THE BRIDGE

tag Coca-Cola

This Japanese vending machine is a virtual girl who sends you text messages

SHARE:

If you have ever visited Japan, you will know that there’s a vending machine on nearly every street. You may recall that we previously wrote about a futuristic vending machine which uses facial recognition technology to recommend suitable drinks to whoever is standing in front of it. And now just recently we found another interesting use of vending machines from a well known company. Georgia, is a popular canned coffee brand produced by Coca-Cola Japan. Canned coffee has always been a popular and affordable beverage among Japanese salary men long before Starbucks arrived on the scene. Even now many of them will opt for vending machine coffee instead of neighborhood stores or cafes. With this specific demographic in mind, Georgia came up with a clever promotion that involves vending machines and mobile phones. Their idea is to turn a relatively boring vending machine into a more neighborly store, doing so in an effort to prompt more purchases. Here’s how it works. You can download an app to your smartphone, and choose one female manager from a list. By reading the QR code posted on your most frequented vending machine, the app registers that machine as your favorite. The female manager…

Georgia-app

If you have ever visited Japan, you will know that there’s a vending machine on nearly every street. You may recall that we previously wrote about a futuristic vending machine which uses facial recognition technology to recommend suitable drinks to whoever is standing in front of it. And now just recently we found another interesting use of vending machines from a well known company.

android-georgia-coffee

Georgia, is a popular canned coffee brand produced by Coca-Cola Japan. Canned coffee has always been a popular and affordable beverage among Japanese salary men long before Starbucks arrived on the scene. Even now many of them will opt for vending machine coffee instead of neighborhood stores or cafes. With this specific demographic in mind, Georgia came up with a clever promotion that involves vending machines and mobile phones.

Their idea is to turn a relatively boring vending machine into a more neighborly store, doing so in an effort to prompt more purchases. Here’s how it works.

You can download an app to your smartphone, and choose one female manager from a list. By reading the QR code posted on your most frequented vending machine, the app registers that machine as your favorite.

The female manager will send you friendly texts whenever you’re nearby and you can then communicate back and forth with her.

This experience turns otherwise ordinary vending machines into more of a store-like destination that keeps you coming back. The Georgia app is available on both iOS and Android platforms.

You can check out the promotion video below to see how the app can bring some enjoyment to a working man’s life.

Manga Camera adds chat feature, giving your conversations a comic flavor

SHARE:

Manga Camera is a popular camera app that cleverly turns your photos into manga style pictures. The app had an impressive 2 million downloads within a month of its release, and has so far nabbed 5.8 million downloads in total, with 4.5 star rating on the app store. Manga Camera has just updated its app to add a chat feature. You can send friends message that consists of a photo and a dialogue in a fun manga style. Chatting back and forth with others in this way automatically creates a sort of live manga story. This ‘Manga Talk’ feature is currently available on iOS but will soon be released on Android as well. The app even has a sort of artificial intelligence built into it. By sending messages to Manga Camera’s official account, the app interprets the content of the text and gives appropriate replies, again in a manga style. Another interesting – and perhaps very Japanese – feature is the ‘talking to yourself’ Bocchi function (bocchi means ‘alone’ in Japanese). The picture you create with this process can then be shared on Facebook or Twitter For those of you unfamiliar with the basics of the popular photo app, the…

MangaCamera-originalphoto MangaCamera-converted

Manga Camera is a popular camera app that cleverly turns your photos into manga style pictures. The app had an impressive 2 million downloads within a month of its release, and has so far nabbed 5.8 million downloads in total, with 4.5 star rating on the app store.

Manga Camera has just updated its app to add a chat feature. You can send friends message that consists of a photo and a dialogue in a fun manga style. Chatting back and forth with others in this way automatically creates a sort of live manga story. This ‘Manga Talk’ feature is currently available on iOS but will soon be released on Android as well.

The app even has a sort of artificial intelligence built into it. By sending messages to Manga Camera’s official account, the app interprets the content of the text and gives appropriate replies, again in a manga style. Another interesting – and perhaps very Japanese – feature is the ‘talking to yourself’ Bocchi function (bocchi means ‘alone’ in Japanese). The picture you create with this process can then be shared on Facebook or Twitter

For those of you unfamiliar with the basics of the popular photo app, the operaton is fairly simple. Users can select their preferred effects frame from over 32 choices. After you have chosen your frame, just take a photo or choose one from the photo gallery. The photo is instantly turned into a unique manga, and the quality is pretty impressive. The resulting photo can be saved to your camera roll or can be shared on Twitter and Facebook.

Manga Camera has recently been used by Coca-Cola Japan to promote their new flavored tea. The beverage giant has even provided special background frames for this new tea, encouraging people post their photos.

MangaCamera