Best Of Me- 

Welcome back to 2016, and with a New Year, some changes to our newsletter – yes, Val has finally decided to let me in on the newsletter writing party – now I’ve just got to be interesting and keep the numbers up, so best you click on the links! The team is all back and firing, and Jacki celebrated her 5 year anniversary with Zuni, a major milestone worthy of champagne. This issue, we’ve covered off the usual New Year topics of resolutions and the latest social platforms, but have resolved to stay away from “Top 10 lists” this year. 

Enjoy! 
Mike 

Swapping travel habits for mobile data

Having worked with Tourism Tasmania and UTAS a lot, we’ve got a real soft spot for Tassie, so it’s great to see some amazing research happening down there – The Sensing Tourist Travel Projectencourages tourists to download an app in exchange for mobile data when they visit the state, and then tracks them throughout their visit. The app strives to create a profile of the visitor covering who they are, what they want from their travel experience and whether the attractions lived up to their expectations, and provides fantastic insight into the customer journey of tourists. The feed of data provided for analysis will be amazing, and I love the innovative approach. 
 

Peach: the next big thing? 

Ello-d out? Sick of Snapchat? Slack is the big new thing in workplace communications and group-connect, and now we have Peach, the personal messaging platform that set Twitter alight last Friday. Sitting somewhere between Twitter, Slack and Facebook, it allows you to bombard your friends with text, pics and GIFs, but is easy to use and incorporates a command line interface similar to Slack and has “magic words”, enhancing your message automatically — for example, when adding a new post on Peach, type “GIF” to choose from a selection of animated GIFs, “Weather” to share the state of affairs outside, or “Events” to share what meetings you have to attend today (pulling from your calendar). While it’s not the first app to tackle the idea of a hyper-simple social network (eg Snapchat!) it is one of the better apps to provide a clean and similar user interface. Worth exploring if you’re on an iPhone, or even just reading this NYT article so you can pretend you did

Customised Museum experience 

Personalisation is on every trend and top 10 list for 2016, and whilst marketers are getting better at it digitally, it’s difficult to carry it over to the real world – A new app called Muzeum is trying to solve this problem for Museums, offering curated guides for each person based on their profile, picking out the highlights and key elements of most interest to them. A great way of linking your digital profile to a real world experience, and an idea that has huge application across a wide range of sectors and areas – conferences,  music festivals, city tours, possibly even pub crawls. I’d love a version of this for small bars through Newtown! 

A device that blocks TV ads about dieting

In a new twist on ad blockers, Lean Cuisine are re-enforcing their brand positioning change by helping users block the regular January onslaught of diet and weight-loss advertising – a chrome browser plug-in kills the word diet and they’ve devised a plug-in box for your TV that reads the captions and kills the sound for 30 seconds whenever it reads the word “diet” or “weightloss”. It’s literally eliminating the competition’s advertising to ensure cut through. See the WSJ’s take on it – are we likely to see an outbreak of TV ad blockers from brands? 

Bits & pieces

• Here are 16 headlines you may have missed during the Christmas break. From Stoner Sloth to Dan from Optus this is quite a comprehensive list of what made news over the past month.
• For those of us who have made some pretty ambitious New Year Resolutions, here are 9 apps that’ll help you reach and keep them.  If your resolution is to learn more or relax better, there’s something on this list for all of us.
• In a bid to get closer to e-commerce owners,I love this initiative from Australia Post. They are providing a pop-up store space for online retailers.
• Earlier last week, Woolies has teamed up with Alibaba the Asian ecommerce giant to launch an online store on Tmall Global.   Tmall Global is an extension of Alibaba’s B2C arm in China that allows international retailers to connect with Chinese consumers without having a physical presence in China.
• Some great stuff came out of CES this year, including Samsung’s Family Hub Refrigerator that not only has a giant touchscreen on the front, but also packs a small camera that lets you to see what’s inside while you’re at the grocery store. Mashable has a good summary of the most interesting gadgets, whereas Gizmodo thought that every gadget looked like a s_x toy.