Coupons. Gift cards. Loyalty points. These tried-and-true tools of the retail trade might not be as sexy as other forms of marketing. But together they account for more than $165 billion in purchasing power ($110 billion in gift cards purchased, $48 billion in loyalty points earned, and more than $5 billion in product coupons redeemed). That’s almost as much as total e-commerce sales.
via The Coming Branded-Currency Revolution  – Harvard Business Review.
The founders of music website Last.fm have created a new service that tracks users’ web browsing history to suggest sites they might be interested in. Lumi is a web discovery tool for effortlessly finding relevant news, information, entertainment and products.
via Content Discovery Tool Recommends Sites Based On Past Web Activity – PSFK.
In your life, you have at least one relative stranger whom you’ve grown close to. Maybe it’s a doorman. Maybe it’s the cashier at the local bodega. Maybe it’s the guy who works in the next cubicle over. So what if you only know their first name, and you’ve never had a conversation that exceeded 45 seconds? Over months of opened doors, midnight candy bars, and borrowed staplers, you’ve become quite familiar. You have a bond, a friendship, that can only be built over countless moments of tiny social friction. So why would things work any differently online?
via Facebook’s Secret To Building Friendships: Many Small Interactions | Co.Design.
If you find yourself on a Brazilian beach, no need to leave if the battery on your phone is running low – thanks to Nivea and their clever magazine ad: a solar power charger for your phone.
At some point in the past two million years, give or take half a million, the genus of great apes that would become modern humans crossed a unique threshold. Across unknowable reaches of time, they developed a communication system able to describe not only the world, but the inner lives of its speakers. They ascended — or fell, depending on your preferred metaphor — into language.
