Elevating Interactivity

Obviously you don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict that emerging interactive technologies like touch and mobile are going to eventually revolutionize the in-store shopping experience just like the Internet revolutionized catalog shopping. The ability to have more information and more utilitarian functionality at the ready while you are shopping is clearly a value proposition that retailers want to be able to deliver as a differentiator from their competition. Of course many service providers and retailers have been attempting to deliver that sort of value proposition for years now, to greater or lesser degrees of success.

Personally I think we are in an interesting arc in the evolution of the space because of the dynamic between competing notions of how to acheive the objective. On the one hand you have the concept of in-store kiosks. They are well understood, highly usable, and available to all. But they are also expensive to provide in any number and stationary. On the other hand, you have the strategy of providing mobile applications for customers. They are cheaper to distribute en masse and they can travel with the customer. But they can be hard to use and they inherently limjt the potential user base.

Right now the mobile set, which is much more newly viable, os gaining ground to the kiosk set. And in many foreseeable futures mobile will probably win the day. But it’s still not a satisfying, or even viable, alternative in a lot of cases. Which brings us to Springboard, which is an interesting way to split the difference.

Springboard is a small interactive touchscreen device that gets mounted onto the hand;e of a store’s shopping carts. This allows it to travel along with the user as he shops but it’s still big enough to be usable and it can potentially be used by eveyone. It doesn’t solve all of the issues of either the tradiotional kiosk or mobile app, but it solves some of them. It may be the right product for right now.

Evidently it’s being rolled out in Canada currently. I’m really hoping to find some installed base here in the states so I can see it works as expected.