Smart products

Recent innovations in mobile and sensor technologies allow for creating a digitalrepresentation of almost any physical entity and its parameters over time at any place. RFIDtechnologies, for instance, are used to ground digital representations, which are used to trackand geo-reference physical entities. In general, physical worlds and digital representationsbecome tightly interconnected, so that manipulations in either would have effect on the other.

Integration of information and communication technologies into products anywhere and anytime enable new forms of mobile marketing in respect to situated marketing communication, dynamic pricing models and dynamic product differentiation models. As Fano and Gershman state: “Technology enables service providers to make the location of their customers the location of their business” [Fano, A.E., Gershman, A. (2002). The future of business services in the age of ubiquitous computing. Communications of the ACM 45(12), 83–87.] .

Smart products are specializations of hybrid productswith physical realizations of product categories and digital product descriptionsthat provide the following characteristics:
* Situated: recognition and processing of situational and community contexts
* Personalized: tailoring to buyer’s and consumer’s needs and affects
* Adaptive: change according to buyer’s and consumer’s responses and tasks
* Pro-active: attempt to anticipate buyer’s and consumer’s plans and intentions
* Business-aware: consideration of business and legal constraints
* Network capable: ability to communicate and bundle (product bundling) with another product (business) or product sets

The vision of smart products poses questions relevant to various research areas, including Marketing, Product Engineering, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Economics, Communication Science, Media Economics, Cognitive Science, Consumer Psychology, Innovation Management and many more.

Research groups

* Research Center "Intelligent Media", Furtwangen University [http://im.dm.hs-furtwangen.de/?en]
* Center for Ambient Business, University of Cologne, [http://wim.uni-koeln.de/CAB.cab.0.html]
* Telecooperation Group, Technical University Darmstadt, [http://www.tk.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/index.php?id=363]

Publications

Fano, A., Gershman, A. (2002): The Future of Business Services in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing. Communication of the ACM, 45 (12), 2002, pp. 83 – 87.

Gershenfeld, N., Krikorian, R., Cohen, D. (2004): The Internet of Things. Scientific American 291(4), 2004, pp. 76 – 81.

Maass, W. & Filler, A. (2007): Tip 'n Tell: Product-Centered Mobile Reasoning Support for Tangible Shopping , Proc. of MSWFB 2007: Making Semantics Work For Business, part of 1st European Semantic Technology Conference, Vienna, Austria, 2007.

Schmitt, C.; Fischbach, K.; Schoder, D. (2006): Towards Ambient Business - Value-added Services through an Open Object Information Infrastructure, in: Proceedings of the CollECTeR Europe 2006, pp 141 -148.

ee also

*Ubiquitous computing
*Ambient intelligence

References