Virtual wife reminds you to eat healthy

Written by: Rebecca Milner on October 21, 2008 at 9:31 pm | In DIGITAL LIFE | 6 Comments

We’ve seen a lot of products and services targeting “metabo” fighters—those typically middle-aged salarymen trying to rid themselves of the few extra inches around the mid-section associated with the dreaded metabolic syndrome. Of those, the “Virtual Wife” service from Metaboinfo.com has to be one of the best.

Subscribers to the free service can choose from one of four virtual wives, who include a cute maid café waitress, a cool domineering analyst, a motherly nurse, and a fashionable nail artist, and even pick her name. Users then input their height, weight, and lifestyle habits.

In return, they receive 4 emails daily from their virtual wife that include nagging reminders not to engage in unhealthy habits and suggestions for reaching their ideal body weight—all in a tone of voice appropriate to the chosen character.

The service also includes a “meal management tool” with a space to input a menu and find out how many calories are likely involved. We’ve featured coverage before of how mobile phones are being used as health aids, and while this example is less serious, it does fit the trend and furthermore, shows how these services are increasingly not only accessible from mobiles but instructive and communicative as well.

Tags: Dieting, health, Metabo, Mobile, Wellness
Category: DIGITAL LIFE
Other categories: MARKETING IDEAS, LIFESTYLE / FASHION, PRODUCT INNOVATIONS

Endless Banana from Epoch combines trends

Written by: Michael Keferl on October 14, 2008 at 9:23 pm | In DIGITAL LIFE, LIFESTYLE / FASHION | 8 Comments

It’s interesting when real world trends manifest themselves in unexpected ways. Take bananas for example…

This year has been all about the “morning banana diet” which came from the runaway hit book of the same name that’s all about eating lots of bananas for breakfast to lose the extra kilos. 700,000 copies don’t lie.

Of course, if you think you’ve heard something similar…you have…but the banana diet has more holding power and supermarkets can barely keep them in stock! For a country that imports 102 million tons annually, that’s not an easy feat.

As a result, we have two market trends in one little toy. Epoch is now entering the “infinite toy” market with it’s Endless Banana, which encapsulates the production trend of infinite menial (yet fun) tasks with the consumer trend of bananas, bananas, bananas.

It even has it’s own embedded sound with voice actress Saki Fujita, adding the necessary moe element to a banana that you get to peel over and over again, even simulating the feeling of it while peeling.

Now comes the question: What seemingly boring things would you like to do over and over again, but in a simulation?

Tags: Bananas, Dieting, Epoch, Mugen
Category: DIGITAL LIFE, LIFESTYLE / FASHION
Other categories: MARKETING IDEAS, PRODUCT INNOVATIONS

Japanese TV, natto, and the power of open minds

Written by: Michael Keferl on January 20, 2007 at 2:25 pm | In LIFESTYLE / FASHION, MARKETING IDEAS | 3 Comments

**Update Below**

On January 10th, a popular Japanese program on Fuji TV called Aru Aru Daijiten (The Encyclopedia of Living) had an episode on the ultimate diet for losing weight and slowing down ageing. The special ingredient? Fermented soybeans, otherwise known as “natto”. For the uninitiated, natto is basically rotting soybeans in a styrofoam package. They smell pretty rank, but are actually quite delicious on top of rice with a raw egg and some seaweed. Of course, many despise the stuff, but all agree that it’s healthy food. Judge for yourselves…looks delicious, eh?

According to the people we talked to, Aru Aru said that if you eat two packages a day, one in the morning and one at night, you’ll be able to lose weight. No diet, no exercise, just natto. They said that natto has a special hormone called DHEA (dehyrdoepiandrosterone) that aids in weight loss. This all seems pretty banal, as we’re used to “miracle diets” in the Western world, but something very Japanese happened for the next week.

Natto, in nearly every supermarket in the entire country, was sold out. Gone. We noticed it immeditaely at the market ourselves, and made inquiries to people we know. In fact, the mothers or wives of nearly everyone we talked to went out and bought more natto than usual because of the show!

This passes as a silly story about fads in Japan and the power of media, but we think it runs deeper. Japanese people certainly trust the media more than most other people, but they’re also more open to new ideas and are willing to try them. After all, we’re not talking about a special food that costs a lot of money. You can get a 3-pack of natto for less than a dollar, and many people eat it on a regular basis anyway. Why not give it a try? Lots of other people are in the midst of their two-week natto extravaganza, and they’ll certainly tell their friends and co-workers if it works or not.

This has much more to do with an open-minded attitude on the part of Japanese (despite it being faddish) which translates into new and constantly evolving product lines. Look for natto to come in “Super DHEA” packs in the near future.

**UPDATE 01/20/07** One of our favorite foreign bloggers in Japan, Marxy, has clued us in on a possible deception in this whole natto thing. While that doesn’t take away from our premise (that Japanese are very open-minded to try new things) it does reveal a shady side of Japanese TV. Is there a natto lobby out there handing out envelopes of cash?

Screenshots from Aru Aru Daijiten

Tags: Dieting, TV
Category: LIFESTYLE / FASHION, MARKETING IDEAS
Other categories: DIGITAL LIFE, PRODUCT INNOVATIONS