Slashdot Mirror
Real-World Hyperlinks
RunAmuk writes "Wired is reporting about being able to "Point and click your mobile phone at a poster in London movie theaters this July and you'll be able to directly access the movie's Web page." While there are many practical uses for this technology, like in museums as the article suggests." I'd like to use it at video rental places and CD stores to get product reviews.
A long-range Cue Cat!
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
Send pictures, check your e-mail, surf the Internet, and instantly pull up movie reviews!*
...
*Note: Requires $10 activation fee, you must upgrade to the $59.99/month package, and you will be charged $0.39/minute for every minute you go over your already worthless amount of daytime minutes.
I'd like to use it at video rental places and CD stores to get product reviews.
You must be new to the Internet.
For example, it could be used in museums and galleries, where visitors could download high-quality audio and visual content about exhibits.
.02
Will this hinder museums from adding both visual and audio cues to their exhibits? I personally think that cell phones should be banned in public places such as museums and this will just encourage Joe to hop on his cell phone and chat with Mary while I am trying to enjoy some peace and quiet.
I saw some really interesting usages of computers in museums (like here, I realise this is more of a piece of art, but you get the idea).
Keep the cell phones out and enjoy getting away from things that you see and use everyday.
Just my worthless
Oh this would be such fun to hack..
Child: Daddy, what's that "Finding Nemo 2" about?
Father: Let's look on our phone, son.
>clicky click click
Father: Hmm.. it appears to be about a man stretching his bottom wide open.
Trolling is a art,
Point and click your mobile phone at a poster in London movie theaters this July and you'll be able to directly access the movie's Web page.
Is some guy wearing a sign going to jump in front of me and start blathering on about casinos or cheap travel discounts?
But when I leave the computer I don't really wanna take it with me. I don't wanna phone that can get internet. I want a phone that is simple... I have a dad that has a pda, digital camera, gps. Its beyond annoying when you have to stop because someone in your group has to check the gps corodanites for the place you are at. Technology is great, But so is this world. Lets enjoy the world and technology, But make sure that we have a balance. If your balance is take your pda everywhere with you then thats your choise.
I'd like to use it to point at a CD and get it queued in Kazaa.
How are the phones choosing what to "receive", point and "click"? thats a little vague. And what happens if someone slams a bunch (of different ones) up on a wall, which tag, or do you get them all? Who will administer all these tags? Can coke go around and plop them on pepsi billboards? Can a prankster (heheh) make some to well, in essense spam users with their messages? It sounds like a cool idea, but the implementation issues sound potentially horrible.
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
I'd like to point and click on a girl walking buy, and having www.XXXgirlnextdoor.com or www.milf.com pop up, showing the nekkid details.
No longer would consumers be fooled by packaging and out-of-context reviews! All the crap merchandise would have to be reduced to their actual value. "Top Gun" will sell for $3 on DVD.
Blar.
Howzabout I point the thing at a pretty girl, and it reads her RFID tags and tells me what her blog URL is...now *that's* an 'enabling technology'! :)
It's hard enough
to read the current
text on my cell phone
that has a screen no
wider than this mess
age. I can't imagine
reading lengthy discuss
ions of art works and
paintings on a cell
phone. I think my thumb
would break from hitting
the scroll button const
antly.
Why would they have to charge for this? With this new technology, Spam and popup ads will finally be able to escape from the computers into the community at large where they can really wreak havoc.
People think billboards are sight pollution, well, we ain't seen nothing yet. Ten years from now, you won't be able to walk down a city street without a bombardment of media messages.
Just like the Internet, all these media messages will be free!!!!
Pavlov would have a field day on this site... you guys hear the bell "RFID" and you can't help but start salivating.
I think the parent post was just pointing out the simplicity in such a gadget - not its invasion of your so precious privacy.
As a few funny posts have pointed out, you'll never see reviews for products in the stores, and if you /do/ see them, you aren't going to see the really terrible reviews--accurate, perhaps, but still bad, so their accuracy is irrelevant--in the store next to the aisle where you'll find said reviewed product.
Not to take the opportunity to take a shot at Microsoft (seriously), but IE does something in the same mindset. Rather, it doesn't do something:
It doesn't block pop-up windows. Why? Advertising is what would be blocked, and Microsoft wants more people to advocate its browser. If company A has a product that company B is going to hide or recommend you don't touch, company A won't care about company B's method of delivery.
Capitalism(tm): Pro-consumer all the way!*
*void in the real world
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
There is an interesting system just launched in the UK where you dial a number on your phone, then hold your phone up to the source of the music for thirty seconds. It hangs up, and then messages you back with the name of the song, if it can work it out. This return message then costs you 25p for the trouble.
:-)
It's automated, but gawd knows how it does it. That has to be some seriously clever software doing music detection. Either way, I figured it's yet another 'real world' hyperlink example.
Unfortunately the name of the service escapes me, although it's advertised regularly on London's KISS FM. Does anyone else here know about this? I believe you can access the service by 'using the numbers down the middle of your phone..' 2580, perhaps? Just goes to show how good radio advertising really is! Ha!
If you're using a computer at CMU (or one of Telerama's wireless hotspots in Pittsburgh), you can find out when the next bus comes near you at bus.maya.com. Perhaps it's not as glamorous as streaming Quicktime movies to your phone, but it's probably more useful ;-)
That said, I hope someone solves the location-based services infrastructure problem. The bus hack depends on mapping IP addresses to lat/lons, which is incredibly brittle and evil.
For a bunch geeks, a bunch of people hear such do seem to be hating a potentially cool new technology.
Sure, maybe these things would hijack your cell-phone, and then the world would end. Somehow I doubt it.
I think the power would be more in the hands of the consumers. The article talks about infrared communication, not radio frequencies. This means that you would have to establish a direct line of sight link. If I have to point the IR port on my phone at something, I have a great amount of control over that.
I think a potential area of trouble is who gets to control what links get displayed. But I could see myself walking into a Barnes&Noble and browsing some books. One looks interesting; so I scan the "WebCode" or whatever with my phone. A couple links pop up on my screen, one to the reviews section of B&N.com for the book and one to the publisher.
Maybe I'm being too trusting, but this idea sounds pretty cool to me.
I'll get to how this ties into the thread shortly... but: We vote on elections that have very little choice. But every day, we vote with our dollars, transferring our economic power to the company that makes/sells the product/service. Boycotts are a way to vote with your $, but here's a much more effective way to do it subtley and daily: Every store (grocery, clothes, car), can have a bar-code (or RFID, or infrared) tag on each item, (or MUCH better for our privacy, can have this tag on the SHELF that contains the item so we don't take it home). And it'd be great if we can point a cell/pda/hand-held device at the shelf, and pull up info on the product. We could each put this product ID into the lookup field on whatever info-providers' websites/db's that are in-line with our values. I.e...Some may choose to find out what the Sierra Club thinks about the product, others may care if the product uses child labor, gives money for or against political causes, etc... This is kind of like a hugely expanded product label explaining contents, etc, but is not limited to what the company wants you to know, but what other data is really out there that you care about. You wouldn't read the label every time you purchase something, but as you are constantly tweaking your purchasing habits, you switch to spending money on feeding businesses in line with your values just like you would tweak your habits to shift towards low-fat or other choices. It's been years that I've been thinking this would be a good idea, and since I don't have the money to patent it and lock out others, I'm putting this idea "open source" on slashdot so any greedy co-opter doesn't lock people out from doing this right. your thoughts?
I don't want to read webpages or anything on my celphone. I don't even CARRY a cell phone. I do carry a PDA though. If I could point my PDA at one of these little tags, and have it capture the URL to a Mozilla bookmarked-tabs list that I could then pull up in mozilla when I get home, I'd be plenty chuffed. If something caught my eye through the day, I could just bookmark it and check it out later when its more convenient.
404 Error:
Another...
A pirate walked into a bar with a steering wheel in his crotch.
The bartender said "Do you know you have a steering wheel in your crotch?"
The pirate responded,"Arr, it's drivin me nuts!"
Don't forget to tip your waitress.
Early barcodes were viewed with great suspicion. People did not understand that they were just printing in computer-only font. Add the "mysteries of lasers" to people whose only experiences with computers to date had been a punch-card phone bill that they heard charged their neighbor $9999.99 for long distance, and movies such as Colossus or James Bond where lasers were used only to cut good guys in half and yeah, people were paranoid.
And somehow, we'd like to think more of ourselves at this point, that we're more technologically enlightened.
Truth is, more of us are more enlightened. We have seen large databases, and we have seen them misused. We have seen technology used to provide us with new and better advertising (via browser cookies, credit card purchases, etc.); terrorist tracking in airports where the wrong bits in a database cause a code at the bottom of your ticket to mean "body cavity search"; streetlight mounted cameras issuing red-light tickets; U.S. Government announcements regarding systems such as TIA, etc, etc, etc. We have all seen the abuses, and have no reason to think the situation will get better instead of worse.
The reason RFID is viewed differently from barcodes is twofold.
- RFID is permanent, and
- RFID can be read without your permission.
Barcodes are typically printed on tags ripped off at the point of sale, or printed on the packaging that is thrown away when the consumer gets home. A barcode in your pocket means nothing. It stays your business because nobody and nothing can see it unless you choose to show it to them. But current RFID proposals use durable tags manufactured into the goods and meant to stay permanently in the merchandise. And they can be read from eight feet away via a hidden antenna in the ceiling (or in the ubiquitous security antennas flanking every nearly every store entrance these days.)So, got RFID in your jacket, your jeans, your wallet, your credit cards? Let's just have a look as you pass through our fancy store entrance. "$400 shoes, $59.99 khaki Dockers, $89.99 shirt, $19.99 naughty underwear; and three Gold and two Platinum cards with a total current open credit line of $69,252. Send two scantily-clad female salespeople immediately, and change the video posters to 'Dominatrix Theme #3'." [All you geeks wish, anyway.]
Contrast that image with "Mismatched tennis shoes, $7.99 Wal*Mart jeans that we tracked through a Goodwill store last December, and an army surplus greatcoat. No credit cards and one Illinois food stamp card detected. Food stamp card cross referenced to CrimNet: holder Joe Smith is African-American, has two counts of drunken brawls in taverns, and marijuana charges dropped since successful completion of rehab. Lives in Cabrini Green. Change the video posters to flashing red 'Security Alert Theme #1', start the tracking cameras following this guy immediately, and send two burly security officers to encourage him to complete his shopping experience at Wal*Mart."
Now, take the same guy and dress him up in nice clothes, but leave the food stamp card in his wallet. Same guy, different look. He's still going to get escorted out of the store for the dual crimes of being poor and shopping while black. And now that process can be automated.
Has the second guy committed a crime? Some people might say, "not yet, but he sure fits the profile." Others would say that he won't because with a tracking system like this, he would never get the chance to steal. But the honest answer is still, "no, he has done nothing wrong." And now does he get the same opportunity as Mr. Khakis above? Not any more.
John