In Minority Report, Tom cruise walks through a shopping centre and is met by a barrage of advertising. Scanning his retina for information, the companies use personal details to try to sell him goods. “John Anderton! You look like you could use a Guinness, right about now” a beer advert shouts.
Kiosk is a new app using software created by NewAer that, without compromising your privacy, wants to help shops sell you things in a similar yet less irritating way - and the same software could also revolutionise online dating.
Working with Unilever, Kiosk's main focus is information – letting you know your purchase history when you walk into a shop. Much like Apple’s iBeacon, it facilitates proximity-based marketing but without having to use any hardware.
The company is now offering anyone the ability to build a web-based app on top of its software. Whereas in the past to build a proximity app like beacon you had to be a developer and use hardware, this system works solely through software, and allows peer-to-peer communication without any network present.
It’s not only usable in marketing. Acting like “cookies for the real world,” the dating app Cheekd uses the same software in Kiosk to know when a match is within a 30ft radius.
It doesn’t require internet connection, which means people could still communicate in locations such as on the tube, or in underground gigs. The “peer-to-peer” cookies also let users send short messages using the software without draining too much battery.
Privacy is a big part of this software. “We don’t know where you are, because we only know when you’re in front of this screen,” founder and CEO Dave Mathews told WIRED. “We don’t know where the screen is. Before we wrote a line of code, we wrote a privacy policy. We never know where you are.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
