[LINK] Not a good week to shop in Beijing

[Jim Birch]

On 25 July 2012 08:35, Tom Worthington wrote:

>

> After paying the brand owner on-line, a cryptographically protected
> digital label would be transmitted to the store and be embedded in a
> machine readable label, which would be applied to the product. The
> purchaser could verify this was genuine by scanning the label and check
> it matched the product code (the labels would be unique to each item).
>

Nice idea, but the best branding is built into the design.  You might have
to print a skin too.


> At very upmarket locations,
> the maître d'hôtel would be empowered to ceremonially rip of fake
> labels, before ejecting you from the premises.  ;-)
>

This would really ice the cake for top-end brands where - despite the
glossy advertising engendering quality and features - the price is the real
product.  To really make this fly you'd want to crowd source the process:
make the cryptographic label publicly readable and couple it with a smart
phone augmented reality app with a cloud database so any bitch could play
spot the fake, any where, any time.  You might think you look a million
bucks but they'd be checking the actual purchase dollars of your rig,
including any applied discounts.  Luxury retailing perfected!  I'm off to
the patent office.

(More seriously, this is interesting from a biology-in-action perspective.
Sexual selection theory says that a fitness signal must be biologically
costly to work, for example, only the peacock with the best genes can
thrive with a tail that requires a great physiological effort to maintain,
hinders its normal activities and makes it more liable to predation.)

Jim