Rewards offered to diners if they leave their smartphones at the door

Social Rehab recently created an offline kit designed to replace smartphones, and followed up by rewarding diners for putting those smartphones aside for the duration of their meal.

It’s a situation many diners know all to well: going for dinner with a friend, looking forward to catching up – but instead spending most of the meal staring at the top of their head as they sit glued to their smartphone. Enter Singapore-based Social Rehab, who recognized this problem and decided to do something about it. Social Rehab takes a light-hearted approach to peoples’ dependancy on their phones, offering users a kit to replace their phones’ functions. The kit includes a pair of glasses with lenses that match that of an instagram filter. They also include ‘Like’ stickers that can be stuck on anyone and anything the user enjoys, a stack of branded post-it notes so that diners can write each other messages instead of sending tweets, and a sketchpad so friends can draw each other pictures. Smartphone addicts just need to email the company and they will post out a kit. As a follow up, the company recently held a launch night in Singapore where attendees were challenged to go without their phones for the evening, and were then rewarded accordingly – the longer the attendee left their phone alone, the bigger the discount they received on drinks. As we spend more and more of our lives online, how can else could entrepreneurs make the offline world equally irresistible for all those smartphone addicts out there?