NEWSROOM

Unleash your stories – Jamie Mcdonald

“Turning cities into playgrounds”. That is the vision of ‘Shwoop’, one of the Unleash Space’s homegrown student start-ups, and one that Jamie Mcdonald, one of our creative technologists and also on the Velocity team, is a founding member of.

Jamie’s story

In his first year of university, Jamie started exploring entrepreneurship by attending Velocity Innovation Seminars, as well as attempting to make an app (which ultimately failed). However, through this experience and with the help of Velocity, Jamie learnt a lot about entrepreneurship. When Unleash Space opened, Jamie became a creative technologist, a role he really enjoys. Jamie met his entire team at Unleash Space; they all now work out of the space and are getting support from mentors and experts.

Jamie describes Shwoop as “a guerilla advertising platform that creates hi-tech physical activations for city gamification”; a platform where they develop fun, interactive technology in urban spaces that can “create a sense of awe and inspiration in others”.

One of the projects Jamie has been working on at Shwoop involves a partnership with New World. In January 2019, Jamie had the privilege of meeting New World’s CEO, CTO and Head of Customer Service. He pitched to them the idea of mounting a product-recommendation system that gives people exclusive discounts, which the New World team were delighted with. With their support and the use of the Maker Space at Unleash Space for prototyping, this concept quickly developed from an idea involving discounts to a working product for personalised meal recommendations, and it is currently being launched in four different stores across New Zealand.

How does it work? When you first enter the supermarket, a button (with the diamond-shaped New World logo on it) can be pressed, where you then get taken to a screen asking for your current emotion. Combined with information about the weather and purchasing history, a personalised recipe is given with its ingredients listed and their respective locations in the store. Not only is this a more interactive way to shop, it also helps the 70% of Kiwis that walk into a supermarket decide what they want for dinner.

Jamie and Shwoop have an exciting future ahead of them, as they continue to focus on “creating perfectly tailored physical activations to places”. Currently they have a relationship with Auckland Council, Auckland Live and Aotea Square, which will help achieve their goal of interactive installments dotted all over the city. They are also working on projects with three global advertising agencies.