Fishburn Hedges

29.06.2010

Following its launch just over a month ago, the iPhone’s Fatbooth app has already received over 50,000 downloads. While fun and quirky, it's essentially a one trick pony. On a mission to separate the wheat from the chaff, this blog post will be taking a look at the functional aspects of digital buzz.

Unilever’s smile activated ice-cream vending machine

Unveiled at Cannes Lions advertising festival earlier this year, Unilever's new vending machine was introduced as the 'Share Happy' machine. Delivering free ice cream only to those who smile at it, the 'smile-o-meter' technology not only encourages consumer interaction - it requires it.

The machine detects age, gender and shows users how much they are smiling. It’s fun, engaging and encourages positive interaction with the brand. And if you want to tell your friends about it, you can share your experience on Facebook.  

Google recipe search

As part of its new navigation design, there is now a recipe search function on Google. It’s the latest development of ‘rich snippets’ by Google which work to deliver key snippets of the most relevant information on the search results page. So, if you’re searching for tiramisu, you can now see preparation time, user ratings and images of the finished item directly on the search results page. Giving this key information to the user is designed to deliver more relevant results and encourage more click throughs. 

Pop up restaurants

Springing up all over London, pop-up restaurants are the recession’s answer to fine dining on the cheap, and if you love cooking it’s the new way of making money. Popping up in Paris, New York and now London, these unofficial restaurants are able to keep costs at a minimum through the existence of Facebook, PayPal and Twitter.

Google Caffeine

Caffeine is Google’s latest upgrade to its web search, providing 50 per cent 'fresher' results. It’s a move closer towards real time live search – analysing the web in smaller portions and updating the search index on a continuous basis (using the previous layer-based structure it could take up to 2 weeks to update new content fully). This move towards real time indexing means more accurate search results, which in turn means happier searchers.  

While there's a lot of digital ‘stuff’ out there that’s trendy for the sake of being trendy, these examples prove that technology is much more interesting when it is used to help improve the things we do every day.

Posted by Elle Macgregor-Chatwin