- Using mobile apps to interact with merchandise: Using the Quikkly iOS or Android app, you scan what the company is calling an Action Tag — its own proprietary barcode-esque tech — and this immediately invokes an online action, such as listening to a track on Spotify, adding a contact to your address book, following someone on Twitter, or even connecting to a public WiFi spot. “When you see interesting stuff online and there’s a button to interact with it, you can click on it and something happens immediately. ‘Like’ on Facebook, ‘Follow’ on Twitter, add to Basket, listen to the song. In the physical world, it’s considerably more difficult,” says Quikkly CEO Fergal Walker. “If you’re interested, you would have to manually search for the item, hope you find the right one, and hope it works on your mobile. Quikkly removes the hassle and makes it as simple as it is online.” Quikkly also makes it pretty easy for anyone to create their own Action Tags, to be included on, for example, a business card, flyer or poster. This can be done via the website or mobile app. In fact, Quikkly is talking up its mobile-first play. To create an Action Tag, you simply select from a grid of pre-defined actions and fill in the needed details, such as URL and custom message.
- Using mobile apps to interact with toys: “We want to draw kids out of a two-dimensional screen, to blend a hands-on physical experience with an app, and make something new come to life,” said Vikas Gupta, a co-founder and the chief executive of Wonder Workshop, a start-up that makes Dash and Dot, two programmable toy robots that will begin shipping to early backers this holiday season. Dash and Dot are controlled by a mobile app, but they can also be taught to understand and react to events that happen in the real world — to play a real tune on a xylophone, say, or to bark in response to a child’s clap. Wonder Workshop is on the vanguard of a trend that threatens to overrun much of the traditional, mass-manufactured toy business.
- Twitter Experiments With Engagement Stats Directly In Tweets: Want to know just how many people actually care about what you’re tweeting? A new Twitter experiment spotted by ex-Twitter platform head Ryan Sarver will show many you how users are clicking on the links in the updates you post, with a handy link directly in the expanded Tweet view in the iOS application. As usual with Twitter’s features, this is limited to a small sample pool of users at first, but could roll out more widely if deemed successful. At the bottom of the tweet view, for those with this feature enabled, you’ll see a “View Analytics Details” link, which takes you directly to a synopsis of the overall interaction with said tweet, including overall impressions, and “engagements,” which includes how many people actually clicked on a link you shared, how many expanded the tweet and more.
- Uber is causing the price of taxi licenses to crash; separately, a legal setback causes Uber to suspend operations in Nevada; ~1000 jobs might be at risk: The average price of an individual New York City taxi medallion fell to $872,000 in October, down 17 percent from a peak reached in the spring of 2013, according to an analysis of sales data. In other big cities, medallion prices are also falling, often in conjunction with a sharp decline in sales volume. In Chicago, prices are down 17 percent. In Boston, they’re down at least 20 percent, though it’s hard to establish an exact market price because there have been only five trades since July. In Philadelphia, the taxi authority recently scrapped a planned medallion auction. Most major American cities have long used a system to limit the number of operating taxicabs, typically a medallion system: Drivers must own or rent a medallion to operate a taxi, and the city issues a fixed number of them. In New York, which established its medallion system in 1937, that number is 13,437. The number has risen only gradually since the late 1990s, even as the city’s economy has boomed.
