The fashion etailer created a pop-up store window that allowed shoppers to use iPads and smartphones to bring the products to life.

Net-A-Porter won and innovation in mobile marketing award at E-Consultancy’s Innovation Awards 2012

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Although we are nearly two months in to 2012 it is interesting to note that some are predicting global internet growth of more than 3% this year.  In the past five years internet usage has grown a whopping 121% showing just how reliant we are on it in our daily lives.

By the end of this year almost 76% of the world’s population will be on the internet and according to the infographic more than half of us will suffer from a malady termed ‘e-anxiety’ if we can’t check our email or Facebook page.

40% of us will be accessing social media from our mobile phone and it is predicted that there will be 62.8% more Tablets users with the majority using the iPad.

Creativity Online reports that to promote its new product Ready Baked Jackets, McCain Foods is tempting UK consumers with the wafting smell of ’3D baked potatoes’ as they wait at city bus shelters in York, Manchester, London, Nottingham and Glasgow. Already the advertising term ’Smell-vertising’ Technology has been coined to describe this development – jargon that is worse than the potato itself.

Potato Scented Bus Stops

I am not sure that I would necessarily want to smell baked potato at a bus shop but it would at least be a change from the other smells one associates with a tightly packed mass of humanity waiting to catch the Number 10 to Russell Square or some other location.

The potato poster works by having a hidden heating element that warms the fiberglass 3D potato when you press a button.  It then releases the aroma of oven-baked jacket potato throughout the bus shelter. The smell in question was developed in collaboration with a specialist scent lab over a period of three months.

Press my jacket takes on a whole new meaning!

Those of us who have lived in Singapore know full well that the heat of the day can be oppressive and seeking cool respite in a underground subway concourse is one way to beat the heat.

Paypal has seen an opportunity to try out its “Shop and Pay On-the-Go” Pilot in the MRT’s. According to their blog, they have doubled theirr mobile predictions for 2012 to $7 billion are a trialing a system that enables Singaporean commuters to shop and pay on-the-go.

The pilot is now live across 15 subway stations island-wide. Commuters choose an exclusive deal by scanning a QR code on a billboard or poster using their smartphone, then pay with PayPal in as little as two clicks.

Making use of a digital wallet is not a new experience in a society that has used smart cards on transport and for retailing over many years.Singaporeans are very techno-savvy.

Smartphone penetration reached 70% in the country last year, and a recent study Paypal conducted revealed that nearly 7 out of 10 Singaporeans were likely to make a transaction on their mobile phone.

Paypal believes that the beauty of its mobile transaction is that no additional infrastructure is required for merchants, retailers and consumers.  Their study also revealed that nearly two thirds of mobile shoppers had previously stopped a mobile transaction in the past because of the hassle of entering financial details on a small screen.

They have go around this problem by using scan and click QRCodes. Shopping on the go has never been easier.

Source: Vincenzo Cosenza

This recent map from Vincenso Cosenza graphically shows the dominance of Facebook in the social media world. Facebook is ranked #1in 127 countries out of a total 136 listed.

Equally interesting is how this landscape has changed in the past three years.

Source: Vincenzo Cosenza

Note how Twitter and LinkedIn are contesting for second place.

Vincenzo Cosenza has also mapped the the connections between Italy’s blogs and their Influence.  His aim is to understand the bloggers relationship and how blogosphere is evolving into a complex information ecosystem.

Source: Vincenzo Cosenza

The Web is a big place packed full of global opportunities but if current trends are to be believed, thinking ‘local’ is the best business approach.

A ‘localised’ online presence develops business growth cultivates greater customer loyalty.

Social media is a critical part of this marketing mix, as are incentives (deals). Group deals continue their rapid rise in popularity, up 33% in 6 months.

By far the majority of people searching online (73%) are looking for local content as this infographic shows.

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The pay off is that 82% of searches online result in off line follow-up, either through a visit to a store, a phone call or a purchase.

So even if your business has a global perspective the greatest success will come from localising your offering – local content on localised web sites, engagement in local social media and forums. One size (of content) does not fit all.

Courtesy: Geek & Poke

This is conductive cotton making a simple circuit. (Credit: Cornell)

I have just discarded my old Tshirt and put on another, pre-purchased at a recent sale.  Not an uncommon occurrence.  In the future though, my simple cotton garment promises to be replaced by something quite special.

T Shirt computers will be coming to a store near you in the foreseeable future.  Material scientists from Cornell University’s Textiles Nanotechnology Laboratory have managed to create transistors and electrical circuits from cotton yarn by coating the threads with gold nanoparticles, and then a conductive polymer.

According to an article in ExtremeTech two kinds of transistor were created: a field-effect transistor (FET), much like the transistors found in your computer’s CPU; and an electrochemical transistor, which is similar but capable of switching at lower voltages, and thus better suited for wearable computers.

But engineer David Forbes is not waiting for this science to mature and has already created a LED television you are able to wear as a shirt.

There are a few unfortunate implications of doing so, including raising the hackles of airport authorities in Detroit last year when he entered with 160 circuit boards and a mass of other electronics strapped to his body.

David Forbes's TV vest contains 14,400 green, red, and blue LEDs that together make 4,667 pixels. Steven Meckler

His first effort at wearable television weighted an uncomfortable 50 pounds but his latest version, funded by a small homemade watch business he runs on the side, is far less cumbersome.Forbes managed to convince the airport security that he wasn’t a threat by offering to show them The Simpsons on the coat. Bart to the rescue again!

Keyboard Thongs (i.e. slippers, jandals) for the Geek who has everything?

Can one make a case for Bacon?

Both SPAM and Bacon are  ’meaty subjects’ and this is no coincidence. As this infographic demonstrates it would take a staggering 52,000 years to unsubscribe from all of the Bacon sent to the world’s in-boxes in one day.

It is projected that Bacon will account for 80% of your incoming email by year’s end and no, I am not telling ‘porkies’!

So Bacon may well be legitimate email but too much of it will give you in-box thrombosis.