Samsung, Cheil take philanthropic approach to branding

“This initiative has been a project that appeals more to industry specialists, or so called tech geeks,” says Dr. Thomas Rattei, professor of bioinformatics at the University of Vienna.

The free Android app enables users to simply turn it on by setting an alarm clock when going to sleep. While the user sleeps, the smartphone “works” for a good cause by contributing its unused processing power to scientific research. Small packets of data, no more than 1 megabyte in size – smaller than a conventional MP3 file – are sent out from the research lab servers and returned again after the mobile devices have performed their calculations.

The Faculty of Life Sciences of the University of Vienna then builds a database from participants all over the world, providing an open-sourced protein-calculation database to the scientific community for further research on cure for diseases like cancer or Alzheimer’s.

The initiative is part of Samsung’s ongoing global branding campaign, ‘the Launching People’, aimed to create innovation that contributes to peoples’ lives and the community. “Power Sleep was a great project to support, because we felt it was an initiative that really aligned with the brand’s core belief,” said Gregor Almassy, CMO of Samsung Electronics Austria. “Moving forward with programmes like Power Sleep, we believe innovation should become the bridge that enables people to utilise technology further – not just for themselves, but also for a greater good.”

“There was this amazing technology out there, which was unfortunately still unknown to the vast majority of people,” said Claus Adams, COO of Cheil Austria. Adams quickly realised that the biggest barrier to usage was the technology’s ‘techni-ness’. “So we focused on one question – how do we make it easy for a wider crowd to embrace and participate in a crowd-sourced donation platform?” So Cheil and Samsung rallied a team from around the world to realize this idea.

The Power Sleep programme will be available to download for free in the Samsung App Store and the Google Playstore for Android devices from version 2.3* upwards starting from February 15, 2014.