Good day blog-followers, this week goes about a creative and innovative product.

A couple of days ago, I saw something extraordinary on the web. I was checking Facebook and all of a sudden, there was a picture of an umbrella on the Facebook page ‘Art&Design’ and it looked funny.

So I have a question for you guys, do you also get tired when your umbrella breaks by a violent gust of wind? I surely do! Well, apparently there exists a solution for that, the umbrella from Nubrella. I didn’t know that and I’m sure that a lot of you also didn’t know this. The umbrella looks like a helmet but bigger. It covers your entire upper body and there is one big advantage of this umbrella, you don’t have use your hands! I put a few pictures with this blog so all of you can see what the umbrella looks like.

The product comes with a lot of advantages. The first and the most important one I think, is that your umbrella can’t break anymore when there is a lot of wind. Because of the fact that you don’t have to use your hands, you can easily use your phone or ride your bike!

I went to the website of Nubrella and apparently they already sold their umbrellas in over 66 countries. I hope they soon will be available in the shops here in Belgium. If you would like more information about this product, just go to the website http://www.nubrella.com/.

- Niels

I would like to start with this sentence; a surge in 'second screen' value. What do I mean with second screen? By second screen I am referring to mobile. Nowadays the marketers can’t ignore the value of offering their brands and products on mobiles because more than 75% of the world has access to mobile devices.

It is very important that your website is mobile-friendly, that it is responsive and easy to use on mobile devices. 2013 will be all about offering value in mobile app form. What value can your brand offer a mobile device user? I introduce you to the upcoming marketing trend: Shoptimization.

So I can all hear you think, what is this new trend? Well, according to Rohit Bhargava, the founder of Influential Marketing Group, it goes mainly about having new mobile apps that let the consumers optimize the process of buying everything from fashion to medical prescriptions.

There are a couple of examples that I would like to explain. Firstly, you have several apps like slice, dashlane, etc. that allows consumers to use a single button to do everything, from combining all your online purchasing, to price checking. This makes it easier for the shoppers to buy anything and it is also a good way for the retailers to obtain new data to optimize the shopping experience.

Another example of shopping apps are CardStar, perx, Keyring, … Instead of carrying all those loyalty cards in your wallet and having an endless search for the right card in the right shop, those apps allows you to put all those loyalty cards in just one app. There also exist an app to store all the discount coupons you find in the brochures. This is very useful for people who like to use the discount coupons.

As you can see, those examples are just the basic apps, it goes way beyond this.

Well, this was my blog for this week, I hope you guys liked it!

Niels