Redemption sounds like the kind of credit card you would want with you at the Pearly Gates, ready to slip a bribe to the doorman, Saint Peter, to let you come inside. It is not. The Redemption is a payment device, cunningly disguised as a credit card.

The point of the redemption is to combine your actual credit card account with in-store points you earn for purchases. The device, which looks exactly like a regular credit card, has a couple of buttons on the front. Go into a store where you have sufficient points saved up and you can hit the Redemption button to pay with those points (hence the otherwise rather biblical name). If you choose to pay normally, press the other button. Whichever you choose, a light will blink on to tell you which option you picked. The sales clerk just swipes your card in the normal way.

The Redemption, from Dynamics Inc, will work with any magnetic-strip reader. When you pay with points, the new balance of points for that particular account is written back to the strip. The card can be used with multiple store accounts, meaning you can ditch all the plastic store-cards filling up your wallet.

The card has undergone trials with Citi Cards, and will expand next month. The Redemption joins a rather more essential smart credit card called Hidden. Announced this past September, the Hidden has five buttons on its face. The owner must key in a PIN to reveal a hidden section of the card-number and simultaneously activate the card.

The Redemption is clearly a missed opportunity. It should have been rolled out in churches and used to pay money for the collection during mass. For every dollar donated, you’d get a point that could be redeemed when you finally head upstairs.

Dynamics Debuts Next-Generation Payment Card with Options for Credit and In-Store Point Redemption [Business Wire]

See Also:

• Square Mobile Credit Card System (Beta)
• Visa Case Turns iPhone into Credit Card
• From Credit Card to PayPal: 3 Ways to Move Money

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The past few months have been fruitful for Israeli startups. Several U.S. and European tech giants have made high-profile acquisitions. Foreign VCs are making massive capital injections. Now local publications such as Calcalist and The Marker are filled with rumors of upcoming purchases.

5Min Media, an Israeli-American video startup, is the most recent acquisition. AOL bought the company for an estimated $65 million, with chairman Tim Armstrong praising 5Min for helping to complete “our end-to-end video offering from content creation through syndication and distribution.”

In other words, AOL is going to raid the hell out of 5Min's video library of 200,000-odd shorts and make use of both their (considerable) API development and existing syndication partners. 5Min comes to AOL with a robust library of content. The firm inked previous content-sharing agreements with CBS, Hearst and Scripps to convert existing programming into bite-size “how-to” videos. Additional video content comes from other media providers, which is then augmented with crowdsourced footage.

AOL's purchase of 5Min follows on the heels of content-sharing deals the Israeli company recently signed with both Dailymotion and Answer.com. 5Min's video content now powers Answer's “Video Answers” functionality, while 5Min's videos were fully integrated into Dailymotion's archives. AOL has a long history of purchasing Israeli firms: Prior acquisitions include ICQ developers Mirabilis, Relegence (financial services), Yedda (crowdsourced questions and answers) and Quigo (search engine marketing). Meanwhile, AOL subsidiary Adtech just opened their first Middle East office in Israel this past summer.

Google has also been diving headfirst into the Israeli purchase blitz. An estimated $10 million was spent to acquire Quiksee, a Herzliya-based firm that developed a method of integrating personal video into Google Maps. Quiksee is Google's second acquisition in 2010; web widget/gadget manufacturing house LabPixies was picked up in April for approximately $25 million. Israeli firms have done well selling to Google; the state is tied with the United Kingdom for the highest number of companies Google purchased abroad in 2010.

Employees at Quiksee will be working with the Google Geo team; according to local paper Haaretz, “the firm's technology is regarded as the missing link in Google's Street View service (used by both Google Maps and Google Earth), which allows users to view photos along numerous streets around the world”. Quiksee's technology could hypothetically enable Google to add Interactive Street View videos to Google Maps.

The two purchases follow on the heels of a number of summertime Israeli acquisitions. Storwize, which specializes in data storage, was purchased by IBM for $140 million. According to Brian Truskowski of IBM System Storage and Networking, Storwize's technology helps “clients compress their primary data while preventing storage sprawl and lowering power and cooling costs.” Video development firm Optibase sold the bulk of their business in July to France's Vitec Multimedia for $8 million following several quarters of losses; the remainder of Optibase's Israeli business is shifting exclusively to real estate.

Other Israeli firms have been lucking out thanks to large contract and investment deals. Mobile advertising developer Amobee Media just entered the German market after inking a deal with regional giant Gruner + Jahr Electonic Media Sales to handle billions of ad impressions per month. Amobee's move follows on the heels of their acquisition of British advertising agency RingRingMedia earlier in 2010 for an estimated $15-$20 million.

Face.com, who manufactures facial recognition software technology used by Facebook and others, just received $4.3 million in their latest round of funding. Investors include Yandex, the most popular search engine in Russia and the world's eighth largest. Yandex, which enjoys a massive user base in Russia, the former Soviet Union and the Russophone diaspora, offers Flickr- and Picasa-like photo-sharing features. However, Face.com has been criticized by online privacy activists due to the firm's API, which allows developers to build their own facial-recognition apps. Although processor-intensive, Face.com's API could potentially allow employers and government agencies to search through any anonymous pictures uploaded to the internet.

As it's stated in the book of Jobs: Thou shalt not worship false iPhones.

Or so goes the thinking in a new study from Duke University, which concludes: "The brand name logo on a laptop or a shirt pocket may do the same thing for some people that a pendant of a crucifix or Star of David does for others." In fact, the more religious a person is, the less brand expression appears to matter.

Researchers at Duke ran several experiments to determine this disconnection between brand importance and religiosity. In one, the team analyzed geographic areas for the number of Apple, Macy's, and Gap stores per million people. These statistics were compared with brand-discount stores. "Then they compared these rough measures of brand reliance against the number of congregations per thousand and self-reported attendance in church or synagogue, controlling for income, education and urbanization differences," the report says. "In every analysis, they found a negative relationship between brand reliance and religiosity."

In another experiment, a group of students were asked to write an essay on "what your religion means to you personally." A second set of students wrote essays on an unrelated topic. Both groups then underwent an imaginary shopping trip, where they were asked to choose between a series of products. A similar online experiment was conducted with hundreds of participants, divided between those who reported being religious and those who did not. In both cases, "those that were highly religious [or primed to think about religion] cared less about national brands ... religion reduces brand reliance by apparently satisfying the need to express self-worth."

While this perhaps finally solves the mystery of why Christopher Hitchens and Nietzsche were such label whores, it also provides insight into how certain brands--namely Apple--develop cult-like followings. Similar to Duke's report, brand expert Martin Lindstrom conducted a 3 year, 7 million dollar study comparing brain scans of the religious to those with high brand loyalty. Lindstrom discovered that the scans of people loyal to Apple matched the scans of devoted Christians. 

All praise the almighty Steve!

"Brands are a signal of self-worth," said Gavan Fitzsimons, professor of marketing and psychology at Duke. "We're signaling to others that we care about ourselves and that we feel good about ourselves and that we matter in this world. It's more than 'I'm hip or cool'...I'm a worthwhile person, and I matter, and you should respect me and think that I'm a good person, because I've got the D&G on my glasses."

And an Apple on my iPhone.