Discovery tools, applications that help individuals find, explore and learn, are one of the key battle grounds in the technology sector as Apple discovered to its cost when it ditched Google Maps in favour of its own inferior software.

There is a lot of information out there that can help you plan and enjoy your day, it’s just fiendishly difficult to get to grips with it all.  A well designed discovery app should pull everything you want to know about your location, the weather, transport, news, local restaurants, your diary etc. into one easy to use app.  For example, if you give it access to your diary, it should be able to tell you that the flight you’re about to take is delayed.  As an additional challenge, it needs to achieve a high level of personalisation in a way that doesn’t seem too Big Brother.

Google Now (#GoogleNow) seems to have pulled this off; the feedback to date is overwhelmingly positive.  Consumers have grown increasingly reluctant to share personal data with big companies but Google Now seems to offer enough in the way of useful information to make this trade-off worthwhile.  It’ll be interesting to see if it’s relatively quiet launch in 2012 gives Google the edge over its rivals in 2013.

The news that BT have bought the rights to show 38 live Premier League matches for each of the next two years is interesting for two reasons.

It could be said to be a milestone in the journey towards technology platform integration when a telco company outbids TV rivals to win the right to broadcast the most watched domestic soccer league in the world. Are BT setting their stall out for a bigger TV play?

Secondly, the money. The £3bn price tag that the Premier League has put on the 154 live games values each game at an average of £20M - which makes next year’s season the most lucrative yet. BT must have decided that the potential advertising revenue and additional subscribers to their service is worth the outlay. Who can blame them, when this is the exact same model that Sky used to grow their subscription base in the 90s?

What isn’t clear however is what BT are going to do different to make being second choice to Sky as a football broadcaster work for them when ESPN and Setanta before them struggled to top the viewing league table.

Sony’s release of its Apple (iOS) compatible Music Unlimited streaming service, intended to challenge Spotify’s iPhone app, is a natural and welcome step in line with changing customer music needs and behaviours (http://www.thevalueengineers.com/2012/01/26/spotify-the-low-key-music-revolutionary/). Streaming is the future for all forms of digital entertainment, and music is leading the charge.

But I think Sony is missing a trick here. They offer two subscription packages: $3.99/month for listening to pre-determined channels (radio-style?) and $9.99 for access to Sony’s music library consisting of 15 million songs. Spotify’s catalogue has long surpassed 15 million, but more importantly, there is no clear incentive for any one customer group to switch to Music Unlimited.

As I have argued before, Spotify’s finest trick was to get people hooked in the first place by offering free music access. Here at The Value Engineers, we see time and again that consumers do not appreciate the value of technological innovation until they’ve tried it themselves. There are high barriers to adoption in place, and only a truly motivating and appealing incentive will push people to give new technology a go – and therefore fully experience the benefits that innovation offers.

Sony is not offering any such incentive. There is no free service to get customers to buy in, so Music Unlimited will struggle to convert iTunes/CD people to streaming. And for those of us who are with Spotify – well, there are no clear benefits to switching. And switching is a pain in itself.

One thing’s for sure: the Battle of Streaming has only just begun.

Sony's Music Unlimited

I love a gadget.  I especially love taking things to pieces to see how they work, then trying to piece them back together afterwards.  It’s one of the things that drew me to innovation like a moth to a flame.

It struck me this morning, while absent-mindedly contemplating my new Gillette Power razor, that there are now more gadgets in my life than ever before.  It’s not just the obvious ones like the iPod, satnav, Kindle, Blackberry and so on, but a new breed of gadgets that has begun to spring up.  They not only offer time-saving convenience, but also new, bigger, brighter benefits too: better performance, better quality, better effectiveness… everything is being motorised, electrified and powered up.

So, as of last week, my partner no longer uses a flannel and cleanser to remove her make up.  She now has a bright pink Clarisonic Mia Skin Cleansing System (a large round, soft brush that oscillates on a shower-proof handle), which claims to use gentle sonic vibrations to “ensure you can enjoy smoother and more balanced skin, firmer skin with improved texture and less blemishes”.

If I want to whiten my teeth I no longer have to brush them with a whitening toothpaste; I can use a Rapid White Blue Light Tooth Whitening System, claiming to be “clinically proven to whiten teeth up to five shades in just two hours”.  If I want to make coffee I no longer have to boil a kettle and dissolve some instant coffee; I can use any number of surface-top devices to replicate the in-home coffee shop experience.  The list goes on, with hay fever relief products, cigarette alternatives, sexual pleasure enhancers, home decorating systems like the Dulux Paint Pod and Weathershield BackPack, room fragrance diffusers and even a new in-home hand soap dispenser… and we haven’t even touched on kids’ toys.

What does this mean for your innovation strategy?  If you haven’t already gadgetised, now is the time to start exploring new ways in which the existing benefits of your products can be further enhanced with a gadget.

I was intrigued to discover recently that premium anti-ageing skincare range Astalift is now available in the UK, four years on from its original release in homeland Japan. The range has all the design and linguistic cues you’d expect from an upmarket skincare brand: glamorous packaging, neat little application tools (those tiny little spoons just scream luxury, don’t they?), dual-language descriptors (English and French, naturellement), breakthrough science and a liberal application of words like ‘radiant’, ‘luminous’ and ‘youthful’.

So far, so normal, right? Well, yes – at least until you get as far as the manufacturer. It then becomes just a little less standard, because in this case, Astalift is a product of Fujifilm Corporation – long-standing manufacturers of photographic and digital media technologies.

At this point, your thoughts are probably running along the lines of something like: “Okay, this is going to be one of those ‘Top 10 worst brand extensions’ blogs, isn’t it?” Actually, it’s not, for two simple reasons. Firstly, the parent brand has acknowledged the seeming incongruity of a photographic manufacturer going into health and beauty, keeping any link between Astalift and Fujifilm firmly restricted to the fine print on the website and back of pack.

More importantly, however, the new line builds on transferable brand expertise and a very real set of RTBs, as the company explains:

“Fujifilm’s Astalift series is a comprehensive anti-aging skincare brand, developed by using cutting edge core technologies accumulated over many years of research and development of photosensitive materials. These distinctive technologies include the findings of its own collagen research, anti-oxidization technology and nano-technology.”

With the abundance of new, almost sci-fi technologies now utilised by the health, wellness and beauty industries, it’s suddenly not so surprising that a brand such as Fujifilm, with its heritage in capturing and arresting the effects of light, could put that experience to good use in anti-ageing.

So there you have it. Not an April Fool’s joke, but rather a potentially very lucrative decision by the business to look beyond the first circle of innovation. To close with a question that’s often lumped in with the laziest of marketing and business strategy, but can just occasionally prove wholly apposite: when was the last time you thought outside the box?

Fujifilm certainly has.