China has become the first nation to embrace facial recognition technology to authorise digital payments following an innovative play by Alibaba to ease queues in local KFC restaurants. The so-called ‘smile to pay’ service has been introduced in the city of Huangzhou as part of a trial with the chicken chain to boost the customer […]
Google has released its answer to Apple’s ARKit in the form of software development kit (SDK) called ARCore, which brings AR capabilities to Android devices. Google, of course, already has an AR platform called Tango. However, Tango only works with the most powerful of devices that have been kitted out in a way to harness its functions. […]
Barclays has teamed up with Apple to become the first UK high street bank to introduce the ability for customers to make payments using their voice through Siri. Siri has been integrated into the Barclays Mobile Banking app, meaning iPhone and iPad-using Barclays customers no longer need to open the app to pay existing payees and mobile […]
Facebook is expected to expand its inventory by designing an augmented reality (AR) glasses that could display digital objects in the physical world, according to a patent application filed by Oculus. ‘A waveguide display used as part of the virtual reality (VR) system, AR system, mixed reality (MR) system or some combination therefore’ is how […]
If you’re into Instagram food porn, you’ll know how hungry you can get by just looking at people’s mouthwatering posts. So, in Brazil, Heinz capitalised on this by enabling Instagram users to actually eat the delicious food posts they were drooling over. The so-called “Irresistible Posts” campaign, created by ad agency Africa with the support […]
BuzzFeed’s foodie content platform Tasty has launched the Tasty One Top, a bluetooth-enabled induction cooktop. In an interesting move for a media company, Buzzfeed’s latest media rethink involves bringing its foodie platform Tasty into the kitchen with the launch of a smart appliance. Currently only available on pre-order in the US, the One Top connects […]
Mindshare is placing its FAST (Future Adaptive Specialist Team) integrated performance unit at the heart of its business going forward. According to the agency, FAST is an integrated service that joins together with traditional media planning and buying services, enabling maximum efficiency in driving insights, targeting, allocating investment, activating and optimising across all media. To […]
Researchers at Google’s experimental unit, Area 120, say they’ve built their first version of a digital advertising format designed specifically for mobile, virtual-reality applications. The unit showed a prototype of the still-nameless product in a blog post co-authored by Google product manager Aayush Upadhyay and associate project manager Neel Rao. The demonstration video showed a cube floating […]
Haptics technology has existed for years in various forms, but is quickly gaining ground in the consumer electronics industry. A 2016 market report by Technavio estimates that the haptics technology market in consumer electronics will grow at a CAGR of 21.1% from 2014 through 2019. We caught up with Josh Stivers, Director of Product Management […]
Mindshare, the global media agency of WPP, recently announced that it is placing its FAST (Future Adaptive Specialist Team) integrated performance unit at the heart of its business as part of an ongoing transformation programme evolving the agency into an Adaptive Marketing organisation, to help clients do the same. We had a chance to sit […]