publishers (crafts, say, or sci-fi) can find communities of enthusiasts. But general publishers need to find something looser than a community, and the thing those people share is more likely to be an attitude than a specific hobby or interest.
So, if we were to create publishing 2.0 (or more appropriately, publishing: second edition), what would it look like?
Stand for a topic, attitude, or both.
First, the essence of a new-style publisher is that it stands for a topic, an attitude or both. And that it stands for the very best in that topic or attitude. Ideally a publisher should have an underlying sense of purpose, of the change it wants to make in the world. And this isn’t a new idea: back in 1935, Penguin was set up (explicitly as a brand) to make good reading affordable to the many.
Create useful content with a POV.
Second, a new-style publisher finds and creates useful content in many media, not just books, around that point of view. People want short films, longer films, audio, articles, interactive blogs… and, yes, books. All these items are very visibly branded, with the author brand (if there is one) but also the publisher brand. The image of a book cover on the Amazon iPhone app is just 1cm across – in that tiny image, the publisher brand should be easily visible. Again, the uniform covers from the early days of Penguin are also the future.
Build and nurture an ecosystem of partners.
Third, the new publisher links with other brands that share its point of view. It uses bigger brands to amplify its voice and multiply its reach. A good example is the small-ish publisher Anova linking up with a much bigger brand, National Trust.
Be a host.
And fourth, the new publisher sees itself not as broadcaster but as host. It hosts online forums, but also face-to-face events where readers get to meet the writers they like. And it may arrange for those writers to teach some of those readers how to write. Faber is in the lead here, with its Faber Social events and its Faber Academy schools.
In the world of content (horrible word), there’s still a place for taste, editing, curating, authority. Indeed, a need and a demand for them. The critical question for publishers is how to make money from that demand. My own publisher, Andrew Franklin of Profile, writing in the current issue of the Author. worries about the downward pressure on price, when so much content is now free. The best publishers will find new ways to be useful, and new ways (some already pioneered by Faber) to charge for that.
Last year, we worked with Oxfam on the identity for their new campaign, GROW. The campaign is about positive ideas for feeding all 7 billion of us, without using up all the earth’s resources. Here’s something that’s been happening in Tanzania…
Once a goalpost for aspirational middle class bookcases everywhere, the Encylcopedia Britannica will soon cease to exist in print.
Being useful to customers is one of the most important requirements for any successful venture today. And while Britannica sales have slipped in the last 10 years, Wikipedia, the non-profit experiment in crowd-sourcing authority, has proved itself increasingly useful (even among academics and scholars). The shift reflects what people actually need in an increasingly collaborative world, where reality has to be continuously defined and updated from multiple points of view.
In an interview with the New York Times Media Decoder blog, Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., said “It’s a rite of passage in this new era…Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.”
About half a million households still pay a $70 annual fee for an online subscription to Britannica. 15% of the company’s revenue comes from those subscriptions and about 85% comes from selling curriculum products to schools. Selling print copies now accounts for less than 1%.
Sales of the print sets peaked in 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold in America. But by 2010, that figure had dropped to only 8,000 sets sold! It makes a lot of sense for Britannica to now shift its focus to educational curriculum for schools (to best fit their resources to the wants of the world).
While Britannica changes its course, there’s still a public affection tied to the 244 year-old brand that 11 years of Wikipedia hasn’t fully squashed. Perhaps 2012 will be another record sales year, as nostalgics jump to purchase Britannica’s last-ever print copies.
It’s digital advertising’s 18th birthday and Google Creative Lab is celebrating with Project Re: Brief, an experiment Google put together to “re-imagine what advertising can be and push the boundaries of how creative ideas and our technology can work hand in hand.”
The project revisits four classic American commercials and interviews the old school creatives who made them, asking them to re-imagine their work for today’s multi-platform audiences.
In the trailer above, Amil Gargano (Volvo- “Drive it like you hate it”), Paula Green (Avis “We try harder”), Howie Cohen and Bob Pasqualina (Alka-Seltzer “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”), and Harvey Gabor (Coca-Cola “Hilltop”) admit that the enormous technological shifts in the way people communicate today have brought them out of their comfort zones.
The result is a collection of modern day ad makeovers in which creatives get to rethink their best work and Google gets to show off its own technology. Coke’s classic “Hilltop” featuring the song “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing,” becomes a mobile display adthrough which viewers can send and receive messages in multiple languages and (literally buy and send a Coke) to people all over the world.
Volvo’s 1962 “Drive it Like You Hate It”, which offered that driving the car had therapeutic advantages “cheaper than psychiatry,” is “translated” through the story of Volvo owner Irv Gordon, a man who’s put almost 3 million miles on his 1966 Volvo P1800S. With Google+ and Google Maps, the new experience invites viewers to become a part of Irv’s travels in real-time as he counts down to the 3-million-mile mark.
Other reimagined commercials are forthcoming. The project will culminate in a documentary this spring, directed by Doug Pray, and the same team who joined him to make the Emmy-Award-winning film and PBS hit “Art & Copy.”
As more New Yorkers take to their bikes this spring, the clothing logistics of commuting can be a challenge—from hot days to sudden downpours, the elements of NYC streets can be unpredictable. The newly launched Levi’s Commuter Series attempts to bridge the gap between fashion, lifestyle, function and fitness.
The collection combines high-performance details from waterproofing and sanitization technology (to keep riders dry, clean and odor-free), to ultra-functional 3M reflection tape (for safety). Levi’s connects their strong brand history as the original, American working denim and translates it to innovation for the unique needs of urban bikers with construction-inspired waistbands to hold U-Locks.
JeWon Yu, a designer of the collection discusses the vision on their blog: “Simply put, the commuter on the bike—be it young, old, from all walks of life….I feel like this lifestyle transcends any kind of trend and is something that anyone can participate in regardless of where you live, work, or play… It just feels so right for the brand. City landscapes are changing all over the world in response to the numbers taking to the streets on their bikes as their preferred method of transportation. It’s not just about San Francisco anymore, this is totally relevant worldwide and Levi’s, being a global brand, is keen to it and supports it completely.”
The brand is also creating a series of Mobile Bike Shops, a partnership with Urban Outfitters, traveling across the country from Portland to New York, offering both bike and fashion services throughout the summer.
As innovation and engagement become driving forces in brands across all industries— creating custom experiences for more specific audiences—based on lifestyle instead of age/demographic—is a better way to make a bigger impact.
Knight-Mozilla OpenNews is a partnership aimed at driving open source innovation in news. When it started in the spring of 2011 it had an initial set of news partners that included the BBC, the Guardian, Zeit Online, the Boston Globe and Al Jazeera English. This morning I read that The New York Times, ProPublica, Speiegel Online, and Argentina’s La Nacion will also be joining.
It’s encouraging news for publishing, an industry this blog has repeatedly said needs its major players to embrace experimentation and co-creation if it’s going to develop new ideas for news presentation, delivery, and revenue-generation.
The formal announcement will be made at SXSW tomorrow, alongside a series of exhibits showcasing how open source projects are leading innovation in news, in areas like real-time visualizations, augmented video, data-journalism and HTML5 web tools.
One of OpenNews’s ambitions is to build bridges between journalists and hackers. It awards 8 fellowships annually and “embeds” each fellow at partner organizations, where they spend a year writing code in collaboration with reporters and newsroom developers. It’s fun, for example, to think about OpenNews fellow Cole Gillespie, a JavaScript developer born in the North Carolina Appalachians, becoming intimately familiar with the daily ebb and flow of Germany’s Zeit.
For participating newspapers, the project is an opportunity to try a different approach and expand their ecosystems (#boundaryless). For designers, developers and content creators, it’s about creating and supporting a community where the web is studied as it gets made. Since its creation, other groups like Hacks/Hackers have emerged that share a similar goal.
According to OpenNews’s site, they’ll soon be sponsoring “hackdays” where people can write code that helps to solve real-world journalistic problems. They’re also working on a site called “Source,” where free case studies, walkthroughs, tutorials, and code snippets will be available. We’ll keep an eye out for this and write about it when it exists.
Few deserve a shout out more today than our friend and partner Hayat Sindi, founder of the Institute for Imagination and Ingenuity (i2 institute), who was just named to Newsweek/Daily Beast’s list of 150 Women Who Shake The World.
Raised in Saudi Arabia, Sindi convinced her family to let her study abroad in London in 1991. She excelled in school and became one of world’s leading biotechnologists. She co-founded Diagnostics For All, a new medical diagnostic technique which uses small, affordable paper strips and a drop of blood or saliva to diagnose liver disease, and down the line could potentially help in diagnosing AIDS.
Wolff Olins and PopTech collaborated with Sindi last Fall to develop the brand and identity around her newest project, the Institute for Imagination and Ingenuity. The institute is focused on encouraging entrepreneurship in the Arab community amidst an unemployment rate of over 40%. In Sindi’s words, her mission is to “create an ecosystem of entrepreneurship and social innovation for scientists, technologists and engineers in the Middle East and beyond.”
