Category: Emerging Technology

Fridge Magnets

Who says plain fridge magnets cannot be revolutionized? 🙂 Here are two brands who have done just that, and in the process also enhanced their brand experience with their consumers.

VIP Fridge Magnet

Red Tomato Pizza in Dubai take their loyal pizza patrons very seriously. So they created the ‘Pizza Emergency Button’, a fridge magnet with a difference. Each button had a loyal pizza patrons favorite pizza programmed into its memory. When hungry all that the loyal patron required to do was flip the pizza box lid on the magnet and press on the pizza button inside.

Wifi Water Magnet

Evian in Paris created a simple fridge magnet that allowed owners to order water and request a particular delivery time directly from their fridge!

The ‘Smart Drop’ magnet was made up of a microcontroller, LED screen, a wireless chip, battery and an inbuilt HTML5 app that did all the work.

Shop and Pay on-the-go

In June last year I had covered how Homeplus in South Korea had created a virtual store in a subway station in order to blend into people’s everyday lives. Since then Procter & Gamble has set up the same virtual stores in four of the busiest subway stations in Prague and Chinese online supermarket Yihodian has also borrowed the idea and installed virtual supermarkets in 15 subway stations around Shanghai.

This year PayPal has also launched the same QR code shops in 15 Singapore subway stations and enabled commuters to buy Valentines gifts from eight different retailers by simply scanning the QR code on their smartphone…

In USA, PayPal has eliminated the need of a wallet or phone altogether. In a partnership with Home Depot, PayPal has begun to roll out an in-store service that enables payments at stores using only a mobile phone number and a pin number at checkout…

Money is truly being re-imagined and contactless payments is going to be a norm by late 2012.

IllumiShare “Share Any Physical or Digital Object”

Microsoft has recently unveilved IllumiShare a real-time, low-cost, peripheral device that looks like a desk lamp. The device uses a camera-projector pair to capture video of the local workspace and transmit it to the remote space while the video of the remote workspace is projected back onto the local space.

Will be interesting to see how this impacts all the video conferencing services out there. 😎