Korean Supermarket Uses a Guiding Light to Point Out Discounts on Your Smartphone

April 18, 2013 Leave a comment

Korean Supermarket Uses a Guiding Light to Point Out Discounts on Your Smartphone

April 17, 2013

by Steven Millward

“Mom, turn right for the candy – AND HURRY!” We’ve seen Korean supermarket chain Emart (KRX:139480) do some innovative stuff before, like its shadowy QR codes. But this time Emart is trying something more substantive – using smartphones and LED lights to guide shoppers around their stores and lead them to discounts. Dubbed ‘Emart Sale Navigation’, the idea is a combination of car-like GPS with a location-based discounts app. But rather than actually relying on GPS (which could be unreliable indoors), the Korean supermarket is using special LED lights on the ceiling to send information to lenses attached to shopping carts. Then, so long as you have the Emart app on your Android phone and it’s attached to the shopping cart on the special plastic arm shown in the pictures, you’ll be guided around the aisles by dedicated indoor maps. If you pass an area where there’s a discount coupon available, that’ll pop up on-screen. It’s all pretty clever and actually simpler than it sounds. For consumers it’s pretty straightforward, as all you need to do is have the app on your phone and then attach it to your cart. Emart itself sorts out the lenses and the lights, so shoppers don’t need to worry about compatibility issues. It avoids other technologies likeNFC and QR codes which tend to be either fragmented across devices or just too damn confusing for most people. So one single app in this project from Emart makes it all intelligible and fairly easy. If you’re in South Korea, grab the Emart sale navigation Android app and then head out to do some shopping; or check out the two-minute demo video (in English) here:

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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