Focus: Latest

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Paleo: dieting goes back to the Stone Age

Paleo is a diet that emphasises the importance of understanding our species' evolutionary history by determining which foods promote optimal health. When consumers aspire to go back to a time before your brand existed, how do you engage them?

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Coca-Cola says 'Hug Me': gestural marketing gets personal

Companies are beginning to look at ways of encouraging consumers to respond with gestures as well as words, as the rise of gestural marketing sees brands seeking new ways of showing that they understand the needs of their audience.

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Transparency and honesty from 'charity: water'

In just five years, New York-based charity: water has raised nearly $50m. This has been achieved by emphasising transparency; 100% of donations go directly towards projects, and donors can track exactly where their money is going.

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CashStar: digital gift cards and mobile giving

In societies that are cash-rich but time-poor, gift cards have emerged as a popular solution. The gift card market in the UK alone is currently worth £4bn; and with smartphone penetration rising, gift cards are becoming digital.

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23andMe: a genetic Facebook

For a couple of drops of saliva and a few hundred dollars, US-based genomics business 23andMe will extract your DNA and screen it for genetic disease markers. Since launching in 2007, the company has processed 150,000 paying customers' DNA.

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48: conquering the youth mobile market

How do you attract a notoriously fickle youth demographic to a new mobile phone network in an already saturated marketplace? Easy: you give them an exclusive, members-only deal which makes all other networks appear, well, a little bit lame.

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Japan's virtual kiss-o-grams

Scientists at Keio University in Japan are developing digital advertising posters in the form of interactive kiss-o-grams which allow users to get up close and personal with their favourite pop idols.

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No Cash Day

No Cash Day encourages Italians – 91% of whom use cash for transactions – to use electronic transfers for purchases. The event is an attempt to raise awareness of physical currency's various pitfalls.

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Karma: the gift of convenience

Karma is a mobile app that allows you to send thoughtful gifts to your friends and family based on what’s going on in their lives. The app connects to Facebook to encourage you to order a gift for them via text anywhere, at any time.

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MTV Under The Thumb: making television social

MTV has launched a new app which grants smartphone and tablet users on-demand access to the full range of its television shows. Importantly, it also includes a built-in feature which allows users to chat with friends online while they watch.

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Pair: an app for couples

Pair is a mobile app built just for couples. The 'social network for two' enables instant access to your partner through myriad communication channels, from video calling to photo sharing and instant messaging.

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Life 2.0: empowering elderly communities

Life 2.0 is an EU-funded project, involving 13 core partners in five EU countries, which has developed a series of networked applications to help empower elderly residents to live more independent lives.

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Which? Big Switch: the collective consumer

Imagine gaining 190,000 new customers overnight. That’s what energy companies in Britain are doing thanks to the Big Switch, a new reverse auction hosted by Which? and 38 Degrees.

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Feel Rich: health as the new wealth

The music industry mogul Quincy Jones III has created the online platform Feel Rich, which rebrands health and fitness for ‘the urban and hip-hop community’ who have been left feeling ‘alienated by mainstream health information’.

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Hello Sunday Morning

In 2008, 22-year-old Australian Chris Raine decided to give up drinking for a year, and blogged his experience on a website, Hello Sunday Morning. His behaviour has influenced thousands of fellow Gen Y-ers to take their own abstinence pledge.

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Loosecubes: the future of workplaces?

Sharing office space with other independent professionals is already a familiar concept to many freelancers. Loosecubes is a New-York based online database of co-working spaces which hopes to take the trend mainstream.

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VMware: work, text and play

Employees are increasingly insisting on using their personal smartphones as work tools. To deal with this, a new mobile virtualisation platform lets consumers run two phones – one work and one personal – on the same device.

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The Lunch Beat goes on

Lunch Beat is a midday dance meet-up originating in Stockholm, Sweden, which turns the business lunch hour into a club scene. Public monthly events are held in cities around Sweden, offering 60 minutes of energy release on the dance floor.

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GymPact

GymPact was devised in a behavioural economics class by Harvard students. After being picked up by the media and demonstrating impressive results during its first trial in Boston, the idea is being launched worldwide this January.

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Heineken's #mysunrise

Heineken has launched a new campaign that adopts the unlikely strategy of telling people to drink less. In the UK, a country that doesn’t often go in for half measures when it comes to booze, how will the message go down?