Odds are you already use your phone for more than calling, texts and emails. Even if it just the occasional game of Skeeball, you’re like most people if you’ve found that a smartphone adds a little bit more fun to your everyday life. Here are a few other fun summer activities that you might enjoy even more using your phone.
• The amusement park. An amusement park in Ohio may be blazing a trail for Disney: at Kings Island in Mason, visitors can buy park passes with their phones, and present them to gate attendants equipped with barcode scanners for entry. It’s a logical next step for Disney, which just recently published its own app, called “Disney Mobile Magic.” The Disney app lets park visitors make reservations at restaurants, check wait times at popular attractions — even find their favorite characters throughout the park. Could mobile park passes be next?
• Shopping at the mall. Consumers are already using their smartphones to enhance the shopping experience, conducting on-the-go research before buying a television, or checking for the best price on a new jacket. But Motorola’s Jerry McNerney says retailers have an incentive to meet those shoppers in the middle on mobile: by equipping sales associates with mobile devices, merchants can deliver more information to buyers, increase the number of upselling opportunities, and create a more convenient and individualized experience for consumers. So when you’re ready to buy that TV, the retailer can ask about tacking on a Blu-ray player, or help you decide how you’d like to have the item shipped.
• Catching a game at the ballpark. This one’s cheating a little: you probably won’t be able to use this mobile technology until this upcoming fall. But many of the things we love to do in the summertime — go to a baseball game, catch a movie, hop on a flight — could see big changes when Apple drops Passbook into its new mobile operating system. For now Passbook is only a container, serving as a one-stop app for all the barcode-enabled payment platforms currently being offered on iOS. But once it’s launched, consumers might stop printing out tickets for games, movies and flights, and switch over to Passbook to access their favorite events. And in the meantime, there are plenty of baseball-friendly features available on the iPhone, including check-ins and live radio streams of your favorite team’s game.
• Grabbing a good ol’ ice cream cone. You might know Uber as a private driver service. But soon you’ll be able to summon an ice cream truck to your location using the mobile platform. Yes, seriously. As CEO Travis Kalanick tells The Next Web: “It’s kind of fun. That’s part of how we roll.”
How will you use your mobile phone to enjoy this upcoming summer season?
We’re always on the lookout for opportunities to partner with innovators and disruptors.
Learn More