Latitude & Shareable Co-Launch Innovation Study: Food, Connected.

Latitude is excited to announce that it teamed up with Shareable last week to co-launch an innovation study around food and digital connectivity: “Food, Connected.”

Shareable, headed up by Jeremy Adam Smith and Neal Gorenflo, is a non-profit online magazine that reports on people, places, and projects working to enact a more shareable world—these include social innovations, communities, and services like Zipcar, Wikipedia, Kiva, open source software, Burning Man, Freecycle, and Creative Commons. The site discusses the broader trends and implications vaulting all things shareable, in addition to offering tools and actionable tips for readers to take part in the design of a more shareable world.

Food, Connected: The Study

Food 42 Intro from latddotcom on Vimeo.

Read more about Food, Connected on Shareable, or click here to be linked directly to the survey.

Study results will be posted to both Shareable and life-connected.com in the coming weeks.

Header image courtesy of wolf_359’s flickr.

Help Relieve Hunger by Talking About Food [Latitude 42]

Food is integral to the way we live, with far-reaching effects on the environment, personal health and enjoyment. Latitude is conducting a 42 study to understand how new connectivity—improved accessibility, transparency, and organization of information—alters our desires and decisions around food and food-purchasing.

To participate in the study, click here.

Note: Please make sure you are ready to begin the survey before clicking on the link above.

When the study reaches 50 participants, Latitude will donate $500 to The Hunger Project:

Connect with us on Twitter or Facebook to hear when we’ve reached our goal and to receive informational study updates.

The Hunger Project (THP) is a global, non-profit, strategic organization committed to the sustainable end of world hunger.

They work in 13 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to develop effective bottom-up strategies to end hunger and poverty—by empowering people to lead lives of self-reliance, to meet their own basic needs, and to build better futures for their children.

Some of THP’s initiatives include the creation of economically and environmentally sustainable community centers for meeting basic needs in rural villages—and micro-financing loans to women food farmers in Africa, whilst providing these women with training, support, and economic education to help them increase their incomes and better provide for their families.

Read more about THP’s key initiatives here.

Latitude 42: Food, Connected

Tell us about a specific instance during a grocery-shopping trip where you wished you had more information of some sort. This can be any type of information – food origin, health, price, location in the store, or anything else that was frustrating during your experience.

Learn more about Latitude’s Food, Connected study, or watch the introduction video below.

To participate in the study, click here.

Note: Please make sure you are ready to begin the survey before clicking on the link above.

Header image courtesy of transaid’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

Shareable / Latitude 42: Food, Connected

Contributing editor: Marina Miloslavsky.

Latitude is pleased to announce that it has partnered with Shareable for its Food, Connected study! Results will be posted to both life-connected.com and Shareable.net.

Food & the Rise of Information

Fast Company recently selected “The 8 Biggest Kitchen Innovations of the Last Decade.” While a number were—predictably—devices, 2 of the 8 selections were Web-based (the epicurious iPhone app and freshdirect.com).

Food is integral to the way we live, with far-reaching effects on the environment, personal health and enjoyment. Latitude is conducting a 42 study to understand how new connectivity—improved accessibility, transparency, and organization of information—alters our desires and decisions around food and food-purchasing, with implications for retail experiences in general.

Using computers, including hand-helds and smartphones, we can make our preferences better known to the people who bring us the food we buy and eat: farmers, processors, distributors and retailers. We can demand and eventually get precisely the kind of food we want.

Essentially, the power to change the way we shop for food, the way it gets delivered to us and ultimately the way it gets produced.

New York Times, “The Way We Live Now: Faster Slow Food”

These recent technological innovations are empowering people with information; they’re filling gaps in the food shopping experience that we may not have even acknowledged previously, but which have a significant impact on the way we live.

Latitude 42: Food, Connected from latddotcom on Vimeo.

To participate in the study, click here.
Note: Please make sure you are ready to begin the survey before clicking on the link above.

Latitude’s 42 aims to explore these gaps more fully, to understand how existing solutions can be repurposed to fill these gaps, and to discover novel opportunities rooted in real needs and desires.

A Taste of the Future

In an earlier post on the projected future of food shopping, we speculated what the opportunity space for “information innovations” might look like—search-filtering by personal preferences like health, price, and food origins, and digital grocery lists with “smart memory,” recommendation capabilities, and compatibility with online grocery stores.

(Food for thought: up-and-coming blippy.com socializes real-time purchasing, asking “What are people buying right now?” and Ikan is a home bar-code scanner that digitizes your store list as you throw items away, then provides home delivery for items on the list—”the Netflix of groceries.”)

Narrative Analysis: the Power of Personal Storytelling

Personal narratives are the chosen “input” for this 42 study (textual, audio, or video formats). Implicitly or explicitly, structured storytelling can indicate “problems” (needs/desires), and suggest the latent or future solutions that could fill these gaps to better improve an individual’s experience.

More than traditional surveys, narrative analysis can reduce the gap which results from what individuals say versus what they actually do.  (A study called “Reality Bites,” which profiled the behavior of 1000 UK grocery shoppers against their stated attitudes on health, environmentally responsible purchasing, etc. found significant discrepancies here.)

Latitude 42: Food, Connected

Tell us about a specific instance during a grocery-shopping trip where you wished you had more information of some sort.  This can be any type of information – food origin, health, price, location in the store, or anything else that was frustrating during your experience.

To participate in the study, click here.

Note: Please make sure you are ready to begin the survey before clicking on the link above.

Email innovation@latd.com if you have any questions, or to request more information.

Follow Latitude 42: Food, Connected study updates here.

Header image courtesy of yourdon’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.

Recent Conversation

  • krgaskins says:
    Cartoon: “App Show & Tell” http://ff.im/-guJJ6 This comment was originally posted on Twitter
  • latdsteve says:
    Inspired by one of our studies – Cartoon: “App Show & Tell” http://ff.im/-guJJ6 This...
  • Jessica Reinis says:
    Michael, you’re so right. My favorite geek moment at a bar: Taking my phone out of my...
  • Our Partners:
  • ReadWriteWeb
  • Shareable
  • samasource