commerce Archives | Digital Cortex

Ingreedy: Cake Technology

Ingreedy are a start-up with a novel product idea: selling glass jars filled with just the right ingredients to make tasty baked goods at home.

The central idea is smart: outsourcing production to the customer adds value, making for an interactive post-purchase experience where there would otherwise be none, while the nice packaging helps too.

Ingreedy’s Logo

Ingreedy co-founder Samuel Cox classes himself as a maker of things and has done all sorts of cool things. His interests “wrap around inventing new and diverse approaches to the way we use, play and explore creative & interactive technology” – although in this instance, the technology is cake.

But rather than being an inert jar of cereals, I think Ingreedy Jars represent the culture of Makerdom: those increasingly vocal hobbyists who are using the web to share their tips, tricks, hacks and designs.

Etsy is a good example of the kind of commerce that the web has enabled for the crafts market, while Instructables provides ‘recipes’ for people make useful stuff themselves. Rules of production are shifting further with costs of 3D printers coming down, and the likes of Makerbot taking on a high-street presence. I think Ingreedy takes elements from each of these, and makes them accessible through their choice of medium.

Ingreedy Jars are available in four different mixtures: Rocky Road; Brownies; Chocolate Chip Shortbread and Oaty Raisin Cookies, costing £12.00 each. Orders placed in November will ship in time for Xmas.

Yo Gabba Gabba

If you’ve not yet had the pleasure, I’d urge you to get to grips with Yo Gabba Gabba, which is a sensationally well-conceived kids show from the US that’s been running for about four years:

Yo Gabba Gabba is the creation of W!ldbrain Entertainment, who have to be one of the coolest multimedia companies I’ve encountered. Based in LA and NYC, these guys make TV shows, films, adverts and merchandise, and have partnerships in place with Nickelodeon and Disney.

They also own Kidrobot, which has a strong line in collectible vinyl toys, clothes and art. So it won’t come as a surprise that Yo Gabba Gabba is centred around five toys:

Muno (he’s tall and friendly)
Foofa (she’s pink and happy)
Brobee (the little green one)
Toodee (she likes to have fun)
Plex (a magic robot)

The characters are brought to life at the beginning of each show by their owner DJ Lance Rock:

As well as being an educational and visually stimulating show, I think it’s a great example of how content powers commerce, with W!ldbrain capitalising on the strength of their creation through “apparel, accessories, books, electronics, games, home décor and toys, available at retail through top licensees”, including their Kidrobot stores (clever, huh?), “Spin Master, Ltd., Simon & Schuster, Nickelodeon Home Entertainment and Paramount Home Entertainment, Nickelodeon/Sony BMG and others” (thanks Wikipedia).

This kind of integrated commercial thinking takes true advantage of today’s twisted media landscape, subverting pre-existing norms of content creation and ownership.

For example, a recurring musical segment in the show features The Aquabats, a superhero-themed rock band fronted by the show’s creator. The Aquabats have now been awarded their own W!ldbrain-produced TV show – so it’s evident these guys are all about through-the-line thinking.

What a modern company – W!ldbrain, I salute you.

Experts Predict The Next Decade In Mobile

Rudy de Waele has been a busy man. He’s curated 37 of the world’s most notable voices from Mobile & Academia for inclusion in his Mobile Trends 2020 slide deck – a collection of thoughts on where we’ll all be this time next decade:

“I asked some of my personal heroes in mobile to write down their five most significant trends for the coming decade. All of them have been of great inspiration to me during this decade: for their ideas, visions, talent, the capabilities to adapt and the perseverance to succeed whatever the situation.”

Here’s the deck. Hit fullscreen for best viewing experience:

These are my five stand-out ideas from the presentation. What are yours?

Digital syllogomania:

Digital garbage collection becomes a (very) lucrative business
Slide 10 / Fabien Girardin / Researcher at Lift Lab

Sensors:

Mobile devices will have sensors added which will enable the capture of local data from temperature to noise and from location to who else is on the room
Slide 13 / Tony Fish / Entrepreneur

Cellular voice dies:

It truly becomes another form of data on the next generation data networks
Slide 30 / Kevin C. Tofel / Managing Editor at jkOnTheRun

Mobiles manifesting AI:

Fulfilling, at last, the vision of “personal digital assistants”
Slide 33 / David Wood / Principal at Delta Wisdom

New sonic experiences:

Augmented reality, 3D sound, will create new mobile audio formats and end user experiences
Slide 41 / Atau Tanaka / Director of Culture Lab

Kopimi

An admission to you all – I’ve used Pirate Bay to download stuff for free.
A statement of facts – I also believe in protecting the rights of content creators.

How do I reconcile my piracy usage of great content with my belief in copyright? The jury is still out on that one, but with the Pirate Bay being forced into a subscription model, the decision to go straight is made slightly easier for me.

On the subject of licensing, I’ve registered Digital Cortex under one of these:

It’s an ‘Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike’ license, issued to me by the Creative Commons for the content here on this site.

It grants users of Digital Cortex the rights to:

Copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
Make derivative works

But only under the following conditions:

Attribution. You must give the original author credit.
Non-Commercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a licence identical to this one.

All of which sounds really boring, I’m sure. But Creative Commons licencing is on the up, because more of us are turning to our keyboards and becoming content creators. The CC give out little blog badges and buttons for your site, the iconography of which we are now beginning to accustom to. The CC logo is most prevalent on Flickr, where choosing a license type is part of the sign-up process.

For those more liberal in their stance on free content sharing, there is one license I’d like to tell you about. It’s called Kopimi, and it is the exact opposite of copyright.

Using a Kopimi badge on your site means you specifically request that people copy and use your work for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, with or without attribution, to be hacked to pieces and repackaged however they damn-well please.

It was created by Piratbyrån, the team behind Pirate Bay as a way to challenge attitudes to intellectual property rights, whilst in the face of all those hundreds of class-action lawsuits that ended up forcing them into submission.

From my research I appear to have found an originator of the design, whose post over at LogoBlink gives a nice side-by-side of the look and feel of each opposing license:

A side-by-side comparison. Which do you prefer?

I hope that once Pirate Bay is all over with, Kopimi manages to live on.
I identify with the general concept of free (or cheap!) content for all, but without a licensing approach that allows for the free distribution of content, piracy will remain an issue, and copyright will be broken time and time again.

Thank god for Spotify is all I can say.

Summary So Far

In summary, Mobile AR has many paths leading to it. It is this convergence of various paths that makes a true historical appraisal of this technology difficult to achieve. However, I have highlighted facets of its contributing technologies that assist in the developing picture of the implications that Mobile AR has in store. A hybridisation of a number of different technologies, Mobile AR embodies the most gainful properties of its three core technologies: This analyst sees Mobile AR as a logical progression from VR, but recognises its ideological rather than technological founding. The hardware basis of Mobile AR stems from current mobile telephony trends that exploit the growing capabilities of Smartphone devices. The VR philosophy and the mobile technology are fused through the Internet, the means for enabling context-based, live-updating content, and housing databases of developer-built and user-generated digital objects and elements, whilst connecting users across the world.

I have shown that where the interest in VR technologies dwindled due to its limited real-world applicability, Mobile Internet also lacks in comparison to Mobile AR and its massive scope for intuitive, immersive and realistic interpretations of digital information. Wearable AR computing shares VR’s weaknesses, despite keeping the user firmly grounded in physical reality. Mobile AR offers a solution that places the power of these complex systems into a mobile telephone: the ubiquitous technology of our generation. This new platform solves several problems at once, most importantly for AR developers and interested Blue-chip parties, market readiness. Developing for Mobile AR is simply the commercially sensible thing to do, since the related industries are already making the changes required for its mass-distribution.

Like most nascent technologies, AR’s success depends on its commercial viability and financial investment, thus most sensible commercial developers of AR technologies are working on projects for the entertainment and advertising industries, where their efforts can be rewarded quickly. These small-scale projects are often simple in concept, easily grasped and thus not easily forgotten. I claim here that the first Mobile AR releases will generate early interest in the technology and entertainment markets, with the effect that press reportage and word-of-mouth behaviour assist Mobile AR’s uptake. I must be careful with my claims here however, since there is no empirical evidence to suggest that this will occur for Mobile AR. Looking at the emergence of previous technologies, however, the Internet and mobile telephony grew rapidly and to massive commercial success thanks to some strong business models and advancements in their own supporting technologies. It is strongly hoped by developers like Gameware and T-Immersion that Mobile AR can enjoy this same rapid lift-off. Both technologies gained prominence once visible in the markets thanks to a market segment called early adopters. This important group gathers their information from specialist magazine sources and word of mouth. Mobile AR developers would do well to recognise the power of this group, perhaps by offering shareware versions of their AR software that encourage a form of viral transmission that exploit text messaging.

Gameware have an interesting technique for the dissemination of their HARVEE software. They share a business interest with a Bluetooth technology firm, which has donated a prototype product the Bluetooth Push Box, which scans for local mobile devices and automatically sends files to users in acceptance. Gameware’s Push Box sends their latest demo to all visitors to their Cambridge office. This same technology could be placed in public places or commercial spaces to offer localised AR advertising, interactive tourist information, or 3D restaurant menus, perhaps.

Gameware, through its Nokia projects and HARVEE development program is well placed to gain exposure on the back of a market which is set to explode as mobile offerings become commercially viable, ‘social’, powerful, multipurpose and newsworthy. Projects like HARVEE are especially interesting in terms of their wide applicability and mass-market appeal. It is its potential as a revolutionary new medium that inspires this very series.