You can enjoy your cup of coffee with an avian companion at this café:

• Customers pay Fukuro no Mise a $19.50 cover charge for a drink and an hour with its numerous owls.
• The café doesn’t have food so you don’t have to worry about the birds pecking at your dish.
• You can have the owl climb up on your shoulder or head – or just slowly pet it as you sip your coffee.
• The place gets packed quickly and reservations are required in advance.

Read more on Business Insider.

The Economist wrote about startups aiming to be the Uber for kids:

• Uber for kids sounds like a great idea. It’ll save parents from having to drive their offspring to school and after-school activities.
• Startups are finding creative ways to make the service child friendly. One gives children and drivers a code word – a child is only to get into the vehicle if the words match.
• Parents can track the ride, including the driver’s speed.
• There are problems. Demand is concentrated during certain times of the day, meaning that drivers can’t really make a living from the service.
• And parents may never be comfortable teaching their kids to get into a stranger’s car.
• Startups must also deal with the fact that Uber may decide that it wants to be the company that builds the Uber for kids.

Read more at The Economist.

Merchants are using our smartphones to track our movement within stores, wrote The Economist.

• If a retailer see’s that shoppers often go from drinks to frozen foods, then they might want to push the sections closer together – or further apart, to expose customers to more products.
• If you’re in a Westfield shopping mall and you search for a rival, you can expect to see a discount offered to you on the spot.
• Once the systems become precise enough they could also be used to help guide customers to the exact spot where they’ll find their desired product.
• Apple and Google are looking to build systems that will allow for this kind of tracking. Those who use public Wi-Fi shouldn’t expect privacy anyway – Wi-Fi agreements often confer the right on the provider to track location.

Read more on The Economist.

Last week was CES, a technology event where businesses introduce us to their vision of the future. Lauren Goode wrote about a pair of high heels:

• Zhor Tech has a pair of heels with adjustable heights. Through a smartphone, the height of the heel can be lowered from about 7.9 centimeters (3.1 inches) to 4.3 centimeters (1.7 inches).
• The soles of the shoe are heated, with temperature controllable via smartphone.
• They also serve as fitness tracking devices, monitoring your activity.
• The footware is advertised as lasting four days on a single charge.
• You can expect to shell out $300 for a pair.

Read more including Goode’s impression of the aesthetics of the shoe on The Verge.

The Economist wrote about floating palaces:

• Super yachts appeal to the uber elites. At one trade fair the average yacht cost $22 million.
• It is a market prone to trends. These days the hottest yachts come with companion vessels that will carry gear such as jet skis and speedboats, without taking up valuable space on the yacht itself.
• Space is at such a premium that yacht makers are creative about ways to maximize it. A helipad might be set up to quickly transform into a squash court, or an outdoor movie theater.
• The industry is worth $27 billion a year, and through shipbuilders, insurers, and service staff, is thought to employ 150,000 people.
• It is an industry that takes its cues from others. Seeing the popularity of virtual assistants such as Cortana, today’s yachts accept voice commands, allowing owners to speak to their boat.
• Shipbuilders also realize that younger millionaires value experiences over anything else. So they’re building the yachts to make sure they can survive environments like Antarctica.
• Yachts are a status symbol. Perhaps this is why the average boat is only kept for three years – before its owners sell it and move onto something better.

Read more about the industry at The Economist.

The writers at Cracked compiled a list of companies that dominate eccentric product categories:

• The striped white blankets that most American babies are swaddled in soon after they’re born at a hospital, are all made by an Illinois company.
• Since the 1850s a single shoemaker has made the shoes worn by American Presidents. For Obama they re-issued the shoes worn by Abraham Lincoln.
• A business in Queens, New York, makes 4 million fortune cookies a day – singlehandedly supplying most of America’s fortune cookie market.
• A Rhode Island Company has cornered the market on making “Body of Christ Wafers” for churches.
• The religious food-maker’s wares are appreciated because the holy wafers don’t create crumbs, which would inevitably end up on the Church floor, and ignominiously be swept away.
• The company is responsive to shifts in market demands, and is exploring the creation of a gluten-free version of the wafer.

Read the full list, replete with some clever jokes, on Cracked.

In a wider look at the challenges facing the gambling industry, The Economist had tidbits about how casinos were planning for the future:

• Young people don’t gamble as much. But they do like video games. And so casinos are planning to have “skill-based” games for players to bet on.
• Experiments include “gravity-free” rooms where players can climb up walls, and LED screens that change the interior scenery.
• Mixed virtual reality shooter games may allow friends to band together to fight monsters – and bet on the number that they’d be able to kill, or their overall accuracy.
• Casinos might also consider offering bets on televised e-sports.
• And then there are less ambitious initiatives like offering Game of Thrones slots.
• It’s unclear if any of this will be able to save casinos in a world where slot machines look like dated technology and fantasy sport betting is just a few taps of a smartphone away.
• Perhaps the future of casino towns like Las Vegas is to forget their gambling origins, become host towns to conventions, and maybe offer the young a night of debauchery through a happening night-club scene.

Read more at The Economist

Maureen O’Hare looked at Burger King’s latest store concept:

• Burger King has opened up a 15 person sauna in Finland. Patrons can give servers their orders and eat the chain’s grilled burgers in the steamed saunas.
• It sort of makes sense. Saunas are extremely popular in Finland with one available for every three people in the country.
• It is a place where Finns socialize and host business meetings.
• The spa offers Burger King branded towels and can be rented out for three hours for the equivalent of $280.

Read more here.

Source: CNN

Via: Marginal Revolution

Restaurants that serve a wide variety of cuisines, and are on the pricier end on the market, are all starting to offer burgers. Ryan Sutton looked into why this was:

• Restaurants that introduce a burger usually price it to be much cheaper than the rest of the options on the menu.
• And since burgers normally come with fries, it usually means patrons are too full to consider appetizers or deserts.
• Therefore, the economics of burgers are confusing – they seem like they would drag down restaurant margins.
• But restaurants reason that they attract a broader base of customers who might eventually order more expensive things on the menu.
• It’s the dinner period that is usually the most lucrative for high-end restaurants anyway, so several will limit the burger option to the lunch menu.
• Though classy restaurants also have to deal with grumpy chefs who didn’t get into the gourmet food preparation business to flip burgers. To placate them, some restaurants will limit the number of burgers they sell to as little as five per day.

Read more here.

Source: Eater

Via: Marginal Revolution

Hotels are looking to get into the movie screening business writes Liza Hamm:

• People like doing dinner and a movie, and many people already come to expensive hotel restaurants for dinner. So why not complete the evening experience and offer the movie as well?
• The theaters are typically open to both guests and non-guests and offer a premium theater going experience.
• Tickets can cost as much as $90 and include dinner as well as movie theater snacks like shiitake mushroom and cheese flatbread.
• One hotel allows parents to drop off their offspring at a children’s movie theater where they will be supervised by attendants, leaving the happy couple to enjoy an evening on the town.

See what some hotel movie theaters across the world look like and have to offer over here.

Source: The Wall Street Journal