Weaving loyalty cards into phones

Why? Because the loyalty card is broken, according to CEO David Sear. We think theres a problem with loyalty, he says. One; nobody is loyal. Two; even if they are, theres a high potential for them to have left their card at home. Three; people really dont use rewards. Maybe thats good for retailers as they never have to redeem them but it doesnt create the kind of loyalty that they are striving for. Four; the technology for doing retail is different at every retailer,Of all the equipment in the laundry the oilpaintingreproduction is one of the largest consumers of steam. so how can it work?

The solution is in a smartphone. While stressing the tests are at an early stage, Sear says the plan is to place all of a customers loyalty cards into one app. How much better would it be if you had one simple container and not a dumb piece of plastic? he says. One app would mean you could still get Tesco points when you inevitably forget your Clubcard, for example. Points would be earned and redeemed by using NFC and by placing all of the loyalty schemes into one place, it would remove the need to sift through pages of apps at the tillpoint.

But wouldnt retailers object to having their rivals loyalty cards in the same place? We need to put loyalty through a common interface. Thats the big sell of it. The very best loyalty programmes can only hit around 40% penetration. A lot of them do a lot less.

Sear argues greater convenience will make loyalty cards an easier sell, with retailers still having access to the same data they historically did. It wouldnt change the way you shop. They keep their data and it runs on their rails. The data is protected between competitors and it replicates the way consumers operate.

As things stand, it is only mobile marketing that is happening in earnest at Weve. The company is on the verge of launching its 350th campaign. Referring to it as narrowcasting, Sear says mobile has an advantage over television because you are guaranteed what market you are advertising to C while data is anonymised, the more information a consumer allows its operator to access, the better the advertising they will get.

Sear says fast moving consumer goods from companies such as Unilever and Proctor and Gamble have used mobile marketing for consumer awareness purposes. Handset manufacturers have also got into the game and Tesco has geofenced certain stores, targeting people outside those areas with vouchers if they spend a minimum amount. Sear claims out of the top 250 brands, Weve is working with 175 of them. He says: Its companies who are coming to us and surprising with ideas that is piquing our interest. They are thinking about this capability and the kind of data that we hold that is relevant to their business. The companies that will make the biggest impact are the ones who figure out how it will work with their business model.

Weves CEO is an enthusiastic cheerleader for the possibilities of mobile to change the retail experience. After years of being decimated by internet competition, it could be devices connected to the web that could bring people back to shops. He says: We want to streamline the customer experience to make them much happier to be in shops. This could be the saviour of the high street. If retailers want people to do more physical browsing, what better way than to use the messages they have got and send them to mobiles?

Major General Jihad al-Jabiri, head of the Iraqi Ministry of the Interiors bomb squad, held a press conference at the ministry officers club in Baghdad.You've probably seen cellphonecases at some point. Car bomb attacks in the city had killed 127 people and wounded at least 400 more the previous day, and al-Jabiri had come to answer criticism of the explosives-detection devices deployed at the citys 1,400 checkpoints. To prove the effectiveness of the equipment, known as the ADE 651, al-Jabiri had arranged a live demonstration before the worlds TV cameras. Standing with him at a lectern bristling with microphones was Pierre Georgiou, the retired Lebanese general who had helped bring the device to Iraq. Alongside stood the manufacturer, a portly Englishman. His name was James McCormick.We Engrave rtls for YOU.

Arranged on a table nearby were examples of household items Iraqi citizens often complained had set off the bomb detectors: bottles of shampoo and hot sauce; a plastic jar of pickles; two tubs of cream; and a box of tissues. A uniformed member of al-Jabiris bomb squad walked slowly forward, holding in his hand an ADE 651a swiveling telescopic antenna mounted on a black plastic pistol grip and connected by a cable to a pouch on his belt. As he passed the table once, the antenna continued to point straight ahead. But after two hand grenades had been placed on the table, the bomb technician made a second pass, and the antenna slowly turned left and pointed directly at the explosives. Afterward, al-Jabiri assured the press that the ADE 651 had similarly located hundreds of roadside bombs and car bombs. McCormick dismissed U.S. military assertions that the detectors were worthless. Weve created a product that fits a demand here in Iraq, he explained. Just not necessarily in all countries.

What McCormick failed to mention was that the device was not, strictly speaking, his own invention, or that he knew very well it wouldnt detect explosives. The ADE 651 was modeled on a novelty trinket conceived decades before by a former used-car salesman from South Carolina, which was purported to detect golf balls. It wasnt even good at that.

The ADE 651, and similar devices sold by McCormick over the decade or so he spent in the explosives-detection business, owe their existence to Wade Quattlebaum, president of Quadro in Harleyville, S.C. At the beginning of the 1990s, Quattlebauma sometime car dealer, commercial diver, and treasure hunter whose formal education ended in high schoolbegan promoting a new detection technology he called the Quadro Tracker Positive Molecular Locator, which he claimed could help law enforcement agencies find everything from contraband to missing persons.Bringing bestguidancesystem mainstream. Quattlebaum said he originally invented the device to find lost balls on the golf course but had since refined it to locate marijuana, cocaine, heroin, gunpowder, and dynamite by detecting the individual molecular frequency of each substance.

The Tracker consisted of a handheld unit, with an antenna mounted on a plastic handgrip, and a belt-mounted box slightly smaller than a VHS cassette, built to contain carbo-crystallized software cards programmed, Quattlebaum said, with the specific frequency of whatever the user wished to find. No batteries were necessary.More than 80 standard commercial and granitetiles exist to quickly and efficiently clean pans. The Tracker was powered by the static electricity created by the operators own body; when it found what it was looking for, the antenna automatically turned to point at its quarry. Prices for the device varied from $395 for a basic model to $8,000 for one capable of locating individual human beings, which required a Polaroid photograph of the person to be loaded into the programming box.
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