 FROM DAILY MAIL SHILLS Shoppers are to be targeted with money-off electronic vouchers as they wander the High Street with the arrival of 'Ping Marketing'. The electronic vouchers will be sent direct to a mobile phone by coffee shops such as Starbucks or beauty brands such as L'Oreal as they pass stores offering deals. The technology relies on the GPS satellite system that allows mobile networks to track people every minute of the day via their mobile phone. The system has created concerns that the tracking of the movements of consumers by stores chasing sales is a threat to personal privacy. Customers who sign up for the scheme will be sent a text message when they pass every Starbucks However, O2, which is the first mobile network to trial the system to Britain, says customers must actively opt-in before they receive any vouchers. So far, the network has signed up more than one million Britons to the system. The new way of targeting shoppers is known as geographic marketing, directing advertising and offers to people based on their specific location. When the consumer moves within a set distance of the store - passing through a so-called geo-fence - the voucher is sent automatically via a text message to their phone. The idea has echoes of the film Minority Report in which Tim Cruise was recognised as he passed a Guinness billboard and a personalised greeting was played to him. Starbucks and L'Oreal have signed up to a six month trial. Others will join soon and, eventually, most stores on the High Street could use the system to entice custom. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1320846/Starbucks-bombard-people-money-vouchers-direct-phones-pass-coffee-shops.html#ixzz12WHMxtbz Notice how all of the hooks for these technologies seem like they are oriented towards 3 year olds. Whether its relegating statements to cute tweets, collecting lucky charms in the RFID matrix, playing GPS augmented reality games on fourquare or the farmville cartoon, they have successfully dumbed us down in the virtual playpen. From The Telegraph Minority Report-style advertising billboards to target consumers. RFIAdvertising billboards similar to those seen in the film Minority Report, which can recognise passers-by, target them with customised adverts and even use their names, are being developed by computer engineers. By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent The billboards being developed by NEC, the Japanese technology, company also use facial recognition software as seen in the movie.Researchers at IBM have revealed they are working on technology which will lead to consumers being shown tailor made adverts that reflect their personal interests. Digital advertising screens are already appearing in train stations, on bus stops and on the sides of buildings, but currently they only show generic adverts for a handful of products. The new advertising hoardings will behave like those in the film Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, in which Cruise's character is confronted with digital signs that call out his name as he walks through a futuristic shopping mall. "John Anderton. You could use a Guinness right about now," one billboard announces as he walks past. IBM claims that its technology will help prevent consumers from being subjected to a barrage of irritating advertising because they will only be shown adverts for products that are relevant to them. The system works by using the same kind of wireless technology tags found in Oyster Cards – the travel cards used on the London Underground. READ MORE From ZIOPOST GPS finds new crowd-control and medical applications By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH 06/06/2010 06:44 A Hebrew University researcher has shown that GPS can control crowds or the movement of shoppers, and even evaluatE patient recovery after surgery. Global positioning systems (GPS) have become commonplace to help drivers reach their destinations using satellites. But a young Hebrew University of Jerusalem researcher has shown that GPS can have other uses as well, such as controlling crowds or the movement of shoppers, and even evaluating patient recovery after surgery. Michal Isaacson, a doctoral student working with Dr. Noam Shoval of HU’s geography department, has been involved in developing new approaches for the use of advanced tracking technologies. Her work has implications for understanding the activity of people in different settings, such as urban areas, shopping malls, theme parks, national parks and other tourist attractions. It has already been tested to evaluate crowd activity and flow at Spain’s Port Aventura theme park. For her research, Isaacson has been named the first-prize winner among students in this year’s competition for HU’s Kaye Innovation Awards at the Hebrew University. The prizes will be presented on June 9 at the university’s Board of Governors meeting. Her work in this field has resulted in a book coauthored with Dr. Shoval and in several articles published in leading geographic journals. The first article she coauthored, published in The Professional Geographer, was noted by the journal as one of the top five most-cited articles in 2006 to 2007. The system she and Shoval have developed uses GPS technology to record the location of people for a designated period of time. During this period, participants are required to carry a small GPS unit with them. The tracking data is then analyzed using a computerized, time/space analysis engine, to derive maps that indicate the volumes of activity throughout the location and charts that indicate how different types of populations spent their time in the location. The data obtained using tracking technologies can also be analyzed in real time, creating virtual “radar” of the activity of visitors throughout a destination. Real-time analysis can lead to dynamic management of attractions in a more efficient way, both expanding the number of people that can visit an attraction within a given time frame and controlling their flow to promote sales. The analysis of this data can also change the way attractions are planned, and enable effective planning of future additions to an attraction. The technology also has far-reaching medical applications, they say. In collaboration with Dr. Yair Barzilay of the HU-Hadassah Medical School and Hadassah University Medical Center’s orthopedic surgery unit, a method was developed for detecting the mobility of patientsafter surgery as an objective measure for their recovery and well-being. The patients carry a GPS unit with them after the operation, tracking their movements, which are then analyzed. Future development will integrate additional sensors that will allow the combination of GPS data with physiological data, such as heart rate and blood pressure. The system was recently licensed through Yissum, HU’s technology transfer company, to Location Based Intelligence Inc., a US company, for further development and commercialization in the medical arena. Defining the potential market for this invention in the field of medical application is difficult at this stage, mainly because this product is creating a new market. READ MORE AT THE ZIONIST POST READ MORE @ INSIDE TECHNOLOGY SPECTRUM I must admit that on more than one occasion, I cut some of my university classes, which on retrospect, may not have been for the best of reasons. Since class attendance itself didn't count towards my grades, the only penalty I incurred was if I couldn't understand later what had been taught during the lecture. Some classes you didn't dare cut for that very reason. At Northern Arizona University (NAU) in Flagstaff, Arizona, the administration has instructed that next semester professors should seriously consider counting class attendance as part of the course grade for their freshman and sophomore classes, says this Arizona Republic article. The administration's reasoning is that students who attend classes and participate are generally more successful than those that don't. The administration says that it wants to reduce the drop-out rate of the university's lower classman, and cites various statistics to back up its objectives. The fuss about attendance would probably not be a news item except that NAU intends to use RFID proximity card readers to automatically take attendance in classes of 50 or more freshman and sophomore students. NAU has used RFID-enabled student ID cards for years to allow its students access to their resident halls, purchase meals on campus, etc. In smaller freshman and sophomore classes, the professors would manually take class attendance. Many NAU students don't like the idea, and some privacy advocates have expressed reservations, too. READ MORE  From TechCrunch Today at Facebook’s f8 conference in San Francisco, the company have given all attendees a small RFID tag attached to their conference badge. This tag is a part of something called “Facebook Presence” which allows you to “check-in” at various places around the conference simply by swiping your badge. Yes, it’s location. This is actually the same thing Facebook uses for its infamous keg bot at its headquarters. Employees have been using this for a long time, now they’re letting the rest of us in on the fun. To use it, you go to this page and manually type in your tag number to link it to your Facebook account. Then, everytime you swipe your badge somewhere, it goes right to your profile. Apparently, you can also tag yourself in photos this way. READ MORE   Bear in mind that 50% of any population falls below the IQ median and that RFID is obsolete anyway. View full story here http://rawstory.com/2010/03/germans-microchip-skin-poll/ |    See all tech news here
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