NNSafe (2)

Third place we ended, in the online battle, but today we achieved the 'best presentation' - prize on presenting our concept at Nationale Nederlanden HQ in Rotterdam!

We had developed a concept called NNsafe for an insurance company called Nationale Nederlanden. Customer insights of current and future customers is essential to deliver high quality service. Our concept focuses on risk prediction of future customers, based on the behaviour of current customers. With this concept we ranked third on the Battle of Concepts website. See also my previous post about NNSafe !

VOIZ Politics Discussion Platform

Wouldn't it be cool if you could see the plans and steps of your local city district - government? Wouldn't it be cool if you could interact with those plans, create some bonding, interaction with civilians, participating in and with your environment.
Last friday we have presented our end concept VOIZ. We had to came up with a trend (we chose 'crowdsourcing' and 'citizen involvement in politics'), an idea (a way to attract youngsters to politics), and a concept (an online platform where current discussions, polls and games give youngsters influence in politics).

This you had to work out, with full design, a guerilla campaign and a business model (as shown in the presentation). We were second place out of four teams in class!

Download the presentation:

http://stud.cmd.hro.nl/0773253/jaar4/minor/voiz_presentatie.ppt

Pomegranate Phone

Looking for new developments like Instant Voice translation we stumbled upon the Pomegranate Phone. At first we were shocked; wow what a wonderfull design, and 'more things that you could ever think of ever fitting into the palm of your hand'. Everything build in; phone, camera, full internet browsing 'and that's just the beginning' as the trailer tells you...

But then...

... well just look for yourself...

http://www.pomegranatephone.com/

And for more information, and a nice review about the Nova Scotia Viral go to:

http://issmatblog.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/nova-scotia-pomegranate-phone-great-viral-but-is-it-effective/

NN Safe

Third place, on Battle of Concepts (www.battleofconcepts.nl), with a concept for Nationale Nederlanden (www.nn.nl/), one of the biggest insurance companies in Holland. Their problem? The immense overload of data. How can they use this data for risk management?

NNSafe is an application developed for NN to calculate risks amongst their target group in actual, recent but also for future insurances. How does it work?


Mainly, the application researches the current database of clients, and connects to the major popular social networks like Hyves and Schoolbank. The application corresponds their own clients with users on those platforms, by simply matching names, resulting in the public details, which consists out of ‘places they visit’ and ‘groups they belong to’. This information can be very much useful for this kind of risk management; because you can count the amount of groups, places, hobbies, sports and interests by seeing in how much they are representing in a certain field of behaviour. For instance, you can see that a client with a high risk behaviour is likely to be somebody who comes from a certain place in town, or has a special taste of cigarettes, likes to play dangerous sports, or belongs to groups of rebellious soccer supporters...

Dutch on Ice

How cheesy can it be? It’s a few days below zero and everybody suddenly wants to skate. And so do I, how Dutch. And even if I did not have skates, and even if I did not skate for years I managed not to fall down at all.

It’s Saturday morning, early as I biked through the streets of The Hague, on the way to a friend of mine where we would gather up.

It’s minus five I guess, but I’m prepared (with Mongolian trousers included). And my skates of course, found and got them within a few hours on the online market place, picked them up for a dime in Delft on the way home from Rotterdam yesterday. It’s hard to find skates now, and on the news they are even mentioning traffic jams all over the place because of the sudden immense interest to ice skate.

“It might be your last.”

And how lovely, a few hours later we were on the ice, somewhere on the fields outside of the big city, where the Dutch landscape truly comes alive. We passed the old farmer mills and children selling coffee and hot chocolate on the docks, hundreds to thousands people were on the ice.

On the way we stopped in a village, ice skating through its channel. We heard folk music and saw a lot of people gathering up in the centre, where everybody was on the wooden flounders entering the local bar.

The smell of hot stew (yes, the famous pea soup) combined with thick hot dogs was nearly unbearable, as I sat eating saying: “I hope they’re not going to play Frans Bauer…” But they that the moment I said it, a tune of him, one of the most famous and traditional Dutch folk music artist, started.

I guess you just have to love it. I did.