There is a belief that technology will always  solve the ills of society and bring prosperity to us all. History has shown this to be true with the creation of new industries that provide jobs to the growing population. There is growing evidence that technology can do the reverse and make our lives worse. The recent ban of fracking technology to recover natural gas in New York state has shown there are medical side effects for the local communities where the drilling takes place. This blind faith we have that technology equals a better life can be dangerous, as you can see.
 
But wait, here is a new product announcement out of the latest technology trade show in Las Vegas this January, it is called the Brain Beanie, it's a neurological device that fits on your head like a hat. The Brain Beanie receives all of your brain waves and allows you to control all internet enabled devices and appliances at home through a mesh network. This technology has been adopted by all the major device OEMs, car manufacturers and home builders for brain wave protocol and has been approved for use by the Global Technology Standards Council (GTSC) in Romania (the previous home of KGB cyber unit).
 

It comes with a  personal communicator function so you can get rid of your smartphone as it enables your brain waves to send email, text or voice. You can purchase all your take-out,  groceries and products with the e-commerce capability with delivery to your couch by a solar powered drone. This headgear can be used at work, in the car and at home, so you will never have to do anything that requires any mental or physical exertion.
 
This device is considered a breakthrough in dealing with today’s obesity problem caused by people sitting on the couch more than 20+ hours a week watching television, gaming and surfing the net.  It can monitor your weight by sending electrical stimuli to your body to  monitor your metabolism through the medical app that you can purchase as an extra feature. Other optional accessories include a holographic projector that creates a 12 inch  screen for you to see in 3D. Standard features include an action camera,  virtual assistant (male or female with custom Avatar settings), 10G of Ram, 1 TB of storage and a micro super computer processor that was modelled after the NASA standard for space exploration.
 
The cost of this product is $599  and it's available at the Brain Beanie Store website www.brainbeanie.gag and it comes with a 6 month guarantee that you will not have to purchase another one through planned product obsolesces. After the 6 months you can buy a monthly package for $20.00/mo and get a free product upgrade. The founder of the Brain Beanie, Joe Propellerhead says he was inspired for the product from a 1979 Maxell TV Commercial  that became a pop culture classic that brought couch culture to the mainstream. Joe says "I wanted to create a couch potato product that will appease to the masses and also solves some of the major social issues like obesity for eternal good health.”
 


With 40% of web traffic attributed to bots, critics of the product wanted to see how security issues were implemented to protect users from the hacker community  for criminal or malicious activity like adware, spyware and malware. Joe Propellerhead says that the security features includes a “ Intrusion Pulse” that was developed by the open source community that places a tracker tag on any unauthorized access through the sniffer code and then sends a electrical pulse bomb response that disables the source server and then is automatically logged in the cyber crime database at the GTSC in Romania for follow-up.
 
Geek fantasy or is this coming soon to a store near you soon in the next generation of devices? Sometimes, I wonder as I watch technology invade our lives everywhere and try to expand into other industries like media, publishing,  music , banking and medical; What does Microsoft know about the news business or banking or Google and Facebook know about selling advertising for that matter? It's like a baseball coach thinking the same strategy will work in hockey, sometimes it works and sometimes it will not.  Here are some claims and myths that these companies have made to into fact, or have they?
 
Somebody clicks on your ad and it is a lead.
This is the #1 myth perpetuated by the tech community to fool advertisers.
A click in some people minds is a form of response and with response rates of less than 0.1% how is this better than direct mail that have higher responses rates through better targeting? In my opinion all this has spawned is a click  fraud industry that is largely unreported. As any start up industry there is always an overpromise and under delivery scenario we see too often  to get people’s attention and this is a classic case. I look at awareness as clicks are unreliable.
 
Give away you content for free, get traffic, sell ads and get rich.
Just ask the newspaper industry about this and you know how this is so not true. All we have now is unprecedented  clutter on online as there are no barriers to entry online except for a computer. The fact you can get rich by blogging is a myth somewhere, just ask any writer and the person trying to sell the ads. The only one to benefit was the search engines as they have access to free content and sell ads around it. Publishers now have to struggle in getting people to pay for their online content as we all know free to paid is very hard to do.
 
A Facebook Like is a brand endorsement online and will lead to your company’s success
Facebook has done a good con-job of the value of a Facebook like to get people’s attention and has spawned a fake “Facebook Like” industry. This myth has taken away marketing efforts to social media with not so great results and have publishers chasing Facebook likes instead of subscribers. Social media is a “GOSSIP” medium. like the tabloids. Just because celebrities  (who suffer from hero worship) twitter feeds have been a very successful publicity tool for their fans to sell concerts tickets, music and movies does not mean it will work for a manufacturer of widgets.
 
A lot of technology claims are actual myths perpetuated by the relentless need to fill a 24/7 news cycle to provide content. Just like any hyped up stock, if you hear it enough times it must be true. The digital medium is the only ad medium where buyers have to deal with click fraud, automated web traffic and hacker attacks.  You do not have that problem when you are buying traditional media like TV, radio , print and outdoor, And now they want me to buy on these new programmable ad networks.  Anybody want to buy me a Brain Beanie so I can use the Intrusion Pulse?