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Posts Tagged ‘Shopping List’

Study Reveals More Details About The iPhone Mom

A few months ago, we wrote about mobile ad network Greystripe’s study that placed “iPhone moms” (mothers of young children who own iPhones) as one of the new and growing mobile advertising demographics on the street. In August, Greystripe claimed that iPhone moms made up 29.5% of all iPhone users. Today, the ad network is releasing a follow-up report which offers detailed behavioral characteristics of moms in their iPhone ad network. Similar to the “soccer moms” demographic, iPhone moms are a consumer segment that has vast potential for advertisers and app developers.

The report shows several interesting patterns. For example, over 59% of iPhone moms surveyed say they let their children use their iPhone. And 41% of moms who own iPhons download apps specifically for their children to use.

Shopping is another key use of the iPhone for moms. Close to 60% of iPhone moms depend on their phone to locate the nearest store around them while 41.94% of moms use the iPhone to keep track of shopping lists. Other shopping activities include comparison shopping, (39.43%) downloading coupons (19%) or keeping track of items on sale (22.94%).

When it comes to actually shopping at the grocery store, a little over half of iPhone moms use their phones at the grocery store, with 40.14% using it as a shopping list tool and 22.58% using it as a recipe resource at the store.

Unsurprisingly, close to 90% of moms who have iPhones use it for personal entertainment which includes listening to music, browsing the Internet or using entertainment apps. Email comes in at a close second place with over 79.57% of iPhone moms surveyed using their phone for checking messages. And it seems that many moms use the device as an organizational tool with over 64% of iPhone moms using their phones to manage their calendar and schedule, which is 9% higher than the rest of the iPhone community as a whole.

Moms are looking to the iPhone and other smartphones as both a valuable organizational tool and an entertainment portal, making the iPhone a valuable advertising platform. While Greystripe says that this demographic have tended to be late adopters, I’m not so sure if this is true considering the rapid growth of “Mommy bloggers” over the past few years. There’s a blog that’s devoted to iPhone Moms and offers recommendations for kid and baby-friendly iPhone apps for moms to download.

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Five Apps for the weekend warrior

Filed under: Software, iPhone

Getting through the work week is hard enough for most of us… but the minute Friday afternoon rolls around, there’s a certain breed that face the weekend with a long list of “honey do” projects and household duties. Yes, the weekend warriors need iPhone app love too — whether to help with those maintenance challenges, or find ways to make the break from the day job a bit more enjoyable. Here’s a five app collection just for you, my brothers and sisters in the two-day sprint; enjoy.

Weber’s On The Grill[TM] [iTunes link] for iPhone, at $4.99, would seem to be a bit pricey compared to other grill-centric cooking apps selling for $0.99 (dadoo’s Grill Guide) or the large number of free and well-regarded cookbook apps on the store (check out Epicurious Recipies & Shopping List, for one). Nevertheless, if you’re serious about getting the most out of your grill, the $5 you spend on this app will be well worth it.

Weber may be the world’s largest grill manufacturer, but the relationship of Weber owners to their grills feels more personal than mass-marketed; in fact, the slightly obsessive and cultish fandom around the Weber brand may seem a wee bit familiar to, uh, owners of a particular company’s computers, music players and cellphones. Ahem.

The iPhone app takes the Weber customer very seriously, providing a great collection of hundreds of recipes along with grilling technique guides (including videos from chef Jamie Purviance), time and temperature recommendations, a handy shopping list manager, and a convenient cooking timer right in the app. About the only thing that’s missing is an optional meat thermometer to plug into the dock connector (which I would totally buy if they made one).

Continue reading Five Apps for the weekend warrior

TUAWFive Apps for the weekend warrior originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 15 Aug 2009 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Internet Fridges: State of the Market

The Internet fridge is probably the most oft-quoted example of what the Internet of Things – when everyday objects are connected to the Internet – will enable. Imagine a refrigerator (so the story goes) that monitors the food inside it and notifies you when you’re low on, for example, milk. It also perhaps monitors all of the best food websites, gathering recipes for your dinners and adding the ingredients automatically to your shopping list. This fridge knows what kinds of foods you like to eat, based on the ratings you have given to your dinners. Indeed the fridge helps you take care of your health, because it knows which foods are good for you and which clash with medical conditions you have. And that’s just part of the sci-fi story of the Internet fridge.

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This type of ’smart home’ fridge has actually been attempted before, in the dot com era, and flopped. Has there been much progress since then in the Internet fridge market? Let’s find out.

This is What We Want…

This video shows a prototype of a fridge that uses RFID tags to automatically notify you when milk needs to be bought. Designer Kim Otto took a Siemens refrigerator and replaced the existing flat screen with a touch screen panel PC, then added an RFID tag reader.

…But, Let’s Tack a Computer and TV onto The Fridge For Now

The reality is less exciting than what Otto presented. It turns out that the appliance market isn’t quite ready for internet fridges that go beyond mere entertainment.

The Electrolux Cyber fridge was released in 2006 and it pretty much sums up the current state of the market for Internet fridges. As the Appliancist website noted: "The Screenfridge is equipped with a computer and a touch screen so you can surf the Internet, send e-mails and buy and order food for your home without leaving the kitchen [...]"

In other words, it’s just a computer tacked onto a fridge. No automation, no RFID tags, none of the ‘Internet of Things’ functionality we’re all looking forward to.

Samsung’s Wireless ICE Pad refrigerator is another of this ilk. Its main feature is a detachable LCD touch pad computer. It also features an "entertainment center" (i.e. a TV); along with a calendar, scheduler, message board for "smart food management."

The most recent I found was reviewed by Webware earlier this year: a fridge by Whirlpool featuring a detachable tablet computer made by Data Evolution.

It’s not just computers and TVs being tacked onto fridges either. Last year Gorenje released a "Made for iPod" refrigerator, which as the name suggests is a fridge with an iPod on it. The fridge freezer features an iPod docking station, wireless LAN for Internet connection, and built-in speakers. One of the suggested use cases is watching video recipes.

Wait, There Are Some Good Uses for Internet Fridges

Perhaps the most interesting innovation we’re seeing with Internet-connected fridges right now are ones that use Web technology to save power and optimize themselves.

A good example is GE’s demand-response refrigerator, which can adjust its settings and reduce power consumption based on pricing signals from the electricity company. As Greentech Media reported earlier this month, GE has partnered with energy technology company Tendril to "develop algorithms and other technology that will essentially allow utilities employing Tendril’s TREE platform [Tendril Residential Energy Ecosystem] to turn GE [...] appliances off or on to curb power consumption." This is done either via the Internet or special sensor meters. It’s estimated that demand-response systems like this save between 10-30% in electricity consumption in homes.

The Time is Still Nigh

Clearly the age of the Internet fridge hasn’t yet arrived. Adding computers and TVs to fridges has been tried by many of the main fridge manufacturers, but those efforts were half baked.

Until RFID tags that connect to the cloud become more common place on food items, the Internet fridge is yet another product looking for a solution. We’ll check back in a couple of years!

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