Over the past 24 hours I’ve seen some pretty ordinary reporting from some high-profile sites like this and this around Facedeals. While most surface-level reporting simply see the colour blue and the word Face in the name and incorrectly join the dots, a little research would make it perfectly clear that Facedeals are not associated with Facebook.
Facedeals is a labs project from RedPepper, built on top of open hardware and software like Raspberry Pi, Arduino, OpenCV. Facebook Graph API and written in Python.
Facebook check-ins are a powerful mechanism for businesses to deliver discounts to loyal customers, yet few businesses—and fewer customers—have realized it. A search for businesses with active deals in our area turned up a measly six offers. The odds we’ll ever be at one of those six spots are low (a strip club and photography studio among them), and the incentives for a check-in are not nearly enticing enough for us to take the time. So we set out to evolve the check-in and sweeten the deal, making both irresistible. We call it Facedeals.
While the goal of Facedeals is potentially very exciting for the world of business and customer loyalty programs. most journalists miss-reported this story. Most were keen to engage in bashing the tall poppy and simply jumped to the assumption this was just another security bungle by Facebook. Seriously people, Google is your friend, it takes about 30 seconds to debunk this one.
More info @ http://redpepperland.com/lab/details/facedeals/
