Group items tagged

Starting today, on the retail shopping holiday known as Black Friday here in the U.S., Walgreens will begin rolling out its new scannable mobile coupons which work at its over 7,700 stores nationwide. The coupons are being made available in the Walgreens mobile applications and to use them, you simply show your phone at checkout where it will be scanned by the cashier.

You’ll find the coupons in a special section within the mobile application where you’re also able to sign up for SMS-based alerts.

Coupons will only be offered one at a time every two to three days, and will range in value from $0.50 to $5.00. The discounts will be targeted towards a wide variety of products, including beauty items, gifts, consumables and everyday essentials, like diapers.

We need ambient findability. We need smart ways of guiding people towards the content they’d like to see — with categorization and search playing complementary goals.Getting people to the content they want to see, using the search functionality your average newspaper website has on offer, is not exactly what I’d describe as fast or effortless. Full-text search can be a daunting experience. We need some sort of a sitemap that acts as a gateway to our content and is broader than our primary navigation.We need deep links to the topics that are currently on people’s mind and that are being talked about.How neat would it be if we could also browse by mood or by genre?We need quick links to topic pages about related persons, organizations, events and locations.We need links to terms on Wikipedia (e.g. using Apture) or the ability to look things up in a dictionary (like the one they have over at the New York Times)Related content should be referred to either using tags or if you’re really hip, using relationships. Search behavior doesn’t always revolve around a big input box and a submit button.Faceted search needs facets: ways of splitting up search results into meaningful categories. Rich metadata and a well thought-out categorization scheme is a prequisite.Online search should work similarly to asking a question to a flesh-and-blood reporter

If you are already familiar with AR you’ll notice that String lives somewhere in middle of fiduciary markers and natural feature tracking. Tracking images combines the high contrast black border of a marker and a complex natural image in the centre. This mix actually works well. With a marker users can identify it as having special significance when presented to a camera (much the same way users identify QR Codes as having significance). With NTF images the challenge is telling the user that the image as has significance without providing a large amount of instructions. Combining the two therefore goes someway to solve the identification problem. The String SDK which is currently available for iOS with an Android version in the works is powerful enough to build some pretty amazing solutions. I normally say that any AR demo is only as good as its 3D objects, that’s still true as eye candy sells, but String does an amazing job of recognising the markers even in poor lighting.

What is Books2Barcodes? Books2Barcodes is an ongoing effort to convert all the world's great books to QR codes (2D barcodes). Each work featured here is the entire text of a piece of classic literature translated into several thousand barcodes. With a mobile device equipped with a camera and a barcode-scanning app, you can experience the joy of a great book as read through 800-character fragments on your cellphone.

Warning notices at the top of websites, annoying pop-up windows, forms asking for your consent ... fears have been voiced that browsing the web could become more complicated and time-consuming as a result of "challenging" new EU rules on internet cookies.They are small text files put on to our computers by websites so they can remember things about us, and almost every site uses them.But at one minute past midnight on Thursday 26 May, the law surrounding the way they are used changed.

From that date, all UK businesses and organisations running websites in this country were required to obtain people's consent before they install cookies on their machines.Some experts have said that where the new rules could have a big impact is if people are looking at lots of different sites they have no relationship with. For example, you might be browsing a dozen online retailers looking for the best price on an item. The worst-case scenario is that every time you visit a new site, you face a pop-up window, a "splash page" (which comes up before the home page) or a bar at the top, informing you about how cookies are used on the site, and asking for your consent.

n advertising circles there is an axiom that says that a customer has to be exposed to your product or service at least three times before they will convert. It's called the rule of three. It's why companies run remarketing campaigns. It's also an explanation for two conflicting surveys concerning location based social media.

In the first survey by Dubit, a youth communications agency, they found that 48% of teenagers surveyed had never heard of location based social media services such as Facebook Places and Foursquare. And of the 52% of the teenagers that had heard of these services, few of them actually used those services. The survey consisted of 1,000 teens between the ages of 11 to 18.

The second survey by Comscore's MobiLens showed that 16.7 million mobile users accessed check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla. And 95% of those users regularly accessed a mobile web browser. The medium age range was 18 to 34. So what's going on? How can teenagers, who practically live and sleep with their mobile phones, be so out of the loop when it comes to location based social media? The answer is that they simply haven't been exposed to the services often enough to see the value.

The initial set of documents from the Skyhook trial (which I analyzed here last week) gave a quick flash of Google's gamesmanship. But examining the larger set of documents from the initial phase of the Skyhook trial against Google is opening a window into Google executives' views on how they sought to reinforce Google's monopoly and collect personal information from its users. These  other batches of documents (see these PDFs here and here from the trial) highlight how Google both recognizes the monopoly nature of location-based services on smartphones and how it can keep extracting private information from users while maintaining a figleaf of "consent." As the New York Times noted in a story over the weekend, the emails flying back-and-forth give an almost minute-by-minute window into the workings of high-tech negotiations-- at least until some legal-aware top managers abruptly killed email exchanges with messages like "Thread-kill and talk to me off-line with any questions."  But in the meantime, we get some quite damning admissions by Google execs on their internal practices.

When Motorola and Samsung announced they were going to use Google-rival Skyhook for their location-based services on their Android smartphones, Google on one hand responded in these internal emails by noting the superiority of Google location information precisely because they were maintaining constant surveillance on customers and local wi-fi spots to update their location maps. "We are constantlyre-mapping through our users, which keeps the data re-refreshed," said one email (see p. 44) or, from another manager, the advantage of "the large volume of device distribution that helps the data collection. (see p. 32) Conversely, the managers bemoan the doom if Skyhook gets the business from manufacturers like Motorola and Samsung and Google loses the ability to spy on customer locations through the smartphones. "It will cut off our ability to continue collecting data to maintain and improve our location database.  If that happens, we can easily wind up in a situation we were in before creating our own location database and that is (a) having no access at all or (b) paying exorbitant costs for access."

Google managers recognize this market as a classic winner-take-all monopoly situation where controlling more devices let's you control more data which in turn gives you such an overwhelming advantage in providing location-based services that manufacturers will have to use your service.  With Android phones beginning to take off strongly in early 2010, who controlled those location-based services would create a tipping point for control into the future.

InMobi SmartPay™ will enable app developers, game companies, and content providers in the US $200bn mobile content and virtual goods space to expand their business and monetize their users quickly and easily into new markets by providing a one-time, no-cost, single point of integration across multiple countries.

The solution offers consumers a seamless, pure mobile checkout experience using secure, direct to carrier billing to start, but expanding to all forms of mobile payment methods including credit cards, PayPal, and local mobile wallets by the end of 2011.

†The new solution already offers reach to over one billion consumers in seven countries, including the US, UK, Germany, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Malaysia, with huge growth plans to expand to over three billion consumers in 30 countries by the end of the year.

The leading computer company plans to build a system that will sense when people are trying to video live events — and turn off their cameras.

A patent application filed by Apple revealed how the technology would work.

If an iPhone were held up and used to film during a concert infra-red sensors would detect it.

Looking for new ways to make money? Checkout the new trend of “Crowd Commerce”; this new concept is driven by the smart phone technology, mainly iPhone and powered by Gigwalk Inc.Just 10 weeks after they first launched their app, Gigwalk Inc. was able to capture over 116 thousand gigs on their network (and rapidly increasing). Gigwalk connects companies in need for location-specific tasks with freelancers (called Gigwalkers) willing to take on gigs in that location. Gigwalk currently operates in, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle and South Florida.

Are defined hours of work an anachronism that’s holding us back? Or is the freedom to work whenever we want something still reserved for a select few, and/or a trap that causes us to work more rather than less?

Flexible work is something that seems increasingly popular with programmers and other online workers, for reasons that Zach Holman of the software repository GitHub described in a recent post on the GitHub blog, entitled “Hours Are Bull****.” Holman said that for most of the staff who work on the service, there are no defined working hours whatsoever — everyone is on their own schedule and they work whenever they need to in order to solve the problems that need to be solved. As he puts it:

Hours are great ways to determine productivity in many industries, but not ours. Working in a startup is a much different experience than working in a factory. You can’t throw more time at a problem and expect it to get solved. Code is a creative endeavor… We want employees to be in the zone as often as possible. Mandating specific times they need to be in the office hurts the chances of that.

Geofencing: As long as you're here ... One of the promises of mobile advertising — at least from the merchant's perspective — has been the potential to advertise to customers when they're near your store and can act immediately (and impulsively) on your offer. To make these location-triggered offers, merchants need to delineate a "geofence" around their retail outlets — a radius or polygonal area in which customers who have opted into a deal program can be notified on their mobiles that an offer is available nearby. Indeed, Groupon is working on adding such location-based deals to its daily offers, according to a letter sent from its general counsel David Schellhase to two U.S. Representatives who were asking about Groupon's privacy policies.

By some measures, 90% of all texts are opened within three minutes of receiving them.

Goodman said that location-triggered delivery is highly effective with "exceedingly high" response rates: between 11% and 60% of users are likely to visit a store when pinged with an offer if they're nearby, and up to 46% are likely to make a purchase.

St. Louis-based mother-son team Spearhead Development has updated its QR Card Us product in response to customer feedback, cranking out a new iteration in just one week. We covered the launch of the mobile Web-powered business card provider on August 18. The new version of QR Card Us separates the QR link itself from the 'hard card,' or physical business card, so that customers can buy standalone QR Cards - mobile-friendly Web pages from which contact info can be saved - without worrying about their physical cards becoming outdated. It also adds Organizations, which allow a moderator to manage QR Cards for a company, club or any kind of group. Finally, the update adds Notes, which lets users attach any kind of text note about a new contact to their saved info.

Today, your iPhone is a gadget, a mere consumer appliance. But your future iPhone will become increasingly human. You’ll have conversations with it. The phone will make decisions, prioritize the information it presents to you, and take action on your behalf — rescheduling meetings, buying movie tickets, making reservations and much more.

In short, your iPhone is evolving into a personal assistant that thinks, learns and acts. And it’s all happening sooner than you think,

Ultimately, however, human beings are hard-wired to communicate with other people, not computers. And that’s why the direction of interface design is always heading for the creation of artificial humans.

Can the UK overcome sector fragmentation to build an ‘Internet of things’ industry? The European Commission recently approved a plan to encourage farmers to use electronic tagging to identify cattle. This, regulators believe, will help make rearing cattle more efficient, cut fraud, and help stem the spread of diseases.

revealing new patterns of interconnectedness in the physical world.

A broad term (even by the standards of ‘cloud computing’ and ‘big data’), it was first coined by British-born MIT researcher Kevin Ashton in 1999. Its approximate meaning today is a system for integrating the data produced by devices such as RFID tags or sensors in order to monitor, measure, manage and enhance physical objects.

Linking the data together is proving to be one of the sticking points for the Internet of things, according to Maurizio Pilu, lead technologist at the UK government’s Technology Strategy Board (TSB). The TSB recently held an over-subscribed workshop to discuss the possibilities and challenges facing the ‘Internet of things’. “The feeling was that applications and services that could make money, and that could change our lives, are not emerging fast enough,” explains Pilu. “And one of the main reasons is that data produced by ‘things’ is not interoperable, due to the fragmentation of the industry.”

Maurizio Pilu believes the UK has three strong advantages when it comes to the Internet of things. “We have world-class communications technology research base; we are strong at data analytics; and we are an early adopter of technologies like this,” he says.

“But there is one big disadvantage,” he says. “This stuff costs money, and like other countries, the UK is going through a period of cautious investment decisions.”

Of course, oftentimes you don’t really want to tell all of your friends where you are, and even then you may only want them to be able to see your whereabouts for a short while. That’s where Glympse comes in. The service, which is based entirely around ‘sharing your where’ with select friends a few hours at a time, has just raised a $7.5 million Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures and Ignition Partners.

Say, for example, you were running late for a meeting and wanted your coworkers to have a sense for when you’d be arriving at the office. Instead of having to send a series of text messages (“15 minutes..”, “traffic bad, make that 30 min”, and so on), you could just send a Glympse that let them track your progress on a map. Then, when you arrived, you could turn the Glympse off and the map would stop updating.

So where is Glympse going next? The company isn’t sharing much about its future plans, other than to say that they’re working with partners to integrate the product into “the everyday life experience”. In other words, expect them to move well beyond their own iPhone and Android apps in the near future.

Online video is exploding, with annual user growth of more than 45 percent. Mobile-device time spent increased 28 percent last year — with average smartphone time spent doubling. And social networks are now used by 90 percent of U.S. Internet users — for an average of more than four hours a month.

Every venture capitalist, Web publisher, and digital marketer is hyper-aware of these three trends.

What replaces the declining searchable Web is a new and “fully connected” digital life. You may have heard this before. After all, the promise of the Web was to connect pages with hyperlinks. Well, this time, “connected” means much more. It means the Web connects us, as people, to each one of the individuals online; and those connections, ultimately, extend from one of us to all of us.

New technical standards and consumers’ extensive use of mobile media put us on the cusp of an explosion in mobile payments.

Long rumored and heavily used in Asia, mobile phones have the ability to be used as payment devices similar to credit cards.

Now, the growing penetration of smartphones, the widespread use of phones to comparison shop, share price or product features or accept discount and coupon offers makes mobile payments the next high demand phone function.

Zoosh is a new technology that brings NFC-like payments to any phone with a speaker — i.e. every smartphone on the market.

Using the almost-inaudible 20,000KHz range — which almost every cell phone speaker is capable of — Zoosh technology can then send data to a receiving microphone. The end point can either be a point of sale — a shop, a ticket machine — or it can be another mobile phone. Apparently the technology has been successfully used in noisy environments — and it’s also fairly safe to assume that a technology like Zoosh would be designed to incorporate as much redundancy and error checking as possible.

Narrate, the company behind Zoosh, envisions two main use cases for its ultrasonic payment system. The first is just like Google Wallet: for $30 — a third of the price of NFC hardware — Narrate says that points of sale can be upgraded to accept Zoosh payments.