IVR Deconstructed

Cookies pass information from your computer, through your Internet browser, to sites you’ve visited. Basically, it’s a way for websites to know if you’ve been to the site before and for your browser to target their advertisers to the right people.

Those are two uses. Fairly benign ones.

Step back to 1995…

Cookies were released onto the public through Internet Explorer in October 1995, according to Wikipedia. Two ominous things about it: one, users didn’t have a choice whether to use them or not because computers accepted them by default and, two, users didn’t know they existed.

It wasn’t until the Financial Times wrote an article about cookies in early 1996 that the public became aware of these little guys, according to Wikipedia. The article, of course, sparked a litany of privacy rights debates.

Fast-forward to today…

Cookies are going well beyond just helping websites tailor your experience. Aggregators are using them to track all the websites we visit, and then passing that information on to retailers, banks, health insurance companies, et cetera, according to the New York Times.

That’s where the scary scenarios come in like the bank one I shared in Aggregators Are Watching. You can add loads of other scenarios to that one. I mean, imagine being rejected for health coverage because you did a search for ‘high blood pressure’ or ‘smoking cessation aids’ or something like that?

According to the New York Times, a new practice called weblining is emerging that’s similar to the redlining practice of the 1970s where banks and insurers drew lines on maps around inner-city areas and refused to offer their services in those areas.

Except now those institutions are doing it based on our Internet searches. For example, a bank may deny you credit because your Internet search habits are similar to those of other customers who were negligent on their bills.

Alarming, isn’t it?

So, we have some ability to control the Big Brother effect, but not really. With browsers, we can turn off the cookies (prevent the browser from uploading them on our computers).

The problem with that, though, is that many websites won’t let you on their site if you don’t allow cookies. Try it yourself if you haven’t already and you’ll see what I mean.

When I first got my smartphone I turned off cookies because I was hesitant about mobile Internet security, but I soon discovered that I couldn’t get on anywhere without enabling them.

Imagine this in a real-world scenario…

You walk up to a storefront and a security guard stops you at the door.

“Welcome to ________,” he says. “May I ask where else you’ve shopped today?”

“Excuse me?” you say.

“Can you tell me the other stores you’ve visited today?”

“I don’t understand. Excuse me, I’d like to go in the store.”

The security guard blocks your path. “I’m sorry, I can’t let you into our store if you won’t share your shopping habits with me.”

You stare at him. “Are you serious?”

“I am,” he says.

“Can I see your manager?”

“I’m sorry. She’s inside the store.”

What do you think your reaction to this kind of treatment would be?

“Have you lost your mind?”

Maybe something like that? Well, that’s what’s going on in the cyberworld today.

In the U.S. alone, there are approximately 78.2 million dog owners and 86.4 million cat owners.  Thirty-nine percent of U.S. households own at least one dog, and thirty-three percent own at least one cat.  Total pet industry expenditures for the year totaled 50.84 billion dollars for 2011, increasing about 2 billion dollars from the previous year, with a 2-3 billion dollar increase observable year over year.

But this relationship is certainly not all one-sided.  There are numerous proven health benefits associated with pet ownership.  Pets help to lower blood pressure with recent statistics released showing that people with hypertension showed lower blood pressure readings in stressful situations than those who did not own a pet.

Pets provide companionship, which can result in greater psychological stability, which is proven to protect from heart disease.  People with pets have been shown to make fewer doctor visits, and they help fight depression and loneliness also.

So what do these statistics demonstrate?  There a lot of people out there who love their pets, and a lot of pets out there who love their people.  As a pet owner myself (I have 5-month old kitten named Lily), I am well aware of all the benefits and rewards of having an animal companion.

Every so often however, the kitten seems to want to climb the drapes when I want to sleep, or thinks it is a good idea to explore high up cabinets instead of playing with her toys on the ground.  Trying to redirect an animal’s attention, especially a baby animal’s, is no easy feat.  Sometimes your puppy would rather chew your shoes than his rawhide.  We’ve all been there.

Enter technology.  Every day on this blog we write about the historic and life altering technologies that power our business and personal lives.  Luckily for our pets (and ourselves!), the benefits of technology are not only for humans.  Companies market everything from computerized identification tags to automatic doors and feeders, streamlining our pet’s lives as well as our own.

The other day I was perusing CNN Technology and stumbled upon something quite brilliant.  An iPad app made to entertain cats.  If you take a look at the video above, you can see several very pleased kittens happily playing with several iPad games designed just for them.

One enterprising developer authored three games meant to entertain and stimulate the world’s cats, and even allows their owners to gather statistics on their reflexes and intelligence.  The games are as you’d imagine (protecting cheese from mice, navigating a tomato around a bull’s eye), and the application comes equipped with a feature that shuffles between games to keep cat’s attention when signs of boredom appear.

Pretty nifty idea, right?  As long as you have a screen protector (to protect against sharp kitten claws), you can put your iPad to good use entertaining your pets in a safe and fun way.  As an indoor cat owner, this strikes me as a very innovative use of technology, and not only pleases me, but my pet

Watch a few seconds of the video above (if you can keep it to only a few seconds, actually—it’s mesmerizing)…

That video is U2 in a Pop On the Box appearance in 1979, and it’s…well, you can judge for yourself…. And looking at the Bono in that video, somehow I can see him as the guy who invested in Facebook, not the guy from the Sunday Bloody Sunday video.

Actually, it reminds me of Will Ferrell’s character in Zoolander—designer Jacobim Mugatu, formerly Jacob Moogberg of Frankie Goes to Hollywood before Relax fame, who invents the piano keyboard tie, makes it rich off it and then goes on to become a well-known fashion designer. But anyway…

Through his investment company Elevation Partners (which he co-founded, according to the Belfast Telegraph), Bono owns 1.5% of Facebook’s shares, which is valued at about $750 million at the moment—enough to make him a billionaire (or at least his investment firm) when the social media giant goes public, which is imminent.

Again, please don’t take this the wrong way U2 fans, but it’s just a little surprising. No, not the Pop On the Box video, which is more than a little surprising…the fact that Bono is gonna be one of the new Facebook billionaires.

But it’s true. Facebook is looking to raise about $5 billion with its IPO, which would be the biggest initial public sale of stock for a web company in history, according to the Washington Post. Experts are estimating that Facebook’s IPO could raise the overall value of the company up to somewhere between $75 billion and $100 billion.

According to the Belfast Telegraph, it will certainly raise the value of Elevation Partners’ shares to over $1 billion. Which will earn more for Bono than U2 has earned in the 30-plus years of their existence.

Well, it seems Bono the Rebel has done well for himself, doesn’t it?

Wow. It’s like Luke Skywalker listening to the Emperor make his case in Return of the Jedi and, instead of telling him to go bake a cake, he says:

“Well, when you put it that way, it does make a lot of sense. I mean, I’d get to work with my dad, which is pretty cool (except he can be kind of a jerk sometimes). Alright, why not? Dark Side it is.”

“Don’t Be Evil” is Google’s credo. Or at least it used to be. Recently, it seems like they’ve thrown that out with the trash, along with the Millennium Falcon and Boba Fett’s ship in Empire Strikes Back.

For the record, here’s four Dark Side things Google has done lately…

One—

Recently Google broke its own rules regarding paid sponsorships and had to censor itself in its own listings. I personally thought the whole thing was hilarious (I don’t have anything against Google, I just thought it was a funny situation).

Basically, a blogger that Google had hired (through subcontractors) included a direct link to Google’s website in his blog post (a no-no). We can’t really blame Google for that because it’s not entirely within their control, but it’s a mistake nonetheless. Google dinged itself for 60 days in organic search rankings for the gaff.

The funniest part to me was that they were saying things like they’d have to monitor the things that Google put up on its website and stuff like that. So like one Google dude yelling over the cube to another Google dude, “Dude, don’t put that up.”

Two—

At the end of last year, Google representatives scraped the client database of a small company running a business listing website in Kenya (to help get Kenyan businesses online and boost the poor nation’s economy), then used it to try to steal the company’s customers.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, not-yet-evil Annakin Skywalker.

The Google reps systematically (over months) scraped Mocality’s client list (manually, which is even more Darth Vader-ish), called the clients saying Google was working with Mocality (not true) and tried to sell them websites. 

Read the rest in the follow-up to this post, And the Google List Goes On…

CNN special contributor A.S. Hamrah, a film critic from Brooklyn, thinks we’re attracted to the film The Artist because of our desires for more things tangible in a digital age.

I think he’s probably right, but I don’t see technology as counter to our nature. As Hamrah even suggests, technology may provide use with both the cause and the cure.

The Artist is a silent black-and-white about the transition from silent to talking films—talkies. It comes at a time when we’re transitioning from projection films to digital and 3-D, and it’s evidently scratching and itch because it’s up for 10 Oscars.

“As digital imagery takes over the movies, filmmakers and audiences seek to reconnect to an analog, hands-on world,” Hamrah writes. “One in which machines are understandable and fixable.”

He has an excellent point. For all our emphasis on the mind and thought, humans tend to forget we’re animals as well. The mind can’t make the body forget about itself—not a body whose main purpose is to exist and thrive in a very physical, tangible way.

The mind’s wanderings are secondary to our body’s need to go on, and our instincts take over whenever there’s doubt about survival, overriding the mind quite easily and surprisingly (just ask people who’ve endured extreme hardships and done things they never thought themselves possible of to survive).

And the thing is, our natural selves need tangible, need to touch and feel. While our minds are understandably bewildered and awed by the magic we call technology, our natural selves don’t really care.

But to say that technology is ruining us or taking us away from our true nature is to simplify the point. While this is certainly happening to some degree, we’re also quite aware that it’s happening. And we’re not idly standing by while it does.

Stay tuned for the second part of this post…The Artist vs. Avatar