Regular readers of Springwise may remember the Hellmann’s mayonnaise campaign in Brazil that printed recipes for those who purchased the mayonnaise, using the other items also being bought as ingredients. Unsatisfied with stopping there, the company has returned with the Recipe Cart, which uses NFC technology to immediately suggest meal ideas to shoppers as they walk past other ingredients.

The campaign was the brainchild of digital agency CUBOCC, who fitted shopping carts at the Pão de Açúcar shopping center in São Paulo with touchscreen devices. When consumers placed a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise in their cart, the tablet detected where they were in the store through NFC tags located on each aisle. For example, if they walked past the vegetable section, a video of a summer salad with mayonnaise began to play on the screen, while those next to the fish were recommended a fish, onion and mayonnaise bake. If they liked the recipe they could interact with the display to find the location of the necessary ingredients in store, or share the meal idea with friends over social networks. Some 45,000 customers were involved in the campaign and – according to Hellmann’s – sales rose by almost 70 percent. The video below shows the Recipe Cart in action:

Although the campaign lasted only one month and focused on one specific product, could this idea be expanded to include a wide database of recipes targeting multiple consumer groups, given its apparent success?

Website: www.hellmanns.com.br
Contact: www.hellmanns.com.br/fale_conosco

Learning can be expensive, and we’ve already seen startups such as Raygun try to help college students in US save money. But what about those who can’t even afford a basic education? Brazil’s Mais Estudo is hoping to get more young people into university by offering vacant classroom spots at reduced prices.

While some courses and universities may be oversubscribed when it comes to taking on new students, others have gaps that don’t generate any income for the institutions. Rather than leave those spaces empty, Mais Estudo partners with those offering graduate, postgraduate and technical courses and agrees a discount – which can be up to 70 percent – that is applied to those who enrol through the platform. Unlike a student loan – an option many poorer students end up taking – there are no fees to pay back upon completion of the course. The following video explains – in Portuguese – more about the project:

Institutions gain revenue they otherwise wouldn’t have, low-income students benefit by being able to receive the education they need without the costs typically involved, while Mais Estudo takes a 50 percent cut with universities. How else can higher education be made more affordable?

Website: www.maisestudo.com.br
Contact: www.maisestudo.com.br/fale-conosco

Spotted by: Dagoberto Salles

Just a few months ago we featured Blue Badge Style, an app that helps disabled users find fashionable London venues that are wheelchair-accessible. Now focusing on similar concerns in Brazil, the Accessibility View project aims to use Google Maps and Street View to help disabled people find the most accessible routes through São Paulo.

As in many big cities, São Paulo’s sidewalks vary widely in their condition – with bumps, holes and other obstacles often making it difficult for the physically disabled to navigate through the city. The Accessibility View project, led by Eduardo Battiston, who is executive creative director at AgênciaClick, aims to help remedy that problem with an app that offers the equivalent of Google Street View, but from a disabled user’s perspective. The project already won first place in Google’s Creative Sandbox; next, it hopes to team up with the Associação de Assistência à Criança Deficiente (AACD) to equip members with cameras as a way of gathering the necessary photographic views from a wheelchair’s perspective, according to a Catraca Livre report. The video below explains the premise in more detail:

Another app, another small step toward better accessibility. Tech-minded entrepreneurs: what could you add here?

Website: www.cargocollective.com/battiston/Accessibility-View
Contact: jucabattiston@gmail.com

Spotted by: Nathalia Souto

We’ve seen restaurants encourage ethical behavior before, with the Halfsies program sending donations to fight hunger when customers opt for a smaller portion. Now the Le Repas bistro in Brazil is offering a free salad for any diner who rides their bike to the café as a reward for being green.

Visitors to the French-themed restaurant who arrive on two wheels are greeted with a bowl of fresh green leaves to give them some healthy sustenance for their journey. The restaurant owner hopes that the reward will provide an incentive for cyclists to visit, as well as encouraging other local businesses to try something similar. If successful, perhaps a few more people will be traveling around the area on bike, doing their bit to cut carbon emissions.

Are there other similarly simple ways to incentivize eco-friendly behaviour?

Website: www.lerepas.com.br
Contact: www.lerepas.com.br/contato.html

Spotted by: Regina Gauer

We recently wrote about how the University of Virginia is helping boost the local economy in South Africa by getting workers to build and sell their own water filtration devices. Now a new project taking place in Brazil, Eu que Fiz – which translates as ‘I Made That’ – is providing mobile training in chocolate-making and food business management to those in the country’s poor areas.

Based in São Paulo and organized by grocery brand Selecta and charity CUFA (Central Única de Favelas do Brasil), the project has repurposed a truck as a learning space, featuring a small kitchen and classroom. The vehicle is travelling to favelas and other low-income areas to teach women how to make chocolate products, as well as give them the business knowledge they need to create sustainable income. Classes last for three hours each and participants learn a new recipe each time. The project is timely with Easter around the corner, although learners will receive continued support once they complete the course.

The scheme provides skills and opportunities to those that need it most, with the aim of helping them to produce a source of income that will last. Could other industries embark on socially responsible enterprises such as this?

Website: www.cufasp.org.br
Contact: claudia@cufasp.org.br

Spotted by: Nathalia Souto

Closed captions are already used to translate foreign speech in television and film, but also to provide hard-of-hearing viewers with same-language transcriptions. Marrying these two concepts, Easy Way Subtitles now allows those who can’t speak Portuguese to enjoy Brazilian television by running hard-of-hearing captions through Google Translate.

Developed with the help of creative agency Loducca, the system is aimed at students, or visitors and residents of Brazil who arrive without sufficient knowledge of the language to understand national television programming. Closed caption data provided by television companies is uploaded to the Easy Way server and run through Google Translate in real-time. Using the app on a second device – such as a smartphone or tablet – viewers can choose which channel they are tuned into on their television and the language they’d like it to be translated into. They can then place the second device next to the television in order to watch the program with subtitles. The following video offers a demonstration of the app:

The technologies that Easy Way Subtitles is based upon have existed for a while, and the success of the service relies on the simplicity of its concept. Could this idea be implemented by other countries to make their cultural output more accessible for visitors?

Website: www.easywaysubtitles.com
Contact: www.facebook.com/easywaysp

While Boston authorities are making their civic services mobile with its City Hall To Go scheme, the Brazilian city of Curitiba is using a new suite of apps to benefit its residents. Passaporte Curitiba features a range of apps that aim to improve users’ experience of the city.

In collaboration with the Instituto Curitiba de Informático, the city has created ten apps in the series, which enable visitors or long-term residents to access free wifi, information on the cheapest groceries in the vicinity and a community chat forum. The idea behind the launch is to take advantage of digital technologies to greater integrate the city’s inhabitants with those around them. This could be particularly beneficial to older or disabled people who may have become disconnected from society.

Passaporte Curitiba is a way for both tourists and lifelong denizens to take greater advantage of what the city has to offer. Could this work in your part of the world?

Website: www.passaportecuritiba.org.br
Contact: www.ici.curitiba.org.br/faleConosco.aspx

Packaging is a necessary part of a lot of food distribution, and yet remains an environmental problem when it ends up contributing to landfills and litter. We’ve already seen projects such as Canada’s Tiffin Project, which provides a small re-usable tin for takeaway customers to put their food in, but now a marketing campaign for Bob’s fast food chain in Brazil has come up with another solution – by making its packaging edible.

Conceived with the help of advertising agency NBS, the restaurant franchise wrapped its burgers in a kind of rice paper that can be eaten along with the burger. Instead of unwrapping the food, customers were able to simply bite into the wrapped product. The idea behind the campaign was to illustrate the irresistibility of the burgers, but – according to the company – there were no wrappers left in the restaurant following the campaign, suggesting the concept could provide an environmentally-friendly solution to litter.

Although the taste and texture of the paper may not have complimented the burger, Bob’s took a step towards combatting the sustainability problem with packaging. Could this campaign be implemented more permanently?

Website: www.bobs.com.br
Contact: www.bobs.com.br/fale-com-a-gente

Following swiftly on from our coverage of PredictGaze, the platform that makes use of devices’ cameras to enable gesture control, we’ve spotted some more innovative use of such technology. The Intera project at the Hospital Evangélico de Londrina in Brazil is helping surgeons to control vital on-screen imagery with gestures to save precious time in the operating room.

When performing complex surgery, reference material such as x-rays and patient exam details is necessary to ensure the procedure goes smoothly. Many surgeons still use physical x-ray film and light boxes, which can take time to set up and is limited to the space of the display area. According to reports, those behind the Intera project wanted to bring the operating theatre into the digital age without requiring the surgeon to take off their gloves to operate a computer or tablet and are now using the Microsoft Kinect to allow doctors to control the display while keeping their hands ready for the task in front of them. The images are displayed on a large screen in the operating room and vital imagery can be swapped or magnified and video can be paused, rewound or slowed down. The video below explains – in Portuguese – how the system works:

The system makes the process of retrieving and displaying important visual cues for surgeons easier and quicker, reducing stress for doctors and giving patients a greater chance of survival in emergency situations where time is of the essence. Intera has already been used successfully in actual operations but at the moment it is limited to the Hospital Evangélico de Londrina. Could this innovation benefit hospitals around the globe?

Website: www.aebel.org.br
Contact: aebel@aebel.org.br

Spotted by: Regina Gauer

We’ve seen several tools for helping businesses create an online storefront, including tinypay.me, but Brazilian Genstok takes such e-commerce efforts a step further by enabling users to stock these stores as well. Specifically, Genstok connects product suppliers with would-be sellers for commission-based partnerships.

Users of Genstok begin by creating a virtual store on the site and choosing what kinds of products they’d like to sell; options include everything from lipsticks to electronics. Users also decide what kind of commission they’d like to earn from within a set range. They then populate their store with the chosen products and offer them up for sale online. All inventory is shipped directly by suppliers, so there’s no need to stock products at home. Each sale, meanwhile, earns a commission from the supplier that provided it.

There’s no end in sight to the fresh new ways there are for sellsumers to earn cash online. E-commerce entrepreneurs – one to emulate in your area?

Website: www.genstok.com.br
Contact: contato@genstok.com.br

Spotted by: Dheymerson Garcia