Tag: technology

Sonic Notify: Mind. Blown.

Posted on

This is seventy-four different sorts of impressive.

Sonic Notify is a flexible technology solution that presents a unique opportunity for content strategists focusing on proximity and live experience solutions. Their clients purchase a speaker, or a “beacon” (which come in multiple shapes and sizes) that send out high pitched audio signals inaudible to the human ear within music and other soundtracks that trigger compatible apps to launch websites, videos, texts, maps…etc.to pop up on people’s smartphones that are within range of the device. The technology can be installed anywhere from a super market, to a football stadium, to a personal wallet.

So you hear nothing, but your cellphone reacts to the inaudible signal and pops up with some content relevant to your current location. Here’s the video, in which the presenter (or rather the presenter’s smartphone) meets Jim and buys some cheap nappies:

[vimeo clip_id=”33556728″ width=”678″ height=”452″]

Outstanding. And yes, while this technology has the potential to be rather invasive, it also has the potential to be hugely useful and beneficial to the smartphone user. I love it.

1-year-old thinks a magazine is a broken iPad

Posted on

We were ahead of the curve on the Red Hartebees vs Evan van der Spuy video – posting it here when it had just 300 views, way before it had the 74 billion (is this right? – Ed.) it has now.

And I think this one has the potential to go viral too. It’s a one year old girl (the daughter of the CEO of the French Telecoms company Orange-Vallee, as it happens) who can’t understand why she can’t pinch-zoom and scroll on a magazine.

 

As her Dad says:

Technology codes our minds, changes our OS. Apple products have done this extensively. The video shows how magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives. It shows real life clip of a 1-year old, growing among touch screens and print. And how the latter becomes irrelevant. Medium is message.

There’s nothing wrong with this. Things move on, we advance, we progress. Yes, books are great to hold and touch and smell (for weird people), but those are simply emotional responses. And while it’s fine to have emotional responses, we shouldn’t let them hold us back. We have to realise and we have to accept that in the future, books as we know them almost certainly won’t exist. Just as if I handed my kids a cassette tape or a rotary-dial telephone, they wouldn’t know what to do with it, so this one year old doesn’t understand why she doesn’t get any response from the magazines.

One thing it does make me realise is how important introducing as much new technology as possible into my kids’ lives is. Because being able to utilise touchscreens and the internet is every bit as important to them as being able to read a book was to us “back in the old days”.