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Internet of things, meet the baby’s bottom: Parents too busy looking at their smartphones to pay attention to their babies can now do both thanks to Pampers. The Procter & Gamble brand with help from Google is testing Lumi, a monitoring system that can alert parents via smartphone app when a diaper needs changing. Price is to be determined, and you need to get on a waiting list to try it. The upside for Pampers is that more frequent changes translates to more diaper sales. The app will also let parents monitor babies via a Logitech video camera with two-way audio and tracks room temperature, humidity and movement. The reusable, detachable sensor, which works only with Pampers Swaddlers diapers, detects moisture but not necessarily No. 2, which still requires the smell test.
Alexa, find me a house
Through Amazon Echo, Amazon has made itself indispensable to many consumers inside their homes. Now, the company is hoping to become indispensable to people when it comes to buying those homes. The Seattle-based ecommerce giant said this week that it is teaming up with residential real estate company Realogy Holdings Corp. for a new program called TurnKey. The initiative pairs homebuyers with affiliated Realogy agents. Sweetening the deal, those house buyers get $1,000 to $5,000 worth of products and services from Amazon.
X-rated vino
Napa-based Tank Garage Winery is out with a new variety called “Skin Flick,” which as the name implies pays tribute to the porn industry. Labels feature a recreated film strip of an actual porno from the 1970s called “Wet Wash.” The marketer says it wants to “celebrate the Golden Age of Porn, an era of decadent glamour and sexual revolution back in the late-’70s through early-’80s.” There is also a hook to the wine-making process, however tenuous. Tank Garage says it lets the white grapes “ferment on their skins, just like a red wine, to soak up its orange color and arousing flavors.”