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Innovation Series: Lifestyle Top Ten

By Burn •

  • 2018

Back in June, we looked at the most exciting environmental innovations of 2018 so far. This time, we’ve explored some of the most recent ideas on the table designed to enhance daily life.

  1. Mirror ‘Morror’ on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?

Firstly, ‘Morror’, a smart mirror innovation with several attributes designed to improve your daily beauty routine. Some of the features are as follows:

  • Step-by-step, pre-installed makeup and skincare tutorials
  • A lighting system made up of 38 LED lights and a smart chip that simulates natural sunlight (to limit the times where you’re convinced you’ve nailed your makeup look, but in reality, you step outside looking like a heavily-contoured, embarrassed Oompa Loompa)
  • Information that may influence your beauty routine for the day such as the weather or level of humidity
  • A timer that can be set for up to 60 minutes to induce a low level of stress (or thrill?) and/or ensure you won’t be late
  • An attachable 5x magnification mirror to zoom right in on your pores
  • No wires to avoid clutter and allow you to carry out your beauty routine across different rooms
  • Blast resistant glass…which, quite frankly, is excessive.

Personally, unless they invent a mirror that can flawlessly apply a variety of make-up looks to my face whilst I press snooze 37 times, I’m content with using my phone, a window and a standard mirror.

  1. ‘Netflix for magazines’

Next up is the digital magazine service Texture, recently bought by Apple, which gives users access to a virtual stand of over 200 magazines for a monthly subscription fee of £7.19 (currently equivalent to $9.99, not just a random price).

The neat app offers intuitive access to a wide range of magazines from National Geographic to Vogue on iPad, iPhone, Android devices and Amazon Fire tablets. Much like Kindles, I appreciate that the concept makes perfect logical sense financially, spatially and to an extent, most persuasively for me – environmentally. BUT – the excruciating pain of paper cuts aside – I’m still struggling to see how they can ever beat the real feeling of flicking through a fashion magazine (and saving the best ones forever) or turning the pages of your book. Anyone else?

  1. Flat battery? Give me a minute 30 seconds

Researchers from the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in South Korea have developed a high-power, hybrid aqueous battery that is apparently safe, environmentally friendly and can be charged in less than 30 seconds from a low power source such as USB. That is all.

  1. Truly fresh products

Back in March of this year, the world’s first supermarket for start-ups, KaDeTe, opened its doors in Berlin. The concept for the supermarket was that it supported newcomers in the highly competitive food and drinks industry by exclusively selling items that hadn’t yet made it retail and/or wholesale outlets. Additionally, there was the added benefit of the perfect opportunity for traders and customers to test new products as part of the newcomer’s market research. The potential for this idea to be applied to other industries, from beauty to technology, is undeniably quite exciting.

  1. Let the discounts come to you

“Online sales of non-food items have soared over the past five years, from 11.6 per cent of the total market in December 2012 to 24.1 per cent in December 2017”.

Naturally, we have become savvy in finding the best deal, nonetheless, searching for discount codes (many of which don’t work) can be time-consuming. One new option for countering this and saving precious time is a free browser extension, Honey. When you click on it, the extension scans the internet for the best discount code and automatically applies it to your basket, making saving money online easy and quick. The extension also calculates how much you can save whilst you accumulate ‘Honey Gold’ points, which can be converted to cashback whenever you make a purchase or get a friend to sign up. I’m not sure what the exchange rate is, but if it’s anything like loyalty points from supermarkets, you’re not going to get much.

  1. A personal tutor with a difference

With over 20 years of experience in education, EdTech have developed ‘Robot Ani™’. The robot uses artificial intelligence to deliver personalised one-to-one tutoring with an on-going analysis of their student’s learning activities. The benefits of this include real-time feedback and the opportunity to learn wherever and whenever suits the tutee (or, most likely, the tutee’s parents). With a community that’s10,000 strong already – is this a move towards eliminating the need for human tutors?

  1. Would you like to actually be able to sleep on a plane without flying first class?

European aircraft giant Airbus has teamed up with Zodiac Aerospace to innovate and market sleeping ‘berths’ designed to fit inside aircrafts’ cargo compartments and improve passenger comfort.

According to the duo, the sleeping modules are likely to be developed alongside similar modules, including kids’ play areas, gyms, conference rooms and restaurants – all of which are easily interchangeable with regular cargo containers. Amazingly, the berths could be operational in A330 wide-body jets from 2020. Ryanair will, I’m sure, be charging five times the price of your original, ‘bargain’ ticket to enjoy the added luxury – especially if you want to sleep at the same end of the plane as your friends and family.

  1. Redressing the gender pay gap

When the German Federal Office of Statistics revealed the country’s unadjusted gender pay gap is 21% (i.e. women are paid 21% less for doing the equivalent job to men), native fashion chain, Paisley, responded by issuing its own ‘FEM’ currency. The ‘FEM’ banknotes are worth 21% more than the Euro, a powerful and intelligent initiative that hopefully brings the world one step closer to ending the gender pay gap.

  1. “What’s that smell?”

Thanks to the media agency MediaCom and HarperCollins, it’s no longer just the traditional, paper books that smell delicious. The collaboration installed a scented bus shelter on Tottenham Court Road to promote vegan, online-blogging team BOSH’s first cookbook. The science behind the mouth-watering campaign was to appeal to people at their ‘point of hunger’ during their commute home, triggering the appetite-inducing hormone ghrelin with the aroma of the vegan chocolate fudge cake. Whether the bus shelter contributed to the success or not, ‘BOSH!’ is the fastest-selling vegan cookery book since records began and the cake in question’s recipe video has reached a staggering 15 million views. Make way for ‘smell-vision’ and taking the Great British Bake Off to the next level of sweet-tooth triggering.

  1. Waste not, want not

Depressingly, one third of all food produced globally is wasted and yet nearly a billion people worldwide go to bed hungry every night. Too Good to Go is a free app that uses your location to find tasty food at a reduced price that would otherwise be thrown out. In under two years, Too Good to Go has been downloaded by 3 million people, partnered with over 5000 stores and 2.5 million meals have been rescued from being wasted. Download the app now to be part of the food waste revolution (and eat well at a wallet-happy price!).

From the above innovations, leave a comment and let us know which you think is the most exciting!