Regarding bar-code scanning …

Regarding bar-code scanning in retail stores, Bryan Skelton writes:

I think this is a great idea, plus many retailers already have the
infrastructure set up for it, it is called wedding registries. You and your
partner choose products you are interested in around the store, set
up a profile in one of their kiosks, and then your friends/family around
the world can view your list to see what to get you as a wedding
present. At Target, they give you a bar code scanner gun that you walk
around the store with and just zap all the stuff you want to add to your
list, hand them back the gun and they download it into their system
and it shows up in your registry on their site. Easy. As you pointed out,
you should be able to do the same thing for yourself, in any store.

There are already specialized Palm Pilots that are being used to scan inventory. It wouldn’t be hard at all to devleop a custom Palm application that you can allow your Palm-owning customers to use to keep a copy of their portabe “digital library” with them and update any time they walk into a store. And well, if you must, there is also the same technology available for PocketPC.

37Signals Whitepaper: Contingency Design: Maximizing Online Profitability By Helping People When Things Go Wrong

I think this may constitute a different kind of “crashing”. And to think, people are going to pay a premium for this.

An good article on the future of using Intel chips in handheld devices:

Deep down Intel knows the mobile experience is truly horrible, and it wants to fix it. We want one inch thick laptops which last all day, but the technology doesn’t get us there. Intel can’t, like Apple, simply define some standards in a quick half-hour meeting, and email them to the hardware division for implementation. It needs to coerce and finesse its OEMs to arrive at the same destination. (Apple’s power management is terrific, but then it doesn’t have to play by the ACPI rules).

Research in Motion has a new Blackberry device out that includes built-in cell phone capabilities.

Posted by Cameron Barrett at March 4, 2002 05:05 PM

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