Category: Personal brands

At TravellersTV.com everything revolves arround video content based on holiday destinations. You see the continents on a click-able Google map. Once you have clicked a video over the continent begins. Then you can zoom in on a destionation and you will find related video chanels (in total there are 1200 destinations and 20 lifestyle tv channels). The videos often include supplementary text. In addition you find a buttons by every destination for more information over accommodation, food and drink, attractions, events, activities, transport and shoppig. You can rate, tag and comment on everything and you can also send the information on to others. But... it's still a beta version, sometimes things work and sometimes they don't, the content is far from complete but it is still well worth a look. A good concept with a lot of possibilities for good business models in the future...

House specialist Immospy, known in the Netherlands as miljoenhuizen.nl, is now available in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. By focusing on Europe (instead of individual countries) almost 4 million houses for sale are made available.

Playboy has created a version of Playboy.com for the iPhone, iPlayboy contains, amongst other things, Playboy radio, videos, tips for going out and of course the Playboy photos. Have you always wanted to know the difference between a Bunny, a Playmate and a Centerfold? The website offers an ‘Ask Hef' function that will give you the answer to this and much more. The site was launched with the choosing of ‘Miss Mobile Playboy'.

Seatguru tells you exactly where to sit in the aeroplane. After selecting an airline the consumer receives information about the planes used by that airline and how the seating is configured.

Reuters Labs, the laboratory of the news agency Reuters, automatically recognises people in video with advanced pattern recognition software. If you search for George Bush(you get a choice of two people with the same name), George Clooneyof George Harrison you are very quickly presented with a list of the videos in which those people appear (via dc, Dutch).

Sounds advanced, but soon we’ll be able to walk down the street, point our camera at our surroundings and use face recognition (and other characteristics such as the ‘walk’) to see who is walking past us. We won’t need to tag any more photos or videos because it will be done automatically. The online identity and the real identity will meld completely. It will have an enormous impact on society. For example, in maintaining public order or restricting access to offices. But you could never again walk straight past a friend who you hadn’t seen for 30 years. Your personal contact brand will know exactly who it is.

In a restaurant in Israel it is now possible to place your order directly from a display on your table. A waiter is no longer necessary. It is also possible to play games. Visitors think it’s fun and are pleased that their children are included. The owner of the restaurant is certainly happy with the 12% extra turnover (via dc, Dutch). We gather more displays around ourselves. Now they have set content, but soon we will make content with our personal food brand for personal advice. Or check our e-mail. Or evaluate the furniture we saw earlier in the day. All that whilst enjoying a delicious meal that passes perfectly in our diet. In a couple of years this will be the most normal thing in the world. 

Business social network LinkedIn introduces company profiles (see below for details, li). A lot of information that hasn’t been available before has now been published. Furthermore, LinkedIn offers companies the possibility to add information. LinkedIn thus pushes the brand coming out for all companies, meanwhile becoming more and more relevant as a personal career brand: a brand that helps you in your career.

With AppleTV, a small device placed near the TV that makes a wireless connection to the internet, the user can now directly download a movie without even getting up from the couch. An interface appears which allows the user to directly select movies. Prices are $2.99 for a normal movie, $3.99 for a new movie, and a dollar extra for HD format. Take a guided tour here. (ap).

Thus personal media brands further evolve. Now in HD format, soon in life size screens that cover whole walls. Now AppleTV only gives access to entertainment, soon we will pay a lot more for interactive content. The experience economy then will really come to life, and AppleTV can coach us in making selections out of all these possibilities.

Through Jogging Over A Distance joggers now can continuously stay connected. In this video two joggers who say goodbye and continue each on their own route. Through the headset they can keep talking to each other, whereby they hear the other person’s voice from ahead or from behind, wherever the jogging partner is.

We thus connect the whole world. People, animals, plants, objects, means of transportation: everything is mapped. And we can contact them, wherever we are, whenever we want. In this environment personal brands will bloom.

SmartyPig offers an online savings account for which you can invite friends, family or colleagues to contribute money towards a goal you have chosen yourself. SmartyPig has developed a widget for social networks MySpace and Facebook, so you can make your savings goal accessible for more people (fe, Dutch). Saving, lending, investing: it is all about trust. And the people directly around you trust you most. Brands are more and more building on this trust: they get better at tribal thinking since they have less chance to reach the consumer with messages, while at the same time they have more chance to facilitate the consumer. This development fits in that trend.

This Dansmat.info dance mat has you stand on 4 arrows: up, down, left and right. The mat is connected to the PC and on the screen you see arrows, appearing to the rhythm of the music. The purpose is to tap the right arrow at the right moment. If you do it right, you can get points and choose harder songs (dm). We here see the experience economy take shape: an economy in which money is made by giving us personal experiences at our own place. With that a dance coach evolves, a form of a personal sports brand, a brand that teaches you how to dance (although still very simple, but it is a beginning). And finally this is just the media evolution in which all we do (walk, cry, jump, talk, turn, type) is used by brands on the other side of the medium, and through which they can shape the dialogue with us. We will see lots of developments here.

Moviq is a new Dutch home and living site that offers not only a huge supply of houses, but also all suppliers in about 70 related service areas like realtors, notaries, contractors, truck rentals, and painters. Consumers can share their experiences with the suppliers with other users. Besides, the site offers content (text and video) for inspiration (em, Dutch).

Thus personal home brands slowly evolve. Now still aimed at suppliers, but soon the consumer will be central. Now there is only one mortgage supplier (Rabobank), but soon the home consumer will be able to choose here too. Now it doesn’t show all houses yet, soon Moviq will be the only place you have to go to find your house. Now it is still aiming at the period before buying a house, soon Moviq will keep inspiring you, even after you have moved. Now Moviq still sells your details to third parties, soon the relationship with the consumer will be core, and details will never be sold again. There are still lots of steps to take, but the amount of offers within the moving market show that Moviq has a huge potential. Well done!

The Dutch website for home delivered meals Thuisbezorgd.nl accepts more and more different payment methods. Not only Visa, but also American Express is now accepted. Other payments methods have been used for longer already: iDeal, a personal business account (De Baas Betaalt, meaning ‘the boss pays’), and payment on account for companies (tb). Personal brands also take care of our payments, so that they know exactly what we bought earlier, what we did, and what we enjoyed. This financial transaction support is part of that. As soon as they know what meals we have delivered, they can also start helping us get food delivered we still need to cook. They thus can slowly grow into being personal food brands. Although they still have a long way to go.

Developing personal media brand Joost starts with live streams. Starting next week, watchers anywhere in the world can watch the NCAA basketball championships live (em, Dutch). Thus personal media brands slowly evolve. Live or not live, this type of brands takes care of entertainment on the couch after a day of hard work. Be it passive, a little active, or very active: we don’t have to leave the house any longer. Once Joost gets mass-accessibility on TV, broadcasters will have a lot to worry about.

The WII Balance Board is a sort scale that can accurately determine where you put pressure on it. Apart from all kinds of fitness exercises, the Board also makes it possible to train your balance (fc).

Promoting balance in mind and body is not a short contemporary hype, not a trend like ‘we are going to play games again’, but a very long term trend. This trend however is only beginning, and will only further develop after the world economy has come to balance, we can hardly speak of low wage countries, and the automizing and robotizing trends have allowed us to work less. We then will finally have the time to structurally work on ourselves. We will then be able to do things we now consider ‘inexplicable’, as ’magic‘, or supra natural. It will take some time, I am talking about 2050, but the first products to help us in this are now introduced. And these are just brands again.