Monday, January 12th, 2009...10:18 pm
New Products At National Retail Federation Big Show
I’ve been in NYC since Saturday at the National Retail Federation’s BIG show at the Javits Center. I’ll be posting my thoughts over the next few days between speeches. One of the most talked about areas was the Sonic Bar Experience. It was a pavilion featuring several new technologies and how they might be used in the music store of the future.
One of the most interesting was Joe Engalan from VECTORform who took the time to explain how his company took last year’s hit product, the large format, multiple image Microsoft computer table and wrote a new interface for a music store.
Joe Engalan, Head of Development for VECTORform
They also hooked up a wall unit to show the dozens of onlookers. With a “gee whiz” type of attraction, Joe showed how someone could come into the music store and lay down a card that had their personal information (probably evolving to their cell phone.) The computer would read it instantly and read their personal music like their Ipod playlist, maybe make suggestions. OK, so what Joe, the Genius playlist in Ipod already does that.
True enough but it also could let you know which of your artists were coming to town and get tix for you, it could show you their new videos and more.
You could also mix your own dj mix using the cool touch interface (which is available now as a free download to your Iphone from the App store – search “Surface DJ”). If you liked what you created, you could email it to yourself. Or drag it to your address book on the table to the right and email it, or the tix, or the song, to your friends.
As we talked further, it seemed this would be much better at the premium product level where someone could work with the customer and use the table to interact and guide the customer.
Joe smiled and told me about a BMW dealer in Germany using it to show customers exactly how they could customize their BMW. For the dealer, there are cards with actual samples of every leather. Once the customer finds the exact shade they want, they place the card on the table, it reads and stores it. They can do this down to the minutest detail.
Sure it can generate pictures at various angles but it captures all of the information, stores it, can email it and issue another card the customer can simply take with them to order online, call or email. All that time is not wasted and the employee who helped them gets the credit – brilliant!
Are you going to see this in a year or two? Definately not in the mass markets but as retailers are looking to differentiate themselves, make shopping fun and technology increases accuracy and choice, you’ll see it in premium brands.
Imagine if you were able to bring in a photo and such a system could read the photo, add it to the table and you could choose your flooring in real time from actual samples in store. Or do over your kitchen cabinets. Or add your Hunter Douglas window fashions. Anywhere thousands of dollars are being spent for something customers traditionally have to take on trust should be looking at this now to brainstorm what such technology could do for them!
In coming days I’ll update you also on KeyRingThing, the Microsoft Commerce Server robot, Creative Communications direct mail kiosk and even CEO Lee Scott’s revelation that just last week Wal-Mart had a 25% increase in a very premium product. Stay tuned!
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