A Few New Tech Products

On The Huffington Post (where I also blog), writer Pamela Poole has a savvy take on a handful of new tech products featured and/or inspired by the annual Boomers Business Summit. 

I’ve been to a few of those…

24 March 2006
At My Table at The Summit
"So can you tell if someone is having sex?"
"…We think so."
"... Good sex?"

Ms. Poole’s HuffPost Piece:

Leave It To Boomers: Transforming Aging With Tech
… We all know that the physical and cognitive abilities of older people can deteriorate, leaving them unable to manage ordinary tasks and vulnerable to exploitation. It sucks.

Fortunately, thanks to today's tech, we've come a very long way from the "I've fallen and I can't get up" necklace!

The products range from very interesting to old hat to slightly convoluted.  You can sort them out yourself.

The thin, portable reading glasses make sense to me – and/or similarly constructed magnifying glasses. 

The super-duper walker has me wincing. My first thought was of a bag lady pushing a shopping cart - not a good image.

Some hybrid of this and a product I blogged about a few years ago might work:

14 October 2011
Entrepreneurs & Baby Boomers II
… Awhile back I received a phone call from a gentleman who’d designed a clever piece of exercise/sporting equipment for rollicking and rolling on trails. It was an adaptation of another clever, successful product, making a certain popular activity much safer – and more fun.

I’m just not convinced that people would want to mosey around with a shopping cart.

More about technology, baby boomers, entrepreneurs, advertising:

10 April 2013
Entrepreneurs, VCs & Health Tech
… I’ve always been a big fan and supporter of tech and health tech.  Fabulous stuff is on the way.

But there will be backlash.

Nine Years Later: NostraChuckus Prophesy Come True

NostraChuckus, famed Soothsayer and advertising gadfly who’s been startling the world for years with his mundane prognostications, has again predicted the future.

Excerpt from Advertising to Baby Boomers © 2005:

 

Nine years later:

Older, Richer, Wiser? Don't underestimate the over-50s
Another misconception that was blown out of the water at this year’s event was that retirement and old age is a time for winding down …. The session gave the audience a real-world view into the hearts and minds of mature customers and the fact that they no longer see retirement as a chance to wind-down but more as a chance to rediscover and reinvent themselves.

---

Just for fun: Going Nutty Over Older Women's Bodies (HuffPost)

The Age Premium

Are companies finally catching on?  The New York Times seems to think so:

The Age Premium: Retaining Older Workers
By Steven Greenhouse
… They (employers) go the extra mile to assure experienced employees that they are valued and that management is eager for them to stay. Some employers promote innovative programs to show that they appreciate their older employees and don’t want to lose their experience, their rapport with customers or their ability to mentor younger workers.

Through the years I’ve written quite a lot about this. A sampling (some go back years, so many links within the posts have expired):

05 November 2006
Ignore the Research and Trust Your Gut

17 July 2006
What Kind of Genius Are You?

01 April 2007
Calcified Advertising Agencies

01 May 2007
Rance Crain Makes Perfect Sense Yet Again

10 November 2007
Old Masters and Young Geniuses

10 January 2008
Diversity = Productivity

21 May 2008
Baby boomers are smarter than you think

30 November 2008
Brains More Distracted, Not Slower with Age

13 January 2009
My Brain, Your Brain, iBrain

03 February 2009
People generally get better.

12 May 2009
Oprah & Dan … & Chuck

11 June 2009
Older Employees' Better Coping Skills Mean Better Engagement

31 August 2009
The Trouble with HR

21 September 2009
Advertisers: Be Prepared For Big Boomer Brains

03 January 2010
2010: The Year of The Baby Boomer Brain

03 March 2010
Aging Brain Less Quick, More Shrewd

15 March 2010
Hire Baby Boomer Creatives

16 April 2010
The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain

06 May 2010
The Year Of The Baby Boomer Brain

07 May 2010
Memo to H.R: Older Brains = Smarter Brains

10 May 2010
HR/Brain Roll

24 May 2010
Diversity as a Strategic Advantage

07 June 2010
The world might become a better place.

07 August 2010
Digital Advertising Natives and Immigrants

24 January 2011
The Creative Art Of Growing Old

29 February 2012
Memo to H.R: Boeing Gets A Bargain

"No, I don't think a 68-year-old copywriter can write with the kids. That he's as creative. That he's as fresh. But he may be a better surgeon. His ad may not be quite as fresh and glowing as the Madison Ave. fraternity would like to see it be, and yet he might write an ad that will produce five times the sales. And that's the name of the game, isn't it?" - Rosser Reeves

18 September 2012
Those Baffling Boomer Brains

29 May 2013
Intergenerational Teams A Strength
________________________________

More from the NYT article:

… Some experts on aging say the baby boom generation has changed the definition of retirement.

I may have mentioned this almost a decade ago…

From my book © 2005, 2007:
Contrary to popular myth, Baby Boomers do not believe that they are still teenagers or young adults. (Some probably do, but they need therapy.) Boomers are slyly redefining what it means to be the ages they are. Included in this new definition are some youthful attitudes - but the real change is that instead of winding down, many are winding up. We're not 'looking forward to retirement,' we're looking forward to new lives, new challenges. Only a small percentage will opt for pure retirement. (I predict that in twenty years the word 'retirement' will still be in dictionaries, but followed by the modifier archaic.)

Ageism Raises Its Techie Head

This post is a cheat. You’re getting a one-for-two deal. I’m merely sending you to my blog on The Huffington Post:

Ageism Raises Its Techie Head
… PR Guru and Forbes Columnist Peter Himler offers a good-natured rant about ageism in the tech world … He's come up with a list of 20 New Yorkers over 50 who aren't exactly luddites…

And/or check out two groups of posts:

Human Resources/Brain Power

Entrepreneurs & Baby Boomers

Maybe next time I won’t be so lazy.

Housing and Baby Boomers

From my book Advertising to Baby Boomers ©2005:

Chapter Four: Give Boomers Room for Choices
….When developing or molding a community for Baby Boomers, start with the concept of ―neutral. Do not confuse this with ―sameness. For example, when designing an indoor community space, do not assume that it will be used mostly for Bingo. Fashion it with flexibility so that it may be used for almost anything...

Why did I say this?  Because I knew Baby Boomers were going to do whatever they wanted to do with their lives, their living spaces.  More from my book:

… The common term used for such places is “Planned Communities.” However, when presenting planned communities to the public, Baby Boomers could wince at the concept. You know it’s planned, we know it’s planned (What else could it be?)—but “planned” may sound too restrictive to Boomers. We don’t like the idea of anything planned. We want to do it ourselves, construct our own lives. Let us sustain the illusion, or a partial illusion: communities are not planned. We do not want to live in prefab theme parks. “Next-Stage Housing” sounds a bit stilted, but at least it’s on the right track.

Some Baby Boomer sociology experts predict that semi-retirement and retirement communities will naturally develop personalities based on shared interests. These could be gardening, motorcycles, vegetari- anism, the arts, even a community where the shared interest might be financial speculation.

Brent Green, author of Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers, believes that many 50-plus communities will become hotbeds for social activism. If we have a resurgence of our youthful activist days, it may be to pick up where we left off—revivifying proactive sensibilities Boomers had as teenagers and young adults, an idealistic fervor that “once gave us the greatest sense of engagement and meaning.”

When developing or molding a community for Baby Boomers, start with the concept of “neutral”. Do not confuse this with “sameness”. For example, when designing an indoor community space, do not assume that it will be used mostly for Bingo. Fashion it with flexibility so that it may be used for almost anything.

Finally, housing industry folks are getting wise:

A Guide To The New Retirement Communities
Richard Eisenberg, Contributor
… In the past, with traditional retirement communities, people were dependent on a company or nonprofit to create them. That traditional model was much more top-down..

The Forbes piece talks about Co-housing, Niche retirement communities, NORCs (Naturally Occuring Retirement Communities), Shared housing – all concepts covered by yours truly and others a decade ago.

Louis Tenenbaum, Aging In Place Guru, shows up in this recent PBS NewsHour segment:

Check out Louis’ blog: Aging in Place Ideas

Many more links and posts:

Aging In Place & Universal Design