This video was filmed at TED last year and features Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demonstrate Sixth Sense technology.

Pranav Mistry, the inventor of the software, describes Sixth Sense as ‘a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.’

The device enable us to interact with the world around us in a slightly different way. For example, if we’re shopping it could quickly scan a product, recognise it and provide additional information on that product to enable us to decide whether or not to buy it.

Interested? For further information take a look at the Sixth Sense website.

Last night we went along to a Q and A session with founder and CEO of My-Wardrobe, Sarah Curran and PR Director, Lauren Stevenson. The event was organised and hosted by Manchester Fashion Network.

My-Wardrobe.com went live in 2006 and now receives over 800, 000 visitors each month. Sitting comfortably between Net-a-Porter and ASOS, the affordable luxury brand has won numerous accolades and was recently listed as number three of the Online Fashion 100.

Sarah and Lauren were extremely open and generous in sharing information about the company and how it had grown from two to almost 90 staff. They offered some great insights into marketing, PR and e-commerce.

When Lauren joined the company in 2007 to build the in-house PR and Marketing team, she had two main objectives: to build a personality for the brand and to seek industry endorsement. She accomplished both in a relatively short space of time.

The initial challenge, she explained, was to create awareness of the brand. Meeting with all areas of the press from endorsers such as Vogue, Harpers, Elle and Marie Claire to the Sunday supplements and Grazia, she managed to obtain industry approval and at the same time drive sales.

With the growth of e-commerce and many fashion brands now selling direct to consumer as well as through stockists, their challenge today is to ensure that the press write about the brands in relation to My-Wardrobe.

Lauren puts their PR success down to good relationships, providing exceptional photography and making the journalist’s job as easy as possible. You need a very clear idea of what the brand is and what makes it different to other brands. In the case of My-Wardrobe what makes it different is its personality. Rather than taking a traditionally prescriptive approach, My-Wardrobe has adopted a fun, friendly tone which is pushed consistently throughout the site and marketing channels. Combined with exciting content and a growing community this makes for an exceptional user experience.

The My-Wardrobe brand has become synonymous with MY-TV, the site’s video channel. Sarah explained that the use of video brings the clothes and accessories to life. You can see how the clothes are worn, how they hang and at the same time learn about latest trends and how to wear the latest styles. Products are listed alongside videos providing a quick route for customers to purchase featured items.

During questions at the end of the event the subject of customer retention was raised. Both Lauren and Sarah agreed that customer acquisition and customer retention were equally important in achieving company growth. Sarah went on to add that having no customer retention is like having ‘a bucket with a hole in it’.

The subject of social media was also discussed and Lauren talked a little about how they had embraced it. Describing social media as a ‘word of mouth’ channel she talked about the importance of customer feedback, building relationships and allowing an open conversation. Customer comments, whether through Twitter, Facebook or through their feedback company, Feefo are not censored and all comments are answered.

Their recent Denim Dash Facebook campaign, involving five pairs of jeans, several clues and a dash around London, proved extremely popular. The campaign was shared across different channels and Lauren talked about the importance of a multi-channel approach to marketing.

In terms of the most successful marketing channel, Sarah confirmed that this was direct email marketing, stressing the importance of targeted email campaigns as opposed to a blanket approach.

As the event drew to a close one theme stood out. ‘Integrity’ had been a recurring subject throughout the evening; integrity in product selection, integrity in marketing and integrity in customer management. From the website experience, to customer services, to managing social media channels, it is clear that My-Wardrobe has adopted an open and honest approach to all aspects of their business. Both Sarah and Lauren referred back to this on a number of occasions and it is clearly something that it at the heart of My-Wardrobe.

One of the questions that people ask me, quite a lot in fact, is whether they can use images from the internet on their own websites. The short answer is no. Not without seeking and obtaining permission. The same is true for text, graphics and videos.

Of course some creators are happy for their work to be distributed and shared, perhaps in return for a link back or credit. But how can you be sure that this is the case? Many people are still unclear as to the rules and as a result a not-for-profit organisation in San Fransisco has made a number of licenses available to the public that are free of charge. Creative Commons licenses allow creators to specify which rights they reserve and which are waived.

The following video explains how this works.

Image sharing site Flickr is a great example of Creative Commons in use. At the bottom right of each page is a section called ‘Additional Information’. This states whether the image can be used and if so, how.

Of course some unscrupulous individuals will still upload images that don’t belong to them and pass them off as their own work. Therefore, a degree of common sense is needed.

If you’re in any doubt as to the source of the content, don’t use it. If you’re not sure about rights always seek permission.

Image courtesy of Opensourceway’s Flickr photo stream - www.flickr.com/photos/opensourceway/4371001458

Calling all retailers.

A series of master classes with input from Mary Portas will be delivered through the National Skills Academy for Retail skills shops over the next few months.

Topics covered are:

• My shop, my future: Building, mobilising and maintaining a vision for your business
• Retail finance and business planning: Understanding the key financial factors driving your business
• Buying for your customer: Buying products to attract and keep customers and deliver profit
• Selling and service skills: Standing out from the crowd with customer service that brings success
• Creating desire: Visual merchandising and the ‘wow’ factor to set your shop apart from the rest
• Marketing for more customers: Spreading the word about your business without spending the earth
• You and your team: Developing both you and your team to create a forward-looking, successful business

“This series of master classes will help you understand what is going on out there and will give you the tools to really help your retail business succeed.” - Mary Portas

Courses cost just £200 + VAT. Find out more and register your interest at www.nsaforretail.com.

Did you know that you can convert scanned text into Google Doc format? This is particularly handy if you have hard copies of old records or documents that need to be in text format. Rather than spending hours typing them out you can scan them into JPEG, GIF, PNG or PDF format and import them into Google Docs. Their OCR technology will do the rest.

The original image is included in the doc to make it easier for you to edit and correct mistakes.

Interestingly, this came about as part of Google’s 20% time. Software Engineer, Jaron Schaeffer was presented with a problem. A colleague’s wife had found a stack of ancient family chronicles in the attic and wanted to continue writing them.

Here’s the tech bit - http://googledataapis.blogspot.com/2009/09/import-scans-or-go-multilingual.html.

More info at http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/06/optical-character-recognition-ocr-in.html.

The annual Thinking Digital conference took place at the Sage last month. Two days packed full of innovative talks and great networking opportunities. Seminars covered everything from Creative Commons and citizen journalism to story telling and the impact of sound.

One talk in particular grabbed my attention because it dealt with two subjects close to my heart - websites and books. Professor Luis von Ahn of Carnegie Mellon University took to the stage to talk about reCAPTCHA.

CAPTCHA codes are those pesky codes that you copy when you’re filling in forms online. 200 million of these codes are typed everyday. Their function is to ascertain whether you’re a human being or a bot. Bots and automated programmes can’t read distorted or obscure text. Humans can.

Professor von Ahn worked out that it takes an average of ten seconds to type the codes. Hence around 150,000 hours everyday are spent typing them. It was this colossal perceived ‘waste of time’ that led Professor von Ahn and the team at Carnegie Mellon University to come up with reCAPTCHA.

Each time you type a reCAPTCHA code your are helping to digitize books. Here’s how it works. Books printed before the digital age are scanned and made available in digital format using a scanning technology known as OCR. Unfortunately, for many books the print has either deteriorated or is too obscure to be read by a computer. Each of these illegible words is embedded into an image and used as a CAPTCHA code. Therefore, when you’re copying the words in a reCAPTCHA you’re deciphering them for OCR.

But if the computer can’t read these words, how do they know that you have typed them correctly? Here’s how, explained rather succinctly on the reCAPTCHA website:

‘Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.’ Accuracy is estimated at .1 / .2 %.

Wow.

Professor Luis von Ahn Talking About reCAPTCHA

Further Reading:

- www.thinkingdigital.co.uk
- www.captcha.net
- www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou
- www.vonahn.blogspot.com

Top image courtesy of the Thinking Digital Flickr group.