For reasons I can’t begin to understand, having suffered it the first time around, vinyl is making a comeback as a music medium. I just read about London hotel ‘W London’ who are jumping on the bandwagon and offering guests a record player and free access to a comprehensive vinyl collection during their stay.

Now as I say, it’s not for me, but it does offer the hotel two things – an all-important point of difference from its competitors and some free publicity.

I’m not suggesting you introduce record players and vinyl into your business, but I am suggesting that you give some thought to how you might put clear water between you and your competitors and garner free publicity at the same time. As W London have proved, it needn’t cost a fortune, and may not even need to be something directly related to your core business.

www.wlondon.co.uk

According to a recent U.S study, even though 88 percent of home buyers are pleased with the service provided by their real estate agent, only 25 percent actually return to them when they sell their next house. This is largely due to the long  time periods between the two transactions. Homekeepr is a start-up company that enables agents to maintain ongoing relationships with their clients in order to retain their business further down the line. It aims to do this by positioning them as local experts who provide clients with a searchable database of recommended product and service providers.

A lot of businesses face a similar problem – the time period between one purchase and the next is a long one., and so it’s imperative that these businesses find some way of maintaining contact during the hiatus. A good way to do this is to provide regular useful information, perhaps in the form of  a regular email newsletter.

The frequency and nature of contact will depend on the industry and customer relationship, but the principle remains the same   – you want to be at the forefront of your customers mind when the purchase cycle comes around again.

www.homekeepr.com

Drunk Mode is a new phone app which in the words of it’s developers, “acts as a condom for your phone.” The basic idea is that the app, aimed at college kids, helps to keep the user safe and secure when intoxicated.

The app offers a drunk dial blocker that hides selected phone contacts for 12 hours, preventing inappropriate calls to ex-girlfriends. Then there is ‘Find My Drunk’ which  uses GPS to help users locate drunken pals and ‘Find a Ride’, which can source a taxi home or offer walking direction to friends’ locations. Finally,  ‘Breadcrumbs’ creates a map of the user’s movements using passive GPS data, and lets users retrace their steps , whether to find a lost item or for peace of mind.

Drunk Mode will soon be integrating a number of extra safety features  including a panic button that will text alerts to loved ones if the user finds themselves in a dangerous situation, and the ability to share the profile of a missing person with everyone in the network in a five mile radius.

Now you might argue that the best course of action is to avoid getting in that state in the first place, but it’s an interesting idea and may provide a  mental springboard to something else. Are there other reasons why certain features should be disabled from phones at certain times, and could there be money to be made in an app? For example, might an app that disabled gambling sites after a pre-determined period of use, be a good idea for some people?

www.drunkmode.org

As someone living in a house with a stash of cosmetics to rival a small Boots branch, I can understand the need for this. Glambot is an online cosmetic store that resells pre-owned makeup. The company buys unwanted cosmetics from members and then re-sells, enabling customers to make money from all the stuff they bought and never used.

My first thought was that there is a hygiene issue but the company claim to have a system for sanitising and repackaging products. Even so, I’m not sure I’d want to be using a second hand lipstick…or any lipstick for that matter, but you know what I mean. This is a fairly recent start-up, so it’s too early to gauge success.

This might provide a mental springboard though. Are there other products which people ‘over-buy’ and could form the basis of a business like this?

www.glambot.com

‘Writer.is’ is a website that host daily journals, complete with a text typing effect, that recreates the writer’s composition one letter at a time.

Anyone can use Writer.is, either as a writer or reader. To create a journal, users  make a profile and then choose a title and background image for their project. Then, they are encouraged to update their journal daily. Readers simply select a journal and it opens on a separate page. The story appears gradually, one character at a time at the speed it was written, with the cursor flashing in the pauses between words.

I mention it for a couple of reasons:

1. You may wish to create your own blog on this platform.

2. There may be other applications for this ‘view it as it was created’ approach.

Website: www.writer.is