jabailo - I'm fairly luddite when it comes to payment technology. It's not that I'm against NFC and payment by apps, it's just that I haven't gotten around to figuring out how to use them.
I'm well on my way to being the 2030s equivalent of the old person who holds up the whole line at the grocery store because they insist on writing a check.
I've experienced the same reactions when I've used Google Wallet. Assuming the POS terminal works, the cashiers and other customers sometimes stare in amazement and ask what I did.
I'm not a big coffee drinker and I'm not a fan of Starbucks roasts, but I'm surprised that Starbucks can't look up a loyalty card based on one's phone number. That really is primitive.
By the way, for loyalty cards, credit cards and other numbers, I store them in BlackBerry's Password Keeper app which uses AES encryption, so I have the information if I haven't taken the appropriate card.
I like Evernote, but I really do look towards the future and think today's contacts software is quite primitive compared to what it should be able to accomplish. Of course, you could say that about many things, including me!
For example, I was just at Starbucks. I didn't have my Rewards card (which gives me points everytime I buy there) so I asked the counter person if she could look it up by phone number. No she said, eventhough she has a state of the art IBM Pos workstation! I quipped that every local supermarket can do that.
Another one is the Near Field Readers on credit card swipers. It's like this lost technology they installed in some places and forgot about. For example, I went into RiteAid and used one, and the cashier was shocked. "How'd you do that!?" so I explained it to her. In general, using it produces awe, like using a magic wand. Many times the NFR is there but broken or disconnected.
BTW, the Evernote Hello app isn't so you can identify people when you meet them again. It's basically an address book app; it's designed to let you get in touch with people later.
I seem to remember reading a science fiction novel years ago where people walked around with various colored shapes above their heads that indicated their emotional state. No Internet or social networking profiles, though, so it's not sufficiently data-dense.
I want life to be like Second Life, where everybody walks around with their name floating above their head. You right-click on their avatar, it calls up their profile.
Supposedly if you use a person's name frequently, you're more likely to remember it, jabailo. I'm not sure if that actually works, jabailo. I've never tried it, jabailo.
The iPhone has an app called "Bump" that lets you exchange contact information by tapping phones together. I've never really used it.
In some techie circles, business cards are obsolete. You just Google the people you want to contact, or look them up on Twitter.
Yes. Mixing Facebook and business raises larger issues. People let their hair down on Facebook, but people often don't want to do business with hair-let-down people.
One of my favorite people on social media has a real potty-mouth, and frequently uses crazy profile photos on Twitter. But her LinkedIn profile is very professional, as is her profile photo there, where she's wearing a suit and is made up and ready for business.
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The US National Security Agency learned the hard way that it can be dangerous to give a contractor too much money and access, with too little scrutiny. The NSA and other government agencies hire tens of thousands of contractors
a year to analyze data. Edward Snowden -- who revealed himself as the NSA leaker after fleeing the country -- was one such contractor, reportedly holding a $122,000 salaried position at Booz Allen Hamilton at the time of his departure.
Midsize businesses rarely achieve the same standards of security in their own datacenters as professional providers that specialize in delivering these services to organizations.
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
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