Recently, I've been having difficulty reading small print in poorly-lit places, specially in the evenings when I feel my eyes tired after a long day wearing contacts. This happens often at restaurants with menus, reading the ingredient list of a product at a supermarket (which I do a lot of) and it happened a few weeks ago trying to read a newspaper on a late flight from Mexico City to Lima (which I know I'll be doing a lot of in my new assignment).
With a radical change of demographics in many markets around the World, what I'm going through is probably becoming a growing trend. This certainly opens the door to marketing opportunities in products and certainly in services. One of Brazil's top-selling newspapers, Folha de São Paulo, was recently redesigned with larger easier-to-read fonts. Last week-end, my wife and I were in Buenos Aires having dinner at Sushi Club Palermo and the waitress seeing that we were struggling trying to read the options, came out with a back-lit menu. Sushi Yuku, a new restaurant in Blumenau created by my good friend Juliano Mendes, was Brazil's first restaurant to use iPads as menus.
With a bright screen, great photography and adjustable fonts, the iPad is not only great for re-thinking the restaurant experience, but it also makes it easier to be able to read on a night flight or in bed with the lights off. I love it.
