Support me. Please.
February 24, 2010
Companies, if you support me, I’ll support you.
I will go out of my way to buy from you. Even if you cost a bit more, I will buy from you. All you have to do is support me.
Please.
Was reading today about the drop in Dell’s stock price, and my first thought was, “Serves ‘em right.”
Catting around on the Web
June 1, 2009
Got allergies to cats? Got five thousand bucks and a lot of patience?
You, too, could own a hypoallergenic cat…not. And thereby hangs one of the nicest examples I’ve seen in awhile of how the Web can make things tougher for con men. The Web is most certainly rife with fraud, but if you take the time to do a little online research, it’s also one of the best ways to spread the word on crooks.
Bye bye, S-G-I
April 1, 2009
Silicon Graphics finally tumbled to the bottom; it’s being acquired by Rackable Systems for a piddling $25 million. At the height of its glory SGI probably spent that much on year-end holiday celebrations.
This isn’t a huge surprise, I suppose. SGI pretty much slid through the gamut of I call the 9-step marketing plan to oblivion that seems to hit most hot high-tech companies:
- Here’s a brand new thing. Seems pretty cool.
- Here’s the hottest product on the planet!
- We’re Gizmodagon. We’re hot. So are our products.
- Breakthrough innovation from the company that brought you Gizmodagon I.
- Gizmodagon. Products that just work better.
- Gizmodagon. A name you can trust.
- Gizmodagon. Our people make us great.
- We’re not your dad’s Gizmodagon anymore.
- Gizmodagon. Now available at Walmart.
If a high-profile tech company gets to #7 without a massively effective overhaul–and I can count on two hands those that have–I figure they’re pretty much toast.
Not that SGI wasn’t filled with great innovators, or that there wasn’t a heckuva lot of prestige in owning their products. There was–I have an SGI LCD panel that’s still a thing of beauty, even if it no longer works. But yesterday’s expensive new server is today’s flower box.
SGI just never seemed to get past waiting for data center guys to toss out those nasty-cheap Wintel boxes and crawl back home. It’s too bad, too: The earth missed out on a lot of very cool visualization stuff when SGI lost relevance. Let’s see what Rackable does with what’s left.
She sleeps with the fishes
February 28, 2009
For $6,495, you can be the marine equivalent of a Christmas tree topper.
Eternal Reefs will take your cremated remains, mix them with concrete, pour them into a mold, add a bronze plaque and sink it into the sea. Voila! A coffin that’s also a coral reef.
Kindling myths
February 26, 2009
Just read Roy Blount Jr’s worries over Amazon’s new Kindle 2 in the NYT. Apparently its text-to-speech feature will kill the audiobook business, destroying the livelihoods of all writers for centuries to come.
Oh for heaven’s sake. Has Mr. Blount actually HEARD text-to-speech? Or an audiobook? (Despite his claims to the contrary, I doubt it.) Comparing TTS to an actor’s performance on an audiobook is a bit like comparing a rock to a Ferrari: Both roll down the hill, but that’s about it.
Absolutely, positively proves the old adage: Write about stuff you know.
Authors’ livelihoods are in jeopardy for many reasons: Books are being subsumed by the Web, reading ain’t exactly in fashion, recession-caused advertising woes are killing writing jobs right and left, newspapers are dying. And the head of the Writer’s Guild chooses to spend his precious NYT op-ed space on the Kindle?
Give me a break. And somebody elect a new guild president.
Save us, George Clooney!
February 9, 2009
Bunch of us were discussing management moments this morning and I contributed a favorite: The large-ish dot-com where I worked had had another Final Downsizing* (I rode all the way to FD No. 7 and not long after the company fizzled).
In this one, FD No. 2 or 3 as I recall, the surviving employees were sent to the company’s big central conference room for a rallying speech by the CEO. The room sported a new giant projection screen on the back wall with a podium, Patton-style, in front. As everyone sat, the CEO stepped into the spotlight.
Mobile marketing on steroids
December 24, 2008
Anybody out there tried SnapTell for the iPhone? It’s, variously, a powerful, scary or just plain freakin’ cool new tool, available free on iTunes.
SnapTell helps you find the best price for a book, CD or DVD you’re interested in buying. You use the iPhone camera to snap the cover, then SnapTell identifies the title from its database. It will deliver reviews and a rundown on prices, new and used, from the nearest local stores, Google, Barnes & Noble, eBay and Yahoo. It lets you comparison shop while you’re actually standing in the store, and–assuming it can get to the data, which is a BIG assumption–could be a boon to students trying to save money on textbooks, for example.
I tried out the SnapTell app on a few books and DVDs. As long as I was snaptelling stuff with a valid ISBN/ASIN number it seemed to work reasonably well.
It can’t do the impossible. A snaptell of corporate distributions, such as Bullseye Glass’ Connections video, generally returns a “No match found” error message or it picks the closest match in its database, which can be fun. 
One of Philippe Faraut’s excellent sculpting tutorials, The Art of Sculpting: Children (left), came back listed as Budapest at Night, a CD of Hungarian music by Sandor Lakatos and his Gypsy Band (right).
I can see the probable landmarks that SnapTell established between the two (the square photo, arch of the sculpture’s head, the bangs and the left temple, the neckline, etc). Corning’s latest DVD, Glass Masters at Work: Lino Tagliapietra, a documentary by Robin Lehman, shows up in SnapTell as a $400 textbook, Linear Motion Electromagnetic Devices for similar reasons. Still, those are mile-wide misses that demonstrate the problems inherent in relying on image matching alone.
If I need to compare prices on, say, the English version of Princess Mononoke, it could really come in handy. And it will also save time; I can snaptell an entry to a friend looking for a particular book much faster than I can type in how/why buy info on Gigi-the-iPhone’s lousy screenboard.
Of course, behind the noble purpose–saving money–lies clever marketeering. SnapTell comes from SnapTell, a SilliValley mobile marketing firm that’s using image matching and mobile phone cameras to drive marketing campaigns. Mobile cameraphone users snap photos of ads and products to learn more about them, and participating companies deliver the info along with messaging and branding reinforcement.
For companies, it’s a potentially very effective way to reach the mobile demographics, especially since anyone going to the trouble to take a picture of an ad is already at least partially sold. For users, it’s a fast way to get more information, coupons, freebies, etc., without touching a desktop PC. And since it’s inherently opt-in, it’s far more welcome (presumably) than mobile spam.
The downside for users, however, is the usual: Signing up is forever, and once a company has you in its database as interested, it’s up to THEM to stop. And there’s another con: Since SnapTell isn’t in the game for philanthropy, presumably whoever shows up on the SnapTell bookstore list is either a free resource or has paid to be there. No pay, no show.
That’s probably why the two most obvious book resources I use, Amazon.com and the local Powell’s, were nowhere to be found. Since I’ve no intention of downloading an app for every establishment I buy might something from, and since my consumer info is a valuable marketing currency, SnapTell is either gonna have to sell everybody or figure out how to provide comprehensive info and still make money. Google did it–let’s see what SnapTell comes up with.
Hooray for Amazon.com
November 3, 2008
Amazon.com has decided to tackle one of the banes of my existence: Scumsucking, finger-slitting, diss-the-customer packaging. They’ve posted a “Frustration-Free Packaging” credo that promises to eliminate the clear plastic shells that eat your fingers, triple or sometimes quadruple boxing that costs more to ship, eats trees and fills up your garbage can, and those REALLY STUPID styrofoam bits that get on absolutely EVERYTHING and take years to vacuum up.
Thank heavens somebody finally gets it.
Quest for voltage
April 9, 2008
I want a car that plugs in, if I can ever find one that (a) really exists and (b) really exists where I live.
Car makers make it sound as though all it takes to drive electric is an open road, a plug, and a credit card. The reality, however, is quite different.
Anchors away
February 8, 2008
Yes, I realize it’s spelled “aweigh.” I was making a point. 
For those of you who haven’t heard about it yet, the Asian Internet outages that wreaked so much havoc on overseas business lately were caused–in part–by a ship’s anchor dragging over undersea cables. (You can read about it in WSJ)
The last time this happened, right before the holidays in 2006, a Taiwan earthquake was the proximate cause. Now, you can in some measure predict and protect against moderate earthquakes, but this time the outage was caused by the nautical equivalent of a cow kicking a lantern in Mrs. O’Leary’s barn, and that’s a lot harder to guard against.
When I was a tech reporter covering US federal computing, the nice guys at NIST learned of my fascination with gigantic networks and sent me a chuckle: Mae East was most vulnerable to attack from a sale-crazed Christmas shopper.