Four new ways the digital world is invading the real world

The upcoming ad:tech New York conference is packed to the hilt with cutting edge media and technology companies offering a preview of the new innovations consumers and businesses can expect to see soon. However, most of the companies overlap in the same digital space. Below are five digital companies that are working to carve out their own space in a brave new frontier—the real world.

Beintoo

Online rewards are great, but there is only so much fun you can have with virtual farming tools. Beintoo is one company that wants you to make hay the old fashioned way—with cash.

Of course, the idea of games and apps paying you money to use them can present a whole slew of legal and practical dilemmas. To circumvent these issues, Beintoo simply created their own economy. It’s called the B-Economy, and it is powered by the Bedollars companies reward to their users, which can then be turned in on the site’s gift shop or one of its partners for actual products.

With Beintoo you can play the games you love and make some real coin on the side—stick that in your pipe, Mario.

Manilla

The only bad part about stockpiling lots of goodies: keeping track of the bills. Enter Manilla, the company that wants to take all the loose ends of your life and put them in one neat and clean digital folder.

Manilla actually works with all those companies you hate dealing with: The cellphone carriers, the cable provider, the utility company and even the credit company. They automatically store all of your bills and account information and notify you when payments are due.

The best part? Unlike every other part of paying bills, Manilla is painless, works easily across platforms and is completely free.

Snipp

Everyone at ad:tech will be talking about mobile marketing. And why shouldn’t they be? The online mobile space is where we all live now, right? But there is another world of marketing just outside the mobile screen called "the real world," and Snipp is a company that would like to bridge the gap between the two.

Using their “Mobilize Me” platform, Snipp helps take physical media into the mobile world. Besides standard QR text message inputs, Snipp utilizes its own Snapp Image Recognition to create custom tags from any unique image, such as brand logos, packaging and UPC codes.

Since Snipp’s elegant concept works with images on any medium, we will soon be finding the bridge between the digital space and physical world easier to traverse than ever.

ElevatorNet

Finally, a company that knows how to take advantage of a captive audience: ElevatorNet.

While it may seem overly niche to specialize in creating and displaying Internet-linked information and advertisements in just elevators, ElevatorNet understands the unique challenge of dispensing information to consumers in the time it takes to ride the elevator. And by combining advertising space with information those elevator riders actually need—the floor, the weather, a news ticker—they insure attention.

ElevatorNet’s linked-in screens offer an additional safety benefit, allowing the building to communicate via messages and video in the event of an emergency. Though it may be just a small piece of your day, having your elevator fully hooked up may help you get the information you want, and even sometimes need.