“Some of the best-loved technology on the planet” is how Apple describes its products when recruiting new employees. It’s a fair description.
The love that consumers send Apple’s way could flag, however, if the company puts into place new advertising technology it has developed. In an application filed last year and made public last month by the US Patent and Trademark Office, Apple is seeking a patent for technology that displays advertising on almost anything that has a screen of some kind: computers, phones, TVs, media players, game devices and other consumer electronics.
Filing a patent application, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean that the company plans to use the technology. The application shows at the least, however, that Apple has invested in research to develop what it calls an “enforcement routine” that makes people watch ads they may not want to watch.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Its distinctive feature is a design that doesn’t simply invite a user to pay attention to an ad — it also compels attention. The technology can freeze the device until the user clicks a button or answers a test question to demonstrate that he or she has dutifully noticed the commercial message. Because this technology would be embedded in the innermost core of the device, the ads could appear on the screen at any time, no matter what one is doing.
The system also has a version for music players, inserting commercials that come with an audible prompt to press a particular button to verify the listener’s attentiveness.
The inventors say the advertising would enable computers and other consumer electronics products to be offered to customers free or at a reduced price. In exchange, recipients would agree to view the ads.
If, down the road, users found the advertisements and the attentiveness tests unendurable, they could pay to make the device “ad free” on a temporary or permanent basis.
Would anyone have guessed that Apple, so widely revered, would seek patent protection of a gimmick not unlike one used to sell vacation timeshares? (Agree to attend the sales seminar and get a free weekend getaway!) Or could anyone have predicted that the Apple of this year, a company with premium products, would file a patent application that could make it a latter-day descendant of Free PC and ZapMe, companies that in 1999 gave away PCs engineered to display on-screen ads continuously?
What the application calls the “enforcement routine” entails administering periodic tests, like displaying on top of an ad a pop-up box with a response button that must be pressed within five seconds before disappearing to confirm that the user is paying attention.
These tests “can be made progressively more aggressive if the user has failed a previous test,” the application said.
One option makes the response box smaller and smaller, requiring more concentration to find and banish. Or the system can require that the user press varying keyboard combinations, the current date, or the name of the advertiser upon command, again demonstrating “the presence of an attentive user.”
Everything about this technology seems so antithetical to the guiding principles of Apple that one would naturally wonder whether Steve Jobs even knows whether his company filed a patent application for such a thing.
Apple has 34,300 employees, and Jobs, though named by Fortune magazine this month as “CEO of the decade,” can’t be expected to keep track of everything that every Apple employee does.
Yet Jobs is directly connected to this particular patent application: His name is the first listed of the five inventors. This is a rarity, occurring only four times among the 30 applications on which he is co-inventor that have been published by the patent office since March last year.
How Jobs reconciles this advertising technology with Apple’s culture is not known. An Apple spokeswoman declined to answer questions about the patent application.
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