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by: Eliane Alhadeff
Dr. Ernie Medina and his partners launched their first XRtainment Zone in California last year. The mission of XRtainment Zone is to provide families and kids of all ages a fitness club of their own "where working out is all play."
Continue reading "G4H 2008: XRtainment Zone - Beyond Serious Games For Workouts " »
by: Dominic Basulto
During times of both economic boom and bust, business innovation tends to flourish. During a boom, flush pockets and rosy visions of the future lead to generous spending on innovation projects. During a bust, the need to hunker down and deal with everyday business reality leads companies to innovative solutions.
Continue reading "The Strange Birth of the Banana Box Retailer" »
by: danah boyd
Lots of folks are unaware that multiple brands are owned by the same company (e.g., the same company owns Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy). Consumer activists often complain that this practice is deceptive because it tricks consumers into believing that there are big distinctions between brands when, often, the differences are minimal. Personally, while I'd love to see more consumer brand awareness, but I think that brand distinctions play an important role. I just wish that the tech industry would figure this out.
Continue reading "one company, ten brands: lessons from retail for tech companies" »
by: David Wigder
So far, this holiday season has seen a rather muted push on green by retailers, both in terms of the products they sell and the messages they communicate to consumers. Marshal Cohen, Chief Industry Analyst at NPD Group, recently suggested that such lack of enthusiasm by retailers reflects waning interest in green. Cohen stated: “It’s basically a card that a lot of people played while it was hot and trendy…and it got overplayed.”
Continue reading "Green May Be Ho-Hum for the Holidays, But It's Here to Stay" »
by: Eliane Alhadeff
A web based virtual shopping mall launched in New Zealand, allows users to navigate a three dimensional space to browse and buy products, bringing what the company says is the same shopping experience as in the real world. http://www.themallplus.com/ is not a portal that redirects consumers to third party websites, instead creating an online virtual shopping mall.
Continue reading "Serious Games Bring the Mall to Web Browsers" »
by: Ilya Vedrashko
Bill Gerba at Retail Media News blogged recently about a Datamonitor report that said "the next step in the battle to retain customers' is to streamline the buying experience, bringing it more in line with internet shopping in terms of ease and speed of transaction."
Continue reading "Offline Retailers and Online Expectations " »
by: Dominic Basulto
The other day, the Wall Street Journal featured one of the most inspiring stories about innovation that I've read in quite some time. Shai Agassi, once a fast-rising senior executive at software giant SAP, left the company in March under mysterious circumstances and dropped off the grid, only to re-surface this week, flush with $200 million in VC funding and a radical idea for disrupting the automotive industry.
Continue reading "Radically Re-thinking the Automotive Business Model" »
Continue reading " Screenshots: Kinset 3D Shopping Browser" »
by: Ilya Vedrashko (via Business & Games)
A couple of announcements indicating that Sony's upcoming PlayStationHome (site, wiki) virtual world will have plenty of ad inventory:
by: Joel Makower
Last week's Live Better Sustainability Summit, held just outside of Bentonville, Arkansas, was yet another in what seems to be an accelerating series of "whoda thunk" moments. Bentonville, of course, is hometown to Wal-Mart, which sponsored the event, a daylong conclave that brought together more than a thousand people to a nearby convention centerContinue reading "Blog Action Day: Wal-Mart's Sustainability Summit" »
Not so long ago when browsing through a glossy Danish magazine (forgot which) I stumbled across an ad for RENT A MINI, a car-rental company based here in Copenhagen.
by: Guy Kawasaki
One of the challenges that geeks, inventors, hobbyists, hackers, burners, and artists who are trying to change the world face is finding a place to do their work. Ideally, it would have lots of equipment, supplies, and other geeks. Until the last year, they would have to set up their own workshop or beg for space at a machine shop. Now they can go and hang out at TechShop
in Menlo Park, California.
by: David Polinchock
You know, I wish I could remember where I first read about this, but what a cool idea. Totally changing the idea of what a library is and does. I love the idea of the library as an "idea store" too. Not a repository of information that is sometimes hard to navigate, but a place for you to get ideas.
Continue reading "Idea Store - Created and Managed by Tower Hamlets Council - Home" »
by: C. Sven Johnson
Via a post on the Mass Custom website comes word of a pretty good article over on Design News, “Rapid Manufacturing’s Role in the Factory of the Future” (Link).
by: Dominic Basulto
When it comes to design and innovation, the overwhelming consensus amongst practitioners is that "simplicity" is better than "complexity." When Apple designed the iPod, simplicity of design and operation was a foremost consideration.
Continue reading "Forget simplicity, how about a big dose of chaos?" »
by: David Wigder
Online retailers find that consumer-generated content such as product reviews and ratings have a significant influence on consumer purchasing behavior.
Continue reading "Consumer-Generated Content: An Underleveraged Opportunity for Green Retailers" »
by: Karl Long
In what appears to be the greatest lack of imagination since someone put a radio show on television marketers continue to build shops in secondlife. Just stop it, secondlife is an environment where you can build anything, ANYTHING, replicas of buildings are about the most mundane thing you can possibly build there.
Continue reading "Dear Marketers, Stop Creating Replicas Of Your Shops In SecondLife" »
by: Joel Makower
The natural products industry has become a screaming success. That's mostly good news. It also offers some cautionary tales for the sustainable business sector.
Continue reading "The Spoils of Success for the Natural Products Industry" »
by: Alain Thys
When looking at part 1 and part 2 of the unveiling of Sony Home for the PS3, I was dazzled by what I can only describe as a cool combo of an über-interface to the Sony media-world and a hi-res version of Second Life for my living room TV. Even my wife started saying she wanted a PS3.
Continue reading "Sony Home ... Why can't I make my own stuff?" »
by: Alain Thys
Exactly a year ago this blog went "live" and we just wanted to thank everyone who's been part of making it something much more successful than we ever thought it would be. Today, we've got about 25,000 regular readers, over 1,400 posts, and more importantly, our base of daily feedburner subscribers keeps growing by the week (currently at 2,500).
by: David Polinchock
The Chicago Tribune has a good article about the new Kraft pizzeria opening later this month in Chicago for DiGiorno Ultimate. In discussing the new product line, here's what Kraft had to say:
Continue reading "Kraft seeks Ultimate boost | Chicago Tribune" »
by: David Polinchock
I was going to write about this maybe being a NY thing, but then I thought about a small jewelry store that I went into in Cusco, Peru, where the owner of the store met you at the door, read your aura and then decided if you could come in or not. And yes, we ended up spending about $300 there!
Continue reading "SNOOTS ONLY By SUZANNE KAPNER - Business - New York Post Online Edition" »
by: David Polinchock
While I was in Chicago last week for the RAC conference, Michael Robinson from Anthropologie asked me if I knew about the Q110 bank in Berlin. I hadn't heard about it and he sent me over the link today. This is the "future-banking" concept store from DeutscheBank and it's really pretty damned cool.
Continue reading "Q110 – Die Deutsche Bank der Zukunft in Berlin" »
Today I was invited to Professor Jeffrey Huang’s class on “The Architecture of Banking” to comment on his students’ projects at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL).
By: Ilya Vedrashko
Retailers, beware. The Big Customer is watching you! And takes pictures. And blogs.
By: Ilya Vedrashko
Welcome Social Retailing (TM) - a technology developed and trademarked by IconNicholson and demoed at the National Retail Federation conference's Store of the Future exhibition.
by: David Polinchock
If I can do it on your web site, I should be able to do it in your store.
Continue reading "Prediction 7: You need to E-tail Your Retail" »
by: David Polinchock
What happens when the social elements of things like myspace leave cyberspace and enter the physical world? Can and should brands use their physical space to help facilitate social interaction in the real world?
Continue reading "Prediction 6: The Socialization of Place Continues" »
by: David Polinchock
Retail spaces will become even more important as a connection point between the consumer and the brand.
Continue reading "Prediction 5: Retail Grows in Importance" »
by: David Polinchock
I'm in the process of updating all of our 2007 predictions and thought that I would do one posting with just the headlines. Look for detailed posts sometime over the weekend. And please feel free to post your thoughts as well!
by: David Polinchock
Since everyone is getting into predictions for 2007, I thought that I would make sure that we threw some down as well! Here’s the beginning of my predictions for 2007:
by: Alain Thys
As I compiled the most read posts on this blog, I couldn't shake the feeling that "there was a lot of great stuff missing". That's why I decided to do the "old media" thing and make a selfish editorial selection of what I thought were the twenty strongest thoughts expressed on this blog since its inception (one per contributor).
by: Alain Thys
It's the season to make lists and hitparades, so to end the year we'll do our bit as well. According to Google Analytics, here's a list of the ten most read articles since the launch of this blog on March 5th, 2006. It's an interesting mix, which for me, is also a testimony to the way the Long Tail seems to be working.
Continue reading "The Ten Most Read Futurelab Articles in 2006" »
by: Joel Makower
It's been a busy holiday season for a corps of professionals, courtesy of Wal-Mart, and I'm not talking about store greeters or Santas. The retail giant recently issued an RFP, or request for proposal, to install solar energy systems on its stores in five states -- the largest procurement of solar ever proposed. Bids are due on January 5, hence the end-of-year scrambling.
by: Guy Kawasaki
Marti Nyman is “director of global innovation networks” for Best Buy. This means that his job is to find leading-edge, cool stuff for Best Buy—and yes, he gets paid to do this.
by: David Polinchock
David Meerman Scott has started an Interruption Marketing Hall of Shame over at Web Ink Now and I thought that I would include his number 4 here. Valuable lesson here -- he's willing to boycott a mall he likes to visit because they chose to interrupt him, rather then engage him.
Continue reading "Web Ink Now: Interruption Marketing Hall of Shame" »
by: Dick Stroud
This blog posting is not specific to the 50-plus, other than their contribution as online consumers.
by: Joel Makower
WANTED: One highly motivated, business-savvy, environmentally minded, entrepreneurial self-starter, looking to have a potentially worldchanging impact on how business gets done from a sustainability perspective. Must be willing to move to a small town in northwestern Arkansas. Inquire within.
Continue reading "Job Opportunity: Move to Bentonville, Change the World!" »
