Here’s some of the great stuff we saw at the National Retail Federation (NRF) Retail’s Big Show this year in New York City.
A humanoid robot who can give sales advice
We met Pepper – the interactive, and friendly sales humanoid robot! This very cool robot was responsive to speech, and engaged with the customer in a fun way, giving advice on the products the consumer scanned. He is also apparently able to assess customer satisfaction. Pepper as been described as kindly, endearing and surprising – all very true. We learned that since the launch of Pepper in Japan, over 4,000 Pepper robots have been sold by the company Alderbaran, and the first 1,000 units sold out in minutes!
A way to build stronger businesses, more efficient cities, and smarter neighborhoods
We saw Placemeter – or a high velocity ‘urban intelligence platform’. It was a great convergence of People Counters and Google’s intelligent video/sensor analytics platform for Autonomous Vehicles. It’s objective? To quantify human activites in our cities to help with efficiencies in our ever expanding cities.
Smarter Lighting
We saw Phillips leveraging LED lights to sense and store traffic, without requiring any additional hardware or sensors!
It was a great show, and ended with a great drinks, food and conversation with one of our favourite customers, Gia Ventola, who’s transforming the fashion industry.
