Making Electronic Coupons Easier

Larry Loper sends along a Mercury News Article : Hoping that Digital Coupons Will Cut it. This is about breakthrough work by Cupertino company Ecrio. The article is not about their Mobeam technology, which allows you to transmit electronic coupons from cellphones to standard supermarket scanners, but rather about the research process and it's sometimes odd turns. Describing their newest piece of work:

" ... the gadget translates coupon bar codes loaded from the Web into quick light bursts that trick supermarket scanners into thinking they are reading the coupons themselves. Point the so-called ClipPod at a scanner, press a button and bingo, the coupon savings is deducted from the grocery total ... "

This technology was at FMI and demonstrated at our innovation center because it showed how commonly installed existing technology, such as supermarket checkout scanners, can be used to create new value. It's this kind of piggybacking research that can leapfrog the costs and complexity involved.

Tesla vs the Volt

The Rise of the practical electrics? Maybe we are finally seeing it.

Big Ideas to Deliver

New Yorker article: In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?, by Malcolm Gladwell. A view of Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures company. " ... built on the belief that combining capitalism and invention will benefit the world with more and better inventions as well as create financial rewards for investors .... " . Nice article in the New Yorker's 'wordy narrative' tradition about the vagaries of invention, and how to make a business of it. Also, a mention of the Gray-Bell patent primacy book I recently reviewed.

Protein Folding Game

I was introduced to some of the basic science behind protein folding a number of years ago. It's one of those very tough problems that is very difficult to solve directly with analytical techniques. We thought about some AI techniques that addressed the problem. Solving the problem would be a big coup. Now there is a protein folding site that allows you to game solutions. From Slashdot. Another example of linking machine intelligence to humans, and an example of a potentially very useful game.

Giant Food Stores Shopping Network

Giant Food Stores seeks to improve it's online shopping capabilities. Some details of the vendors involved in this short article that concentrates on the supply chain details. Giant does online shopping and delivery through online grocery pioneer Peapod, which now only works through Giant and US Stop&Shop in limited areas.

Conversation about Conversations

Via Eric Grant Will Richardson writes:

" ... is the conversation moving from more centralized platforms to a decentralized pseudo-realtime mode? are we losing the quality of thought that goes into a paper or a blog post in favor of less contextual snippets and links? .... ".

I have started to see much more Twitter activity and 'list blogs' of late. Are we changing to a medium with less thought and more fire from the hip spontaneity. No stopping to think or analyze? Is this the web implementation of 'Blink'? Is there room for both kinds of communications? Help us.

Martin Lindstrom on Brands at FMI

We saw Martin Lindstrom author of the book BrandSense speak at FMI. Have read this book, but this is the first time I had heard him speak. He is quite dynamic, moving through the audience and up and down from the stage. That can be fun, but also a bit distracting, making you swivel your neck just a few times too often. He uses lots of slides, but fairly few words on them. Lindstrom also has a useful site. which has videos on brand building and you can sign up for a newsletter.

Lindstrom's pitch is all about how all the senses are important to brands. I have been exposed to lots of research about using all the senses in retail environments, so I very much like his proposition. All senses are important, but some are harder to control than others. Sight, for example is something we use often, and we can readily manipulate brand images using vision. Many of Lindstrom's examples use aspects of color and form.

He also suggests that we often have 'Proustian' episodes where the smell of environments profoundly influences us, modified by age and perhaps when and where we grew up. I have seen where the smells of environments have been used to establish convincing contexts. Still, this kind of control is very different, the way broad emotional state is different from making calculated decisions. I would suggest it's often barely controllable at all. While we have learned how to control sounds in three dimensions, smell is often at the mercy of air conditioning systems.

Lindstrom shows many brand examples, and how aspects of smell, taste, sound and vision (but not often touch) are increasingly being used to define a brand. And also how the most successful brands are defined by multiple senses. Lindstrom has also developed a simple graphical means to show the contribution of each of the senses. In some of his site videos he mentions some of the neuromarketing analysis being done with fmri brain scans, but that was not mentioned in the talk. He did not include any background about the statistics he references, such as how .. smell effects us up to 75% more than any other sense ... .

I think there is much to be done in utilizing all the senses in the definition of brands, and also in how brands are linked to marketing and merchandising. Lindstrom show lots of examples, and constructs a means to broadly analyze the influence of the senses. I did not come away with much understanding of what to really do to fully utilize all the senses. There is still much to do to get that place, it does not appear the problem has been solved beyond finding intriguing examples.

Intelligent Sticky Notes

Have followed MIT's notion of ambient intelligence for some time, during demonstrations this always impressed people. Intelligence can be ambient, reactive and collaborative rather than attempting to solve deep problems we request. Yet there were relatively few examples that would ultimately be useful. This one combines 'old' tech convenience with new tech details. Or is this overkill?

" ... Bringing one of the most famous inventions of the 20th century into the digital age, scientists of the "Ambient Intelligence Group" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed the "intelligent stickies". These are essentially Post-its with a twist - the notes written on them can be managed by a PC that will be able to remind users of any information stored on the small paper notes at the appropriate time, via a variety of digital devices. In a project that combines artificial intelligence, RFID, and ink recognition technologies, the MIT team says they have managed to make the popular sticky notes much more useful ... "

WordNet

A number of years ago when looking at language Taxonomies I had cause to look at Princeton's WordNet, " ... a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser.... " . Just started to look at it again for a project. It can be used as a means to establishing the basis for a taxonomy of language. It seems it is no longer being updated.

Tagging

I just read Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web, by Gene Smith. This is a short and easy to read book that defines and elaborates the idea of tagging. Tagging is the informal metadata that many systems allow you to add to the web. The result of tagging is a useful categorization of Web resources. The book is completely non-technical until the final chapters, when coding examples are provided. Also useful are a number of detailed case-studies, such as one of Del.icio.us, one of the first systems to permit useful tagging. Also good descriptions of flicker and LibraryThing, which is being used by some library systems to improve their classification systems. All of these systems are basically about how to classify resources via tagging, but are also different in their approach.

The book is largely non-academic, but does point to some useful survey papers that have been written about the use and statistics of tagging. The book also covers the topic of taxonomies, or the arrangement of tagging data. I could have used some more detail there. Also covers the topic of how rich media, such as images, are being tagged, despite their often lacking text. Perhaps surprisingly MS Vista's Photo Gallery is given some praise as a simple kind of hierarchical taxonomy. I plan to explore.

This book is an excellent introduction to the topic of tagging. I recommend it to anyone who wants to explore related topics. Like all books about tech, its examples may fade, but it is a useful start.

Map of the Future in the Making

Have been a reader of IFTF reports for a long time, making some of their work public appears to be a good idea.

"We are pleased to present our map of the Future of Making! This is our first Creative Commons–licensed map and we plan to share and distribute it at Maker Faire this weekend. We're excited to use it as a way to tie the innovation and general awesomeness of Maker Faire to our research on the future of making .... "

FMI: Marketechniques

I am off to the FMI (Food Marketing Institutes) Marketechniques conference in Vegas tomorrow. Although I have been at FMI many times before, this is the first time I have attended as a solo participant. This conference often provides a hint into how retail technology is progressing. Sometimes methods that were featured a few years ago are absent, and others have taken their place. I reported on these and their potential application in the past, but now I can take a broader and more objective look at their application. If anyone out there would like to meet and discuss what they are up to, would be glad to talk and comment. My blog is still read in and outside relevant companies. I will comment here on what I hear and see.

Hypnotism and Brainstorming

The May 12 Business Week reports on the increased use of hypnotism to enhance creative brainstorming in focus group sessions. It works by making " ... people ultra relaxed - through breathing, meditation and visualization. In that state people are less inhibited .. and may offer their craziest ideas, which are sometimes the best ... ".

Building Language

The Language Log looks at, and playfully illustrates Japanese words for complex concepts, such as uja uja, a term for lots of small things moving together. A commenter points out that using such terms loses the efficiency of using combinations of words. Right, but still delightful. Via Ann Althouse.

To Cork or Not to Cork

You have probably been part of the little script that takes place in a restaurant when ordering a bottle of wine. The waiter opens the bottle and presents you the cork. I was taught that you politely smell the cork, or perhaps just acknowledge it's existence, before going on to a taste. I have never smelled something tainted in this process, but more and more consumers have, and the realization that more apparently good wine was 'corked' and undrinkable has led to the educated consumer rejecting wine and has become an economic problem for retailers and vintners.

You have probably also noticed that more good wine now is sold with 'screw-cap' closures, replacing cork. Although that's still only about 3% of US sales. It is a much higher percentage in Europe and New Zealand and Australia.

Corks too have changed, some of them are now made of plastic or agglomerated cork material. Corks also have a strong marketing component. Consumers expect good wines to have corks, and there is much less romance in a restaurants sommelier simply screwing off the cap, than there is in them pulling a cork with a satisfying pop.

The value of the natural cork was sold as it's ability to last for decades, until a wine is re-corked with the proper ceremony. The trouble is that most wine in markets like the US is consumed within 48 hours of purchase. No need for complexities in storage. It turns out though that there is not just one solution for this problem, some wines should be enclosed with cork, others could economically use screw-caps, once the consumer has been convinced that it can still be good wine.

George M Taber's 2007 book: To Cork or not to Cork Tradition, Romance, Science and the Battle for the Wine Bottle. covers this in considerable detail. Sometimes too much detail, except for the vintner, chemist, retailer, or very interested consumer. Just reading the last couple of chapters can be illuminating, but if you like details it is worth a complete read.

I was struck by how this change in thinking is an interesting mix of technology, process, innovation, marketing and economics. The standards of a thousand years have now been changing in the last few decades to better overall solutions. It's a good case study of how things can change in a short time.

Wegman's Site to Introduce New Store

In Supermarket News a perhaps obvious approach, innovative retailer Wegman's is using a web site to introduce consumers to new stores. The site is here. To generate buzz about the store, I would imagine, but a quick look shows relatively little that will pull people there except a few give-aways. I was most interested in the store layout, but not much new there, and the layout map itself could have been designed for better understanding of value for the consumer.

Optimistic for AI

Patrick Henry Winston, MIT AI Prof, is optimistic about the discovery of the computational foundations of intelligence within the next ten years. The essay is interesting, but undated. More on his web site. His book: Artificial Intelligence is one we used to get acquainted with the field in the 80s, he still teaches AI at MIT See also, Kurzweil's view on this.

Parc on the Future

BBC views the future at Parc, some nice examples, but not comprehensive. In our early days of AI we visited them many times. As is well known, smart people, but not good at delivery to the business.

Surveying the Software Landscape

Carr outlines findings from a just out McKinsey report on the changing software landscape. The full report is here.

Virtual Christian

I just now see that Christian Renaud, responsible for new tech at Cisco, has a blog where he posts about virtual worlds and other edgy topics. There he recently writes about the history and maturing of the virtual worlds industry. I have followed some of these same changes and they mark a direction for the industry that is worth understanding. Cisco also has a virtual worlds blog that he contributes to. Above, an image from collaborative work being done between Google and Multiverse Network to build virtual worlds linked with the kinds of geographic data found in Google Earth. Progress continues.