Mr.Friendly is a Dutch startup that invented a smart urinal, first spotted by The Next Web.
It’s a urinal, with a small screen on top that companies can manage
remotely to serve ads to customers. The Mr.Friendly urinals aren’t just
dumb screens. No, no, they’re equipped with sensors to detect when you’re taking a leak, and only show you the ads then. Because it’s a smart urinal.
The company’s pitch is that the urinal is “guaranteed to
capture 40 seconds of a gentleman’s attention,” noting that the best
time to serve someone an ad is when that “person cannot escape to do
something else, and can only focus on your message,” which I guess
applies here.
Incidentally, The Next Web cites an account from
someone who actually encountered one of the smart urinals in the real
world, where, like any good smart product, it had stopped working.
Gister ging ik naar café de groene vlinder. Het urinoir kon toevallig geen verbinding maken met https://t.co/6SUZZ599Cw. Word ik hier nou gefilmd of is het alleen een sensor? pic.twitter.com/uABw2Ot3GK— Julian Aijal👁🗨 (@Jaijal) December 7, 2017
Look, I could write another couple hundred words on this
and work in a couple more bad urinal jokes, but seriously: if you need
to show ads to customers in your bathrooms that badly, please save
yourself, your customers, your advertisers, and basically everyone
else’s dignity and just put up posters.