Tag: GE

GE Unveils A Futuristic Circular Lamp With Alexa Integration

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
GE has unveiled a futuristic circular lamp that will be able to respond to voice command thanks to its integration with Amazon’s Alexa. Essentially an Echo Dot with a funky LED light hoop on top, the lamp also comes with a speaker that allows Alexa to respond to your requests and commands, as well as built-in voice control over the lamp. GE says it is expecting to ship this product in Q2 2017.

What Brands Should Do
As Amazon started allowing third-party companies to build Alexa into their own products, We expect to see more Alexa-enabled smart home and IoT devices in the coming months. This would no doubt push conversational interfaces more deeply into consumer’s daily lives, upending the way that consumers interact with digital devices and creating a new paradigm for brand-consumer interaction. As Amazon continues to expand the underlying deep learning technologies to more services, it is time for brands seeking to stay ahead of the digital curve to start exploring how incorporating conversational interfaces may help improve the customer experience.

The Lab has extensive experience with building Alexa skills for brands. If you’re interested in learning more about this or have a client opportunity, please reach out to our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: The Verge

Lead image is a promotional image courtesy of GE

How GE Is Using Snapchat To Drum Up Interest For Its Facebook Live Event

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
GE is sending a team into the Masaya Volcano in Nicaragua, one of the world’s most active lava lakes, to install a wireless sensor network for monitoring purposes and it is using two of the hottest social media products to share this adventure with fans. Since Tuesday the company has been sending out Snapchat Stories that document its epic journey downward and is planning a Facebook Live event on August 12 straight from the site of the active volcano, allowing fans to ask the staff members all sorts of volcano-related questions.

Why Brands Should Care
GE is no stranger to livestreaming as the company has used Facebook Live and Periscope to broadcast interesting events to humanize its brand. Hosting a live event at an active volcano is an intriguing premise and using Snapchat to hype its Facebook Live event is a great touch. Brands looking to create live video content should take a cue and learn to use other social channels to properly promote Live events. In addition, Facebook has started testing mid-roll ads in Live video, something that brand marketers should look out for as well.

 

Source: The Next Web

How GE Is Using Live-Streaming To Humanize Its Brand

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
GE is pulling out all the stops for live-streaming, as the mega-conglomerate hopes to engage consumers with interesting narratives and humanize its industrial brand image. The company has experimented with several live-streaming platforms, such as Meerkat when it first came out. It also started using Periscope the day it launched and ran a couple campaigns on the Twitter-owned live-streaming platform, including the “Drone Week” campaign last summer. Most recently, GE launched its Pi Day campaign via Facebook’s Live Video, the newest of the emerging live-streaming platforms, showcasing the different applications of Pi in GE’s engineering.

What Brands Need To Do
According to GE’s global digital marketing manager Sydney Williams, live video content lends a very authentic and human feel to brands, which is especially appreciated by a younger Millennial audience. A lot of branded videos often end up a little too polished and over-produced, and live video provides a good medium to remedy that. For brands looking to experiment with live-streaming, they should be prepared on the technical front to ensure a smooth broadcast, but also willing to roll with the punches and embrace the unexpected.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Big Brands Embrace the Maker Movement

Posted on by Lab Team

The Maker Movement is a group of tech-forward DIY enthusiasts who have taken to engineering anything from electronics and 3D printing to more traditional arts and crafts. Not surprisingly, brands have begun to activate this growing community with programs that empower makers and earn goodwill in the process. Consider Levi’s, which produces a video series showcasing unique designers, or GE, which created shared workspaces and makers competitions in partnership with the online makers network, Quirky.     

GE Unveils “Social Fridge” at SXSW Using Grandstand Platform

Posted on by Lab Team


For those of you that like to party dangerously the GE Garage at SXSW 2012 actually makes you sign a waiver on their iPad before you can enter their event, which showcases serious industrial machinery (alongside less threatening margaritas).  The most compelling station in the tent though is actually the most innocuous—it’s a Social Fridge designed in partnership with iStrategyLabs which leverages their Grandstand interactive social media platform.

The concept is simple: if ten people check-in to the fridge on Foursquare it physically unlocks and allows you to grab a free beverage reward.  A screen next to the fridge acts as both a call-to-action and a scoreboard showing you how close you are to winning your prize.

The Grandstand suite includes a number of games that let you connect people in novel ways using social media at events.  It has great applications for brands and venues, and GE’s customized display shows that using social media to trigger events in the physical world can be used to great effect. Watch a time lapse video of the fridge construction below: