Posts tagged Show
Next, Digital Mall Kiosks Will Look at You, Guess Your Age, Show You Clothes
Jan 12th
One of the most influential retail technologies of the last quarter-century has been digital signage – the use of video to show crisp, bright full-motion advertising, more recently incorporating multitouch interaction. At the National Retail Federation Conference in New York City next week, Microsoft will present a full demonstration of use cases for its Kinect for Windows motion capture system – which uses the technology that first premiered for Xbox 360 – in tailoring live ads directed to shoppers as they walk past window displays and items for sale.
Software being developed for Windows Embedded POSReady 7 will be shown ascertaining live data about the people they scan – including their estimated gender, height, weight, ethnicity, and age – and produce live ads tailored and targeted directly to the estimated demographic. And as the technology’s product manager told ReadWriteWeb today, business intelligence and analytics functions networked to those systems will enable advertising managers to literally change and create campaigns for those live shoppers on-the-fly.
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“Imagine you’re in a mall and you’re walking by various stores,” begins Windows Embedded director of product management John Doyle. “But in one of the stores, you see a digital sign integrated into the front window of the store. It’s showing content about what’s in the store and it attracts your interest. As you walk towards the digital sign, it recognizes you because it’s using Kinect. We have integrated Microsoft Kinect with the digital sign, and it recognizes the individual.”
On the back end of this operation is software co-developed with consumer engagement services provider Razorfish, that utilizes to estimate your personal characteristics using the data gleaned from the Kinect-gathered image. This software, as Microsoft will show at NRF, should make a disarmingly accurate estimate of your age.
“Automatically, the digital sign – because of its ability to connect to the back end and process that information – can immediately change the content that is being viewed on the digital sign,” continues Doyle. This way, a store billboard truly can market to youngsters, first by ascertaining that there are youngsters standing in front of it.
Perhaps a high-end department store on the order of Nordstrom, Doyle suggested, could tailor suggestions for such things as outdoor gear, dresses, and accessories based on the real-time data that the Kinect camera gleans from the shopper staring at its digital sign. It might not even be out of the question for software to estimate the shopper’s tastes in fashion based upon what she’s wearing at the time.
Video of Microsoft’s CES 2012 demonstration of a shopper trying on clothes without changing her own. Posted to YouTube by shopping services provider Retrevo.com.
At CES 2012 this week, Microsoft showed select customers the portion of next week’s NRF demonstration that features the virtual clothes-changing program. Here, a shopper sees herself in digital outfits that are superimposed on the camera image of herself, which is shown in reverse in order to simulate a mirror. The shopper may make gestures to interact with “charms” (as Microsoft now calls function icons, beginning with Windows 
along the top that change the function of the program.
At this point, the functionality is a little crude. Actually, it’s a bit like dressing up a member of The Sims. Simulated clothes, while three-dimensional, are stiff and appear self-illuminated, which may not necessarily lend itself to the most flattering presentation. But you can see where Microsoft is going with this. You can imagine a more evolved form of this prototype using a physics engine to approximate the weight and the shimmer of the fabric, as well as apply the same lighting characteristics as are used in the room, so that dresses don’t look like they’re being held up with garden wire.
If you were wondering how Microsoft would leverage the shopper’s personal copy of Windows or Windows Phone into the mix, here it comes: If the user has a Windows Phone, the Windows Embedded kiosk may be able to send snapshots and other data about the interaction to that phone. Conceivably – although Doyle acknowledges there are already multiple privacy issues involved – the kiosk could glean more information about the shopper via near-field communication.
A lot of this assumes that the kiosk software gets it right. Can the software really guess your age, for instance? If a human being guessed the shopper’s gender wrong, it would probably lead to a no-sale. Doyle responded that the display software might not have to make the right call all the time. It only applies its estimate during the attraction phase, when it’s trying to get the shopper to come closer. You don’t blame a store today for showing you signage featuring kids clothes even though you’re not a kid.
As these kiosks interact with customers nationwide, Microsoft’s Doyle projects a setup where data gleaned from those interactions may be mined in real time by business intelligence software on the back end. Franchise managers could ascertain which items are hot and which are not. And in cases where kiosks are previewing items that are still being sewn in the factories, those managers could make inventory decisions at that point about how many to order. Real-time interest data could be mapped and compared according to a franchise’s various regions and coverage zones.
Doyle admits this setup could give shoppers in California and elsewhere on the West Coast a certain advantage. Live ad campaigns could be deployed first on the East Coast, and tailored for maximum attractiveness and efficiency as the sun passes over the Central and Mountain time zones. “In a single slice of a day, you could optimize that business intelligence, from East Coast to West Coast, very, very quickly,” he remarks.
Though Microsoft’s CES demo involved ordinary HDTV displays, the NRF demo could utilize a new display concept from technology partner Intel, announced just yesterday, featuring a 7-foot, 6-inch-tall multitouch glass screen.
The NRF Expo will be held at the Javits Center in New York beginning next Monday, January 16. Microsoft will be distributing its display over booths 1337, 1334, 1239, 1238, and 983.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Quick SEO Results Show Impressive Site Jumps In 30 Days – PR Web (press release)
Jan 9th
 PR Web |
Quick SEO Results Show Impressive Site Jumps In 30 Days
PR Web (press release) After discovering a large part of the Google algorithm, Quick SEO Results hires new 20 in-house Link Builders to meet the strong demand for their SEO services. In just the first 30 days of its service, websites show impressive site jumps. … Training For Work As An SEO Specialist in 2012 # SEO |
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Louis CK Tries Online Video Experiment With $5 Downloadable Comedy Show – ReelSEO Online Video News
Dec 14th
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Louis CK Tries Online Video Experiment With $5 Downloadable Comedy Show
ReelSEO Online Video News The following is an index of our more popular video search engine optimization (Video SEO, VSEO,… Many of us here at ReelSEO are still settling back into our routines following the awesome SMX West… We had the privilege of speaking with Bruce Clay … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Today Show Discusses Social Q’s [VIDEO]
Dec 8th
Let us know if you agree or disagree with the recommendations for the following discussed in the video: Christmas Card via email People walking and looking at phone Facebook friend requests from co-workers Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Your browser doesn’t support iFrames 
Vote for this poll [...]
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MasterCard’s Partnerships Show Its Evolution Towards Being A Tech Company
Dec 2nd
MasterCard is continuing its big push to become known as a technology innovator and today it announced a strategic partnership and investment with mFoundry, a software-as-a-service mobile banking solution serving more than 560 banks and credit unions in the United States. MasterCard’s announcement comes on the heels of its partnership with Intel and is yet another step in the confluence of the technology and payments industries.
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What mFoundry and MasterCard plan on doing is integrating MasterCard’s PayPass technology into the financial services platform provided by mFoundry. See mFoundry’s product page for a complete list of what the company is working on. In a few words … pretty much everything mobile payments related. That includes checking your bank account, alerts from the financial institutions or banks, gifting, mobile wallet reloads and point-of-sale integration. It can work either through the mobile Web or native applications.
It is likely the POS technology stack that mFoundry has that MasterCard is most concerned with. The mobile payments company has 2D barcode (QR codes for the most part), NFC, numeric codes and sticker/SD card solutions for POS terminals. Infrastructure is the biggest barrier to widespread use of mobile payments at retailers (and NFC capable smartphones in consumers’ hands). MasterCard’s PayPass technology is what the company is pinning its notion of mobile payments to and the idea that the smartphone will be as ubiquitous one day as credit cards are now. Also, those that can afford smartphones are also more likely to be able to spend more money in general, which is a general boon to the payments industry, MasterCard or otherwise.
What does MasterCard have in its pocket now to push the boundaries of mobile payments? It has the initial partnership with Google and the Google Wallet project, it has a strategic deal with Intel to help develop new technology and infrastructure in payments and it now has mFoundry to provide services and connections to financial institutions that are already using mobile banking, finance and payments solutions.
As we would expect from a payments company like MasterCard, the company’s strategy is as much about business as it is about the actual technology. MasterCard is moving aggressively to control the ecosystem and as such kept a company like mFoundry out of the clutches of Visa and American Express. Instead of announcing a $100 million investment in e-commerce and mobile payments, the way American Express did, MasterCard is putting its money into the ecosystem where it can harvest the fruits of other companies’ innovations (especially those that are more technologically savvy) and apply those solutions to its payments infrastructure.
Here is a video that MasterCard posted having a short conversation with mFoundry.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Product Ads Now Show 5 Products
Nov 16th
The holiday shopping season is coming. Are you ready? The holiday season is one of the busiest seasons for shopping online. Online retailers should have already started seeing an increasing trend in sales online.
In order to prepare your busines…
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Search Engine Land’s SMX Social Media Marketing Show Rates Increase Saturday – Register Now!
Nov 10th
Created your Google+ corporate page? Clients asking for theirs? What are the best practices? Will +pages impact AdWords campaigns? The introduction this week of Google+ corporate pages illustrates that constant change is the norm. Keep up; attend Search Engine Land’s SMX Social Media…
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View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Latest SAP Mobile Apps Show Progress for Sybase Platform on HTML5
Oct 10th
Despite having been generally available for mobile systems like iOS for over two-and-a-half years now, you don’t hear much about something called the Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP). That may change soon, as a new set of mobile apps for human resources professionals, developed in conjunction with Sybase’s parent company SAP, are demonstrating an emerging pathway for other developers to develop custom enterprise apps in the same vain.
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The SUP system is designed to work with enterprise applications to generate RESTful Web services. Those services are exposed as APIs, and are generated for use by one of the three leading mobile platforms. There’s a reason for this: SAP wants its mobile apps to look like they belong on the platforms on which they run, so iPad apps look like iPad users expect.
Part 3 of the video set that begins here (this is Part 1) shows the creation of a Hybrid Web Container.
“SUP allows you to deliver across multiple mobile devices and form factors – iOS, Android, and BlackBerry – and what we’ve done on top of this platform is provide what we call the Hybrid Web Container,” explains Nick Brown, SAP’s senior vice president for mobile strategies. “In essence, it’s an HTML5-compliant container with native extensions into the device that allows you to access things like camera, video, and voice (which the current HTML5 does not include). This Hybrid Web Container runs on top of WebKit [or] Silverlight for Windows, and allows us to have a secure, encrypted conversation with a native store to our HTML5 container.”
The process of mobilizing
The container is essentially a basic Web form with everyday controls for entering, editing, and deleting data. Folks who’ve been designing on-screen forms since the days of Access (some would say these still are the days of Access) will be immediately familiar with this process. The underlying mechanics of these container forms are in HTML5, Brown tells us, although you can adjust and tailor the CSS to suit your company’s style or the general style of your mobile platform.
Sybase calls the act of making its enterprise databases available on mobile devices “mobilizing;” you do this using the SUP development environment. Dragging and dropping table names from the database list into a diagram creates what SUP calls a mobile business object (MBO). That object is used as a kind of prototype for the SUP server to determine how data transactions are to work between the server and mobile clients.
“Let’s take something simple like leave request approval – I want to mobilize that,” Brown says. In the SUP environment, you define how you generally want forms to appear on your target platform of choice. Then you identify the data that’s relevant to the decision making process – for leave request approval, that would include who’s making the request, for how long, when, and how much leave time remains. That’s pretty obvious, but it would also be helpful if the app could report if anyone else has requested the same holiday.
SUP takes that subset of the data model, and then performs code generation. The code that’s generated is specific to individual mobile platforms, either for HTML5 or native apps.
Productivity apps from SAP
The latest mobile productivity apps from SAP itself that use the SUP platform, announced last week for release this quarter, include SAP Manager Insight (shown above), which gives HR managers direct access to key performance indicators (KPIs) for employees. “Productivity to us means we’re providing something to an employee user of a company that helps them either perform a role within their responsibility in a corporation, or generally initiate or move a process forward that’s part of the overall back office abilities,” says Brown.
Another example is Employee Lookup, which gives a mobile user access to not just the general data about contacts, but also the structure of the organization they work for, in a map that can be traversed by finger. “Other things would be simple request creations, like a leave request to go on holiday; capturing and recording my time; and creating expense reports,” SAP’s Brown adds. “A lot of these users may be non-traditionally targeted users for corporations, who were previously supported via a paper process or a Web portal. Now, with BYOD (bring-your-own-device) policies at work, we see a real opportunity for our customers – even within SAP – to enable people to access this type of functionality in business processes more easily. A much broader audience can be addressed through mobility.”
Brown offered this illustration: Suppose a user is fairly high up in an organization, and manages other managers. She wants to obtain metrics across the entire management team, including employee retention rates and satisfaction rates. A tablet-based app could access this user in ways that Web portals couldn’t. “So I can look for issues, look for challenges, find managers who need coaching or removal, or managers I want to exemplify in the organization.”
One of the problems SAP saw with the Web portal approach is that managers tended to use the goal-setting procedures for those portals perhaps twice per year at best. Performance tracking needed to run six months or more, because that was the period between average uses. And in those organizations, managers didn’t institute rewards often enough to keep their employees happy.
So the SUP platform has SAP designate a subset of its Human Capital Management (HCM) functionality, and use that as a prototype to create a mobile interface. “You take that data model, that subset of functionality, and you put it on SUP, and then SUP compiles those databases and those workflows to the targeted devices, so you can just focus on UI – either HTML5, or native UI functionality on the device” the SAP VP says.
“Any Web developer who understands HTML as their primary development platform can take our HTML5 applications, or their portal applications,” Brown continues, “and leverage this container to deliver customized [functionality] with their labels, their look-and-feel, as well as support the look-and-feel you would expect on the devices.”
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