Moviq is a new Dutch home and living site that offers not only a huge supply of houses, but also all suppliers in about 70 related service areas like realtors, notaries, contractors, truck rentals, and painters. Consumers can share their experiences with the suppliers with other users. Besides, the site offers content (text and video) for inspiration (em, Dutch).

Thus home coaching brands slowly evolve. Now still aimed at suppliers, but soon the consumer will be central. Now there is only one mortgage supplier (Rabobank), but soon the home consumer will be able to choose here too. Now it doesn't show all houses yet, soon Moviq will be the only place you have to go to find your house. Now it is still aiming at the period before buying a house, soon Moviq will keep inspiring you, even after you have moved. Now Moviq still sells your details to third parties, soon the relationship with the consumer will be core, and details will never be sold again. There are still lots of steps to take, but the amount of offers within the moving market show that Moviq has a huge potential. Well done!

The Dutch website for home delivered meals Thuisbezorgd.nl accepts more and more different payment methods. Not only Visa, but also American Express is now accepted. Other payments methods have been used for longer already: iDeal, a personal business account (De Baas Betaalt, meaning 'the boss pays'), and payment on account for companies (tb). Coaching brands also take care of our payments, so that they know exactly what we bought earlier, what we did, and what we enjoyed. This financial transaction support is part of that. As soon as they know what meals we have delivered, they can also start helping us get food delivered we still need to cook. They thus can slowly grow into being food coaching brands. Although they still have a long way to go.

Related trends

• Coaching brands

Coolblue, known of several web shops like pdashop.nl, wants to raise the quality of visitor reviews. To accomplish that, Coolblue has created different fields for a special title, pluses, minuses, a minimum amount of words, and the possibility to upload pictures. Besides, other visitors can rate the review (am, Dutch). A good example of how brands are asking more questions, and are having dialogues with individuals. First we only had the open question (how did you like it), now we get: 'What did you think were the pluses'. And soon we will get an extra question on why a certain element is so strong. And now still in boxes, in which we may type words, but soon in spoken dialogue.

Developing home entertainment coaching brand Joost starts with live streams. Starting next week, watchers anywhere in the world can watch the NCAA basketball championships live (em, Dutch). Thus home entertainment coaching brands slowly evolve. Live or not live, this type of brands takes care of entertainment on the couch after a day of hard work. Be it passive, a little active, or very active: we don't have to leave the house any longer. Once Joost gets mass-accessibility on TV, broadcasters will have a lot to worry about.

The WII Balance Board is a sort scale that can accurately determine where you put pressure on it. Apart from all kinds of fitness exercises, the Board also makes it possible to train your balance (fc).

Promoting balance in mind and body is not a short contemporary hype, not a trend like 'we are going to play games again', but a very long term trend. This trend however is only beginning, and will only further develop after the world economy has come to balance, we can hardly speak of low wage countries, and the automizing and robotizing trends have allowed us to work less. We then will finally have the time to structurally work on ourselves. We will then be able to do things we now consider 'inexplicable', as 'magic', or supra natural. It will take some time, I am talking about 2050, but the first products to help us in this are now introduced. And these are just brands again.

It is now possible to consult business social network LinkedIn with your mobile phone (lb). All brands can soon be consulted on every screen (like a watch, navigation system, or mega 3D television). The challenge is to adapt the content to every kind of screen, in a personal context. Social networks are ahead in mobile communication. This is logical: we have a lot of social interaction when we are outside the house, in the street. Soon we won't just be able to exchange business cards through our mobile phones, but we will also be able to directly link, and record a message as a note of the conversation. And we will only have to aim our mobile at somebody for the person to be recognized and the profile to be shown directly. These are the steps we may expect pretty soon.

Through the special miCoach phone (a product of Adidas and Samsung) the runner gets a personal assistant while running. A coach who knows what you want, and who helps you to get there. The coach can determine your fitness in the first run, help you define your goals, and make a plan to get there. Top trainers are supporting the coach. Besides music during your run, you get spoken instructions, and your heart rate and running pace are monitored (mb, Dutch).

We more and more surround ourselves with technique, offered by brands. Soon miCoach will also measure what music leads to what changes in achievements for us. And miCoach will tell us how to run, so that we don't have to think about it, and will have us take a different route if something is going on on our usual route (and we don't want to run there). And miCoach will have us compete with others. Real time, or as a benchmark. But even here it doesn't stop. Thanks to all kinds of mental techniques we will be capable of even better achievements. Practice for that starts at home. And thanks to all kinds of sensors, miCoach will exactly know how we move, and how this influences our performance. There miCoach will give tips as well. And on and on. This will not stop.

Consumers control the data at financial advise brand Wesabe. Although the consumer can upload all financial data from transactions, which thus are stored on the Wesabe servers, the help desk can't just get to those data. The consumer can authorize a help desk agent to get to his data by entering a code on the website. The help desk agent needs this code to get access to the data (em, Dutch). Thus brands slowly build their brand memory, a memory that remembers all communication between consumer and brand. Other people can't access this information, although the artificial brand agent will undoubtedly be authorized to do so. This way new brands slowly develop the dialogue model, while existing brands still have a long way to go.

Dutch newspaper NRC is now also available on e-paper. This electronic, very thin paper is available in a so-called reader (em, Dutch). Brands will soon communicate through hundreds of different devices. Not programming the consumer will be important, but the flexible adaptation to the type of medium: portable, size, speed, connectivity, and interactivity. This is just another example.

Wuzzon, the online place where everybody can trade their self made mobile content - ring tones, wallpapers and animated wallpapers, launches a shop widget for social network Hyves. Through this widget the 10,000 Wuzzon shop owners can also showcase their mobile shop on their Hyves profile, and thus show it directly to their friends and other people who visit their page. Interested buyers can directly listen to the ring tones as well as order them through the widget (am, Dutch).

Brands get better at tribal thinking. Instead of aiming their communication at the consumer, they find people who are important to spread the word. Malcolm Gladwell has researched and described this before in his book The Tipping Point. He found that three types of people, at the most 5% of the population, have special characteristics fundamentally important for buzz. One of these types are the so-called 'sales men'. Wuzzon gives this type of people lots of opportunities. Well done.

Related trends

• Tribal

Isvou is a Chinese visual search engine. If you are looking for a purse that looks like one you have seen before, you can upload a picture, after which automatically a selection of similar purses is shown, which can all be ordered directly (cw). Although this seems very advanced, it really only is the beginning. Soon we will walk in the street, point to something we like, and directly ask our fashion coaching brand if we can get something like that. We will then get the possibilities presented to us through our ear plug, as well as projected in our glasses, and are directly advised about the combination with other clothes we own. Uploading and clicking then will seem so old-fashioned. Visual searching is a small step in that direction.

Internet users can ask questions at Chinese website QiHoo. These are first automatically interpreted and if possible answered. If there is no satisfying answer, the user can ask the community (cw).

In the supply driven economy collecting answers and information was important. In the new economy, answering questions is important. Whoever manages to interpret questions the right way, and answer them, in the end will win the consumer's sympathy. Google owes its success to this, although it still has problems interpreting questions. Even Google is still at the start. Maybe it's time for Google Community?

You might have seen that Mensmerk.nl, the Dutch origin of this website, has been nominated for the category best design (and best marketing) for the Dutch Bloggies (the prizes for the best weblogs in the Netherlands). I am very proud of that. However, I have 1001 other ideas I would love to research and implement. Think of video, voice, chat, flash animations, web 2.0, etc. etc. etc. Time however is my biggest problem. Are you looking for a fun (practice) assignment and do you want to go nuts? Let me know and contact me directly! I am looking forward to hear from you!

There is no deadline for this call. Only when this posting has been removed from the homepage (under the heading 'looking for'), then I have enough ongoing projects.

Google starts a trial project giving out free voice mail numbers to the homeless in San Francisco. This voice mail number can be used as a call-back number for job applications, or for doctors and hospitals to keep in touch with their patient. If the project proves to be a success, Google wants to spread this service to other American cities (dc, Dutch). What a great example of socially responsible business. This is the brand coming out in its purest form. In this process the burden between manufacturer and consumer completely disappears, working transparently is second nature, and the brand more or less integrates in society. To operate responsibly, these brands make sure everyone benefits, and they use their core competences to help the weakest people in society. Socially responsible business is not about 'look how green we are', and then follow a new trend the next year. That is just responding to a societal (media) trend. No, socially responsible business is about the long term process of change in organizations, which after all is the only survival process. Google gives a great example here.

Related trends

• Brand coming out

British broadcaster BBC sells programs through iTunes. Hit series like Little Britain, Spooks en Torchwood can be bought through the British iTunes store. One episode costs 1,89 pound Sterling (2,50 Euros) (bc, Dutch). Thus BBC slowly changes from broadcaster to production company. Programming the night of the media consumer will get less applicable - that task is taken over by home entertainment coaching brands. In the long run, the government will determine what content is distributed to its citizens, for free (to every world citizen in fact), based on tax money. Paid content however will soon only be applicable for commercial parties who will make very high quality (interactive) content, the basis for the experience economy.

Related trends

• De-nationalizing
• Experiences

Social network Hyves collects several e-mail addresses per member. Sometimes an e-mail address needs to be confirmed explicitly, sometimes a different mechanism is used (hy). Thus brands don't only remember one e-mail address per individual, but all contact possibilities. Besides, through the brand memory they unlock the collective memories of individual and brand, in which all communication is saved. So that if an e-mail address disappears, the dialogue can still continue.