~ @lawrencelenihan on The Problem with Most Fashion-Tech Startups
Author points out his view of the current landscape of fashion tech startups:
the biggest flaw I see is that these “Internet entrepreneurs” fail to understand how the Internet will fundamentally transform the fashion industry, not just provide another access point to buy something.
Author suggest some ideas where entrepreneurs can make a innovative difference:
- online retailer must be more than a role for aggregating cusomers and using umimaginative sears-catelogue formats
- there is enormous opportunity to use technology to create shopping experiences that replicate the emotion that a customer feels when they shop an incredible physical store. displaying products like they are in a grocery store (row & columns) doesn’t work.
- sites can engage users’ emotions with videos/images, etc to tell a story.
Source: The Problem with Most Fashion-Tech Startups | Op-Ed | The Business of Fashion
~ Social media can help auto manufacturers find vehicle defects, researchers say
The researchers developed a computer-based information system that provides auto manufacturers an efficient way to discover and classify vehicle defects.
Abrahams said consumers rely heavily on the Internet for information about automobile safety and reliability, looking up vehicle consumer surveys, insurance industry statistics, manufacturer websites, and complaints filed with regulatory agencies. But in addition to being consumers of safety and reliability information, he said, automobile users are also producers of such information, using traditional Internet media (such as emails or online forms) and, increasingly, social media tools (such as bulletin boards, blogs, and Twitter).
Whether in public discussion forums, social networks, product reviews, visitor comments, wikis, or user-written news articles, user-contributed content is characterized by variable quality, said Fan.
It is, however, a daunting challenge for firms to process the “unstructured and dynamic” content of social media in order to detect the useful nuggets on vehicle defects that are buried among millions of unrelated or immaterial posts. So Abrahams and Fan sought to understand and prioritize the vast volume of consumer-produced automotive information and to ferret out and analyze the safety and performance issues.
via Virginia Tech
~ #SocialMedia #Research: The jacket that talks to Facebook
In an emergency situation, we cannot expect rescue crews to do their jobs while fumbling with a tiny mobile phone when they need to read and send messages. Instead the scientists decided to create a prototype jacket that could communicate with Facebook.
A group of students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) Department of Computer and Information Science (IDI) decided to create a prototype jacket that could communicate with Facebook, and have been working on the assignment for the last six months.
They decided to use the Arduino platform to create the physical user interface with social media. Arduino is a popular system used to develop physical prototypes that integrate with ICT. The platform that supports the jacket communicates with an ordinary Android mobile phone via BlueTooth. This means that the user does not get tangled in cables.
via AlphaGalileo Foundation
