Google purchased Nest to get ahead of the connected home market, and now major brands are catching on to the notion as well. Today, Honeywell announced an official competitor to the Nest; called the Lyric, it similarly controls central AC through an app that learns your preferences, when you’re home and away, and controls the temperature in your apartment or home to match your habits. It geofences your apartment, and claims to save you energy, essentially functioning in the same way as the Nest but without the Google or startup tag attached to it. The Nest officially has a serious competitor.
Category: Percolate
Playstation TV Coming This Year
Just when you thought you had a handle on all the over-the-top platforms, Playstation announces the North America release of Playstation TV. The $99 device will stream PS Vita and select PS 3 games to your TV in addition to media services like Hulu and Netflix. More importantly, it enables remote play for current PS4 owners who can stream games to additional TVs without the need to move their main console.
Eye Tracking For Gaming Is Just the Start
At this week’s E3 convention, SteelSeries is showing off its new Sentry Eye Tracker, a device designed to track where a gamer looks while playing. This primary function can offer insights when training for gaming tournaments, but it is promising in a much wider range of fields. Tobii, a Swedish company that supplies the tracking technology for the Sentry, sees its technology being used to assist people with disabilities, conduct academic research, and track attention for market research. It is likely we will soon see PCs coming to market with this sort of technology baked in, so it stands to reason that we will be seeing more and more applications of eye tracking in the next few years.
Microsoft’s E3 Press Conference
Microsoft’s E3 Conference can be defined more by what it didn’t say than what it did. There was no mention of the once requisite Kinect, social media integration or video. Instead, the tech giant focused on showcasing their major game partners like Halo 5 and Call of Duty which of course look stunning in the gameplay demos.
iOS 8 Credit Card Scanner To Boost Mcommerce
iOS 8 has a new feature which will use your iPhone camera to scan credit card information for more seamless purchasing online. What’s more is that website developers do not need to enable the feature as Safari will activate it whenever a credit card is requested and prompt users to scan within the keypad. According to eMarketer, more than 19% of US retail ecommerce will be on mobile devices in 2014. Expect this development to boost purchases from the mobile web in the future.
Accessing The ROI Of Content Marketing
Brands as publishers is the latest marketing movement as we see more and more brands creating original content on owned channels. Much like the beginnings of social, clients are grappling with measurement. Should success be accessed from a marketing perspective or a publisher? The answer lies somewhere in between.
Take a look at content marketing network, Contently’s latest findings above. The thoughtful piece outlines 4 keys to calculating the ROI like considering engaged time and repeat visitors which is something our friends over at Chartbeat have put into action.
Wearables You May Actually Want To Wear
Sometimes we get so caught up in wearable tech functions that we forget the form factor. You do need to actually wear these things at the end of the day. In an effort to push Glass into the mainstream, Google is pairing up with designer Diane von Furstenberg to design limited-edition frames. The cultural cache may provide some renewed excitement for the groundbreaking tech that has many turned off thus far.
To see great examples of tech meeting fashion, check out Netatmo’s June, an elegant UV sensing bracelet.
Native Ads That Scale: Twitter Acquires Namo Media
Namo Media was one of MoPub’s main competitors as they offered an SDK that allowed developers to easily integrate native advertising into the feeds within their apps. They connected into multiple ad exchanges to dynamically fill ad inventory using existing assets and copy, adding the flexibility and scale mobile native ads were in need of. It was their SDK that was the main differentiator to MoPub, but Twitter’s offering obviously had more scale.
Now it appears Twitter has acquired the company in search of technological improvements to MoPub. Should be exciting news for mobile advertisers who can easily port over existing assets into native streams. If you can’t beat em, join em!
Anti-Smoking Campaign On Vine
Quit, an anti-smoking charity, has released a series of Vines to relay the age-old message of smoking cessation. Each video starts “Before the video starts again, another smoker will die” as a smoker dies every 6 seconds. It’s a novel, albeit grim way of marrying medium and message. Additionally, the three videos have separate sign-offs to hit their distinct targets – the uncommitted youth, the invincible Millennial and the resigned older smoker. On Gen Z week, we need to recognize Vine as a new medium to deliver succinct messaging that cuts through the clutter in today’s fully mediated world.
Introducing The Water Purifying Billboard
Cause marketing is great, especially when your media is actually powering the cause not with dollars but with action. That’s the premise behind the air-purifying billboard in Peru and most recently water-cleaning billboard from Japan’s Shokubutsu Hana cosmetics brand. Read the full article to see how they’re doing it.
