Let’s found the wireless consumers’ movement. We’ll need a bar-code scanner and cheap wireless packet communications that we can plug into the PDA. Then when we’re shopping, we need only point the scanner at the UPC bar-code on a given product to retrieve the information about it from Consumer Reports, the Wine Spectator, the New York Review of Books, or whatever. Reviews of the products would pop up on your screen, hypercard-style, with buttons you can press with your pen to get further details, comparisons with other products, and so forth. You’d subscribe to these various services, paying per month or per screenful. This idea can be extended considerably. Merchants can choose to make their prices and other information available on servers for these products, so that when you scan a certain bottle of wine at one shop, another shop can automatically tell you that they have it for a few dollars less.
Predictor: Agre, Phil
Prediction, in context:The June 1994 issue of The Network Observer, an online newsletter, carries an article titled “The Wireless Consumers Movement” by Phil Agre, TNO editor, who was, at the time, working in the Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. Agre writes:”Let’s found the wireless consumers’ movement. We’ll need a bar-code scanner and cheap wireless packet communications that we can plug into the PDA. Then when we’re shopping, we need only point the scanner at the UPC bar-code on a given product to retrieve the information about it from Consumer Reports, the Wine Spectator, the New York Review of Books, or whatever. Reviews of the products would pop up on your screen, hypercard-style, with buttons you can press with your pen to get further details, comparisons with other products, and so forth. You’d subscribe to these various services, paying per month or per screenful. This idea can be extended considerably. Merchants can choose to make their prices and other information available on servers for these products, so that when you scan a certain bottle of wine at one shop, another shop can automatically tell you that they have it for a few dollars less. Obviously you wouldn’t receive this information unless you wanted it. But it works best after you’ve already bought the product. Press the “evaluation” button and scan the barcode on the bottle of wine you just drank (book you just read, etc.), and a page pops up with various buttons on it. (And of course you can customize this for each product class if you like.) Maybe you can tap a number for how much you liked it. Maybe you can call back up what the critics said, and press a button to make note of whether you agreed or not. After a while each critic will have a ‘scorecard’, so you can develop a sense of which critics share your tastes. Another mechanism could automatically correlate the judgments made by everybody using the service, and then statistically predict which products you might like, given what others with a history of similar tastes have liked. Several people think that information like this might become a commodity. Your judgments and preferences are valuable information to producers. Your PDA could offer you certain amounts of money to sell this information, with one price to sell it without any demographic information about you attached, another price to sell it anonymously but with your vital stats included, yet another price (maybe much higher, depending on the market) to sell it with your name and address, and so forth. But this might not work: someone could just go down a grocery store aisle, entering bogus preference information for every product just to collect the cash. It’s probably just as well.”
Biography:Phillip E. Agre was an associate professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has been the author of research studies on the Internet. He edited The Network Observer, an online newsletter on Internet issues. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Economic structures
Subtopic: Shopping
Name of publication: The Network Observer
Title, headline, chapter name: The wireless consumers’ movement
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/tno/june-1994.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Guarino, Jennifer Anne