[ paul isakson ]

I Hate to be Redundant...

While watching House tonight, this commercial came on. Looks like the below videos, no?

A Sign of iPhone Things to Come?

Not sure how I missed this one a couple weeks back. Good thing I dropped in at Left Pocket to see what my friends at Integer have been looking at lately.

While I find it hard to believe that Starbucks would have much interest* in this due to past experiments with mobile devices that didn't work out, it is an interesting idea and use for the iPhone.

Not only is the interface design attractive, it also seems like a more valuable use for Semacode tags than having them be used to send people to a URL on their mobile device. (Assuming the Semacode tag links to a bank account/credit card.)

What's most exciting about it to me is the potential it points to for what the iPhone can do once the SDK gets released by Apple (why are they holding this up again?) in February.

Things like this just might be what get me to stop waiting for the second generation model to come out. Then again, maybe not. What's a few more months, right?

* It might be true that a lot of iPhone users drink Starbucks, but I don't think the vast majority of Starbucks customers have iPhones. Therefore, this would be an expensive undertaking for them (consider all the back-end technology needed) with little ROI, not to mention the potential of making all of their non-iPhone customers upset for having to still wait in lines.

apple playing big brother?

Apple is being accused of playing Big Brother on people using the iPhone (and possibly Leopard) through a couple of the widgets. The post on 9to5Mac states that they are collecting info on individual users that could be used to build user profiles that includes data on travel, financial and banking preferences, work details and even personal browsing information.

Some Apple fans are rising to their defense saying that there is no harm being done here by Apple. I'm not an expert on what different bits of code mean, so I can't say who is right. Very ironic though that the company who took a jab at their competition using the Big Brother idea is now being accused of just that.

What's becoming more and more interesting to me is how apparent it really is that marketing and advertising have become the evil empire. Verizon faced some of this same scrutiny a while back when it sent out a letter letting it's customers know they would begin sharing information from their calling records with its “affiliates, agents and parent companies.”

Now that technology is getting to a point where we can start being served up relevant information to our lives instead of being barraged with a million things we don't care about, we're too jaded and distrustful of marketers too allow the sharing of our information that would enable this. I can't say I blame anyone for not wanting to share their information. There are plenty of bad things that cold happen from this.

I just find it interesting that by sharing this information, we could be relieved of some of the annoyance of having advertising that means nothing to us shoved in front of us; yet we don't trust companies enough with this information to make that pain go away.

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