Codetown ::: a software developer's community
Brad wrote: I noticed that in the Florida Mall, there are a lot of kiosks and the sellers there want to sell their stuff. I also see a ton of people walking by with cell phones. Would there be any way to help the owners of the kiosks to engage the cell phones passing by pushing an advertisement to those cell phone so that the owner of the cell phone would be aware of the kiosk and we could sell this product to the owner of the kiosks?
Brad, this is best as a discussion, so I added it. Let's talk first about the idea itself (then about the "art of the start")
It's a fact that people don't like unsolicited email, etc...but your idea could enable people to turn on and off push messages. That would let them receive push messages when they wanted, like when they are in a mall, and not at other times that may be irrelevant.
Let's discuss!
Tags:
What if someone were to talk to all of the mall businesses and see if they might try to make a contest using an app.
One of the restaurants could offer a free entree to the winner for example.
The participant would have to go to each kiosk to find the missing something or other.
The winner would then get the prize.
That way the participants would have to visit all of the kiosks in order to win.
A url in the form of a QR-Code might be used to make the whole thing work.
It could be printed by each kiosk.
What if someone were to talk to all of the mall businesses and see if they might try to make a contest using an app.
One of the restaurants could offer a free entree to the winner for example.
The participant would have to go to each kiosk to find the missing something or other.
The winner would then get the prize.
That way the participants would have to visit all of the kiosks in order to win.
A url in the form of a QR-Code might be used to make the whole thing work.
It could be printed by each kiosk.
Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.
Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

Platform Engineering Labs today announced a major update to its open source Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) platform, formae, adding beta support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and OVHcloud.
By Craig Risi
Daniel Stenberg shut down cURL's bug bounty after AI submissions hit 20%. Mitchell Hashimoto banned AI code from Ghostty. Steve Ruiz closed all external PRs to tldraw. Economic research shows "vibe coding" weakens the user engagement that sustains open source. As developers delegate to AI agents, documentation visits and bug reports collapse—threatening the ecosystem's viability.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
In this virtual panel, we'll focus on performance improvement through platform engineering and fostering developer experience, to increase productivity, quality, developer well-being, and more. We'll also explore the role that tech leadership can play in culture change and performance improvement for software development organizations.
By Ben Linders, Patrick Kua, Abby Bangser, Sarah Wells
Quesma has launched OTelBench, an open-source suite to benchmark OpenTelemetry pipelines and AI-driven instrumentation. It evaluates collector performance under stress while testing how accurately LLMs handle complex SRE tasks like context propagation. Initial data shows AI agents often achieve success rates below 30%, highlighting the gap between code generation and production observability.
By Mark Silvester
This week's Java roundup for February 16th, 2026, features news highlighting: the second release candidate of JDK 26; an update on Jakarta EE 12; the February 2026 edition of Payara Platform; a point release of Apache Camel; and maintenance releases of Hibernate Search and Quarkus.
By Michael Redlich
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by