15 April 2016
At SparkOptimus, we try to highlight the most important news and background stories in digital, e-commerce and retail. Here is our selection of last week’s news:
Spring is around the corner, which for some is synonymous with spring cleaning! If that’s on your to-do list, but you have no idea where to start, then these apps might come in handy. For other personal goals, you can of course turn to good ‘ol Google. This week they added a new tool to their calendar – “Goals” – that helps you plan the things that you like doing in your free time but often don’t get around to doing. Just tell the tool that you want to go for a run twice a week, for about an hour, preferably in the morning, and it will find the most suitable time for you to go for a jog. And ofcourse we cannot imagine our daily lives around the house (and during that jog) without Spotify. But the Swedish company might need to “divert thousands of jobs away from Sweden if major changes […] aren’t made”. The country’s housing, taxing and education systems are making it difficult for the company and its employees to stay.
Next to the spring cleaning apps, we see some innovations that have a more profound impact on changing traditional female household roles. Take for example HopSkipDrive, a ride-sharing start-up that focusses on a very specific niche: providing rides for children. It offers a service to working parents by bringing their kids to school, afterschool activities, birthday parties, etc., playing into one of the biggest needs of mothers feeling they need to choose between a career and a family. Set up by three full-time working moms, it breaks another trend in the tech and start-up world: only “8.3% of venture-capital funded US tech start-ups […] were led by women CEO’s”. One of the solutions to counter this trend is to provide girls with more female role models. However, we’re not sure whether this home-built Scarlett Johansson robot is the proper inspirational figure…