The $499 CameraJet toothbrush is absurdly over-engineered. Dyson’s intense new ad makes that the whole point. When I first saw Dyson’s new CameraJet, I thought it looked sorta like a power screwdriver. Then I learned it had a camera. And my immediate reaction was: Why the heck does anyone want a camera on their toothbrush? My wife and I have used Philips Sonicare toothbrushes for about 25 years. They do a phenomenal job, so both of our girls have them too. Toothbrushing is one of those...
2 days ago • 2 min read
The next smart-home breakthrough may be making the WHOLE house intelligent (and private) instead of adding another device to it. My house is reasonably smart. It also has no frigging clue what’s going on. Lights live in one system. Cameras in another. Speakers somewhere else. Thermostats, locks and assorted sensors each stick to their micro-piece of our world. Not one of them understands how my family really lives in the house. That’s why this new idea from LiveLarge Home is so different....
3 days ago • 2 min read
New research shows creating a physical version of a digital product can undermine the qualities that made the original desirable. Imagine Nike releases a virtual sneaker. It’s scarce. It changes colour. Let’s say it glows when you run in VR, leaves animated footprints behind you, or does other stuff no physical shoe possibly could. People want it partly because of what it can ONLY be and do in a digital world. Then let’s say Nike decides to capitalize on its popularity. And they make the shoe...
4 days ago • 2 min read
The $3,995 Lamborghini stroller shows what happens when a luxury brand transfers its status, design language and scarcity into a totally different product. Your kid could sport a Lamborghini roughly 40 years earlier than you. It’ll cost you $3,995 to make that dream happen. Silver Cross and Lamborghini just released the Reef AL Giallo, a limited-edition stroller finished with flashes of the yellow that helped make Lamborghini famous. Images: Silver Cross / Lamborghini And they didn’t phone...
5 days ago • 1 min read
A 30-year-old mapping brand made one choice at exactly the right moment, and suddenly it’s the #1 downloaded app. Remember MapQuest? I used it constantly in the strange little window of time between paper road maps and having GPS in everyone’s phone and car. You’d type your destination in a desktop computer, print pages of turn-by-turn directions, then drive around flipping loose sheets of paper. And every so often, MapQuest would confidently send you the wrong way down a one-way street. Good...
6 days ago • 2 min read
Amazon makes shopping absurdly easy. A new FTC lawsuit asks whether it made competing for visibility unnecessarily expensive. My household is a power-user of Amazon. We love local businesses and shop close to home whenever it makes sense. But if the same mouthwash is a dollar cheaper delivered to my door than it is at the store across town, that choice doesn’t require a ton of thought. And Amazon has made the whole experience ridiculously good. Search. Click. And it… appears! Don’t like it?...
7 days ago • 2 min read
New research suggests AI influencers become MORE persuasive when they stop pretending to be real people. AI influencers are popping up everywhere, from Instagram to TikTok, and brands are investing heavily in digital personalities that never age, never sleep, and never negotiate endorsement fees. Conventional wisdom says social media must be where they belong. New research suggests otherwise. The researchers found that virtual influencers were generally more effective in traditional display...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Stress balls are ancient by toy-industry standards. NeeDoh shows what happens when an old need collides with social media, collectibility and a particularly stressed-out culture. Somewhere along the way, the humble stress ball became cool. The current star is NeeDoh, a line of brightly coloured squishy toys from Schylling. NeeDoh itself isn’t even new. It launched in 2017. Then TikTok got hold of it. By February, Schylling says it had burned through six months of inventory in six weeks. Sales...
9 days ago • 2 min read
Beni suggests surveillance tech becomes easier to accept when its purpose, personality and boundaries are obvious. I’ve been writing a lot lately about cameras moving onto our bodies. Meta puts them in glasses. Apple is about to stick ’em in AirPods. And a big part of the resistance comes from the obvious question: Am I being recorded right now? Then I saw Beni. (You have to watch this video.) Beni looks like WALL-E’s smaller, sportier cousin. It’s a US $549 four-wheeled camera robot that...
10 days ago • 2 min read
