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Using your cellphone during checkout at Target could soon earn you discounts. Starting Wednesday, the giant retailer will allow customers to take advantage of special mobile-coupon offers on their handsets.
The coupon is redeemed when the bar code on the phone is scanned at checkout. Offers are good only once and expire on the dates listed. “We believe it’s a competitive advantage for us,” says Target.com President Steve Eastman.
The concept behind the pay system is called “lead generation,” Schell says, adding: “The idea here is you can do things like sign up for a credit card, sign up for a Netflix account and they’ll give you virtual currency.” The result is that virtual online economies are “becoming real drivers for [the] real economy,” Schell says. Changes are also afoot that will marry new technologies with rewards programs, akin to frequent-flier programs. “These game systems and the point systems that we know from the real world are going to collide because we’re going to have more and more sensors,” Schell says.” That’s one of the things that’s changing video games.” http://fluentnews.com/s/23590330
The Wired Interview: FCC Chair Julius Genachowski on Broadband, Google and His iPhone | Epicenter | Wired.com
From The New York Times: Movies today are, on average, much pinker than the films of half a century ago. Their shot structure has greater coherence, a comparatively firmer grouping together of similarly sized units that ends up lending them a frequency distribution ever more in line with the lab results of human reaction and attention times. “Roughly since 1960,” Dr. Cutting said, “filmmakers have been converging on a pattern of shot length that forces the reorientation of attention in the same way we do it naturally.” http://s.nyt.com/u/018
[Depression’s Upside - NYTimes.com]
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.html?pagewanted=all)
In a California gourmet market, Professor Iyengar and her research assistants set up a booth of samples of Wilkin & Sons jams. Every few hours, they switched from offering a selection of 24 jams to a group of six jams. On average, customers tasted two jams, regardless of the size of the assortment, and each one received a coupon good for $1 off one Wilkin & Sons jam.
Here’s the interesting part. Sixty percent of customers were drawn to the large assortment, while only 40 percent stopped by the small one. But 30 percent of the people who had sampled from the small assortment decided to buy jam, while only 3 percent of those confronted with the two dozen jams purchased a jar.
Increasingly, personal technology seems like a delivery device for a lifestyle, a tacit prescription of how to live in the Internet’s symbolic order. Study something like the iPad closely enough, and it seems to set a course for how we’re now to use words and images for business and pleasure. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising in shaky economic times that the highest calling for the heaps of digital devices in our lives, with their functioning in excess of anything we rationally require, is to shore up our families, and advertise them to the world, and back to ourselves. Sent with Tweetie
