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back to article Unlock your mobe by STROKING it with your PEARL

Jewellery firm Galatea has released an app which plays audio when one of the company's pearls is touched to the back of a phone. That's not a euphemism. It is usually believed that pearls are formed when a bit of grit gets into an oyster. This is, however, not the case. Oysters are filter feeders and quite adept at dealing …

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  1. Cliff

    Hmmm cheesy bollocks!

    The idea is quite sweet in many ways - you get to store some digital keepsake 'in' the pearl to be replayed whenever the NFC is activated via their app.

    Apps need updating, storage will clearly be online as opposed to on an NFC chip (they suggest using audio or video mementoes) , so the 'generations to come' is a lot more likely to be 'next 10 years or so' until one or more of the following...

    1) NFC becomes outdated and falls out of use

    2) OS versions march on, but the app doesn't keep upadating on newer OS's

    3) The server hosting turns out to be uneconomic as people pay upfront, not periodically

    4) The content is hacked (and I'll bet it's trivially easy - probably just needing a UID of some sort from the NFC chip, brute-forceable)

    5) The video format becomes outdated and no longer supported

    6) Gah, whatever, you get the idea.

    8 0 Reply
    1. Eddy Ito
      Reply Icon

      Re: Hmmm cheesy bollocks!

      I'm guessing they picked NFC because they couldn't get the battery life they wanted with IrDA.

      1 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hmmm cheesy bollocks!

      > The idea is quite sweet in many ways - you get to store some digital keepsake 'in' the pearl to be replayed whenever the NFC is activated via their app.

      Five years down the line the lady puts on a pair of earrings she's not worn in a while and tries to make a phone call. Suddenly her handset is playing low quality camera-phone porn from that drunken night in Magaluf...

      0 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Blowhard
    Coffee/keyboard

    I like cheese

    ...this seems more like saccharine; blech!

    1 0 Reply
    1. Simon Rockman
      Reply Icon

      Re: I like cheese

      No saccharine is this one: http://galateajewelry.tumblr.com/post/104872596198/it-can-hold-your-voice-your-heart-and-your

      And I was good and didn't exploit the obvious NFC Reg joke.

      Simon

      0 0 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If it is not a thing, then it must be nothing.

    "It is not a thing" ?!?!?

    And there is no point in wasting money on nothing.

    0 0 Reply
  4. vonBureck
    Happy

    Dear Reg,

    Thank you for directing me to a cheesy video with just 67 other views, I felt a right tit.

    0 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Dear Reg,

      If you buy her a second pearl, do you get to feel the other one?

      2 0 Reply
      1. Cliff
        Reply Icon

        Re: Dear Reg,

        So the only viewers of this ad campaign are Reg readers? Bless. Somewhere in some marketeers office they're busy watching the stats for the vid, and wondering why their potential customer base is also interested in linux and playmobil.

        6 0 Reply
        1. Alistair
          Reply Icon
          Linux

          Re: Dear Reg,

          "wondering why their potential customer base is also interested in linux and playmobil."

          And rocket motors. BIG rocket motors.

          4 0 Reply
          1. Paul Kinsler
            Reply Icon

            Re: And rocket motors. BIG rocket motors.

            ... well, you picked the right day to say "big rocket motors": ... http://xkcd.com/1461

            0 0 Reply
        2. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Dear Reg,

          The El Reg interest might have been related to the geeks that were hoping it was a pearl necklace rather then just simple earings...

          0 0 Reply
        3. Cliff
          Reply Icon

          Re: Dear Reg,

          Bet you a kitkat that some marketeer with facial hair is excitedly correlating the term LOHAN with their newly found demographic, and are on the phone to Lindsay's agents tight now for the follow-up campaign...

          4 0 Reply
          1. Mark 85
            Reply Icon

            Re: Dear Reg,

            With PARIS as the back-up in case Lindsay can't do it?

            0 0 Reply
  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ding dong!

    I worked for a while as a pearl diver, we supplied new live shell for the cultured pearl industry. There is a story/myth in this business that divers of old would implant pearls into their foreskins. Apparently pearl does not cause any infection or rejection. Apart from the sex enhancement they could easily remove and sell the pearls if needed.

    Now if you made a women's IUD with one of these chips and Bluetooth built-in you could make noises like a pin-ball machine!

    Patent pending :)

    Anon because {For legal reasons I cannot reveal why}

    0 0 Reply
    1. Flywheel
      Reply Icon
      WTF?

      Re: Ding dong!

      Talking of foreskins, it seems rather unfair on the cherub at 50 seconds in to have support what to him must be a veritable wrecking ball of a pearl with just his John Thomas. Or should that be "ball wrecking"?

      0 0 Reply
      1. Alistair
        Reply Icon
        Alert

        Re: Ding dong!

        "it seems rather unfair on the cherub at 50 seconds in to have support what to him must be a veritable wrecking ball"

        Yeeee. Now I'm *glad* I didn't go watch that video...

        1 0 Reply
  6. The Indomitable Gall

    "It's not a pearl, it's a bean."

    Well, that's how I heard it anyway.

    0 1 Reply

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