April 23, 2015 - No Comments!

IBM Apps Built w AAPL’s HealthKit Will Offer Medical Advice

For a long time we've been saying that Apple is quietly building health technology and wearable hardware that's ideally positioned to disrupt the health profession. Much like iTunes did to the music industry Apple's health platform will spawn an industry structured on real-time data, analysis, diagnosis and -we believe- innovative healthcare services.

Does it seem overly optimistic? We don't think so. In fact, data analysis of this nature would allow health practitioners to make more accurate recommendations.

IBM has created a new online service, called Watson Health Cloud, designed to analyze data funneled through HealthKit. It is intended to help companies and researchers find medically useful patterns in data collected via Apple’s platform, and to build tools that offer personalized medical advice based on an individual’s HealthKit data.

And if this is tied to genome mapping, we're talking about a revolutionary approach to medicine.

In a recent Freakonomics podcast, How Do We Know What Really Works in Healthcare? Stephen J. Dubner analyzes the state of Healthcare and he left me convinced that change is coming fast. It's really worth a listen. His position...

...a lot of the conventional wisdom in medicine is nothing more than hunch or wishful thinking. A new breed of data detectives is hoping to change that.

We're excited to see this play out as more apps built on Apple’s Health Platform will offer medical advice, thanks to IBM.

April 21, 2015 - No Comments!

The Sickweather App is sick

We like when data has an immediate benefit. And that's why we like Sickweather - the "world's first Doppler radar for sickness." It delivers alerts for flu, norovirus, pink eye, whooping cough, and 19 other illnesses and real-time warnings whenever you enter a "sick zone." But that's just one part of why this thing is so great. It's packed with interesting data analysis and tech wizardry.

So, where's the data come from? According to the developers Sickweather uses a patent-pending process to track and map reports of illness that they scrape from social media,  in addition to crowdsourcing directly from the user community.

And, naturally, there's a version for Apple Watch,

SickScore(TM) for Apple Watch adds an entirely new dimension to Sickweather’s service, and works by analyzing nearby contagious illnesses found in over 2 million reports gathered and processed each month from combined sources including: social media, the Sickweather community, and Sickweather partner apps. An algorithm then measures the nearby illnesses by their relative reproductive score along with other demographic factors, such as population density. Unique to our Apple Watch app is a Handwashing Timer that runs for 20 seconds (as recommended by public health organizations) and uses Apple's Taptic Engine to let you know when you are done."

Check it out for yourself - Sickweather - community illness tracker, real-time sickness map & health alerts on the App Store on iTunes.

April 17, 2015 - No Comments!

First Donut In Space

A couple of years ago we pitched a QSR on sending a burger into space. With a helium weather balloon. Filmed with a GoPro. And we'd film the entire making of and after events. We pitched it hard. Very hard. But, sometimes nothing you do can make an idea happen. So, it's nice to see these guys from Sweden do pretty much the exact same thing, but with a donut. And here's the video of the first donut in space. Too bad they didn't have the foresight to talk to Tim Hortons.

April 10, 2015 - No Comments!

Woods Canada looks to hire Canadians to camp across the country – Calgary – CBC News

I remember talking about this idea years ago. Seriously. It's an idea my friends and I would talk about constantly when we were doing crown land free camp portage trips throughout Ontario. In fact, we spent a massive amount of time working through the details and "developing" a business plan. But once the trip was done we always returned to our jobs in advertising. Nice to see someone convinced a company to make it happen.

Woods Canada looks to hire Canadians to camp across the country - Calgary - CBC News.

March 14, 2015 - No Comments!

Disney’s $1 Billion Bet on a Magical Wristband

Both of us have been to Disney with our families and even as adults we love it. Disney is a spectacular display of marketing and innovation. Years ago (in 2006) I bought an RFID Mickey Mouse plush doll and dutifully lugged him around the Magic Kingdom as he chirped and told me what lines where shortest and when a parade would begin. Even back then we knew that Disney was onto something. By monitoring our activities and traffic patterns they were able to control the flow of people throughout the park with subtle suggestions of where to go and when. It was clunky then, but you can see how things have advanced with the newest Disney gadget. Here's what the Disney Wristband does,

Tap into the magic with your MagicBand on your wrist. This colorful wristband is actually an all-in-one device that effortlessly connects you to all the vacation choices you made withMy Disney Experience. Your MagicBand enables you to travel lighter throughout your vacation. Use it to enter the parks, unlock your Disney Resort hotel room and buy food and merchandise. Plus, your MagicBand gives you FastPass+ access to all the experiences you've selected online, so you can simply concentrate on enjoying the fun with the people you care about.

Those Disney Imagineers are pretty clever. We wonder, is there's an Apple Watch app on the horizon... because that would be magical. H/T Gerard Dolan

Disney's $1 Billion Bet on a Magical Wristband | WIRED.

March 13, 2015 - No Comments!

IKEA Share the Bathroom

IKEA Share The Bathroom post copy

Here's a campaign that has scratching our heads. How's it work. What's happening in the background. Anyone have a theory? Because we have a few. H/T to Jason Levine.

  • The site says it serves up an ad “at home” so maybe it’s using the master Google cookie to identify the location of two machines that at some point use the same node to connect to the internet? That would make some sense. Few people know about the master cookie… except the NSA (natch!). 
  • The whole thing could be a ruse, and the content you input is randomly served into Google ads. If that’s the case, they know that people rarely travel farther than 50km from their home base. That would allow them to serve up the ads based on geo-node, postal code, or IP location. It would be random, but deliver enough of them and you could increase the likelihood that an ad is seen.
  • Or, the likelihood of someone actually seeing the ad might be incredibly low… and the fact that they offer up a Twitter or Facebook alternative is the real objective. It would be interesting to see how many people do that.
  • It could also be using a behavioural targeting cookie. For example, Zappos makes extensive use of behavioural targeting. AND when you share an item, add it to your wishlist, or share that item with someone I think it captures that info and stores it in the cookie. Maybe IKEA does the same thing. So, cross-referencing several persistent cookies might allow them to cross-target to the IP or machine mac address.

Try it yourself, and let us know what you think they're doing. IKEA Share the Bathroom - IKEA.