For example, when a customer inserts an ATM card, the bank can ping the phone.

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So you can ping a deal to anyone who follows you on Facebook and happens to be in your neighborhood.

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Find My iPhone has a great feature: From the iCloud.com Web site, you can make the phone ping, very loudly, for two minutes, even if its ringer was switched off.

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After some literal hand-holding with a human to understand the basics of a ping-pong swing, a TUD robot can gradually abstract those motions and return the ball in situations beyond the initial example.

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All it needs is your location (which, of course, it has) and some local area information, and it'll ping out a message advising you that you can just pop down the road, buy that wooden stick, and be back in time for your 2PM with Marty from the Synergy Department.

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Having re-Christened it iTunes Ping, or just Ping, Apple now says the service has more than one million users who can view what music their friends are playing or streaming, and can create profiles for themselves.

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