A couple of interesting things in advertising news

I'm not saying they're good things, but they are interesting and could be coming to a city near you.

First, Apple has patented something called iBeacon. You walk in to a grocery store, and you phone now has a map of the store, possibly with an interactive shopping list showing you a good path through the store. Or walking up to an advert on a kiosk for a concert and you can point your phone at it and order tickets. Now, the latter one seems to be a solution in search of a problem: a QR code could set you up to order your tickets, but whatever.

Geofencing is interesting tech. It requires an accurate logging of the latitude and longitude of a location, then defining a perimeter around that point. So a department store would have either multiple points or a big perimeter, a small store in a mall would have a comparatively small perimeter. The problem that I see is a lot of malls have iffy cell phone signals, which means the phone's GPS isn't going to be very accurate. Also, I'm not sure that geofencing logs the Z access: altitude. Do geofenced stores know if I'm on the first or second floor?

You can do iBeacon-type stuff with something called Near-Field Communications, the problem is that not all smartphones have this tech, though it's becoming a more common standard feature. iBeacon uses a lower-powered standard of Bluetooth that allows the creation of a low-powered Bluetooth transmitter, or beacon, that sits there transmitting a code that can be looked up by compatible software when the receiving phone comes in to range. The cool thing about the beacon is that it's inexpensive and the battery can last a year, so it's set-up and forget it. I'm not sure if it requires the phone to use the same low-powered Bluetooth tech, if so, they're going to have the same adoption rate problem that NFC has.

One thing that they talk about in the article is having a few iBeacons in a museum and they can triangulate your location and know that you're standing in front of painting A and not painting B.

I can't imagine me installing such an app, for that matter, Bluetooth on my phone is normally turned off.

http://www.wired.com/design/2013/12/4-use-cases-for-ibeacon-the-most-exciting-tech-you-havent-heard-of/


Next up, FourSquare. It's a web site/something to do that I don't mess with, they're working on something like a Minority Report advertising methodology where you walk in to a store and your phone receives an offer for $20 off on a $100 purchase if you use your X credit card. There's really nothing to this, you only need geofencing and a compatible app, so it really isn't all that revolutionary since FourSquare is predicated upon geofencing. Still, it's getting some advertising.

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/12/futuristic-advertising-at-foursquare/

This is really weird: Sprint is maybe buying part/all of T-Mobile?!

There are two basic things that differentiate wireless carriers. First, frequency. Cell phones are two-way radios that operate in full-duplex: you can talk and listen at the same time. Half-duplex is like walkie-talkies: you can only hear when you're not transmitting. The second is signal encoding, and at the simplest level, there are two types: GSM and CDMA. There are two major GSM carriers: AT&T and T-Mobile, and two major CDMA carriers: Verizon and Sprint.

So not only are T-Mobiles' encoding incompatible with Sprint's existing infrastructure, the frequencies are also different. So to merge the two carriers' networks, all of the T-Mobile towers would have to be upgraded, and all of the Sprint towers would have to be upgraded. This makes absolutely no sense, especially since both carriers are in the middle of network-wide upgrades. Had a merger been considered before they started the upgrades, it could have been factored in, and since all of the towers were being touched in the first place, it wouldn't have been nearly as painful at that point, but they're both well in to their upgrades, so it's really not sensible.

This makes absolutely no sense to me.

Two years ago, AT&T announced that they wanted to buy T-Mobile. The ostensible reason was that they wanted to expand their network to provide better coverage. The only problem with that claim is that although they both use GSM, they're not on the same frequency, so AT&T would have had to update all of the towers on both networks to make them compatible, and it was easily proven that it was less expensive for AT&T to just upgrade their network in the first place, so this merger was shot down very quickly and never came close to regulatory approval because clearly AT&T wanted to gobble up T-Mobile to eliminate a competitor and become bigger than Verizon, and I'll bet T-Mobile customers breathed a sigh of relief when it was shut-down.

A Sprint/T-Mobile merger I think would have an easier time getting regulatory approval since it would be the third and fourth largest carriers merging (Spribile? T-Mobint?), but it still doesn't make sense to me from an economic standing. I think the shareholders of both companies would be wise to vote against such a merger.

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/report-sprint-considering-bid-t-mobile/2013-12-13

A couple of interesting things in news about the NSA

First, I didn't see it but apparently the weekly CBS news program 60 Minutes did a pure puff piece on the spy agency that held water about as well as my spaghetti strainer. I probably would have been throwing objects at my TV had I seen it.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/60-minutes/


Meanwhile, a US District Court judge in Washington, DC, said that the NSA bulk collection of telephone metadata is blatantly unconstitutional. His decision seemed to hinge on two points. First, the case law that the government's arguments were predicated upon was from the late '70s, long before cell phones were ubiquitous, and things have changed. The case, in 1976, a purse-snatcher started calling his victim and harassing her, the police traced the calls without a warrant and the courts ruled that the thief had no reasonable expectation of privacy and upheld the non-warranted search. Now this judge, 34 years after the SCOTUS upheld that conviction, said that reasoning isn't really sensible any more, especially with the NSA siphoning so much information and retaining it forever.

The ruling included an order for the NSA to cease collecting this info, but he stopped short of ordering it implemented since it's obvious the government will appeal the ruling.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/12/16/251645205/federal-judge-rules-nsa-bulk-phone-record-collection-unconstitutional

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/bulk-telephone-metada-ruling/