It’s nice to get a surprise, and it is also nice to get something you’ve been waiting for. The Matter Box that arrived through the post yesterday was a bit of both. I got an email saying it would be with me, then one saying it would be delayed.
Oh the suspense! Well managed communications though – a general note: if you are going to be late with something, let people know. Much better than letting people down. Well done Matter.
The general idea behind Matter Box is best explained by Matter themselves:
Matter is a new and innovative way for companies to talk to people by giving you real, physical stuff – things to hold in your hands, keep in your drawer, or give to your friends.
In a digital age, we want to bring companies and people together around real, physical things
I like the sentiment. As much as I am a massive on-line advocate, real physical stuff trumps the on-line world anytime.
It isn’t easy to show in a picture, so let me list what was in the box:
- Cadbury Cranberry & Granola Bar
- BBC Audio Comedy sampler
- Original Source Orange Oil & Ginger hair and body wash
- LOVEFiLM DVD cleaning cloth and a month’s movies
- O2 sim card pack
- Pimm’s, Baileys, Bell’s & Gordon’s winter drinks pack - recipes and ‘roaring fire’ DVD
- Sampler of ‘Let Battle Commence’ by Conn Iggulden / Harper Collins.
The Cadbuy Cranberry and Granola bar was a timely peace offering for someone – and very nice too. I tried to dig around on the Cadbury (.co.uk) site to see what other things they made that I’d not heard about before. Turned out to be harder than I thought. The
a glass and a half full productions site actually had more info, but I had to wade through megabytes of flash games just to get to basic product information. Grrr…
The
Original Source stuff smells amazing. I like the website too – it is snazzy. However, it still wanted me to play a game – I just wanted to find out if they did any tea tree products! I’ll have to look through the shelves next time I am in a shop. Anyway, the orange and ginger smells absolutely wonderful and doesn’t seem to have set off any allergic reactions.
I picked out those two products as I’ll come back to the others (and a couple are probably something for my work blog), I also picked them because they are good examples of how this sort of marketing can be very effective. A piece of paper wouldn’t have got me to try the products, or drawn a mention. They are something you really have to experience…
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Posted 3 years, 1 month ago. 1 comment
I’ve started using Flock for my ‘social browsing’ – it integrates nicely with many of the services I use (WordPress, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook). This labeled screen shot from the Flock folks gives an idea of what it can do – and this post was edited and posted via Flock too…
Tags: flock
Posted 3 years, 3 months ago. Add a comment
So, you are wondering how to find the nearest hotspot? This one spotted via an article on The Register:
Get yourself one of these, for a mere £20 or so:
How could we have survived all this time without one? Of course, you could always put that money towards a month or two of 3G service. I still can’t seem to find a hotspot when I need one!
Posted 3 years, 12 months ago. Add a comment
Ah… the Nabaztag Rabbit. I’d forgotten how badly I needed one of these until I saw a post on Girly Geekdom that reminded me about them. The Nabaztag (Armenia for rabbit apparently) is a cute looking WiFi enabled smart device, which has recently been updated with lots of new capabilities. It can indicate the status of pretty much anything by moving or wiggling its ears. It can also read (speech to text) and listen (speech to text). It has a flashing tummy as well. What more could you want? Oh, ok. It has an RFID now reader too… Shame the website is such a slush of flash, I would love to just get a speck sheet!
We will see a lot more intelligent devices as the underlying technology gets cheaper and more compact – increasingly these kind of devices can be build with a single chip. It is a much faster way of checking your email that firing up your PC to find nothing is there, apart from the usual SPAM of course!
Posted 4 years, 1 month ago. 2 comments
I’ve been a long-time fan of the Quiet PC folks, from the days when they were based down the road. However, I’m in a bad mood with them now, as they just emailed me details of the Zalman 2D/3D monitors. You need the appropriate 3D glass and nVidia card (and not Windows Vista as the drivers are XP only right now). It is almost enough to make me fire up the old PC instead of the Mac, almost.
Posted 4 years, 1 month ago. Add a comment
I first found out about BugLabs via a post on Scoble’s blog. They have a fantastic uber-gadget, which is essentially a submicrocomputer base with USB ports, ethernet and so on, running Linux, into which you can plug various modules. There are about 80 gadgets on their roadmap such as screens, cameras, motion sensors and the like.
You take the base system, then snap on the compentents you need, creating your own unique gadget in real-time. If my eldest son sees this thing, I am in big trouble, he’ll want a dozen and would have ideas for a hundred more modules! There is an SDK to develop apps and BugLabs are driving the growth of a development community around it. The APIs and connections are open, you can download the specs from their site, so anyone can create modules and applications for it.
If you want to see more, here are a set of videos of Scoble interviewing BugLabs CEO and the marketing guy (is than a new industry job title?)
I can see how you could end up with a few hundred of these around the house doing everything from security to environmental monitoring. Their viral videos and blog are quite cool too!
Posted 4 years, 2 months ago. Add a comment
