Regular readers of Springwise may remember Israeli entrepreneur Izhar Gafni’s USD 15 cardboard bicycle, a more eco-friendly version of the two wheel vehicle. Now the adopted home of the bicycle – the Netherlands – has produced Sandwichbikes, whose wooden frame can be assembled just like flatpack furniture.

Conceived by Amsterdam-based industrial design studio Bleijh, the bicycle is sent to customers in a compact box containing all of the parts and tools they need to build it – less than 50 parts in total. Rather than conceal the DIY nature of the bike, the frame is built primarily from two sides of layered plywood that give the vehicle its name. Since it is made mostly of wood, the bike is more eco-friendly and recyclable once it’s run its course, although it has been designed as a sturdy alternative to traditional models. Finally, owners can feel proud that the device they use to get around each day was built by their own hands. The video below shows how the bike is built:

The Sandwichbike is a rethinking of the typical two-wheeler that creates a greater connection between the consumer and the product, with design that emphasizes – rather than hides – its hand-built nature. The bike is available to pre-order now at a cost of EUR 799, with deliveries to begin in October. What other typically complex products could be redesigned using the flatpack approach?

Website: www.sandwichbikes.com
Contact: www.sandwichbikes.myshopify.com/pages/contact

Spotted by: Tracy Chong

Netherlands-based WaarSchijntdeZonWel.nl has already provided a way for tourists to book last minute holidays based on the current weather. Now another Dutch platform – Suggestme – is doing the same for travelers looking for destinations that are popular on social media at the time and enables users to compile their own custom guide.

Most tourist guides – even digital ones offering personalized suggestions based on user profiles – are static, in that the recommendations are based on historic customer reviews or one-time opinions from tastemakers. In reality, however, a restaurant might be the place to be one week and out of favor the next. Suggestme keeps on top of changing opinions by parsing information from millions of social media mentions across multiple platforms to determine the best places to highlight at the moment its customers are browsing the site. Currently covering Amsterdam, Berlin, London, New York and Barcelona, visitors can also search venues based on keywords such as ‘romantic’ and ‘live music’ to find the places they’re in the mood for. Users can save the locations they’ve discovered and compile them into their own customized guide, ready to share with friends.

Suggestme harnesses the dynamism of the web to provide travelers with a constantly-changing guide to new cities in real time. Could this model be applied to your industry?

Website: www.suggestme.com
Contact: www.suggestme.com/contact

Hot on the heels of our recent coverage of the MJ v1.0, a jacket that enables wearers to make music solely by gesturing, we’ve come across another example of wearable tech. Netherlands-based design group Studio Roosegaarde is set to expand its Intimacy 2.0 range of smart clothing to include a men’s business suit which turns transparent when the wearer is being untruthful.

The group has already released its range of womenswear that turns transparent based on electronic signals it receives. The clothes used ‘smart e-foils’ that are naturally transparent but turn cloudy when light from LEDs are refracted through them. The dresses were connected to sensors that could detect the heart rate – when their bpm hit a certain point, the LEDs were turned off and the material became transparent. Now the studio hopes to apply similar technology to create a business suit for men that monitors their vitals to discern whether they are lying.

Although essentially a high-fashion concept that professionals are not likely to ever willingly wear, the idea does recognize the recent call by consumers for business transparency and corporate social responsibility. Are there other ways wearable technology could more positively help us reveal aspects of our personalities?

Website: www.studioroosegaarde.net/project/intimacy-2-0
Contact: www.studioroosegaarde.net/contact

Some people may get annoyed when audiences start getting their phones out during a performance, but we’ve come across a few projects that encourage those with an urge to check their devices – such as the Providence Performing Arts Center’s Tweet Seat scheme. Now, a new movie from the Netherlands called App has placed viewers’ second screens at the heart of its narrative, providing extra content to those who keep their smartphones at hand for the duration of the film.

Created by film production company 2CFilm, the movie is a thriller that tells the story of a student who becomes addicted to her smartphone. Viewers arriving at the cinema can download the free app – which uses technology provided by SyncNow to ensure updates appear at the correct time during the film – before they enter the theater. Devices are connected via audio signals, meaning customers don’t need to connect to wifi or 3G. Vibrating alerts will notify them whenever extra content is available – for example, during a party scene text messages between characters are shown to offer extra insight into their relationships. However, the movie still makes sense for those who don’t want to use the app. The video below acts as a trailer – in Dutch – for the film:

App aims to cater for cinemagoers who have become used to using a second screen while watching television at home and want to recreate that experience for the big screen, while opening up new revenue opportunities for filmmakers. Is this the future of cinema?

Website: www.appdefilm.nl
Contact: www.2cfilm.nl/en/2cfilm.html

Spotted by: Murray Orange

We first covered Planspot last year when the startup was in the run-up to its launch date. Billed as an event marketing platform that primarily synced with social media sites to easily enable a promotion campaign, founder Satya van Heummen has since considerably changed the direction of his business. It’s a brave move for any startup team to stop, reassess their business plan, and decide to move away from the original intention. But this is what Satya did when he realized that his startup wasn’t helping his clients as effectively as he had hoped. We spoke to Marketing Manager, Reinoud Tjallema, about this change. In his words: “We dropped most of the social media integrations and decided to focus on what our users really want.”

Reinoud found that their clients weren’t too concerned with receiving help promoting their event through social media, something which is relatively easy for most companies to do. Instead, they decided to refocus their attention on the marketing potential of a wider cross-section of media. Their new business plan has expanded as a result: “Planspot now focuses on easily running effective marketing campaigns across multiple channels: traditional media (magazines, blogs, event listings, billboards), social media and newsletters.” The platform also now provides a feedback system for clients so they can see how their marketing campaigns are being received. “The other focus is on providing powerful insights (statistics) that show event organizers exactly how well their campaigns are doing and which channels are performing best.” This expansion of PlanSpot capabilities has gone down well with clients. As Reinoud puts it: “As a result we see a constant five percent growth per week in users, and have a lot of happy and retaining customers.”

Following this change in direction, the team has expanded from three to seven – taking onboard a former lead developer of the Dutch social network, Hyves. There’s also a new focus on their international image, working with US companies to help spread the word. “We went to Silicon Valley in October and have just launched in the US with international partners like Zvents, Getpromotd, Allevents.in, Songkick and Upcoming, basically offering a US-wide media network.”

Embarking into unfamiliar territory is a common journey for any startup founder, and Reinoud speaks frankly about the difficulties of trying to predict the unknown. “A major problem for any tech startup is that you’re doing something that hasn’t been done before. Regarding development we ran into all sorts of trouble, ultimately resulting in delays. Because you’re doing something new, it’s hard to estimate and make fixed roadmaps. Yet business depends on those new features being released and the business needs to get going, especially if you have investors breathing down your neck.” Time can be of the essence when you’re trying to introduce something unique to the market, as there is always a danger that someone else will come along with a similar offering.

They also came up against unchartered territory when working out how to market and price PlanSpot: “The other main problem for any startup is finding your product-market fit. Once you do get new features released, there’s a big chance people aren’t waiting for them or there’s an expectation mismatch. This also counts for pricing your product, something that you always do wrong (unless you’re lucky).”

The team are keen to develop the business still further, but are careful to only introduce new features that will benefit many. “The other major challenge is what feature should be developed next (in order to make more users happy). People ask a lot, but we only want to develop features applicable for more than one user. So it is all about talking and a lot of coffee meetings before we create some new awesome features.”

Reinoud is candid in his assessment of the business’s success so far. “Most startups fail because they get stuck in this vicious circle of delay and product-market mismatch, and simply run out of money. Our main success is that we managed to control delays in development and have come closer to our product-market fit with every new release. The proof for that is a media network that is performing better (the publishing rate is increasing), more users starting to pay, building more partnerships, and that we’ve won some awards.”

Planspot’s remit is now much wider than its original set-up, and Reinoud is pleased with this altered direction: “No matter the consequences, don’t be afraid to pivot. Don’t be afraid to change strategy, your product, your features, your developers, and people in your team. If something doesn’t work, better change it today than tomorrow.” Ultimately, the risk the team took in overhauling the business direction seems to have paid off, giving them more scope for development. Perhaps a good example of the benefit of listening to client feedback when tweaking your offering.

You can read more about Planspot here, or visit the Planspot site here.

We’ve seen emergency services taking advantage of social media before, with the Seattle Police Department improving its engagement with the public by tweeting the calls it received. Now Twitcident is helping first responders to better work out how to proceed by filtering public user updates about an incident by relevancy.

According to the developers, Twitter produces around 250 million tweets a day, and a particularly newsworthy incident at any time could instigate tens of thousands of updates. Using Twitcident, emergency service workers can use filters to find tweets that include photos, videos or geolocation tags, as well as information about risk or reported casualties in a particular region. While users can bring up individual tweets to analyze what is going on, Twitcident also enables them to create data visualizations about the number of tweets with relevant information over time. Although the service has been created with emergency service workers in mind, the platform could be equally useful for citizens who want to take the best action to ensure their safety in the case of local trouble.

Twitcident takes the mass of public updates people make on social media sites everyday, making them useful as a source of real-time data for those trying to save lives. How else can social media content be leveraged for positive uses?

Website: www.twitcident.com
Contact: richard@twitcident.com

Spotted by: Alexia M

We’ve seen several efforts to apply the rental model to clothes over the years, but it wasn’t until just recently that we came across a venture that not only focuses on jeans but is also led by the brand itself. Enter Mud Jeans, a Dutch clothing brand that recently kicked off a brand-new leasing program.

Mud Jeans’ pants are made from organic and recycled cotton through responsible production methods, the company says. In part to facilitate that recycling capability, the company now offers its jeans for yearly lease. Consumers pay a one-time “entry” fee of EUR 20 for the pants they like, followed by EUR 5 per month for a year. During that time Mud offers free repair service should the jeans get ripped or torn. Then, at the end of the year, consumers can send back their pants, pay EUR 7.50 for shipping to switch to a new pair, and then embark on another yearly lease. Alternatively, they can pay four more months’ payments and keep the original pants indefinitely; if at some point down the road they decide to send them back after all, Mud will apply their initial EUR 20 payment toward their purchase of a new pair.

The bottom line, of course, is that ownership-averse transumers can stay up-to-date on fashion while Mud gets to reclaim much of the high-end fabric it uses and put it right back into new products. Other clothing brands around the globe: see any downside here?

Website: www.mudjeans.nl/en
Contact: info@mudjeans.nl

Spotted by: Smith Alan & Elisa Huijsman

In a world where an increasing number of people are posting real-time updates about what they’re doing through their smartphones, it’s no wonder we’ve seen apps harnessing this data to provide a bigger picture. We recently saw Moovit enable commuters to determine accurate arrival times and levels of commuter crowding, and now Avoid The Shopping Crowds is advising consumers whether they should avoid certain retail stores based on the number of shoppers.

Useful for busy periods, such as weekends or festive seasons, the app currently offers data for four stores in the Netherlands – Centrum, 9 Straatjes, Zuid and ArenA. By analyzing social media check-ins, photo uploads, location-based tweets and live webcam activity, the developers are able to display accurate information regarding how crowded each store is, in real-time. Users can easily see for themselves how busy the locations are with a simple bar graph detailing the average crowdedness on each day of the week, although the app also gives advice such as ‘Forget it’ if queues are likely. They, the creative agency behind the app, hopes to develop similar utilities for museums, the beach and ski resorts in the near future. The following video explains more about how the app works:

How else can the constant stream of social media data be leveraged for more useful solutions?

Website: www.they.nl
Contact: they@they.nl

Spotted by: Alexia M

We’ve seen personalization in the dining world through the Hoppit site, which allows a user to select a restaurant based on ambience. Similarly, the IkHa temporary restaurant in the Netherlands recently allowed customers to select their choice of Ikea furniture to populate the space while they dined.

Created by Oatmeal Studio, the café was erected as part of last year’s Nordic Film Festival and aimed to make the experience of eating out more customizable for diners. Upon arriving, customers filled out their preferred furnishings – and meal choice – in pencil onto a paper slip, much like the process found in the Ikea store. As well as selecting from a range of tables, chairs and decorations, diners could cut their own tablecloth from wallpaper hanging from the walls. The space invited those using it to personalize it according to their tastes, providing a more engaging experience for diners, as well as doubling as a showroom for Ikea – despite the company not being officially involved in the project.

While the festival is now over, the IkHa restaurant is still available to hire. How else can others in the hospitality industry offer customers a greater role in designing the spaces they use?

Website: www.oatmealstudio.nl/index.php?/root/ikha
Contact: info@oatmealstudio.nl

Spotted by: Alexia M

The bicycle revolution has been frequently chronicled on Springwise’s virtual pages over the past few years, but it wasn’t until just recently that we came across Netherlands-based Cyclodeo, an effort to provide video documentation of the many routes available to cyclists today.

Cyclodeo lets cyclists around the globe upload videos of their rides onto a Google Map, so others can see exactly what street conditions they might encounter on a particular ride. For each route statistics listed include duration, average speed, elevation and distance. Video captures of Copenhagen are already available along with routes in the Netherlands and New York, among other locations. The video below shows a Copenhagen route uploaded to the site:

The world is increasingly bicycle-focused, and so efforts such as Cyclodeo may be welcomed by those trying to find safe routes in particular locations. Time to help cyclists share their riding knowledge?

Website: www.cyclodeo.com/Cyclodeo.jsp
Contact: www.twitter.com/cyclodeo or www.facebook.com/Cyclodeo

Spotted by: Murray Orange