“The opt-in program will provide Target shoppers with a customized webpage on their mobile phones, with all offers scannable at checkout via a single barcode.”

With the recession we’ve seen a rise in coupon clipping—almost to the point of becoming a competitive sport.  Smartphone applications have also taken off like crazy.

So this is where two trends have converged in a way that one can only expect will work. Because, as we are seeing a lot of the evidence in Pop-Up Lifestyle™, when you “meet people where they are”, fill their needs and make their lives more convenient, they are so much more likely to adopt a product or behavior.

P.S. Not really related but I wanted to mention Jean Paul Gaultier for Target. Wow, the affordable luxury trend just keeps trucking!

So what’s the solution?

If the plan goes through, The city of Detroit will bulldoze 1/4 of it’s roughly 139 square mile metropolitan area. The other interesting thing is that, since no new industry is breaking down their door to get in, it will most likely get turned into agricultural land. Detroit will go from being the Motor City to a larger farming community. This would change the face of Detroit, as well as open new avenues for other cities. Desolate and blighted areas would be seen as opportunities instead of urban failures and rotting carcasses.

As for the people, they would get moved to newer areas where the city can actually afford to police them and put out fires. They effectively get a new beginning in a place that isn’t so……dead.

There are so many interesting apps being released constantly, I’m pretty sure I could do a blog entirely devoted to apps…. Oh look surprise, surprise here’s one…

Aaaanyway, for today’s Guarding™ post, I’m focusing on the idea of services that protect you from yourself.

How about a text with a shelf life of 60sec after it’s been read? Well you can do this and other 007 moves with TigerText:

MSNBC.com: “Called TigerText (ironic, isn’t it?) from a company of the same name, the texting app lets users set a time limit for text messages — and when the time is up, the messages will self-destruct and be wiped from the original phone, the receiving phone, and the server.  It’s perfect for cheating spouses, shady politicians, sexting teens, and people who send a lot of stupid texts while drunk.”

Apparently this app was named before the whole Tiger Woods thing but I’m sure he’s wishing he knew about it.  It’s hard not to think that this is to guard against “naughty behaviour” but the founder of TigerText, Jeffrey Evans says that his service is aimed more at “lawyers and business execs that deal with highly confidential material”.

However, there is a service that wholeheartedly admits that they are saving you from your drunken self.  Straight out of Google Labs came: Mail Goggles

“When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?”

The quiz pops up automatically for emails sent late night on the weekends!  This made me laugh when I saw it but I guess if you’ve ever sent a drunken email that had disastrous consequences it’s not a laughing matter!!

The Wave Essence is “ Trusting products and services for security”. We often think that Guarding™ is all about protection from others or some negative occurrence.   Well, these services remind us that sometimes- we actually need saving from ourselves.

Oooo how about a fridge that locks at mid-night?

What should be focused on is real women and real behavior. Now just how to make something frilly and cute. That’s what Dell aimed at with Della and we all saw how fast that fell apart. And as brave as this new territory is, it’s nothing new when it comes to Guys & Dolls.

We’ve seen everything from the terrible Sony “Gamer in Everyone” ads to Frito Lay’s “women’s world” campaign. The thing most of these companies target is  the general idea that frilly and feminine = product. However, most of these launches see themselves teetering along a narrow line due to the often biased and one sided point of view they put across.

Pink isn’t always the answer, but it may help break the initial stigma of something that’s such a mens market. Not to say they’ll be manufacturing pink cigars, but they are looking at a smaller cigar with a lighter flavor. Something that a women would be willing to smoke, something that could change the behavior of cigar culture.

“Stress is real. It’s caused by all of the things you juggle in life — money, relationships, schedules, family, work, your health.  In your busy day, what if you could pause briefly, and give yourself a moment to get a better handle on things? What if you could put a ‘number’ on stress and watch it get lower over time? What if you could even keep yourself from becoming stressed in the first place so you can be there for the ones you love?”

It’s called UPLIV™, and they claim that it’s the “first comprehensive stress management program that’s personalized to you and your lifestyle.”

You take an online test to gauge what kinds of stress you have and they give you a “prescription” of products, techniques, and resources to help you achieve more balance in your life.

The subscription based program starts with a monthly fee ($99.95 for the first month, $39.95 monthly thereafter).  Which includes the test, the personal program, and “exclusive face and body products made with proprietary Active Essences that elicit relaxing and refreshing moods and make your UPLIV™ program more effective”

The site claims the program has been clinically shown to help relieve stress in as soon as 4 weeks and nearly 8 out of 10 women report reduced stress in their lives.

I have noticed Moment Momentum™  has become such a pervasive Wave in the last few quarters as people start to get serious about coping with the many challenges modern life is presenting us with.  UPLIV™ is aimed specifically at women, which draws my attention to the fact that, while not wanting to generalize, so many women have taken so much on.  Every working mother I know is scheduled within an inch of her life and this is program that helps women get as organized about their mental health as they are about everything else.

Making the time to “take your time” is what Moment Momentum is all about.

The goal is to document all of the more than 10,000 streets named Main in the United States. We invite you to capture the stories and images of the country today. Go out, look around, talk to people, and contribute to this re-mapping of the United States.

Watching the videos and hearing the stories it becomes obvious that Main Street is like a barometer for urban America.

Main Street is small town and urban center; it is the thriving business district and the prostitution stroll; it is the places where we live, the places where we work, and sometimes, it is the places we have abandoned.

Look for stories from Main streets across the country to be featured on upcoming features from NPR.

Just the idea of this kitchen is revolutionary; think about it- simply the idea of a kitchen has stagnated for about the last 50 years in that you’ve never really seen or heard of any new leaps forward in design for the everyday household cooking area. About the only thing we have progressed has been storage space. This kind of vision makes me optimistic for future home design and functional, tactile apparati. We would be so lucky if everyone strove for this kind of progress, rather than simply improving on the status quo.

This is the stuff the dreams of the future are made of.

Question: What is “Watson”?

Following an announcement last April, IBM has forged ahead with their plan to build a computer that can play (and win) the game of Jeopardy against human opponents. Almost a year later they are reporting a significant level of success, although it may not be ready for the big leagues just yet.

Most of us would not consider winning a game of jeopardy paramount to defeating Chess Grandmaster Gary Kasporov,an achievement accomplished by Watson’s cousin Deep Blue, but for a computer winning at jeopardy is far more complex.

Thousands of processing cores and terabytes of memory are needed to compete against human players. “This is a massively parallel computation, and IBM has lots of options for doing this kind of massive parallelism,” Ferrucci says.- Computer World

For IBM, Watson’s performance at this task is far more than fun and games, even though, we can tell from the computer’s name they haven’t lost their sense of humor entirely. Jeopardy is a serious test of their natural language search software and if successful, it would represent a giant leap towards computers that are able to “think” and understand commands and questions in a much more humanlike manner.

“the Watson development team faces many challenges in creating a robotic Jeopardy champion. Without being connected to the Internet, the computer has to understand natural language, determine the answer to a question (or, in the case of Jeopardy, the question to an answer), and then calculate the odds that its answer is correct in order to decide whether it is worth buzzing in.” – Computer World

IBM and their game show partner Jeopardy are both being quite hush hush concerning the results of the contests thus far. IBM has noted that Watson has been quite competitive.

Regardless of the outcome it would seem that natural word search and computers that are far easier to communicate with are in our not so distant future.