Androidland

Androidland is the first Android retail store, opened by the carrier Telstra on Bourke Street, Melbourne, Australia, in December 2011.[1] If it proves successful, it may expand within the country and internationally.[2]

Android's “green robot“

The store is themed heavily in green, featuring several Android “green robot“ sculptures. In the store, Telstra provides visitors with an interactive spaceship zone that features a flight simulator (via the Google Earth software, a Liquid Galaxy set-up[2]), also including a massive screen on which visitors can play Angry Birds. It features scented areas with gingerbread and grass aromas, called “Android grass“,[2] to further immerse visitors.

History

“Over the past 12 months we’ve seen a huge growth in the number of customers coming in-store and asking us about Android phones and tablets. With Androidland we wanted to create a retail environment like no other that helps us to answer customer questions in a fun, interactive way.“ As of 23 October 2012 Androidland is being removed from the Icon Store.
— Warwick Bray, Executive Director, Telstra Mobile[3]

Androidland had been in development since July 2011.[4] Google Australia helped to train the store’s Android experts to be able to assist visitors with their current devices, help them with their new ones and recommend apps to install.[5]

Reception

Logan Booker, writing for Gizmodo Australia wrote “It’s a friendly environment, definitely, and if I were to make the switch to Android, I’d be sure to stop by to aid in my decision-making. The interesting fusion of business with an “experience” beyond product demonstrations gives the shop-within-a-shop a corporate Powerhouse Museum feel.“[2]

gollark: Four dots? Wow.
gollark: Even if you reverse-engineer where it gets the hashes from and how it operates, by the nature of the thing you couldn't work out what was being detected without already having samples of it in the first place.
gollark: Anyway, the generality of this solution and the fact that they'll probably keep the exact details private for "security"-through-obscurity reasons also means that, as I have written here (https://osmarks.net/osbill/) in a blog post tangentially mentioning it, someone could just feed it hashes for, say, anti-government memes and find out who is saving those.
gollark: Although I suppose that *someone* probably keeps the originals around in case they have to change the hashing algorithm.
gollark: It's trickier on images (see how PyroBot does it...) but not impossible. (since you want moderately fuzzy matching, unlike SHA256 and such, which will produce an entirely different hash if a single bit is flipped)

References

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