LBi London

LBi and bigmouthmedia release their Innovations in Retail whitepaper

Posted by Adam Russell May 23rd, 2011

Today LBi and bigmouthmedia release their Innovations in Retail whitepaper, covering the impact of digital technologies on retailers in 2011. Full disclosure – I contributed towards the paper, but it is worth blogging about because it highlights how rapidly the internet is changing expectations within the retail sector. It also provides a really strong summary of some of the opportunities that exist for those able to rapidly innovate.

Just yesterday Apple celebrated their tenth year in retail with a store makeover that put the iPad 2 at the forefront of the shopping experience, acting as the product price label and spec sheets. What’s more, the iPad’s enable you to hail an Apple Specialist and compare products as well as enabling Apple to centrally update prices worldwide instantly. It isn’t an option yet it will be would be much of a surprise to see if the iPads offering ‘I want this!’ style social sharing, direct from a traditional retail environment.

Of course, the LBi and bigmouthmedia whitepaper contains plenty of talk about smart phones, tablet devices and internet connected TVs but what is interesting is that the paper steers clear of the standard ‘more people are buying stuff on a mobile’ vernacular and highlights some of the less obvious behaviours such technologies create amongst consumers.

I myself am what is now dubbed a ‘digital shoplifter’. I enjoy the ability to browse a real physical retail environment yet when I find something I want to buy my first reaction is to check the price online via my iPhone. If the price difference is greater than my perceived ‘instant gratification’ value, then I’ll just leave the shop and order online.

This clearly represents a challenge for bricks and mortar retailers, but it also suggests a shortcoming amongst online retailers too – they still are not able compete with the feeling of holding a product in your hands. And cruciually, outside of entertainments and media where digital downloads get you close enough, no-one can get delivery times down to zero. There will always be a desire to get things sooner!

Also as important for retail is the impact of technologies that bridge the physical and the digital. Much more than allowing consumers to pay for items by flashing their phones, the impact of mobile technology within a retail environment could be huge. Imagine offering users instant in store recommendations based on their online purchase habits or instant credit via QR or NFC (Near Field Communication) for checking in via social platforms.

Social media is also becoming hugely disruptive within retail, as the paper points out. The move towards customer service within a social environment will almost certainly have its winners and losers  - only by sharing customer service and support tasks with their most engaged customers will retailers truly get the most from social channels.

It is clear that consumers’ expectations are on the rise and that retailers will need to continue to search for ways to reward loyal, engaged customers with unique and surprising experiences. Take a look at the full paper to find out how – it is available for free online now.

Tags: apple, bigmouthmedia, innovation, innovations in retail, ipad, LBi, Lost Boys International, mobile, nfc, qr, research, retail, Social Media, white paper, whitepaper

0 comments Share

A Christmas collaboration

Posted by Simon Gill April 20th, 2011

Tags: Christmas, client, LBi, mobile

12 comments Share

Interface developers’ weeknote – 17/9/10

Posted by Jon Wyatt September 17th, 2010

Project ‘Stretchy Balls’ gains momentum

Ray has been working in conjunction with Magnus on the Stretchy Balls robotic table project (a video of work-in-progress).

They will be exhibiting at the London Tent Interactive Design Festival 2010 at The Truman Brewery.
The finished piece will use a canvas 1.6m wide with an 8 x 8 array of servoes / rods, and respond to input from a webcam which will be pointed at the floor of the exhibition. As people move about the floor, their movements will be mirrored by the movement of the balls on the table canvas.

New graphing engine uses vector graphics that work cross platform (including iPhone)

Project: “Green nightmare”
We’re currently working on a graphing ‘engine’ for a client project.
The technologies used are:

• Raphael – to render the graphs using vector graphics which will scale to any size without pixellation. An iOS-friendly alternative to Flash. Requires no browser plugins and works in all major browsers including IE6
• JSON – for lightweight supply of data to the graphing engine using Ajax
• CSS / HTML used wherever possible for extra interface elements eg. Tooltips
• The graphing engine itself is written in Javascript. It’s flexible in the format of JSON data it receives, as any conversion routine can be specified to adjust the JSON structure so it can be rendered
  

On the use of data attributes:

Used with the Raphael graphing engine. The container element for the graph contains all the information needed to initialise itself, within its own data attributes, including a reference to a JSON file with the graph data itself, and units for the axes.

<div class=”graph” data-graph-type=”vertical-bar” data-currency=”us” data-location=”/response_scripts/visualisations_json/vertical-bar-chart-8bars-3.json” data-unit-x=”time.middle” data-unit-y=”amount.us“></div>

This simple markup can be included on initial page load, or injected into the page using ajax. An initialisation routine can then be invoked to retrieve the JSON data and render the graph.
The shapes that make up graphs created with Raphael, are also DOM nodes and can have data attributes, eg. The node below is a single bar from a bar graph and stores data about that point that can then be used to render an information tooltip or popup when the user interacts with the graph:

<rect x=”265.830237777393” y=”82.2897777777778” width=”28.811278930368974” height=”223.7102222222222” data-key=”key1ebneuwiu2nf92y2t4u04” data-behaviour=”show-view” data-point=”{“key“:“key1ebneuwiu2nf92y2t4u04“,“label“:“TELEPHONE“,“amount“:{“eu“:95.228,“us“:209.5016},“items“:{“transactions“:2},“index“:0,“time“:{“start“:1279472031,“end“:1280076830,“range”:{“start”:”19/07/2010″,”end”:”25/07/2010″,”duration”:”1 week”},”period”:3,”middle”:1279774430.5},”colors”:{“base”:”F1E410″,”gradient”:”FFF87E”,”colorIndex”:22},”max”:3,”behaviour”:”show-view”,”currencyAmount”:209.5016,”currencyLabel”:”US”}”/>

Note – data attributes validate under an HTML 5 doctype but not under HTML 4

Facebook API harnessed to publicise energy efficiency goals

Project: “Race against Time”
The new “Energy Fit” site lets customers set goals to reduce their energy use. Now the site lets them automatically update their Facebook page when they complete an energy efficiency goal.
Lbi linked the site to Facebook’s recently introduced “Graph” API (which replaces the older “Connect” API)

‘Over the air’ conference

Tim and Pia went for the mobile conference ‘Over the Air’ in the Imperial College last Friday.

Interactive designer Aral Balkan (www.aralbalkan.com) gave a very inspiring speech about “the art of emotional design” – how important it was to take users’ emotion into account when designing IA and GUI of mobile applications. He also highlighted that User Experience should strictly take priority on top of creative process and any technical difficulties. He has shown us couple of good iPhone applications including his own – Feathers (http://feathersapp.com/)  – a successful Twitter apps allows you to type special characters.

Bruce Lawson gave an extremely useful presentation about HTML5 on Mobile App/Web – http://www.slideshare.net/brucelawson/bruce-lawsonovertheair. He explaining the actual meaning of HTML5 and how it will make front-end coding more pleasure (e.g. built-in webform sliders, calendar, video and canvas) He also shown example of client-side validation, animation effects , embedding video player and controller without using any JS. He suggested canvas is not a replacement for SVG. Canvas draw pixel directly on screen which consume less process power, where on some occasion, SVG is more suitable for usability and accessibility purposes. He also demonstrated the new W3C standard for mobile apps (widget – http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/), which can be easily produced by create .zip with HTML, CSS and JS and rename the file extension to .wgt – currently only supported on Opera browser.
The more interesting thing was he announced that there is a research group inside W3C called DAP which are researching/defining new API for retrieving Contacts/Calendars/Media Capture and Messaging on your mobile – W3C DAP can be found more info at http://www.w3.org/2009/dap/

We came across an organization called UNltd (www.unltd.org.uk) – which provides funding and resources to entrepreneurs which have an initiative using new technologies to solve problems in no developed countries.

Brian Rieger (wwww.yiibu.com) gave an interesting presentation on ‘Rethinking the mobile web’. He demonstrate some live example of achieve “one web” in real world – worth it to see it:
http://www.slideshare.net/bryanrieger/rethinking-the-mobile-web-by-yiibu

“Real World With your mobile” presented by Geoff Ballinger showed the technology around real world recognition using mobile technologies. Through

bar code: redlaser, google 2xing and pic2shop/visionSmart
visual search / video recognizion : googles & google shopper
Compass / GPS : location and orientation
Layar AR & RFID tags.

What would Picassado do? It was a panel formed by Mathias Dahlston, Jason Fields, Tom Hume, Mills and Filip visujic. That was a good debate around the topic around technology and art between the panel and audient.

Jim Brown, CTO of Cloudmade gave a presentation on Geolocation / Multitasking using vertical app for social media. He used as example

London Cycle (http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/london-cycle-maps-routes/id383292875?mt=8)
City Gays (http://itunes.apple.com/app/gaycities-your-gay-city-guide/id303661699?mt=8);

He was highlight the following five points regarding why we should vertical app rather than google api.

1. The possibility to customise maps.
2. Add rich user specific content.
3. Add navigation
4. Monetize with ads & sponsored pols
5. Let you and your user to map and customize their world.

Tags: Facebook, interfacedevelopment, mobile, raphael

0 comments Share

London Guathon DDD Event

Posted by Bahareh Boostani August 18th, 2010

Last Friday I had the good fortune (as well as good friends who did the booking for me) to attend London Guathon DDD event. This was a free community event hosted by Microsoft to reveal their latest technology roadmaps and strategies. Within the geek community these event tickets are  as prized as the golden ones within Wonka  Bars with all 240 places being filled in less than 20min.

Despite being late due to the Runaway tube train  and the Northern line being closed I managed to get to the Odeon in Covent Garden just on time (OK, I was 15 minutes late, but the session started 15 minutes after I arrived).

ScottGu in London Guathon DDD

Scott Guthrie opened up the event with an introduction to the sessions of the day. These sessions spanned four different aspects of Microsoft’s new technologies:

1. VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4
2. ASP.NET MVC 2
3. Windows Phone 7 Development
4. Web Development Futures: ASP.NET MVC 3, SQL CE and IIS Express

What was cool?

First session had many tips and tricks from Scott ‘Gu’ including some which are guaranteed to make the geeks squeal with delight.
The second session was the real meat in the sandwich for those who care about content and the way it is presented. For the past 10 years, ASP.Net was a great platform in terms of development productivity and for building enterprise applications. But its weakness was in the poor quality front-end code it generated; something that LBi interface developers and SEO consultants constantly complained about. However, Microsoft’s new ASP.NET MVC will be a game changer in this part (there are useful packages in IIS 7 to help on the SEO side.)

And yes, Windows Phone 7 will be released around October in UK. Microsoft intends to send a strong statement of intent to the smart phones market. Mike Ormond’s slides on the day can be found here.

And finally, In the last session on Web futures Scott Gu announced new technologies including IIS Express, MVC3, code-first Entity Framework, Razor (the new view engine for ASP.NET) that is going to be released soon by Microsoft. Then he discussed the common themes of these new developments which are to keep the existing technologies working better and cleaner and to enable extensibility and customization.

Revolutionary… No, but Microsoft are moving in the right direction whilst correcting some of the legacy issues of .Net. Who knows one day we may be able to have more than one form again…

Microsoft continue to pick up many of the good ideas that have been implemented in other languages for a little while and we’re starting to see some real productivity improvements as a consequence. However Microsoft remains a big beast and how these developments relate to the Sharepoints and Silverlights of the world remains to be seen. Refinement rather than reinvention is definitely order of the day for Microsoft and for that they should be commended.

Tags: ASP.NET, IIS, Microsoft, mobile, mvc, Technology, UK, VS2010, Web design, WP7

0 comments Share