Title:
Automated Internet based tracking of the toy/gadget product market: is it possible?

Speaker:
Koen Holtman, Philips Research

Abstract:

Philips is always looking to create innovative products, but
recognizes that there is also a lot of product innovation
happening outside of its own primary markets. One market that
Philips is not really selling to is the low-cost impulse-buy
'toy/gadget' market, e.g. http://www.geniegadgets.com/. This
market is characterized by the continuous creation of new
'crazy' products, that consumers are willing to take a gamble
on because the price is low enough. Often, an impulse-buy
product will be interesting to the consumer for a few days or
weeks, but disappoint in the long run. Sometimes however, a new
impulse buy product turns out to be lastingly useful to the
consumer. If this applies to a large set of consumers, we could
call the product a 'new classic'. It might be possible to
automatically detect the appearance of 'new classics' in the
churn, through software that analyses publically available
information like web shop sales ranking trends, e-bay re-sale
value, web shop comment sections, or blogs. Such detection
software would be valuable to Philips, to help Philips find and
understand new consumer needs. A special case of a web-centric
market is the market of products controlled by smart phone
apps. A 'new classic' product might in this case become visible
via the app store rankings of the associated apps. The goal of
this talk is to explore, together with the audience, if
software based or software-assisted finding of 'new classics'
might be feasible today, given the state of tooling and
available information sources on the Internet.