Book Sweet Book

From project management instructor and presentation skills coach Jeff Furman, this book is a complete resource full of useful advice and information for anyone involved in project management. Written in an easily accessible, readily searchable question and answer format, "The Project Management Answer Book" offers a wealth of real-world tips, practical techniques and worldwide best practices. Coverage is wide-ranging and thorough, with topics including: bringing projects in on time, on budget and on scope; controlling risks; building quality into a project; making best use of the appropriate management tools; and, integrating effective soft skills. This up-to-date and forward-looking guide also contains valuable advice on navigating the ethical challenges involved in project management today, current information on networking and tips for using social media.

Goals

Our aim for this project is to find a new way of designing a retail service environment. We have to look at designing a service as a process that brings together skills, methods, and tools for intentionally creating and integrating systems such as the "atm" idea for interaction with customers to create value for the customer, and, by creating a long-term relationships between providers and customers in the business

We have to work upon delivering the right experience as people are seeking meaningful experiences..in designing-for-service experiences we must provide the opportunity for customers to have meaningful, compelling, and fulfilling experiences that address their needs and satisfy wants...

For now we should look at whats out there and consider any possibilities.. dont look at just technology but look at artists and their installations.. see how they make people interact with their work .. we need to break down the normal retail service and redesign the whole shopping experience in a RETAIL environment from A to Z !

Adidas adiVERSE Touchscreen Footwear Wall

Adidas adiVERSE is a giant touchscreen wall that shows interactive 3D models of Adidas’ hottest footwear. You can navigate, manipulate, view additional information and marketing materials on the huge screen, all by touch gestures. When customer is happy with the product, he/she can send it to a virtual shopping cart, then later on check out with a salesperson using iPad-like touchscreen tablet.


Comparing with the previous TEAMLAB Interactive Hanger, I believe this Adidas system is more a 3D touchy gimmick than an actually sustainable and user-friendly retail system. My thought is that, when people go to a retail store instead of online store, they would want to hold and feel the real product in their hand, or randomly pick up stuff on the shelf to try them on. Going to a retail store for flat interactions from in to out (touch to browse + see product detail + checkout) just doesn’t make sense to me.
Suggestion: instead of focusing on total touch interface and virtual models, I think it’s more relevant to put the focus back to the tangible physical shoes on the rack. With simple RFID, proximity sensors and 3D motion capture like Kinect, it’s possible to create many intriguing interactions that crossover the physical and virtual world.
For example, when you pick up a F50 soccer shoe and rolling it in your hand, a dissected 3D model will move, roll, or zoom in/out actually the same way on the screen.
Another idea is that, you can put on the soccer shoes and stand in front of a Kinect, then the system will cast you to a 3D soccer field in which you can match with famous stars or overlay onto important goal moments. How about if you actually purchase the shoes, Adidas will upload the video to Youtube tagged with your name as a courtesy?
http://www.calvin-c.com/blog/adidas-footwear-touchscreen/ 

Next – A Simple Expense Tracker App for iPhone

There are many money and expense tracking apps out there for iPhone, unfortunately many of them are ugly and very cumbersome. If you’re looking for something really simple and fast, Next is probably your best bet.
Next is a very simple expense tracking app which simply lets you hit a category and put in your expense. It doesn’t require additional info such as what the product was or where you spent it. It’s made so that you’re not made to input that info, it’s just supposed to summarise your expenses for particular categories.
When you first open the app you’re given various preset categories as you can see from the screenshot above. Unfortunately you can’t add more categories but I’m sure the preset ones will have you covered. You’ll also notice how some of the category buttons are a darker blue than others, the ones which are darker are the ones where most of your expenses are. So most of my expenses are on computers/gadgets and fuel.
http://theultralinx.com/2013/03/simple-expense-tracker-app-iphone.html

The Awesome Traveling Machine (ATM)

 We’ve all tried to find an ATM. But what if an ATM found you? To illustrate their extensive ATM network, the leading UAE bank, Emirates NBD created the Awesome Traveling Machine – the first ATM specifically designed to be impossible to ignore.
Advertising agency FP7 came up with this creative guerrilla marketing campaign in Dubai where they put wheels on an ATM. It’s a fun prank style marketing campaign that certainly gained the attention of everyone hoping to withdraw money. Imagine waiting for the elevator when an ATM comes out instead of people.
What do you think of this campaign?
http://www.creativeguerrillamarketing.com/guerrilla-marketing/the-awesome-traveling-machine-atm/

Companies struggle to popularize mobile money

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Mobile money may seem like a hot concept, but consumers aren’t warming to it.
At the world’s largest cellphone trade show, here in Barcelona this week, the 70,000 attendees are encouraged to use their cellphones —instead their keycards— to get past the turnstiles at the door. But very few people took the chance to do that. The process of setting up the phone to act as a keycard proved too much of a hassle.
It’s a poor omen for an industry that’s eager to have the cellphone replace both tickets and credit cards. Companies are building chips antennas into phones that let the gadgets interact with “tap to pay” terminals and other devices equipped with short-range sensors, like subway turnstiles. But getting the technology to do something useful and convincing people to adopt it is a slow process.
To make a payment in a store with your cellphone, “you need a lot of things to align,” said Reed Peterson, who heads the Near-Field Communications initiative for the GSM Association, a global trade group for the wireless industry. The phone needs to be properly equipped with NFC hardware and software; the store needs to have the proper equipment and training. The phone company needs to support the transaction, and banks and payment processors need to be in on it.
Some of these things have fallen into place, Peterson said, but the network of commercial agreements that supports these payments needs to expand. And consumer demand remains elusive.
“I want to get to the point where the consumer goes into the store and says ‘Show me only the phones that have NFC’,” Peterson said.
Today, a buyer is quite likely to go into a store and ask for an iPhone, and that’s an obstacle to NFC adoption. Apple Inc. is the lone holdout among major smartphone makers, and hasn’t built NFC into any of its devices yet.
Visa, the global payments network, announced a coup at the show: it has struck a deal with Samsung Electronics to take charge of the “secure element” in the next flagship phone from the South Korean company. The Galaxy S IV is expected to be launched at an event in New York on Mar. 14, though the name has not been confirmed.
The “secure element” is sort of like a safe inside the phone. Whoever controls access to it decides which credit cards, transit passes or other verified “documents” the phone can store. A bank that wants to let customers use their Samsung smartphones as virtual credit cards will have to go through Visa.
Control of the secure element is a crucial battleground for NFC. The GSMA, which is dominated by cellphone carriers, advocates putting the secure element not in the phone itself, but in the subscriber identity module, or SIM card, which plugs into the phone to identify the user and supply a phone number to the network. SIM cards are issued and controlled by the carriers who would like to be the ones in control of the secure element.
While Visa, phone companies and Google (which has its own payment initiative) duel over the secure element, eBay Inc.’s PayPal is wondering what all the fuss is about. The online payment network thinks NFC is a lot more trouble than it’s worth. The company isn’t afraid to say so at the wireless industry tradeshow.
“If you want to change something, you have to solve problems that people have in everyday life,” said David Marcus, the president of PayPal. “It’s not like everyone is thinking ‘Oh, I wish someone came up with something better’” than paper money and credit cards.
PayPal is putting a lot of effort into making cellphones central to the way we shop, but is focusing on the shopping experience itself, rather than payments. The company’s ideal vision for buying a cup of coffee: You pull out your phone on the way to the store, fire up PayPal’s app to order your double-skim latte and pay for it in advance. When you arrive at the counter, the barista has your picture and your coffee, and gives it to you right away. Then you’re out the door.
Thirty years ago, Marcus said, store clerks knew the people in their neighborhood and greeted them by name.
“We think with this technology, we could recreate that personal connection,” he said. “We feel this is going to leapfrog the efforts of NFC.”
http://www.ryot.org/companies-struggle-to-popularize-mobile-money/89449#.UWbOHEQVyUe

Presentation 2

 
 

Some drafts :)

It’s Better to be Pissed Off than Pissed On

Well, today I’m taking a (hand)stand by getting pissed off and hopefully reducing a few instances of getting pissed on by yourself or your overly-friendly neighbor.

The problem with urinals is that it’s impossible for a blind intoxicated teen with undiagnosed ADHD to miss the urinal. But most of a urinal’s surface area couldn’t be more conducive to splash back.

Third grade physics (or eight grade physics, if you’re in the US) lesson: splashing is most likely to occur when a stream hits a surface at a perpendicular angle. To avoid splash back from the standard urinal, one must pee along the curved edges as shown in the scientific diagram. A common alternative is to ignore the splashing by standing so close to the urinal that your body absorbs all of the splash.

Even specially-designed anti-splash urinals are no good. Unless the pee-er is well-educated in the physics of urinating, he (it’s totally PC to use the gender-specific “he” in this instance, right?) won’t know to aim for the sides.

A urinal should be conical to minimize 90 degree interactions, almost like this, but deeper. It’s that simple. Product design kids and go Penngineers: quit the useless crap and save lives.

Next time we cross paths in neighboring urinals, you’ll know why I’m peeing standing sideways.

For further reading, here’s my favorite tip from wikiHow:

Sometimes a careless guy next to you will splash onto you. When this happens, try to discreetly splash a little onto his shoes. If he splashes a significant amount, go ahead and be indiscreet in your retaliation. He won’t know what to do at first, and you should bail while he’s deciding how to handle the situation. Read the entire article here.

http://www.markpan.com/urinals/

And just for funsies:

ATM & Debit Cards

If you have a checking account with a bank, you are offered different ways to access your money other than using a check or a credit card.  You may qualify to receive a plastic card, which can be an ATM (Automatic Teller Machine) Card, Debit Card, a Check Card or a card with combined features.  When you want to get cash or make a purchase, you put your card in a machine, enter a pin number (a secret identification number), type in the amount you want to withdraw or use to pay a bill (not necessarily in this order) and the machine will check to see if you have the money in the bank.  If you do, the transaction will be processed and you can receive your cash or merchandise.  If you don’t, it will deny the transaction.  This is one way to make sure you don’t spend more than you have in the bank.  If you use your card other than in a branch of your bank, there might be additional fees for the use of the ATM.  You will always be shown what the fee is.  You can agree to accept the fee and proceed with your transaction or, deny it and you get your card back and your transaction will not be processed.
 

ATM Deposit - Machines with Scanning Technology

Anyone who’s tried to make a bank deposit lately may have noticed a change in the bank branch’s ATM deposit system. National and regional banks are rolling out machines across the country with scanning technology. While they can take some getting used to, the good news is there’s no longer a reason to fill out time consuming deposit slips or search for a deposit envelope.http://banking.about.com/od/howtobank/a/Atm-Deposit-Machines-With-Scanning-Technology.htm

myIDkey myIDkey – The Most Secured USB Drive

myIDkey is an ingenious and probably the most of secured USB drive and password manager. This highly innovative drive feature OLED display with integrated biometric reader that ensures no one access to your data except you. The best part is its sensible operating system which automatically erases the data if someone makes failed attempts to access it, later you can restore from PC. Apart from security features it features a built-in voice search which lets you search your password and bank details stored as keycards. Checkout the video introduction.
http://bonjourlife.com/myidkey-the-most-secured-usb-drive/

How ATM works ... Sort of .. It would be good if we can get this video and show it

Yo­u're short on cash, so you walk over to the automated teller machine (ATM), insert your card into the card reader, respond to the prompts on the screen, and within a minute you walk away with your money and a receipt. These machines can now be found at most supermarkets, convenience stores and travel centers. Have you ever wondered about the process that makes your bank funds available to you at an ATM on the other side of the country?

In this article, we will look at the ATM device that allows you access to your money and examine the network that the ATM connects to.

http://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/banking/atm.htm