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The new Microsoft shopping cart promises turn your next mundane shopping trip into an adventure! Four years in the making, collaborating with Texas-based MediaCart Holdings Inc, Bill Gates has launched a grocery cart-mounted console that does everything but remove money from wallets to pay for items! It helps shoppers find products, then scan and pay for them without having to wait in line at the checkout counter (a blessing in itself).

But Bill Gates is not completely altruistic. (Indeed, no mogul ever really is.) Microsoft’s acquisition of Quantive, an online advertising company, last year for $6 billion increased the company’s capacity to serve video ads onto these grocery cart screens. MediaCart will begin testing in the second half of 2008, focusing on Wakefern Food Corporation’s ShopRite supermarkets on the East Coast. The way it will work is customers with a ShopRite loyalty card will be able to log into a Web site at home and type in their grocery lists. The list will appear, like magic, when they get to the store and swipe their card on the MediaCart console. As items are scanned and placed in the cart, the console gives a running price tally and checks items off the list.

As if this isn’t rendering the shopper and his or her judgment and abilities enough, this system also utilizes radio-frequency identification (RFID) to sense the location of the shopper’s cart. The rationale behind this aspect concerns understanding consumer shopping patterns and recognizing strategic points to send ads to shoppers for products living on the shelves in those aisles they are either in or about to enter. Presenting coupons and commercials are still in the works.

Is there no escape from ads in this world? Or do we all represent just one giant coupon to be clipped and redeemed for software companies who don’t need the money in the first place?

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