Thrudigital

Everyday I set aside time to read up on what’s happening in the tech industry but also with innovation & new business generally. Springwise is one site that I try to check regularly as it uncovers lots of exciting new businesses and products and this morning while reading Springwise, I discovered an article about nru, an android application, which has just been released by the labs team at lastminute.com

nru presents the user with location based information on theatres, restaurants and bars. The app makes great use of the GPS and acceleromater features in the G1 phone in an interesting radar-esque interface to deliver relevant listings coupled with user reviews, something that I think will be really useful (especially if they release it on the iPhone too).

The reason I think this is so interesting (aside from the fact that the app is pretty handy and smart) is that lastminute.com have a team working on projects like this. In fact after visiting the labs blog I discovered that they’re working on quite a few interesting projects along with the help of external parties such as City, Imperial and Warwick universities. The existence of a labs team at lastminute.com shouldn’t come as a surprise but I think it’s great that there is one.

For me this type of activity brings a company like lastminute.com a number of benefits. Firstly, they are creating a useful product that helps people find new and interesting places which utilises their content in a new way. Secondly, this is on a mobile, so users are engaging with them on a new platform that they may have done so before.

I believe that we are going to see more initiatives like this coming out of forward thinking companies which can only be a good thing. I think tech based companies like lastminute.com can develop a labs team the quickest but I think media groups could will be pretty quick to follow. In fact I recently heard that The Guardian media group had a hack day/weekend that produced some interesting products and while they may not be publicly released like lastminute labs have released nru, it’s certainly interesting to hear that it happened.

I’m looking forward to companies outside of the tech world setting up a labs team like this or at least opening up their content and data in a way for external developers to innovate and create new products.

You can find out more about the app on the labs blog or by watching the youtube video.