As the Apple Watch approaches its vague “early 2015” release date, there’s still a lot to learn about the hotly anticipated smartwatch. Sure, it can give us directions by tapping our wrists and [...]
Geek.com - Apple Watch will soon be plagued by location-based ads
“Wearables and Internet of Things are the next frontiers in the mobile revolution. We are excited to announce industry’s first programmatic ad platform for Apple Watch developers and brands,” said Ash Kumar, Co-Founder and CEO of TapSense in a statement. “While most of our competitors are focused on banner ads and legacy platforms, we are focused on innovation and next generation platforms.
-- submitted from IRC
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Apple Watch Will Soon Be Plagued by Location-Based Ads
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by black6host on Thursday January 08 2015, @02:00AM
Let's see in 20 years how many of the things we own deliver advertising to us. Perhaps more subtle than what we have now but ads all the same. Our TVs report back on us. Our phones do. Heating and air conditioning systems can as well. I'm sure I'm just touching the tip of iceberg. Oh, don't forget the cameras...
I can see your refrigerator telling you that you need more ground beef and this local store in your area happens to have it on sale. And that's just one thing. How many things do you think will be connected to the "Internet of Things" (stupid name...).
And my child will have never known it any other way (at least that he can remember...)
Anyway, think it can't/won't happen?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tftp on Thursday January 08 2015, @02:41AM
It won't happen, unless you buy products that deliver ads.
I don't have a TV. I don't have a smartphone. My HVAC is not talking to anyone except me, and I know that. My security cameras stream data to me. What else?
My refrigerator does not have a camera or a scanner, given that it's older than these things. But even new refrigerators are not likely to be used for those reminders because people vary consumption of food all the time. You cannot use ground beef every single day. Now and then you need other food. If someone buys such a "smart" refrigerator, he'd be annoyed by inane reminders that suggest that the owner of the house is so stupid as to not know what she wants or needs to eat today. That camera and that sensor will be disabled, as they are simply not needed - just as they are not needed today.
People who want to be brainwashed by ads are welcome to consume the electronic equivalent of HFCS by gallons. People who have no use for ads know how to achieve that. There will be no universal solution.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 08 2015, @02:52AM
Go ahead, try me.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Thursday January 08 2015, @02:55AM
You think you're the norm or exception, in terms of not owning a TV and a smartphone...?
The PP makes a very valid observation, for the majority. People shouldn't need to qualify that last bit all the time...
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday January 08 2015, @03:21AM
I think that's an exception even here, on SN - in terms of a smartphone, at least. But that hardly matters. As I said, the society has separated already into those who don't have secrets and into those who still value privacy. There is no way, or even reason, to reconcile the two. Those who don't mind being registered in every database are welcome to go their own way. It may be the majority, but why would I care how many fools ^W alternatively wise people I'm surrounded with? If I don't want to be tracked, I won't be tracked.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 08 2015, @02:06PM
I don't own a smartphone either. But I wonder how long until life without a smartphone will be very hard.
I resisted getting a credit card for quite some time. But finally I gave up. There was simply too much that was no longer possible if you had no credit card. And I'm already seeing the trend with smartphones (or equivalents like tablets). You don't need one yet, but I wouldn't bet that in ten years, you still don't need one.
Because if there are enough fools, the environment will adapt to them, and sooner or later you'll only have the option to either join them or face significant difficulties in your daily life. People will just assume you've got a smartphone (because "everyone" has it). One day you might find yourself in the situation that you cannot even buy at your local grocery shop without a smartphone (because cash has been replaced by electronic wallets/NFC payments).
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday January 09 2015, @02:39PM
Reminders aren't tracking. Targeted advertising doesn't even *have to* be tracking, although it usually is.
Personally, I like to build my own smart devices. I enjoy doing it, and I've never found a paid service that actually does what I want. But the idea of a fridge that can tell me what and where to buy sounds kinda nice. I don't particularly give a crap about food. I eat solely because I have to, and there are times I eat popcorn for dinner for a week straight because I don't feel like going shopping. Or I forget to. So a fridge that can text me while I'm leaving work and remind me to buy milk, and maybe tell me the cheapest place to get it that's on my route home? Maybe even link it to my car so it'll remind me when I'm near the store? Sounds great, sign me up! Now, if it's going to do that by telling every store in the country that I'm looking to buy milk, that's no good. But there's no reason it couldn't just download the fliers for selected stores every week, cross-check those with a list of products I usually buy, and let me know what I need.
...but I do realize I'm probably not going to get that either unless I build it myself. Then again, I keep thinking I should give up on food and start living on Soylent, so maybe I don't even need a fridge...lol
(Score: 1) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday January 08 2015, @03:16AM
I think it would be cool to network the gadgets in my home to each other, but only if I can be dead certain they don't connect to the Internet.
"How can I help you officers?"
"May we come in?"
"Do you have a search warrant?"
"Yes. Your freezer tells us that you put something strong, black and ground-up into it."
"I cannot tell a lie. That's my Pike's Place Roast."
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 08 2015, @04:03PM
If 20 years from now we're still buying stuff from giant corporations and ceding every mote of agency we have to people who steal from us left, right, and center, then we will have completely failed our children and our world.
I see a different future. It's one where we each produce our own energy, grow our own food, and produce things as we need them. The centralized structures inherited from the 19th century will all have been swept completely away. If we get it right our great-grandchildren will wonder how we fools ever allowed ourselves to be so systematically devalued and dehumanized, in much the same way we regard the serfs under feudalism.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 08 2015, @04:46PM
20 years ago we were busily working on the tech and infrastructure to make this happen. I don't believe it's going to fall in the next 20.
It's a little harder to storm the castle these days........
You and I would both like the same outcome. So many people, though, couldn't care less as long as they have new shiny things.
(Score: 1) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday January 08 2015, @03:02AM
is that why my eyeballs start bleeding when I try to keep up on my reading?
A problem we've got is that it costs money to run a website. Everyone expects their series of tubes for free. However the number of websites is growing, as are the number of people using the web.
The number of people actually buying stuff, while I expect it's growing, isn't growing as fast. In addition many other platforms for advertising are losing market share to web advertising. I expect that results in people who once worked on newspaper and radio ads, moving into the web advertising business.
To have enough money to run your web site, you've got to collect a certain amount of ad revenue, but if your share of the world's total ad budget is diminishing, you're going to have to find a way to get more people to click your ads. Hence we have the increasingly garish advertising; my particular gripe is javascript popups that I have to close before I can read the article. This led me to finally install NoScript the other day, which does the job just fine - but that means that the websites aren't showing me the ads anymore. OK for me but not for them.
We need to find another way to finance the web. Google's plan in which we would pay to make ads go away is a stab in the right direction, however I also do not want to be tracked. Before I would be willing to pay to make ads go away, I'd want to know that two different website couldn't correlate my visits with each other. I expect there are ways to do that, however websites are going to see the tracking as a value add.
Another way would be to make websites less expensive. My present focus on finding ways to refactor software so that the computers it runs on use less power is one of my contributions, also the list I am building of computer industry employers. That's aimed in part at enabling employers to hire employees without paying commissions to third-party recruiters.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday January 08 2015, @03:33AM
Who is "we?" It's not the readers - it's the owners of web sites that need to figure it out. SN has one solution for this Web site. I have another solution for my own Web site (it is free, no ads, as it costs me nothing to run.) Other website owners may want other solutions. The readers either accept them, or they do not.
Not sure how many people would sign up to pay for something that they can get for free. It would also spawn a new area of theft. Not that any competent person would ever have a problem with defeating ads... the Web site just can't prevent this without a trusted client on the user's computer. You'd have to write your entire Web site in Flash, or in whatever replaces it - and even then you can't do much about a customer who covers the ad area with a piece of paper. Web operators must understand that there is a small group of people that do not tolerate ads at all, and it is futile to fight them. Web sites should instead focus on the majority that is sufficiently open to ads.
(Score: 1) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday January 08 2015, @03:54AM
Most people who operate commercial websites aren't actually software developers. They are people like a woman I met a while back, who only knew enough to be dangerous. She's registered a good domain, got some good content up, but was otherwise clueless.
The web was invented by a software developer, other software developers extended and added to his invention.
I don't want to see the economy collapse.
I was a Boy Scout. Were you a Boy Scout? A Girl Scout?
When I see a problem that needs to be solved, I volunteer to solve it. Consider that an electrical fault set fire to a dormitory that I was living in. Everyone just stared in shock at the increasingly larger flames. I grabbed a paper bag out of a trash can, put my hand inside it then slapped it over the fire.
It hurt like hell but at least we all didn't die in a fire.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by tftp on Thursday January 08 2015, @04:06AM
Certainly not.
I agree that s/w developers can - and will - help once the decision is made. However the primary question here is not to invent something new, but simply to choose who is going to pay, and for what. A developer cannot help with this - only the owner of the content can make that decision. It depends on too many factors. A developer is not even the best person to enumerate possibilities. You need a business development person for that, one who knows financial consequences of going this way vs. going that way.
That makes sense only if you know the problem enough to not make it worse. Financial advices are sometimes a dangerous thing to offer, as you will be blamed no matter what. In this application "knowing the problem" means "knowing the Web business of a specific person." There are no universal recommendations that fit everyone.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday January 08 2015, @06:23AM
I'm having an increasingly hard time following this ramble. It gets more obtuse at the very moment my interest wains.
In simple short sentences what the hell are you trying to say. No fires. No paperbags.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday January 08 2015, @06:51AM
should take responsibility for solving it.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday January 08 2015, @07:06AM
Thank you. That wasn't so hard now, was it?
I'll do my part, and refuse to buy an Apple Watch. Kthanksbye.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday January 08 2015, @11:17AM
I readily admit that I find brevity to be a challenge.
I am able to write concisely when I set my mind to it - but usually I do not set my mind to it.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Thursday January 08 2015, @08:08PM
tl;dr
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 08 2015, @08:02AM
Everyone already pays for the web. There's no reason for people to have to pay twice. Just like cable was supposed to share part of your money with each channel you watch, your ISP could forward some of your money to each website you visit. That'll never happen because they're too greedy, but it's the fairest solution. You can't automatically rate anything by it's usefulness to each individual person, but you can automatically track how often something is visited or used. Though you'll always have people gaming the system. Maybe people would start developing their web pages to hit more addresses on their server.
I host a couple sites, they're all free and cost little to maintain. They're very popular in their niches and aren't full of unproductive graphics or scripts. Many of the more useful sites I visit are completely free. A few of them have ads. The major sites that make money selling things have tons of ads. These sites shouldn't have any ads because they also make money selling products and services. Any such site doesn't needs ads to exist. The popular information-based sites have donations and funding drives. A few of them have lotteries that bring in tons of money. There are only a few popular sites that don't sell services and don't run donations, sites like generic web search engines. These sites are the only ones that are expensive to maintain (video/image sites limit upload size and viewable counts until you pay and that limits their costs. A search engine has a fixed cost of maintaining a web index even if you only use it once. The cost of a single search is nothing compared to building the index). I don't know of any FOSS search engines that don't simply aggregate the results from commercial ones, but I'm sure such a site could find a workable donation model if its results are good enough. They could also sell access to their database. The rest of the web is niche sites which are effectively free to run. $5 for a name and then run them off your home net connection for 'free'.
You argue that a smaller ratio of people are buying things. That could be true, but sites should also be getting more efficient. Initial development is the most expensive part. After that they should be able to handle maintenance on less people buying things. It's the sites fault if their costs of operation keep going up and up.
There's no right to make money on the web. Every idea/website isn't required to be successful and we shouldn't try to force that. The web existed before it had ads and will continue to exist if web advertising was made illegal (would never happen, but it's an example). I'd argue the web would be better without advertising. Less fake sites, less click bait, smaller pages, and better security. The web will survive without ads. We shouldn't want ads. We shouldn't tolerate ads. They degrade the quality of the web.
Your efforts aren't making the web cheaper. Making easier to use and less maintenance required hosting software would have a direct results on the average person's ability to host a website. The only sites that care about power usage are already popular enough that they had bigger financial requirements to overcome and removing recruiter commissions is so far removed that it has no measurable effect. To make the web better you should make hosting cheaper, not giving more money to those who pay hosting costs. There's no reason to believe that money goes into hosting costs and thus it has no effect on the web.
(Score: 1) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday January 08 2015, @03:06PM
This is easiest to discern if you use an old version of Safari; current versions don't have the "Activity" window anymore. I don't know when Apple removed it, but I expect they did so as the Activity window made it easy to put the arm on videos.
Safari runs on OS X and Windows. I haven't tried but expect it would run OK under Wine on Linux.
Open the Activity window, then leave it open while you visit a few websites.
You'll see that some sites use dozens, even hundreds of URLs to render what the user sees as a single document. That's mostly OK, were it not for many of those resources coming from different domains. That breaks the chunked content encoding in HTTP 1.1, in which multiple resources from a single host are concatenated into a single TCP stream, with some manner of sentinel to indicate where one resource ends and the next begins.
What's worse, many of the URLs have query parameters that are particular to the website you're visiting, the individual page, or your username. I've even seen stuff like "OS=mac%20os%20x&browser=firefox". Why don't they just use the user-agent? Perhaps they don't know there is such a thing as a user-agent?
In most cases, a unique set of query parameters will defeat caching proxies.
Quite commonly many of those resources are analytics services. For example, Adobe now provides free web fonts, but you have to download them from Adobe's servers. See, Adobe acquired an analytics firm. Now Adobe is only pretending to be in the graphic arts business, in reality they are an analytics provider. That's why I have a bunch of stuff like "127.0.0.1 hosted-pixel.com" in my hosts file.
Most of those free emoticon sites, free clip art and so on are in reality analytics sites. I even found one analytics provider that came right out and said their real purpose was for credit checks. I expect the way that works is that if they know you hang out at the wrong websites, you won't get your credit card applications approved.
It's not just that the websites are less efficiently loading their own servers; they are also making less efficient use of the Internet as a whole, by making poor use of, or even defeating the technologies that were developed long ago for the specific purpose of making the net more efficient.
My actual experience these days is that most websites today, when viewed over comcast residential cable, are quite a lot slower than 56k dialup from ten years ago.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday January 08 2015, @07:57PM
A problem we've got is that it costs money to run a website. Everyone expects their series of tubes for free. However the number of websites is growing, as are the number of people using the web.
The number of people actually buying stuff, while I expect it's growing, isn't growing as fast. In addition many other platforms for advertising are losing market share to web advertising. I expect that results in people who once worked on newspaper and radio ads, moving into the web advertising business.
That is the flaw in our Ponzi scheme of a grow forever economy.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 08 2015, @03:21AM
Vote with your wallet. Don't buy crap you don't need, or that has "features" that you find objectionable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 08 2015, @07:11AM
I won't tolerate ads on anything I pay for (yes, I don't have cable), so is Apple going to offer the watch for free since they're taking in advertising money on it?
You know you can ignore someone when they talk about innovating ads and next generation advertising platforms. They don't have your interests, best or otherwise, in mind.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by romlok on Thursday January 08 2015, @10:06AM
This is a mobile advertising agency saying that their platform will support ads on smart-watch platforms. That's all.
If you don't want ads on your watch, don't use apps which have ads on your watch. Problem solved.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday January 08 2015, @06:45PM
Every now and again I forget to install Adblock Plus. It disturbs me every time I see the internet without Adblock Plus.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Thursday January 08 2015, @10:22PM
I need some kind of useful ad blocking system for android. I have not found one yet.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 1) by bornagainpenguin on Friday January 09 2015, @02:38AM
What you want is called 'Adfree Android' and is made by these guys. [bigtincan.com] The app requires root and basically just installs and updates a custom host file for you, maintained and updated whenever things change. Very much worthwhile.
Now if I could just find a way to keep apps I pay for from suddenly going 'free' and being filled with ads while a suspiciously similar named app with many of the features suddenly missing in the old one appears, requiring payment to use, I'd be happy. Same for apps which suddenly decide that since I bought one app from their parent company that I'd love to be spammed with all the new apps they've also created....
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Friday January 09 2015, @09:36PM
Host file (shit, we said it twice in the same thread) blocking isn't the best, but it will have to do. Thanks!
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday January 13 2015, @06:04PM
Adblock Plus is available for Android.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 09 2015, @08:12AM
It all depends on the business model.
Apple's business model has not been ads-based, and they have been pretty good at keeping location-based ads away from the iPhone.
Currently I have no reason to suspect that Apple will ruin the clean looks and estetics of their products by letting third parties take over usability.
Keep in mind how clean a new Macbook is compared to a Windows equivalent, where the latter typically is plastered with stickers for Intel, Nvidia etc.