Bernhard Schindlholzer

Contrary to popular opinion I don’t think that blogs are dead. I would argue that the time of crappy blogs about dogs and people’s everyday experiences is over and they are replaced by high-quality blogs where smart individuals share their thoughts and knowledge about a certain topic.

Some of these authors provide insights and share point of views that average tech journalist do not have because they have become nothing more than PR echo chambers. This is a collection of sites that might be relevant to you as well if you would like to get a better understanding what it means to create remarkable customer experiences.

Monday Note

Monday Note is written by Frédéric Filloux and Jean-Louis Gassée. Jean-Louis Gassée, the founder of Apple in France in 1981 and former head of product development at Apple (He was later ousted by Sculley and the Apple board) shares his views about Apple, media, technology and business models.

Holograms are still a thing of the future but a British company has developed a smart approach to create a hologram illusion and is using it deliver a better customer experience at airports. Tensator has developed a technology called Virtual Assistant which projects the image of a person on a glass-wall to create the illusion of a person talking to you. At the first glance this might look like a cheap gimmick but one of their use-cases looks quite promising.

Security checks at airports have become quite a hassle but for frequent travellers who know which items are prohibited and that you have to take out your laptop of your bag it is still a manageable process. The problem is usually with travellers who are not regulars at an airport and who slow down security checks. Even though there are signs that clearly tell you what you should do, for some reason they go mostly unnoticed.

At this critical...

The financial crisis has at the end of 2011 become a global concern again and the outrage about certain corporate behavior has lead to “occupy movements” globally. A significant drop in consumer confidence in financial institutions is the result that drives citizens to the streets to voice their anger and frustrations. Even though a certain bank might not have been actively involved in the high-risk trades of recent years, the image of the industry as a whole is damaged.

From Zurich, Switzerland to Charlotte, NC: consumers lose confidence

Certainly consumer confidence is different in each market and for each brand. Looking at the situation in Switzerland it turns out that a bank like UBS has experiences several shocks (20 billion USD loss in 2008, 50 billion USD have been written down, US tax evasion scandals and rouge trading scandals that required Oswald Grübel, one of the most prolific bankers in Switzerland to resign as CEO) and customers react and move move...

Tracking consumers online has already become a standard practice and with the right set of technologies it is possible to track individual shoppers, visualize their browsing behavior and use this data to create customized advertisements when they are on another website. Such a level of monitoring has not been possible in offline, real-world retail environments which have are usually dominated by people counters, shopper shadowing and interviews.

Tracking shoppers through their mobile phones

With recent technological developments it seems that we have come a step closer to bringing the sophisticated behavioral tracking known from the online world into the offline work. One solution for this comes from British PathIntelligence in the form of a technology called FoodPath. With this technology it is possible to monitor the movement of shoppers without having them carry any special equipment because...