Innovation Network

Why Ubooly is an Innovation Network Featured Product

Limor Schafman

I bumped into Ubooly at CES 2013 and, besides thinking it was an adorable looking stuffed toy, I also thought a few aspects of its design made it worthy of the "innovation" label.  The bottom line of all of these is that the product developers paid attention to natural human proclivities and their target markets (parents with young toddlers) were behaving.  They took this info and created a fun product.  Let's see if these take off like the Furby Doll flurry of a decade ago. 

Here's a quick list:

1. Cute, furry, rounded objects with round eyes are innately adorable to us humans.
2. Toddlers naturally gravitate to and instantly know how to use their parents iPhones.  
3. Parents tend to give their young children older iPhones as they replaced what they used for their own puposes.
4. Educational and fun games are things parents actually "like" having their kids do on their smartphones.  
5. If a toy can teach a child an language, and continually repeat words so that parents don't have to, all the better.
6. And an engaged child is a happy child, so no better way to learn.  

Here's a short interview where you can learn more.  

 

p.s. - To disclose fully - I owned two Furby's and delighted in stripping them down to their electronics and watching how they worked when they interacted with one another.  A smart toy that was one of the first of its kind and is still around!

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Innovation in Mobile Payments: We're Just Starting

by Limor Schafman

Today TelecomHub, a Washington DC area organization, hosted "Redefining eCommerce: The Future of Mobile Payments."  Moderated by Hook Mobile's Terry Hsiao the panelists Brian Colligan of SeQRPay, Darren Feeley of GeoPay, Eric Ludwig of Rosetta Stone, and Paul Morten of Capital One, plunged the depths of how mobile payment is turning the corner of innovation.

The panel emphasized four key elements to success as the mobile payment marketplace - exploding with startups - continues to push new solutions:

1. Simplicity - Why is Square so successful? A number of reasons: One look at it (or one view of it in action) and you know what it does.  Simple clear product design.  Evolutionary rather than revolutionary in that it still uses credit cards but bridges that important gap that still exists between cards and the mobile phone which still experiences POS issues.  Easy for consumers in that a single swipe and one time entry of personal data then brings up that data for all future transactions so no more entries are needed. For retailers/sellers - a single, low flat fee per transaction.  That's it!

2. Ubiqity - there was much talk of NFC (Near Field Communications) v. QR (quick response) codes v. having mobile payment interfaces be HTML5 based.   And these may not be all the choices.  The issue - the lack of a seamless interface between the user and the POS system that allows for one click purchase so that anybody with any device can buy.  Even with ISIS - the NFC consortiam between Verizon, ATT and T-Mobile, the majority of phones do not have NFC embedded, and this is still causing headaches - or leaving room for opportunity in product development.