Rear window airbag

Following on yesterday’s post on small cars, we are posting today’s news on a micro car invention: the rear window airbag:

Toyota has developed a new rear window airbag that will be standard equipment on its upcoming iQ micro car. There is very little space between the back seat and the rear window on small cars like the Smart and the upcoming iQ, which means there won’t be as much metal to absorb the impact of a rear collision.With Toyota’s new rear window airbag, the rear air bag is ejected from the roof lining during a fender bender. Toyota says it will help protect the heads and necks back seat passengers.

Filed under: Automotive, Innovation, Science , Cars, Innovation

Small car wars

A couple of years ago (actually four) we visited with a potential automotive client, and during our conversations argued that they needed to speed up their small car programs and get to market faster. Normally the product development cycle is at least six years, but in this case the client had vehicles around the world that would fit the North American market well with minor tweaks easily accomplished over a 12-24 month period. The client did not take our advice as seriously as we wanted (they did not hire us at the time).

I met with them again last week, to talk about something else – namely: “How do you help consumers imagine a future that is vastly different than today?” During that meeting the most senior person on their team brought up the meeting four years earlier and said: “I remember four years ago you pointed out that we should focus more on small cars – how did you have that foresight?” It is always nice when clients (and potential clients) commend you for past predictions that have played out as you said they would.

So after saying “thank you!” I explained that the reason small cars made sense then (and now) is that, as American’s go from having 2.1 vehicles per household to closer to three, that third vehicle will be a smaller commuter, grocery, soccer practice (if you do not carpool), and/or dinner date kind of car. It is not only because of gasoline prices that small cars make sense. There is actually great utility in them when you have already covered your other needs with the two other cars in your garage.

Gasoline prices will continue to fluctuate, and probably upward more than downward, and so the small vehicles in the carpool will be used more, and the big cars are still needed… but they just will be driven a little less. Overall mileage will continue to increase. American driving habits over the long run will not change – we still need to get around.

Filed under: Automotive, Information, Market Research , Cars, Clients, Gasoline, Research

Nokia in the news this morning

Nokia is expected to unveil a high-profile touch-screen phone, known by gadget aficionados as the “Tube,” at an event on Thursday.

In launching the device, the world’s largest handset maker by shipments takes its stab at Apple’s iPhone, which set off a wave of copycat devices that attempted to emulate its sleek user interface. Nokia is the last of the major handset makers to put out a touch-screen cellphone.

The device, which will be called the Nokia 5800, emphasizes music first and is more of a multimedia player than a full-blown smart phone. Key to the device will be Nokia’s Comes With Music software, which takes on Apple’s iTunes store.

Motorola Inc. has its Ming product in China. Sony Ericsson plans to launch its Xperia X1, and Research In Motion Ltd. is working on a touch-screen BlackBerry. [wsj.com]

….this is going to be exciting to follow….

Filed under: Innovation , Consumer, Electronics, Innovation, Research

Music on microSD Cards – can you say “MiniDisc” or just “Bad Idea”?

The announcement that four labels have joined forces with SanDisk to market and sell music albums on microSD cards came as no surprise. This is just the continuation of the misunderstanding record companies have about the relationship between customers and their music.

Why would anyone pay more for an album on a microSD card than on iTunes when they are used to getting the music online, saving it to their memory stick or CD, and mix and matching songs and artists?

One of the driving forces behind iTunes is the ability to download individual songs and not have to use some medium (other than iPod) to lug around in order to listen to the music. Imagine how the microSD cards will get lost in backpacks, car seats, among the paper stacks or in old pizza boxes. We’ve been wrong before, but this one we are pretty sure is not going to fly.

Filed under: Innovation, Marketing , Consumers, Music

Who Listens to Podcasts Anyway?

Podcasts entered the online scene as the latest greatest a couple of years ago. Since then short form services like Twitter and updates on Facebook and LinkedIn has arrived, and now take a significant share of the space of communications between friends, fans, and business associates.

While these services (like most things on the net skew younger, podcasts were initially thought to be for a more mature audience. It appears that also here the younger demographic dominates:

Podcast listeners: 22% of men and 16% of women in recent Pew survey tune into podcasts. The rate of downloads is highest among younger, well-educated, financially comfortable users. Of those who have downloaded at least one podcast, 27% are 18-29 years old, 23% have a college degree, and 23% have household income of $75K or more.

All three characteristics better from a marketing point of view than the national averages. So if you have not already considered this form of communicating your brand, now might be a good time to do so.

Filed under: Market Research, Marketing , Marketing, Podcast, Research, Youth

Venice Architecture Biennale

Dutch architects NL presented these images in a larger series in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Minimum Speed 200 km/h – the products that surround us often have unused capacities, we only use a fraction of their potential.

Flower Power – can we move from what the Dutch call “pollution of the horizon” to “heroic” configurations? Is it possible to create an Eiffel Tower, Atomium or St Louis Arch dedicated to the production of environmentally friendly energy?

Google Forest – the sea levels rise. Less land is available. How can we increase the capacity of our cities?

Filed under: Innovation , Architecture, Research

Miles of Aisles for Milk? Not Here

From the New York Times: Like cars and homes, grocery stores are beginning to shrink.

After years of building bigger stores — many larger than a football field and carrying 60,000 items — retailers are experimenting with radically smaller grocery stores that emphasize prepared meals, fresh produce and grab-and-go drinks.

The idea is to lure time-starved shoppers who want to pick up a few items or a fast meal without wandering long grocery aisles or paying restaurant prices.

Safeway has opened a smaller-format store in Southern California, and Jewel-Osco is building one in Chicago. Wal-Mart plans to open four “Marketside” stores in the Phoenix area this fall, and Whole Foods Market is considering opening smaller stores.

And here in the northern suburbs of Pittsburgh, the grocery chain Giant Eagle opened a Giant Eagle Express last year that is about one-sixth the size of its regular stores. It has gas pumps, wireless Internet and flat-screen televisions in a small cafe, a drive-through pharmacy and an expansive delicatessen that offers sushi, rotisserie chickens and ready-to-heat dinners.

“It’s perfect,” said Dusty McDonald, a 29-year-old bank teller who was buying breakfast sandwiches recently for her co-workers at the Giant Eagle Express. “It’s on my way to work. It only takes me 10 minutes to get in and out.”

The opening of smaller stores upends a long-running trend in the grocery business: building ever-larger stores in the belief that consumers want choice above all. While the largest traditional grocery stores tend to be about 85,000 square feet, some cavernous warehouse-style stores and supercenters are two or three times that size.

Statistics compiled by the Food Marketing Institute show that the average size of a grocery store dipped slightly in 2007 — to a median of 47,500 square feet — after 20 years of steady growth.

The biggest push in such stores is coming from the British retailer Tesco, which made a splashy entry into the United States last fall, opening a 10,000-square-foot Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market in Las Vegas.

Since then, Tesco has opened 72 stores in Nevada, Arizona and Southern California.

Gary Smith, founder of Encore Associates, which advises the food and consumer goods industry, said the smaller stores opened by other chains were “a loud message to Tesco that they are not going to be able to walk in and grab market share.”

Mr. Smith added: “It’s also a way for them to do some testing for if and when Tesco comes to their market. They are better able to counter it.”

Besides Tesco, grocery retailers face competition on multiple fronts. Chains ranging from Target to CVS to dollar stores are selling more groceries, and some small convenience stores — long the domain of warmed-over hot dogs and microwave burritos — are offering higher-quality food.

The big grocery chains are not thinking about closing their larger stores, which have been a success. But they hope to capture new business with the smaller stores, appealing to consumers on days when they do not have time for a long shopping trip.

“The average person goes shopping for 22 minutes,” said Phil Lempert, who edits Supermarketguru.com, a Web site that tracks retail trends. “You can’t see 30,000 or 40,000 products. We are moving into an era when people want less assortment.”

Jim Hertel, managing partner at the firm Willard Bishop, which advises supermarkets, added, “If you’ve got 50 feet of ketchup and what you want is Hunt’s 64-ounce and you can’t find it, people get overwhelmed.”

Of course, small grocery stores have been around forever, and some old-time neighborhood markets still exist. Meanwhile, a handful of specialty retailers have proved that shoppers will flock to smaller stores if they are offered a novel experience.

Trader Joe’s, for one, has thrived by offering a limited selection of high-quality, relatively inexpensive products in quirky stores that are 15,000 square feet or less. Aldi and Save-A-Lot are drawing customers in droves by selling a limited assortment of aggressively discounted products.

What distinguishes the new stores is that they are being built by more traditional retailers, and they emphasize fresh, prepared foods for busy consumers.

Kevin Srigley, a senior vice president at Giant Eagle, whose stores are spread across western Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Maryland, said the express store seeks to provide customers with a “smart stop to save you time on the things you need most,” in addition to offering fresh foods.

He said the idea for the express store came from Tesco stores in Europe — his company has a longstanding relationship with the British retailer — and from research that detailed the varying needs of consumers.

Mr. Srigley said he was pleased with many aspects of the company’s first Giant Eagle Express store, in Harmar Township, like customer reaction to the prepared foods and baked goods. But since the store was meant as a laboratory, he said, Giant Eagle may tweak the concept before opening more of them.

Will customers come to the smaller stores? Analysts said that Tesco’s initial sales fell short of expectations and the company stopped opening new ones for several months this year to assess customer feedback and make adjustments.

Still, a Tesco spokesman, Brendan Wonnacott, said that the company was pleased with the stores’ results and that the number of customers and sales were increasing.

“This is a format we are excited about, that our customers are excited about,” he said.

The Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market in Laguna Hills, Calif., offers row after row of bagged produce and its own line of prepared meals that are either chilled or frozen. Customers shopping there recently said they liked the store, though several said they wished that Tesco carried more British specialties.

“They have the best frozen food I’ve ever tasted,” said Nathan Cromeenes, 35, who lives nearby and longed for English shortbread.

He said he liked not having to choose among 50 varieties of spaghetti sauce. “They just have one, and it’s really good.”

Dana Gurr, a 49-year-old saleswoman in Laguna Hills, was less enthusiastic. She said the store was sterile and the vegetables went bad quickly. “It’s not that fresh, but it is easy,” she said.

The reviews were similarly mixed, though mostly positive, at the Giant Eagle Express outside Pittsburgh.

Peter and Kim Maguire stopped by the store for some last-minute items en route to a camping trip. They ended up buying chips, strawberries, blueberries and hummus.

“We pop in here for little things we forget,” said Ms. Maguire, 39. Her husband, 38, added that the store has “great lunches,” including sushi and burritos.

RoseAnn Zanoli, 68, said the express store was “good when you need them.” While she found some eggs, she said she came up empty when looking for a card for her 50th wedding anniversary. “They don’t carry everything that you need,” she said.

Filed under: Marketing , Consumer, Research

New Social Relationships Through Twitter and Facebook

If you listen carefully you can hear a distant rumble from over the horizon. It’s the sound of sociologists advancing slowly towards our online data trail, about to release the mother of all data analysis campaigns that will rain from the internet like a storm from above. New York Times had a fascinating about online social networking tools, discussing how different forms of social relationships are being formed through the use of ‘broadcast to subscriber’ tools like Twitter and Facebook.

These articles pop up quite frequently, discussing how young people live in a ‘post-privacy’ world, or how our personal lives become increasingly public to our friends and acquaintances, but they rarely mention the ways in which these social networks can be used to reveal and exploit the dynamics of social power.

Sociology gets a bad rap in science as being ‘wooly’ or ‘vague’, but it’s often not to do with the methods its uses, but with the way of gathering data.

When attempting to understand social networks, traditional studies may ask people to fill in questionnaires about their social contacts and then the researchers draw inferences about who are the most important players in the community.

Two developments have made this much more powerful. The first is social network analysis, or rather, the application of rigorous mathematical methods from graph theory and network theory to social network analysis.

This allows the quantification of the network in important an interesting ways – such as who is most connected, whether the network is tightly integrated or how fragile it is.

One of the most interesting findings from these studies is that the most connected people, or those with the most explicit status (such as being the boss) aren’t always the most important people in a network.

For example, ‘friend collectors’ on Facebook and MySpace may seem to be the most socially connected, but they’re not necessarily the most influential because many of the connections represent very superficial social connections. Similarly, someone who has only a few connections may be connected to people influential in other subgroups, and so might have a huge knock-on influence. Social network analysis can identify these people.

The second development that has made sociology much more powerful is that the ‘wooliness’ in gathering data is increasingly disappearing because services like Facebook and Twitter mean we are creating the data ourselves, in incredible detail.

One use of this data is to sell to advertising space to marketing companies. Targeted advertising is now common, by location, age, sex or whatever explicit data you enter into your profile.

A much more powerful approach is to target advertising so it appears on the profile of the most influential people on the network. Indeed, Google has just registered a patent that describes exactly this process.

One of the advantages is that it can take advantage of the explicit data, and can identify the key people in a group, and is fairly resistant to friend collectors because it doesn’t just rely on totting up friends, it looks at the network as a whole.

So you could identity the most influential people in the 18-25 age bracket, or the most influential in a small town, or the most influential people that like a certain type of movie.

Online networks can then sell advertising space ranked by influence, like Google sells adwords based on popularity.

Better still, it gives a quantified way of sponsoring highly selected people. You could be the David Beckham of 18-35 year old salsa fans in your town, sponsored to put the latest Latin sounds on your playlist.

Like celebrities, each of us will have an individual worth to advertisers, a price on our profile, and we will be the commodity that technology companies sell to marketers.

These new online social networking tools allow the companies that operate them an insight into the social power structures that run through our lives, and the opportunity to influence them. [mindhacks.com]

Filed under: Information, Marketing, Networks, Science , Network, Online, Social, Sociology, Tools

Urban Surprise: More Bicyclists Means Fewer Accidents

In a study that at first glance seems counterintuitive, researchers at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, reviewed safety studies from 17 countries and 68 cities in California and found that the more people bike in a community, the less they collide with motorists.

“It appears that motorists adjust their behavior in the presence of increasing numbers of people bicycling because they expect or experience more people cycling,” said Julie Hatfield, an injury expert from the university.

With fewer accidents, people perceive cycling as safer, so more people cycle, thus making it even safer, she said.

“Rising cycling rates mean motorists are more likely to be cyclists, and therefore be more conscious of, and sympathetic towards, cyclists,” she said.

Safety experts said the decrease in accidents that comes with an increase in cycling is independent of improvements in cycling-friendly laws and better infrastructure such as bike paths. The safety studies reviewed were from Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, 14 other European countries, and 68 cities in California.

Although the review focused on bicycling, it appears that the more is safer rule also applies to pedestrians, Hatfield said. [livescience]

Filed under: Market Research, Science , Bike, Health, Research, Science, Traffic

Prototype: Scope, a camera for kids

Inspired by James Nachtwey’s TED Prize wish, designer Bas Groenendaal shares this prototype camera with TED. The Scope camera has a fresh look and a singular purpose, he says: to be used as a therapeutic instrument for underprivileged children, e.g. children living in (former) warzones. Children can take photographs and self-portraits in order to rediscover their environment and identity, and share their point of view with others.

With its open-steering-wheel design (you click the shutter by squeezing the sides), Scope invites a new perspective on picture-taking, removing the distance between the photographer and her subject. [more on TEDBlog]

Filed under: Innovation, Science , Design, Innovation, Science