Hack Your Life: The Hottest Lifestyle Startup Trends for 2015
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The hottest lifestyle startup trends for 2015 take some of the most routine parts of your day and give them a digital makeover. Whether it’s breathing, reading, shaving, doing laundry or getting to know your city better, the next wave of innovations for 2015 are here to help.
This week, the Slush 2014 conference has been showcasing the best and brightest startup ideas. Each year, Slush brings together entrepreneurs, investors, business and political leaders, innovators and dreamers to the Finnish capital Helsinki. Founded in 2008, this was Slush’s biggest extravaganza so far, with more than 1200 entrepreneurs from 80 countries among the 13,000+ attendees: including the Prime Ministers of Finland and Estonia, the Chinese Vice Premier, and scores of C-level business leaders from global corporations.
The opening show of Slush 2014 in Helsinki
Some of the hottest trends emerging this year at Slush were life-enhancing technologies, and here are five that caught my attention:
Beauty & Grooming
“On average, men use six cosmetics products daily like shampoo or shaving foam, and women about 12 cosmetics products daily” says Teppo Hudson, lead mobile developer for Finnish startup Cosmethics. The company’s app lets you scan the barcode of your favourite grooming, beauty and cosmetics products to see if they contain harmful ingredients, and suggests a different, less toxic or damaging product you might want to use instead. “The product ingredients are in Latin, or really hard to understand the chemical names, so we make that easier or transparent” explains Hudson. Cosmethics only launched a few months ago, but has already generated media buzz in Europe. Their initial target customers are likely to be ethical shoppers, or people choosing to buy organic or whole food products. ”We think it’s important for people to know what you’re using in the cosmetics products” says Hudson. The app is free, and Cosmethics makes its profit from the product referral service.
Bond Thaiyanurak hates laundry. And he reckons you do too. So the Thai entrepreneur set out to disrupt the laundry business by creating washbox24.”It’s very simple. It’s a locker. You shove your dirty clothes in it. We take it to a central facility where we take pictures and attach a barcode” explains Bond. But then comes the smart part. “We upload the information to your smartphone, you can track it by barcode, everything is safe and when it’s returned to your locker you get anSMS message to let you know”. The concept has been a hit so far, and Bond won the Slush Bangkok pitching competition, which brought him to Slush Helsinki as part of the prize. ”We don’t have anything like this inAsia, most of all it’s about exposure and experience. We are a new scene, just emerging. Back home we do everything ourselves. There’s no startup help, or recruitment, we just do everything ourselves. Getting connected, being on the map, I think that’s what Slush is all about” he says. Right now the company has two dozen washbox24 locations across Bangkok – accessed using secure key cards – but is aiming for expansion. ”Asia first” says Bond “then we would love to be Singapore and Hong Kong”.
Reading
For reading on-the-go, Berlin-based startup Blinkistwill expand its US range in 2015. The company produces shortened versions of non-fiction books for your tablet or phone, and breaks the contents down into ‘blinks’ – each one about a page long on iPads, and roughly 10 ‘blinks’ per book. For the price of a large latte, around $5 per month, you can read all you want. The target audience is young professionals commuting to work. “They’re probably voracious readers who just want to stay up to date on topics which interest them, and keep their career skills sharp” explains Ben Hughes, Blinkist’s Head of Content. “We’re going to be launching this Blinkist premium content, which includes audio, and that’s specifically aimed at the US market” he adds. The audio books of course are perfect for driving to work, where using a tablet device is not an option. Hughes says the sort of titles you can read on Blinkist include “business; entrepreneurship; popular science; history; society; philosophy; psychology, but only non-fiction”. Right now the company has 200,000 sign-ups, and adds about ten books each week to their virtual library.
Some of the books on offer in Blinkist’s ‘virtual library’ / Credit: Blinkist
Exploring
Scottish social media startup Bubbal wants to be Twitter TWTR -7.33% and Google GOOGL -0.36% for places. So, no pressure! The idea of Bubbal is that instead of following people, you follow places, like a stadium perhaps – with all the things happening in or around it: concerts, sports, bars, restaurant, transport options. “It’s a service that basically let’s you find out what’s most important to you, wherever you happen to be” says Mark Sorsa-Leslie, Bubbal’s founder. “It prioritises all the content around you, and sorts it into a personalised list just for you, just for that time”. So if you’re at that stadium, and want to order a hot dog, Bubbal lets you do it straight from the app. If you’re leaving the concert or football game, your nearby geolocated transport options will show up. And when you move away from the area, you will no longer get those notifications. In the US, Bubbal’s already in talks with CBS Outdoor, one of the world’s biggest advertising companies, to use the service on their static and digital billboards to target people with different information, and get consumers to engage with brands. “If you pass a billboard with a Nike sign on it, it will send a message to you based on your interests and preferences” explains Sorsa-Leslie. “If you pass the same billboard as me, you might get a message about running shoes Nike are offering; I might get a piece of content about the football boots they are selling – an offer that is tailored to me”.
Breathing
Niko Järvinen wants to help you breathe more easily. The 27 year-old CEO of Finnish startup NaturVention - Slush features lots of homegrown talent – produces enclosed indoor ecosystems: basically high-tech vertical gardens for your office or school which help purify the air, naturally. “It’s not just about the plants, but about the technology which enhances it” explains Järvinen. “All carpets and furniture and paints emit gasses, and of course if you are in a big city there are cars, so the air is not pure, and this can naturalise the air” he says. The NaturVention plants are non-flowering, to combat allergies, and potted into little tubes of gravel or sand, from where they draw nutrients. Water for automated irrigation is stored at the base of the wall. The whole ecosystem is connected to the cloud to allow for smart monitoring and control. “When we bring a wall to any place, it’s able to find the right settings, it senses the air temperature, humidity and so on” for the plants says Järvinen. For office workers or classrooms – there are about 60 NaturVention walls installed in Finnish schools already – the benefits can be improved health, or help combating sick building syndrome. “You stay healthy, especially in cold climates it gets very dry inside, and this will humidify the atmosphere as well” says Järvinen.
