Tapping the Power Dot on an event listing in the Sunday newspaper and receiving a concert schedule or list of bands playing at a local club. The merchant, publisher or individual's information is then returned immediately via e-mail to the consumer's PC, PDA or Internet Appliance. In addition to its convenience for consumers, findtheDOT technology provides real-time, comprehensive market feedback to marketers on the effectiveness of specific ads, placed in particular publications. He adds that these same issues are true for advertisers of everything from automobiles to vacation packages. For example, a real estate agent can incorporate PowerDOTs in advertisements for homes, so that consumers can tap the DOTs and receive much deeper information about a house than an ad could show.
Consumers can tap DOTs printed on the back of photos to order reprints or duplicates.
Students can access deeper information from textbooks by tapping Power DOTs next to passages for their homework. In addition to direct uses of findtheDOT between companies and consumers, the technology opens a new service for advertising agencies to sell to their clients. Especially important to the ad agency is the simplicity and usability of the service, which will be highly competitive against wire-bound, cumbersome systems. Further, the bar codes the device scans are too bulky to fit into ads and limited in quantity, limiting marketers' diversity of applications. Worst of all, according to Rubin, such devices often receive blistering criticism for their complete failure to protect consumers' privacy.