Ah, April Fool’s Day. The time of year that every journalist and office worker loathes with a passion. We here at Tech in Asia have a love-hate relationship with this blessed/cursed day, as our inboxes and social media accounts fill up with all kinds of unbelievable crap. So as we do every year, we thought we’d share our favorites with you! Open your mind and read on!
Get to work with a drone taxi
If you’re in the land of the rising sun, what better way to get to work by rising up in the morning sky? Japanese transportation company Sanwa Koutsu shows the competition how it’s done.
Open the app, select your destination, put on your nifty harness, grab onto an available drone, and leave your worries on the ground where they belong! Japanese salarymen flying through Tokyo like drone-riding Mary Poppinses is what I call “disruption.”
Ola debuts Ola Rooms
The best (and by best, I mean worst) April Fool’s jokes are the ones that sound the most plausible. The ones where you say “You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a real thing.” That’s the case with Ola Rooms, the latest offering by India’s ridesharing service Ola.
With Ola Rooms, you can order your own hotel room on the go. It arrives where you are, and you wake up God knows where! Enjoy luxury accommodation on the move, all while eating a hearty breakfast and beating the rush hour.
Does anyone honestly not see this happening in a couple of years?
Chope gets phone-lickin’ good
Restaurant discovery and booking app Chope lets you book your table at your favorite eateries, but what if you wanted to experiment a bit more? How do you know if that crocodile curry or that weird-looking chorizo are any good? Well, now you can try before you buy, or lick before you, erm, get sick? Anyway.
With Lick, all you have to do is bring up your desired meal, lick your smartphone, and decide if that’s your thing. The food, not licking smartphones. Just ignore all that research about germs on smartphone screens, it’s fiiiine.
Mercedes lets you pay with your car key
Look, we live in an age where most our stuff does multiple stuff. Our TV isn’t just our TV anymore, it makes Skype calls too. Our phone is a phone, but it’s also a personal computer. So why should our car keys just be car keys? That’s what car maker Mercedes Benz thought, and introduced Mercedes Pay through a post on its official WeChat account. It’s a revolutionary way of paying with your car keys at all supported outlets.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gets Chinese green card
Buy an apartment for your dog
Kayak goes retro
Asus shows you how to charge a Tesla with your phone
A pen that prints
Samsung says hang onto your pants
China’s media join the fun… or do they?
And this was us!
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