Yearly Archives: 2007

Future of Newspaper Boxes, er, Racks?

2 Replies

NewsboxWhat to do with an old newspaper vending machine rack?  This guy added a computer and a flat monitor and turned it into a news display using a slide program that shows pics of newspaper front pages (picture at left).   If I had thought of this I’d have connected the computer to my wireless network, pulled up my browser and kept it on my Google News page.

Update: My brother comments and informs me that this is newspaper rack, not a box.  He knows whereof he speaks so I stand corrected.  He also points the way to a headline that would have obviously been better than the original: Nice Rack!

Turd Man Likes Poop Culture

Leave a reply

As long time readers of this blog probably remember I am the Turd Man of Alcatraz.  Luckily I haven’t had to wrangle any floaters recently and our septic system has performed admirably since we had it sucked dry a while back.  My extensive experience dealing with my household’s bowel remnants has engendered an affinity with folks who are all about the dookey, so I was intrigued when I was scanning my Boing Boing feed and saw this item about Poop Culture.

My heart be still: an entire book and a blog about poop and its accoutrements!  And I have to say that www.poopthebook.com is the greatest domain name I’ve come across.  It’s descriptive, yet action oriented. As for the blog, check out these recent posts:

and my favorite:

I might never get any work done.

Exercising Your Noggin

Leave a reply

My Mom is very afraid of losing her mind.  Not going batshit crazy, but becoming forgetful.  She’s read that playing games, doing crosswords and engaging in other activities perceived as time wasters in the modern world are good for keeping the old noodle in fine fettle so she pursues these activities with a determination she used to reserve for obliterating all meetings in her workplace (that’s a post for another day).  So Mom, this post’s for you.

Found via Phil Butler’s post on the Profy blog is a site called Lumosity which he describes thusly:

About a month ago I began testing a fascinating new beta called Lumosity.
The service is designed to exercise user’s brains with a series of
games that promote cognitive skills. According to Stanford neuroscience
graduate and Co-Founder Michael Scanlon these exercises build cognitive
ability in processing speed, cognitive control and attention. Playing
these fun and simple games for as little as 30 minutes a day can
promote quicker thinking, improve memory, increase alertness, improve
concentration and even elevate a user’s mood.

You can sign up for a free trial at the site and it looks like a full year subscription will run you about $80. I’d sign up but I was born with a terrible memory so I really have nothing left to lose.

Dunning Our 11 Year Old on His Cell Phone

1 Reply

A little over a month ago we got cell phones for all of our kids.  Our biggest worry was that our kids would make an obscene number of calls outside the network (calls to other VerizonWireless users are free) and rack up huge bills.  What never occurred to us was that our 11 year old son might get several collection calls from a credit card company.  Apparently someone who had his number before him owes a credit card company some bucks because they called him three times yesterday alone. 

Today I called the toll free number listed on the phone’s "missed call" directory and the phone was answered by GC Services which is a large call center and collection agency.  The lady I spoke with was helpful but could not find my son’s number in her system which suggested to her that he was in another of the call centers’ database.  (Celeste called the number earlier and had zero luck as well).  The solution?  If he gets another call he’s to hand the phone to me or Celeste and let us find out who they are trying to reach and then we can inform the collector that the number no longer belongs to the person he or she is trying to reach.  I’m really not sure why they can’t connect me to someone who has access to all the GC Services databases so that they can search for the number across all of their accounts at once in order to fix the problem, but that doesn’t seem to be an option.

So here’s my question: are we getting charged usage minutes for these calls and if so, what can we do about it?

No Letters to the Editor?

Leave a reply

I noticed today that the Winston-Salem Journal had zero letters to the editor in today’s (August 9, 2007) print edition.  They had five opinion columns and their own two editorial opinions but not one letter from the unwashed masses.  Honestly it kind of depressed me since the letters are usually as effective at getting my blood flowing in the morning as my 12 cups of coffee. (They did run Cal Thomas who also gets me riled up, but it’s not as fun because he’s not half as bright as the folks here in Winston-Salem and his English ain’t half as goodly either).  I’m wondering if the Journal’s just hit a summer lull in submissions.  I hope that’s the case because I fear that since 95% of the letters seem to come from the same seven people and all those people seem to be in the "AARP members for over years club", that maybe we’ve had a migration from op-ed to the best read page in every paper: the obits.  Like I said I hope it’s just a lull because I really enjoy reading those folks.

Of course if the WSJ runs out of commenters I can now go to Google News and get all the comments I want.  Google has started accepting comments by email, reviewing them and then attaching them to news stories if they’re deemed appropriate.  I expect it will get entertaining fast.

It’s the Shipping and Handling Stupid

4 Replies

Seth Godin has a post on his blog about shipping and handling.  He points to an item on Amazon.com that costs $2.25 but has an S&H charge of $8.57 and then explains why this is a bad idea for the merchant (it kills repeat business).  Seth is right of course, but the reason I’m posting about it is that by sheer coincidence I received an email from Amazon yesterday with this subject line: "We Pay YOU for Overnight Shipping on Shoes & Handbags".  Here’s a pic of the email:
Amazonemail

As Seth points out in his post it’s been common practice in the direct mail industry to split out shipping and handling charges as a way to allow buyers to compare the base cost of an item with the cost of the same item in a bricks and mortar store.  When you think about it, however, it’s really irrelevant because what the consumer cares about is what they’re paying total.  If you add shipping and handling and the item costs more online or from a catalog than in a store then the consumer is likely to go to the store.   An online or catalog merchant would probably be better served promoting the convenience of buying from them versus dealing with a store (no parking, standing in line or surly clerks!).

What caught my attention about this email is that it says they are going to give me $5 on top of free shipping.  They didn’t say they were giving me a $5 discount on any item (i.e. a coupon) but they said my shipping would be negative $5.  I don’t recall ever getting a similar pitch and it’s an interesting way to take a negative (S&H) and turning it into a positive. 

I could be wrong but my take has been that online merchants are using insanely low prices on items so that the items do better on product search comparisons and then make up the difference in shipping.  This has led to the increasingly common practice of applying S&H charges that are multiples higher than the actual price of the product, and as Seth points out that practice is likely to kill customer retention because it just feels slimy.  That’s why I’m assuming that Amazon.com’s marketing team was influenced by that trend and decided to use it to their advantage.

On a completely unrelated tangent I want to know what part of my customer profile at Amazon.com would prompt them to send me a marketing message related to shoes and handbags?  It’s kind of disturbing.

Winston-Salem Journal: Real Estate Cabal Responsible for School System’s Tardiness!

2 Replies

Last weekend was the tax-free shopping weekend for school supplies in North Carolina.  Here in Forsyth County many parents, yours truly included, had a common problem: no supply lists from our students’ teachers.  Sure we could buy the basics like pencils and paper, but any parent will tell you that every year they get a list that has some very specific items on there that you just can’t anticipate. 

Heck, we’ve gotten lists that tell us which brand of a particular item to buy, apparently in an effort to avoid brand-envy among students. God forbid a kid show up with a generic binder and not the "BLACKWATER BINDER:  Made of bullet-proof KEVLAR. Tested and approved by the Navy SEALS and perfect for today’s student. Available in green or pink camouflage" despite the fact that the generic costs 1/10 what the BLACKWATER costs.  No, we must make sure our little robots students all look exactly alike!

Anyway, it caused a problem for a lot of parents that we didn’t have a list of supplies for our big tax-free weekend.  Who’s responsible for the lack of supply lists?  Eh, I’m willing to bet the responsibility can be distributed pretty far and wide, but I have to say that the folks who write editorials for the Winston-Salem Journal cast their net of blame in the wrong direction.  Here’s what they wrote:

It would be even more helpful if parents knew exactly what their children will need for school. But some parents told the Journal late last week that they had not yet received supply lists from their public schools.

The culprit here is
the school-calendar law that the General Assembly passed at the behest
of tourism and real-estate interests a few years back. For business
purposes, they wanted a later start to the school year. So, the
tax-free weekend now comes three weeks before the school bell rings,
and teachers don’t have supply lists ready.

Some will propose to push the tax-free weekend to the middle of August. We argue for a different change.

The General
Assembly should repeal the school-calendar law and let school boards,
not real-estate agents, decide on what is best for educating our
children.

So let me get this straight.  The reason we don’t have the lists we need is because several years ago the real estate and tourism lobbies got the General Assembly to move our school start dates to later in the summer?  And the way to fix the problem of our not getting the lists on time is to give the power of school scheduling back to the local school boards? 

Did our school administrators and teachers not get the memo telling them that the start of the school year has been moved back?  Is it too much to ask for our teachers and school administrators to adjust their schedules? And as Celeste (my lovely wife) pointed out to me,  last year we received our lists before the tax-free weekend and we had the same schedule then as we do now.  What changed?

Seriously, it would be like me telling my client that because this year their annual conference is two weeks earlier in the year than it was last year I didn’t get the attendees their information in time.  I think the question they’d ask me as they were cancelling my contract would be, "Since we published the date of this year’s conference over a year ago shouldn’t it have occurred to you to move your timeline up so the attendees would have the information when they needed it?"

Now, I don’t disagree with the Journal about allowing local school boards to determine their own schedules, but blaming the tardiness of our teachers and administrators on the General Assembly’s actions is some seriously flawed logic.  Kind of like the Journal editors’ argument that the state lottery is a tax.

Oh, don’t get me started.

Check out amAze

Leave a reply

I received an email this morning from Ofer Tziperman of Israeli company.  He’d read my post about Google’s new SMS service and sent me a note about his company’s amAze GPS service.  (He was amused that I used "amaze" in the title of my post).  I’ve not used amAze and my phone is not compatible with the service, but it looks like a very interesting application of the mobile GPS-based service I was writing about in the Google post.  If you’re interested in the service and want to know if it will work with your phone just take a look at the "Handset" page on their site, or you can also browse their message boards to see how others find the service.

Also, check out this PDF of a Financial Times article describing how LocatioNet is planning to build it’s business.  These three paragraphs from the article describe what I was envisioning re. the future of mobile advertising:

It (LocatioNet, ed.) has decided to distribute its local search and navigation application free and generate revenues via targeted advertisements and sponsorship integrated into the application.   Typically mobile navigation services are based on subscriptions.

For instance a chain of petrol stations is interested in giving its customers a branded version of the application. Similarly, mobile phone distributors see it as a way to maintain a customer relationship that lasts beyond the initial sale.

Locationet is also utilising the Yellow Pages model, based on revenue sharing for local search.

A key point here: amAze is free which means it stands a real chance of exploding the universe of mobile phone GPS users.  Think of it this way: would you use MapQuest or Google Maps if you had to pay for it?  Probably not.  Would Google be the monster it is if you had to subscribe to use it?  No way.  I’m not saying that LocatioNet will be the Google of the mobile phone GPS market, but I think their business model is basically what the winner in this market will use.  Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google becomes the Google of the GPS market, but until then it’s nice to see a service like amAze making a go of it.

For more info on Ofer and LocatioNet check out this interview at inbabble.com and this Q&A at Services Mobiles.

Google Continues to Amaze: Search From Your Phone

4 Replies

Google has launched a service that allows you to send them a text message with a search phrase from your phone and then they send a text reply with the results.  Here are some examples:

  • I sent this text phrase: "pizza 27023" and within 10 seconds I had two text reply messages with pizza restaurants in the 27023 zip code, including their addresses and phone numbers.
  • I sent this text phrase: "weather winston-salem" and within seconds I received the current weather in Winston-Salem, including temperature, partly cloudy, humidity, wind speed and direction, and the temperature/rain forecast for the next three days.
  • I sent a text message with my address followed by "to" and then a destination address and within 10 seconds I had detailed directions sent back.  The directions are broken into 5 messages because there is a limited number of characters that each message can have.

Think about this for a second.  You’re trying to get from point "A" to point "B" and you aren’t sure of how to do it. You find the closest address and then text message that address, "to" and your destination and in seconds you have directions.  How cool is that.  Check out the information page for full details, but I can tell you that other search functions that are equally as cool include movies, flight status, stocks, translation from one language to another, currency conversion, and on and on.

Eventually I think that all mobile phones will be GPS-enabled or have some sort of ‘place recognition’ via triangulation of the tower signals and then you won’t even have to actually know where you are.  Then services like this will enable you to feed you information based on a query like "pizza restaurants within 2 miles" or "directions to 8800 Elm Street, somewhere, usa 22222".

This is the kind of stuff that makes my head want to explode.