Neal's Notes

While numerous financial institutions worldwide have embraced biometric technology, widespread acceptance and adoption by customers is still in its early stages.

In short, the technology aims to make authentication easier by using various biological data and behavioral characteristics. Some of these include voice authentication, and facial or eye-scanning authentication. With voice authentication, for instance, a person’s voice has unique identity markers that help banks recognize repeat calls from known fraudsters. In fact, Fortune said the banking industry has placed more than 60,000 voices on a blacklist – “a clear example that biometrics are money in the bank for financial firms.”

And the technology itself is becoming big business. Biometrics Research Group said biometric security revenues topped almost $2 billion last year, up from $900 million in 2012. And researchers think biometric technologies may be able reduce operational risks for financial institutions by at least 20% between now and 2026.

Alistair Newton, an analyst with market research firm Gartner, said his company conducted a digital banking survey last year; many respondents were unaware their bank offered Apple’s Touch ID logins, an authentication service.

“There were also many consumers who were happy to do the extra step and type in a user name and password because it felt more secure to them. So even with the base stuff, like Touch ID, it’s certainly gaining momentum but still has a long way to go,” said Newton.

A few examples of how some financial institutions are using biometrics:

HSBC recently announced a roll out to its 15 million United Kingdom customers. Account holders can access online banking using their voice or fingerprint.

According to American Banker, Citi unveiled a voice authentication service in the U.S. allowing credit card customers to use their voice to verify themselves when they call the bank. Customers who want to use the service initially provide a brief voice sample; once this is done (Citi says it takes less than 60 seconds to set up), when customers subsequently call, their voices are matched to the pre-recorded data. Citi is also considering implementing iris-scanning ATMs.

Barclays teamed up with Hitachi and is offering ‘finger vein’ technology – customers place a finger inside a desktop scanner which checks the individual vein patterns. The technology is currently being used at ATMs in Japan and Poland.

Lastly, customers of Wells Fargo Bank’s Commercial Electronic Office, a mobile banking app, can select from either voice and facial data collection/recognition, or a photo of the whites of their eyeballs – the red vein eye patterns identify individuals and then allow access into the app.

Gartner’s Newton offered up a few caveats – voice authentication will likely achieve widespread acceptance but other technologies like a facial-scanning ATM may be a tougher sell.

“Is that really easier than just putting a card in there? To change customer behavior and habits in financial services, the new solution has to be so much better or easier than the existing services,” noted Newton.

But these hurdles will eventually be surmounted and biometrics over the next few years will catch on across the financial services world as customers will see the benefits of not having to use passwords, and that the technology provides them with a faster and more secure way to do transactions.

The buzzword, the Internet of Food, is nowhere near as ubiquitous and overused as the Internet of Things. In short, it connotes the complete food tech ecosystem – food delivery and distribution services, supply chain analytics, and more – and how all of these elements are quickly become intertwined.

Mandy Saven, who heads up food, beverage and hospitality at research and advisory firm Stylus, told FoodNavigator last year that technology and digital media are greatly influencing the appearance, experience and taste of food.

And marketers are taking notice. A number of supermarkets, for instance, are promoting what Saven calls ‘wonky’ vegetables, or ‘cosmetically challenged produce.’

“Maybe this will make consumers more comfortable; there’s a sense of gratification that they are using foods closer to how they are in nature,” said Saven.

Meanwhile, tech and food companies are embracing high-tech marketing innovations to move food products and simultaneously do a bit of brand promoting.

Some examples:

Patron used virtual reality (VR) headsets to market its tequila. The promo was called ‘The Art of Patron Virtual Reality Experience.’ GoPro cameras were used to give consumers a bird’s eye view of the Patron distillery in Jalisco, Mexico. Since consumers are demanding to know more about what’s in their food, where it came from, how it was produced, using VR helps to bring the experience directly to them – without having get up off the couch.

“Increasingly, consumers want to know the origin and backstories of the products they consume,” said Lee Applbaum, Patron’s global CMO. “For us, VR was the ideal way to bring people inside our doors at scale.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that companies large and small are rushing to meet this demand. Kellogg Co. and General Mills advertise online the names and profiles of farmers who grow oats and wheat for their cereals.

At Sam’s Club, codes are now available on produce packages so shoppers armed with a smartphone can scan and glean who grew the food, where it’s from, and how it was grown.

And Campbell’s has a new website, whatsinmyfood.com that the Journal says is being used “to cultivate a home grown image by detailing, for instance, that SpaghettiOs canned pasta is made with tomatoes mainly from California family farms and cheese that is mostly from Wisconsin.”

On the tech side, food marketers are paying close attention to what food tech companies are rolling out, everything from farming analytics to web platforms connecting consumers with farmers they purchase food from. And these food and beverage startups, according to Dow Jones VentureSource, have raised over $2 billion in less than two years.

One company, for instance, is Tastemade, which describes itself as ‘a video network for the mobile generation.’ The company claims to reach over 88 million people each month.  ‘Tastemakers’ report on an extensive array of unique topics from vegan cooking to Southern BBQ; the site offers up a welter of market intel on food trends.

Another is ipiit. The company’s Food Ambassador app has a database of more than 280,000 food products. Once you set up your preferences (organic, gluten-free, etc.), the app then helps you avoid certain ingredients. You scan the barcode of a given product and check what you want to steer clear of; the app also provides alternative products that fit your parameters.

Going forward, the smartest thing in your Internet-enabled fridge may not be the unit, but the food itself. And all of this will have a profound impact on food marketing.  Bon appetit!

Big Data. Big Data. Big Data. Those two words have been hyped to death in countless articles (mea culpa – this one too), books, podcasts, videos, and more.

But as a marketer, you can’t ignore it as Big Data has matured enough to become more about math than magic – it’s now revolutionizing marketing. Talk to six market research firms and you’ll get six different forecasts but here’s one example of Big Data’s impact in the years to come – CSC predicts a whopping 4,300% increase in annual data generation by 2020. Gartner predicts that CMOs will soon be spending more on IT than CIOs; and VentureBeat said marketing technology companies have reeled in to date almost $50 billion in investment.

Last spring Forbes Insights surveyed IT execs and senior data honchos about what their firms were doing with Big Data. The results were striking – 21% indicated Big Data was a significant business priority; 38% put it in the top five; almost 80% of the respondents stated revenues had increased 1-3% due to measures implemented by Big Data findings.

And while large enterprises have the resources to weave Big Data into their sales/marketing plans, Mick Hollison, writing in Inc., thinks that start-ups may benefit the most “because they are being born in the era of Big Data and are building capabilities to leverage it into their business models.”

Hollison said as an example, Uber is leveraging geo-spatial data and location intelligence to help expand global operations.

Marketers across an array of every type of business are employing Big Data.

A few examples:

Software Advice, a CRM reviews/analysis firm, uses Big Data to match sales reps to customers. Craig Borowski, a market research associate, said Big Data analytics are being used to match the most qualified sales reps to target specific demographic segments to improve both close rates and customer satisfaction.

Deidre Woollard, head of communications at Partners Trust Real Estate Brokerage & Acquisitions, adds that Big Data is allowing her company to view more refined search data on what people are looking for – and why.

“If we know that people who are doing a search are only looking at two or three photos, those first few photos should be the best ones,” she says. “If we know more people search for homes that are between $1.5-$2.9 million than search for homes that are $3 million and up, it might be a better strategy to price a home that was somewhere in between $2.9 million and $3 million, but under $3 million then to grab that search traffic.”

Lastly, Jackson Riso, who heads up marketing at TickPick, a no-fee secondary ticket marketplace, said his firm uses Big Data to better understand which landing pages shouldn’t be optimized, despite their low-conversion rates.

Riso said Big Data enables TickPick to better understand how/when customers convert; they also know that certain high-traffic landing pages have high bounce rates.

“With Big Data we see that those visitors who bounce are coming back via other channels and are becoming some of our most profitable customers, says Riso. “In other words, the one counterintuitive way markets can use Big Data is to understand where they should optimize their bounce rates and where they should optimize their bounce.”

Big Data can divulge trends and patterns that can significantly impact a company’s business strategies – including marketing. Ion Interactive CTO Scott Brinker summed up how Big Data will drive marketing over the next few years:

“Big Data makes it cheaper and easier to test concepts, but marketing is still about coming up with the big idea. Algorithms are great at optimization, but terrible at imagination.”

No doubt about it, e-commerce continues to grow and while it represents a burgeoning share of total retail sales, there are still significant hurdles to overcome.

“We’re in the midst of a profound structural shift from physical to digital retail,” noted Jeff Jordan of venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz.

eMarketer reported, for instance, that e-commerce growth by quarter was about five times that of store locations in 2013 and 2014.

Yet there are headwinds.

Market research firm Market Track said companies that want to succeed in e-commerce must operate successfully amidst these risk areas that could undermine snaring and retaining customers:

• Volatility – Prices changing with increasing frequency and predictability;
• Non-compliance – Pricing and promoting brands and products outside established guidelines;
• Illegal/illicit activity – Counterfeiting and unauthorized resale;
• Size/scope – More retailers, resellers and products available online than ever before.

JDA Software Group also conducted a survey of more than a thousand online U.S. – based shoppers last year. Of the approximately 35% who bought online and elected to pick up their purchases at a store, about 50% experienced problems in initially getting their purchases. Wayne Usie, a JDA senior VP, said it may suggest that retailers might find it challenging expanding their e-commerce sales and keep profit margins.

“Retailers might experience service failures because picking products from storage and packing them into unique combinations for customers is easier in a streamlined warehouse than in a chaotic store, where other customers need to be helped and orders can be misplaced,” said Usie.

Meanwhile, e-commerce retailers are collecting more data than ever, but using it effectively is still a challenge. A study by IHL Group for Dynamic Action, which provides retailers with various software as a service solutions (SaaS), showed that retailers worldwide lost over half a trillion dollars last year due to out-of-stock inventory, an increase of 40% from 2012.

Lindsay Conwell, VP of Solution Engineering for Dynamic Action, said all this big data and the systems built around it can make the e-commerce environment even more challenging for retailers.

“There’s uncertainty as different systems seem to show a slightly different story; retailers are also struggling to get the right data to the right people and places,” said Conwell. “There’s a disconnect in most retailers between marketing and the supply chain. Often, marketing has planned a promotion for a certain date but if the product doesn’t reach the dock in China in time, there is no visibility back to marketing.”

Challenges aside, expect e-commerce retailers to eventually resolve many of these issues and continue to expand online offerings/services. Next year, for example, TradeReady.ca (published by the Forum for International Trade Training, a non-profit organization) reported that countries like India, Indonesia and Mexico are expected to experience the highest growth rate in e-commerce sales, primarily because of consumers’ expanding online access via smartphones.

Noted TradeReady.ca, “the winners in the race to be successful global retailers will be won by those able to adapt, remain agile, and put the latest and greatest technology to work for them, all while giving their customers exactly what they want.”

No matter if you’re a realtor or property manager, technology has redefined the real estate business over the past few years. And now the Internet of Things (IoT) is giving the industry a much-needed makeover – and all for the better.

One example – modelling. 3D printer technology can replicate models from computer-assisted design (CAD), photo montages and other established design tools. Urban Land, published by the Urban Land Institute, says by using architects and engineers’ original data, “real estate concepts and images can be visualized three-dimensionally for agents use in supporting customers’ reviews and decision making.”

And software applications, noted Urban Land, can facilitate making decorating and furniture decisions while construction is underway and during the entire occupancy life cycle:

“Over time, such apps could displace interior designers who will recast themselves as design coaches and logistics managers. Clients will browse the Internet and select their furniture, fixtures and equipment online, relying on the coach’s direction and follow-through to procure, supply and place the goods.”

Beacon technology, powered by Bluetooth, is now helping agents market homes. As reported by Meg White in REALTORMag, the official magazine of the National Association of Realtors (NAR), one example is an app created by Jeffersonville, IN-based Realty Beacon, LLC. The company partnered with Daniel Island Real Estate in Charleston, SC to produce a branded version of the app for a high-end housing development.

“Because the community doesn’t allow ‘For Sale’ signs, the beacons are usually mounted on a home’s front porch. The lack of For Sale signs can present a challenge to buyers but the beacons present an interesting opportunity to circumvent that. It gives buyers a way to explore the island on their own,” said White.

And using data from an array of Internet-connected devices is helping realtors better market their services and product. Internet-enabled lockboxes, for instance, can help manage showing schedules and provide valuable info to both sellers and listing agents about the duration of tours.

“As you have more connected devices, you build a diary for the home,” said Todd Carpenter, NAR’s managing director of data analytics. “One thing that could become really effective is being able to say ‘my house is more energy efficient, and I can prove it.’ ”

On the commercial real estate side, the IoT is already yielding benefits – wireless sensors allow property owners to offer tenants enhanced security without a recurring monthly fee – the sensors are relatively inexpensive and can be installed in individual rental units. An intelligent building, for example, might also have elevators that recognize your speech when you tell them what floor to go to – and these are features that can contribute to greater occupant satisfaction and longer occupant retention.

New York City-based Hipercept, which provides enterprise information management solutions for commercial real estate companies, said IoT applications can provide property and asset managers with the ability to measure data points while using them to improve tenant experience, energy usage, data flow, and more.

“This type of mass connectivity can also present a differentiation factor for brokers when showing space to prospective tenants,” noted a Hipercept article on IoT in real estate. “In the realm of investors, using the Internet of Things provides immense opportunity for better decision making and allocation of funds, based on the data provided on a certain property, set of properties or parcel of land.”

Sandy Apgar, an international authority on housing, real estate and infrastructure, and a former Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations and Environment during the Clinton Administration, believes we may eventually see the real estate equivalent of the Bloomberg workstation terminal, miniaturized for handheld devices:

“Much as mixed-used developments have dismantled traditional barriers among residential, office, retail, and entertainment uses, the Internet of Things helps consumers to integrate technology with their work-life choices.”

Remember that term, ‘banker’s hours’? It connoted traditional opening hours of most banks in the United States from the mid-19th century until the late 1960s – usually 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Ancient history.

Bank tellers will also soon become an endangered species as there are fewer banks, fewer branches nationwide. Bank of America’s Marc Warshawsky, a digital products executive, said his company processes over 175,000 checks each day that are done via mobile phones – no need for a bank branch or ATM. As mobile and automated technology rapidly evolves, banks are further compelled to change how they market themselves, and how they interact with customers. As transactions within bank branches continue to decrease, noted American Banker banks are expected to spend more of their marketing budgets on digital and video messaging.

Consulting firm Accenture covered the topic in depth in their 2015 report entitled, ‘Digital Banking: Stretch Your Boundaries Toward the Everyday Bank’. Accenture said that as technology continues to turn the banking industry on its head, “social, mobile, analytics, cloud and the Internet of Things present both disruption and opportunity.”

Those disruptions and opportunities have already manifested themselves in many ways. Banking industry boundaries are blurring as platforms reshape banking ecosystems. According to Accenture, one such trend are wearables. More than 50 percent of bank executives are either using or experimenting with wearables and Accenture said 63 percent expect wearables to be adopted industrywide by 2017.

“Wearables are still in an early stage,” said Mark Schwanhausser, director of omnichannel financial services at Javelin Strategy & Research. “As banks figure out their capabilities, account holders will start to see the true potential. A smart watch or some type of accessory will be able to offer money advice while they’re shopping. It will be able to act as a true virtual assistant with personalized recommendations on spending and saving.”

And banks are utilizing an array of technologies to help market their services. Barclays recently rolled out a voice recognition system that they claim slashes the time it takes to access a customer’s account from 90 seconds to 10 seconds. According to Accenture, when a customer next calls the bank, his or her speech patterns are compared against the initial recording and if a match, the bank’s call center staff gets a notification verifying the caller’s ID. Accenture says the system has helped Barclays reduce customer complaints in its Wealth division by 60 percent.

Customer analytics are also becoming an integral tool for the banking industry.

“Banks own the richest data set on any person – transactions,” said James Plath, an analyst with market research firm Gartner. “There will be opportunities for banks to mine the data so the opted-in consumer could get relevant alerts.”

And location-based marketing is helping banks generate more revenue and customers.

James DeBello, CEO of Mitek, said a number of retailers are trying in-store beacons and pushing mobile offers to consumers.

“Users can now act on offers in the aisle – they have the option to snap a picture to enroll in a bank loyalty program or credit card and this will open new doors for financial institutions,” said DeBello.

The explosion of mobile and electronic banking have already made banker’s hours 24/7 for customers. John Schulte, chief information officer at Mercantile Bank, said banking innovations will continue — especially in areas like video chat, mobile wallets/payments enhancements, touch ID and location-based intelligence.

“Having a bank that’s wherever you are, open all the time, and offering you convenient, fast and more intelligent ways to manage your money resonates strongly with consumers,” said Schulte.

“Say it ain’t so Joe!”

Those words were supposedly uttered by a small boy outside the Cook County (IL) Courthouse to ‘Shoeless Joe’ Jackson. He had just finished testifying to a grand jury; one of eight Chicago White Sox baseball players who allegedly took bribes allowing the Cincinnati Reds to win the 1919 World Series. Jackson was banned from baseball after the 1920 season but was found innocent in 1921 by a jury.

Debates have raged for 90+ years on Jackson’s guilt or innocence; his baseball cards, however, have stood the test of time. Currently on eBay, for example, you can buy a 1909 E90-1 American Caramel rookie for $10,999.95. If you’ve got some spare change hidden in the sofa, you can grab a 1952 Mickey Mantle Topps Rookie RC #311 for only $38,795, also on eBay (with free shipping!). And in late April, a T206 Honus Wagner card sold at auction for $1.32 million.

While the market for certain types of baseball cards is still strong, a paucity of children and even teenagers at major baseball card shows in recent years appears to be the proverbial canary in the coal mine. Baseball card prices have been falling in recent years in relation to their scarcity. In response, The Economist reported that “seeking to entice new generations of buyers, card manufacturers have experimented with new formats, including cards with pieces of game jerseys and scraps of used bat embedded: gimmicks, true, but tempting ones to those with a desire to commune with actual heroes of the diamond.”

And some companies ratcheted it up even more. Back in 2007, Upper Deck tried to convince collectors to buy its packs by including a card with a World Series ticket signed by Babe Ruth in one of them.

Fast forward to 2015 – Upper Deck doesn’t even offer baseball cards for sale – it now focuses on basketball, football golf, hockey and soccer.

Venerable Topps (established in 1938 as a family gum business in Brooklyn) is capitalizing on its history to lure more customers. The company even has a Rediscover tab on its website with a nice catchphrase – “Rediscover Topps. The story of collecting lasts a lifetime.”

There’s also a cute 30-second commercial featuring San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey. A bunch of eight-year-olds are haggling over his card and what they could get for it. Posey isn’t happy with any of the trade choices until he’s offered a 1969 Johnnie Bench rookie card that had been stored in a shoebox by the father of one of the kids. Posey immediately accepts.

The Rediscover section also has a welter of subsections that provide a lot of useful information for budding collectors. Some of these include Start Collecting and Your Vintage Cards. The most relevant of these for kids in today’s digital society is probably the all-important Apps. One popular app is Topps BUNT®, a real-time Major League Baseball digital trading card game “where the cards you own and collect earn points based on how your players perform on the field each day.”

I still have my 10,000+ collection of baseball cards; I hope all of the card manufacturers can reel in the next gen of collectors – but it will be an uphill battle.

Nonetheless, it’s a great hobby that lends itself to a lot of youthful camaraderie, best summed up by Jefferson Burdick, a renowned baseball card collector and cataloguer whose massive collection is now housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City:

“A card collection is a magic carpet that takes you away from work-a-day cards to havens of relaxing quietude where you can relive the pleasures and adventures of a past day – brought to life in vivid pictures and prose.”

Because it’s still relatively new, most consumers – and marketers – probably don’t have a clear understand of bitcoin. But it’s really the blockchain – the technology underpinning the digital currency – that could have a huge impact on financial and consumer markets.

Gil Luria, a financial technology analyst with Wedbush Securities, estimates that 20 percent of U.S. GDP – about $3.6 trillion – is generated by industries that could be disrupted by blockchain technology. And Aite Group, a market research consultancy, predicts that capital markets will spend $75 million this year alone on developing blockchain technology, reaching more than $400 million in four years.

So what exactly is a blockchain? In brief, it acts as a globally-distributed ledger that logs transactions.

Here’s one concise explanation from Re/code:

“A blockchain is essentially a record of digital events – one that’s “distributed” or shared between many different parties. It can only be updated by consensus of a majority of the participants in the system. And, once entered, information can never be erased. The bitcoin blockchain contains a certain and verifiable record of every single bitcoin transaction ever made.”

Regardless of what you think about bitcoin, the blockchain itself has so far worked flawlessly, enabling strangers, notes Re/code, “to hold and exchange digital money in a completely transparent way – without having to trust each other or any central authority.”

And here’s one real-world example – when someone uses bitcoin to buy a cappuccino, the transaction is recorded on a ‘block,’ or a file of data. Once a block is full, the next block created includes computer code that refers to the preceding block. The result is the blockchain – a permanent string of records.

Bitcoin blockchain technology may also eventually be adopted by quite a few of the world’s leading banks. A partnership recently assembled by financial tech firm R3 has lined up nine global financial institutions to design and deliver distributed/shared ledger technologies to financial markets. It will also try and establish standards and protocols. Participants include Barclays, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, State Street, UBS, Royal Bank of Scotland, Credit Suisse, BBA and Commonwealth Bank of Australia. The banks are keenly interested in the blockchain method because it is supposed to make fraud more difficult.

“These new technologies could transform how financial transactions are recorded, reconciled and reported – all with additional security, lower error rates and significant cost reductions,” said Hu Liang, Senior Vice President and head of Emerging Technologies at State Street.

So how will this all play out? Writing in Forbes, Laura Shin noted that this shared ledger approach could streamline recordkeeping and property transfers – from land titles to patent and trademark holdings. Shin added that Deloitte, the world’s largest accounting firm, is studying blockchain systems for auditing, reconciliation and other functions, “which could sideline legions of CPAs.”

Shin added that while eliminating certain jobs and possibly entire professions, the blockchain – if readily adopted – could result in creating new marketplaces, e.g., for trading mobile telephone minutes and energy credits.

There may also be an “explosion of micro transactions on the Web,” she said. “The Internet of value, linked up with the Internet of Things, could transform the supply chain and global trade.”

And on the consumer side, blockchain technology may soon result in trades and specialization we can’t even fathom today.

Chris DeRose heads up the Counterparty Foundation, a consultancy that advises businesses and organizations on how to integrate Counterparty technology and software (a financial platform for generating peer-to-peer financial applications on the bitcoin blockchain).

Writing in American Banker, DeRose said it’s not a stretch to imagine users reconciling account needs between their Facebook profiles, World of Warcraft guilds and Instagram followings.

“Financiers will be able to create futures markets for ad impressions, airline tickets and LinkedIn connections. And loans could be collateralized from the value earned by answering questions on StackExchange, alongside ownership of rare online goods and assets,” said DeRose.

The power of the blockchain, he added, lies in its ability “to become the lubricant by which markets cross borders, risk profiles and silos. These changes will affect society in much the same way that the Internet crossed markets, reduced risk and opened information silos in the first part of the 21st century. This is the future of the blockchain.”

Will the blockchain usher in money’s new operating system? Has the renaissance of money already begun and with it, open up a new way for consumers and marketers to do business?

Jury’s still out, but a lot of smart people in technology think so.

SIGGRAPH has always served as a unique forum for an array of cool and innovative technologies and computer graphics approaches. Last week’s SIGGRAPH 2015 conference continued the trend.

This marked the 42nd conference and exhibition; SIGGRAPH reported that almost 15,000 attendees, partners and media from 70+ nations descended upon the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Kristy Pron, SIGGRAPH’s Emerging Technologies Program Chair said at this year’s conference, “we wanted to find technologies that can be applied to daily life, whether it will be tomorrow or in a few years. We also wanted to uncover practical emerging technology apps from various industries such as automotive.”

So here are a few examples that are still in the nascent stage but could have real-world applications soon:

SemanticPaint – A collaborative effort by Microsoft, the University of Oxford and Stanford University. The SIGGRAPH demo unveiled what the research team says is a “new and interactive and online approach to 3D scene understanding.” The system lets users simultaneously scan their environment and interactively segments a scene by “reaching out and touching any desired object or surface.” Users have continuous live feedback online. The researchers further stated that errors can be immediately corrected in the segmentation and/or learning, which they claim isn’t currently available to batch and offline methods. They believe SemanticPaint will usher in new apps in augmented reality, interior design and human/robot navigation.

“It provides the ability to capture substantially labelled 3D datasets for training largescale visual recognitions,” noted the researchers.

Cypress, CA-based Christie Digital Systems USA, a visual and audio technology company, demonstrated its latest digital ‘sandbox.’ The company auto-calibrated projection-mapped displays on a number of different types of surfaces and scaled them down to less than 30 seconds. Attendees saw a 3D printed apartment building projection-mapped in real-time. The process – which uses cameras, projectors and 3D geometry “to augment any real object’s surface with imagery defined by a virtual model” – has also been recently patented.

Mid-Air Touch Display – A team of researchers from Keio University and the University of Tokyo in Japan demonstrated a system allowing visuo-tactile interaction with bare hands of mid-air 3D dimensional objects. The researchers created ultrasound fields that created rich tactile textures. Users could see and touch virtually floating objects with the naked eye and their hands.

These and other projects are pushing technology boundaries; going forward, it’ll be fascinating to see how many of these will ultimately impact the way we live and work.

On April 1st, California Gov. Jerry Brown issued an executive order mandating a substantial reduction in urban water consumption compared with 2013 levels. One key element – a 25% reduction in urban water use to help mitigate the state’s worst ongoing drought in more than a century.

And while a number of climatologists and meteorologists have predicted a better than 50% chance of an El Nino winter – which means greater than average rainfall- there’s no guarantee that the desperately needed rain will arrive.

Enter the Internet of Things (IoT). The drought has spawned a welter of startups and innovative partnerships with public agencies and the private sector that utilize the IoT to find smart solutions to manage both water distribution and electricity use.

A few examples:

The Monterey Regional Water Pollution Control Agency (MRWPCA) has teamed up with Candi Controls and MC Engineering to install a system of low-cost, industrial-class IoT devices. By collecting data from connected sensors, the system is helping to optimize distribution of reclaimed water among farmers and everyday users; it also minimizes energy by tracking usage and power consumption.

According to Tom Kouretas, an MRWPCA engineer, the agency is able to mitigate some of the costs associated with its power consumption by moving water at night when possible, and supplementing with solar energy during daylight. However, he added, the water has to be there, 24/7, and solar energy is a ‘dynamic resource’ that fluctuates continually depending on weather patterns and time of day.

“Trying to understand how best to optimize these processes and stay below peak energy demands means that the agency must understand when we are using power, what the price is on the grid, what the total load is of each process, how to distribute loads among various pumps, and how much the solar production contributes to power availability in the moment,” said Kouretas.

Milwaukee-based Wellntel, launched in 2013, has created a non-invasive sensor system that collects water level information from water wells and produces the data on graphs and charts on a private, personalized website and smartphone app. The system is placed on top of groundwater wells and emits a sonar like ping to measure well water. Wellntel has been conducting an 18-month pilot program in Templeton in California’s Central Valley; the system may prove useful in the region as groundwater levels are being depleted at an alarming rate.

San Francisco startup WaterSmart provides software to water utilities nationwide. The company collects literally hundreds of millions of data points each hour that enable utilities to discover leaks and also identify homes or neighborhoods that are heavy water users.

WaterSmart also has a ticker on its website that shows how much users are saving – as this story was getting ready to post, the company claimed that WaterSmart users have saved 1,799,128,431 gallons of water; $9,530,418.58 dollars; 15,834.04 tons of carbon dioxide.

All of the aforementioned isn’t a total panacea that will resolve California’s drought overnight.

But it’s a good start.

Thomas Odenwald, writing in Digitalist Magazine (produced by SAP), summed it up:

“The growing visibility of drought and water challenges in California has created a new urgency and renewed momentum for action by companies, individuals, and elected officials to take action on water stewardship at both the local and state levels.”