New shopping carts will even find sale items
Attention, shoppers: Rolling computer-equipped shopping carts in Aisle Three.
Stop & Shop is testing 1,000 carts with wireless computers in 23 stores. The carts are in three stores in the Boston area now; the rest will be rolled out by the first quarter of 2005.
Customers will be able to e-mail their grocery list to the store and call it up on their cart’s screen. The computers will give shoppers a list of what they bought on their last trip and notify them a product is on sale as they enter the aisle where it’s stocked. They can scan items as they shop to get a running total of what they’re buying. The computers can create personalized coupons as the carts approach an item.
Shoppers can also place a deli order from the cart and get a message from the deli when it’s ready.
The carts are “still in the research phase,” so their final price hasn’t been determined, said Greg Thompson, a spokesman for IBM, which is creating the carts’ computers. Final prices for the carts will be “somewhere around $2,000 to $3,000, he said. Regular old supermarket carts cost about $100 each.
Don’t expect to check your Web mail on these carts, however. The Internet connectivity will be restricted.
Someone’s watching the watchers
The surveillance cameras that keep watch over our daily activities are being watched.
An advocacy group has teamed up with a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher to give pedestrians an online map of camera locations in Manhattan.
Tad Hirsch, a research assistant at MIT’s Media Lab, has adapted a desktop version of the iSee Project for use in handheld devices using Java programming language.
Walkers can roam Manhattan armed with information that will allow them to steer clear of cameras if they wish — though escaping the cameras’ unblinking gaze may not be easy.
Privacy advocates have added hundreds of cameras to the Manhattan map using a Web-based interface, www.appliedautonomy.com/isee, developed by the Institute of Applied Autonomy, an activist organization concerned about surveillance.
The group hopes to spur debate, particularly about networked cameras that stream video to monitoring companies in centralized locations, said one institute member, who goes by the pseudonym John Henry.
Governments debate open source software
Local government offices in the French capital will be moving to open source software, but they’ll be doing it slowly.
An independent study showed that a switch to open source would cause “significant additional cost without improving the service,” a Paris City Hall spokesman said in a statement.
Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe had commissioned the study from French technology consulting firm Unilog SA after the German city of Munich announced last year it was switching to Linux from Microsoft Corp. Unilog advised Munich on the changeover.
The statement did say that Paris plans gradually to “break the dependence on software suppliers with de facto monopolies” — a clear reference to the U.S. software giant.
Japan, South Korea and Brazil are among other countries where efforts are under way to switch public sector offices over to open-source software.
Sending them to the Web
Need any proof that traditional media can send readers to the Web? Look no further than the Oct. 11 Doonesbury.
The cartoon, which is in about 1,400 daily and Sunday newspapers and appears online at “Slate,” features character Mark Slackmeyer as Mr. Honest Voices, referring readers to critiques of the Bush administration and the Iraq war from traditionally conservative sources.
The Oct. 11 strip sent so many readers to an essay by Dwight Eisenhower’s son on The (Manchester, N.H.) Union Leader’s Web site that the site crashed.