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Twones is a new online music service that automatically tracks every song a user plays while online—whether via iTunes, YouTube, last.fm or services—and then creates a single timeline of the music they’ve been listening to. Users can share their timelines and discover new music by exploring a friend’s musical history. The service, which launches in December, works via a small browser plug-in. The innovative aspect? Twones is pushing its offer one step further by collaborating with Tony Player, a system that builds playlists from multiple Twones timelines. When Twones members arrive at a club that uses Tony Player, they register their presence via text message or their phone’s bluetooth connection. The tracks they’ve most recently listened to—as registered by Twones—are then imported to the DJ’s playlist. The DJ picks from those tracks and mixes them, building a set based entirely on the crowds’ recent musical preferences. To add extra recognition and excitement for people whose songs are played, their headshots and usernames are displayed on a giant screen. The event previewed at the Amsterdam Dance Event last week. While nights that encourage party-goers to bring their own iPods have been around for a while, this our first exposure to DJs drawing directly from online playlists, and not requiring active crowd participation. Members make their presence known, and the system accesses and broadcasts elements of their online identity. Part of the OFF=ON trend, it’s an interesting example of extending online networks and online behaviour to the ‘real’ world. One to play with! Website: www.tonyplayer.com — www.twones.com Spotted by: Jeroen Bouwman
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While sites like TripAdvisor offer an extraordinary wealth of information about virtually every aspect of travel, sometimes the one-stop-shopping approach can make it hard to navigate through to the information one needs. When it regards hotels, SeeYourHotel aims to provide a quick and direct way to search by location and view hotels around the globe. With a map filling most of its homepage, SeeYourHotel lets users search by location—whether it's a specific address or a point of interest—and see a map with markers for all hotels in the area. Users can then view actual pictures of the rooms and facilities, compare with other hotels nearby and make their reservations. Major attractions and business centres are also marked on each map, making it easier for users to pick a hotel that's convenient for their purposes. Satellite and hybrid views are available for each search as well, and users can browse through not only pictures but also street views, videos, reviews and availability information. Using SeeYourHotel is free; and the mapping technology is by Google and reservations are handled by Hotels.com, which we can safely assume provides SeeYourHotel with referral fees. There's no arguing with the success of the generalized travel sites, but SeeYourHotel's narrow, location-based focus and quick navigation could win it some fans of its own. As they say, pick one thing and do it right! ;-) Website: www.seeyourhotel.com Spotted by: Jessica McGregor
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We at Springwise are always happy to chronicle the spread of a good idea, but never more so than when those doing the spreading are part of the Springwise community themselves. So it's with great pleasure that we bring our readers one more tale of free photocopying for students, this time launched by one of our very own Springspotters in his home country of the Philippines. At the Philippines' Prime University Ateneo De Manila, Matthew Cua is project manager of Celadon, the university's official Chinese-Filipino organization. Charged with the task of planning the group's Mid-Autumn Gratia faculty appreciation day celebration for this fall, Cua says he was inspired by our free love coverage to incorporate free photocopying for students into the event. Scouting around for sponsorship, Cua found a receptive audience in Dr. Diana Cua-Balcells, a local breast cancer surgeon and alumna of the university, who picked up on the idea as a way to promote breast cancer awareness on behalf of nonprofit organizations including Bosom Buddies, I Can Serve, Pink for Life, Carewell Community and the Cuabang Foundation. Accordingly, among the festival's many offerings was a free photocopying kiosk that aimed both to promote breast cancer causes and to help support Celadon. Equipped with just a single photocopier, the outdoor stand in the middle of campus produced 8,200 free photocopies over the course of the five-day festival, serving some 500 students plus a number of faculty who made copies for their entire classes. Celadon even took the free copies idea one better by designing the paper used to serve as notepaper on the reverse side, allowing it to do double-duty in class or be reused afterwards. Celadon made minimal profit on the event, Cua says—aiming mainly to cover its costs—but the group is planning a similar effort for November, this time with commercial sponsorship, that it expects will be more lucrative. And because "moist paper doesn't work in a photocopying machine," Cua also notes that better precautions will be taken next time to keep the paper dry in Manila's humid open-air environment, using heaters and special packaging. More projects are planned for Chinese New Year as well. Is there any mountain free love can't climb? We think not. :-) Be inspired! Website: www.freelovephilippines.com
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It's no longer a simple matter to rattle off all the "design-your-own" opportunities we've covered in recent years, so numerous have they become. Making the task even more challenging, one of our spotters recently alerted us to yet another one: a site that allows parents of small children to design their own baby shoes. Based in Connecticut, Preschoolians sells what it calls the most flexible shoes in the world for preschool-aged children. Available for kids in four stages—Crawlers, Walkers, Runners and Adventurers—the shoes come in a wide array of styles and colours for both boys and girls, including sandals, shoes, boots and slippers. Preschoolians use a sizing scheme that takes all three dimensions of a toddler's foot into account, and their patented VisuFit technology—featuring a clear window on the sole to take the guesswork out of finding the right fit—was named one of Time Magazine’s Coolest Inventions of 2003. Perhaps even more interesting, however, is that in addition to its large line of existing designs, Preschoolians now allows parents to personalize more than 50 shoe, slipper and boot styles. With four customizable areas on each shoe and 27 colours to choose from, more than a billion variations are possible using the site's simple Flash interface. Prices range from USD 30 to USD 60. Jeffrey Silverman, the company's founder and CEO, explains: "The beautiful thing about this is that parents can easily design shoes for their babies to match literally any outfit. I’ve been in the footwear industry for over 20 years, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that people want to express their individuality without limitations." Indeed, that's a fair statement about just about any product category these days, from cellphones to energy bars to sleeping bags. Keep the customization innovations coming! (Related: Design your own Keds & sell them on Zazzle.) Website: www.preschoolians.com
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When it comes to giving someone directions to a particular place, traditional maps can be imperfect tools, abstract and two-dimensional as they are. A new application built for Google's Android cellphone platform, however, incorporates pictures and personalization to help people answer the question, "Can you show me how to get there?" BreadCrumbz is a mobile navigation application that lets users create directional routes on the fly. The software uses the phone's camera and GPS to take geo-tagged pictures of the user's route while Android's location APIs and Compass sensor track their progress as they navigate. Android's Maps API is then used to overlay route information such as arrows or notes on top of a map. The result is a personalized, picture-based map that users can email to friends or upload to the web to show others how to navigate a specific building or landscape. Voice capabilities are reportedly in the works. A demo on YouTube shows how it's currently done. BreadCrumbz was one of just 20 winners in the Open Handset Alliance's Android Developer Challenge, taking home a USD 100,000 award. It's available as a free download for the T-Mobile G1 through the Android Market. Beyond just helping consumers give each other directions, BreadCrumbz also promises to let them share walking tours of a favourite city, for example, or document personal stories with location-based pictures and information. In the commercial realm, businesses could benefit greatly from picture-based maps that lead consumers to their door—or even illustrate multiple points along their supply chain. The possibilities are many—one to start experimenting with! (Related: Route planner with a wiki twist — Advanced route planning for pedestrians.) Website: www.bcrumbz.com
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Product placements and paid sponsorships help make much of the world's content economically viable, but creating the right match between advertiser and content producer isn't always easy. PlaceVine, which just launched last week, aims to facilitate that process with a site dedicated to brand-integration opportunities. New York-based PlaceVine is a web-based information service that connects content producers across film, television and the web with brands seeking sponsorship and product-placement opportunities. The site's easy-to-use interface allows producers to post projects, list integration opportunities, browse interested brands and connect directly with marketers. Advertisers, similarly, can post listings for products and services, search through potential content projects and connect with the producers behind those that interest them. Deals are then forged offline. Using PlaceVine is free for content producers. For marketers, creating a product profile and receiving inquiries from content producers is free. Paid services include browsing brand opportunities using advanced search and filtering capabilities, and also subscriptions to ProjectStream, the site's monitoring service that sends email updates as new category-specific opportunities are added. More than150 content producers are now using PlaceVine, as are global brands and public relations firms including Arnold WorldWide, the company says. Given that the brand integration market had already grown to USD 22.3 billion in 2007 (source: PQ Media), demand for assistance staying on top of it all is bound to keep growing too. Still plenty of room in this space! (Related: Product placement agency targets YouTube.) Website: www.placevine.com Spotted by: Laura Kreitler
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White consumer goods mesh nicely with the human desire to scribble on things, as we noted last year in a story on white board refrigerators. Now, expanding the idea beyond large appliances, Reebok has launched a dry-erase basketball shoe that facilitates the same type of thing. Released earlier this month, the ATR Talkin' Crazy is a lightweight, cushioned basketball shoe that features a midcut design with removable sockliner and herringbone outsole. Most fun is its dry-erase upper, which lets wearers tell everyone what's on their mind. A dry-erase marker comes included with the shoes, so consumers can write a message on them for one game, erase it and then write a new message for the next. The ATR Talkin' Crazy is available exclusively at Champs Sports stores in both men's and kid's sizes, priced at USD 79.99 for the grown-up version. John Lynch, Reebok's vice president of US marketing, explains: "For as long as there have been basketball kicks, people have been writing on them, but now the Talkin Krazy gives consumers the freedom to express themselves in countless ways." Indeed, self-expression is what Generation C is all about, and this one could be applied to countless other light-coloured goods as well—particularly those the world will see as a person goes about their day. Who will bring this to handbags, backpacks, jackets or other kinds of shoes....? (Related: Customizing sneakers with removable stickers.) Website: www.talkkrazy.com
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It's a tragic fact of life today that one in five African children die before their fifth birthday from simple causes like dehydration from diarrhoea. Basic medicines could save those children's lives, yet no means has been found to make them readily available. A new grassroots project, however, aims to tap into the formidable distribution network of none other than Coca-Cola to get life-saving medicines to the children who need them. The ColaLife project aims to distribute oral rehydration salts and educational materials to people in developing countries through a partnership with Coca-Cola by which its distributors carry medicine in addition to soft drinks. The concept actually dates back 20 years, when its originator—Simon Berry, who was then an aid worker in Zambia—was struck by the realization that one could buy a Coke virtually anywhere on the planet, yet medicine was hard to come by. He proposed designating one compartment in every 10 Coke crates as "the life saving" compartment to transport medicines. His idea fell on deaf ears back then, but today the power of social networking is giving it new life. Specifically, Berry's ColaLife project has tapped the power of Facebook and other social networking tools to amass a group of more than 6,000 supporters, garner widespread media coverage and—at least as important—get the attention of Coca-Cola. Berry has since met with high-ranking officials at the company, and talks are under way to push the idea further. Meanwhile, ColaLife groups have been added on Google and Flickr, and a YouTube video was created earlier this month to promote the project's submission to Google’s Project 10^100 initiative. Currently, ColaLife is seeking an NGO to participate in the project as well. The web is facilitating social change in ways that simply weren't possible before, uniting like-minded activists and gathering support from around the globe. Will Coca-Cola jump in with both feet? That remains to be seen. In the meantime, one to watch—and learn from. (Related: Activism site ensures participation — Customers deliver donated TOMS shoes.) Website: www.colalife.org
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Our previous edition featured everything from eco-forward lunch kits for kids to upgraded meeting rooms, and from people-friendly RFID tags to video games that improve seniors' driving skills. Oh, and a smash shack, for venting all kinds of frustration in a safe retail setting ;-) |
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