ZDNet Must Read:
SAP: New leadership, same old story?
SAP CEO Leo Apotheker has resigned and two of his former lieutenants---Bill McDermott, head of sales and Jim Hagemann Snabe, head of product development---have become co-CEOs. Are these two executives... Continued »
Category: Retail
February 8th, 2010
Google lowers Nexus One return fee - but is it enough?
Google has dropped its “equipment recovery fee” for the Nexus One smartphone from $350 down to $150, a move that follows a government inquiry into the fees that are imposed on consumers who break their wireless contracts early, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
That’s nice - but I don’t think it changes anything about the perceptions surrounding those fees.
The fact is that consumers still face two separate fees. Google imposes one fee - now $150. And T-Mobile charges a $200 for breaking its service contract early. In a post last month, I argued that Google really should stick to making the Android technology better and leave the retail sales - and support - of this device to a carrier partner. I still think that’s true.
From an accounting standpoint, the fees make perfect sense. They’re in place to ensure that customers stick around long enough to essentially pay back - by staying on the customer roll for at least two years - the subsidy that allowed them to buy an expensive device at a discounted price.
But Google is going to stifle the adoption of devices running the Android OS - and that’s a shame because has a real winner here. If anything is going to challenge the mighty iPhone and keep Apple on its innovative toes, it’s going to be Android.
Yet, if consumers starting getting wind of this double-whammy on early termination fees, there’s a big chance that they’ll go another route when it comes time to buy, maybe Palm or Blackberry or, yes, even the iPhone.
I spent a month playing with the Nexus One and I had been really excited about getting one on Verizon when it’s released this Spring. But, now I’m thinking twice. If there were an option, I’d go directly to Verizon to buy this phone and re-up on my service contract. But if I’m forced to go to Google’s Web site to do this, it just might be enough to force me to rethink the purchase altogether.
November 23rd, 2009
Online retailers, marketing firms scam consumers for $1.4 billion
A U.S. government investigation has prompted several well-known online retailers to sever ties with marketing firms after both were accused of working together to deceive customers out of $1.4 billion.
The retailers, including Priceline.com, Classmates.com, FTD.com, Shutterfly.com and Orbitz.com, were accused of working with marketers Affinion, Vertrue and Webloyalty to mislead consumers into unknowingly signing up for “affinity” or “loyalty” programs that would charge their credit card accounts.
August 21st, 2009
Need a job? Microsoft stores now hiring
Microsoft plans to open retail stories in cities “around the world,” and it follows that they’ll need warm bodies to work in them.
Microsoft announced today that it is hiring trainers, associates and managers at its first two stores in Scottsdale, AZ and Mission Viejo, CA.
Here’s the scoop:
We’re looking for new store employees who love technology and teaching and helping others. In particular, we’re looking for people with technical backgrounds who can help customers choose the best Microsoft products and services for their needs and troubleshoot any technical issue they may have.
Interested? You can find more information on Microsoft’s Talent Recruiting website.
More on ZDNet:
- Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft retail store pitch: Whither PCTV?
- Andrew Nusca: PCs need a brand (and why Microsoft stores could revolutionize how a consumer buys one)
- Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft to follow Apple with its own family of retail stores
- Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft: It’s not just a store, it’s a branding experience
August 11th, 2009
Back to school goes cheap: Here comes another round of Mac vs PC
Market research firm NPD Group said today that 44 percent of consumers will spend less this back-to-school season. And electronics, despite falling below school supplies and clothing on the priority list, still ranks high on the chart as consumers go cheap and start looking for bargains to keep costs down.
Count me in as part of Club Cheapo. We spent the weekend at the mall, Target, Staples and a handful of other stores as we try to get the kids - who are heading into the 8th and 6th grades - ready for school. All along, we were watching pennies and forcing ourselves to differentiate between what we need and what we want.
Value, according to the research, is the top reason that drives a consumer purchase this season, ranking higher than a school requirement.
August 5th, 2009
Perceived value of BlackBerry brand drops among adults 18-34, rises for age 35-49; Tour 9630 to blame
RIM’s BlackBerry family of mobile devices has undergone dramatic consumer perception shifts in the past two weeks, according to market research agency YouGov’s BrandIndex.
Since mid-July, BlackBerry’s value perception of adults aged 18 to 34 has tanked, while simultaneously rising among adults aged 35 to 49.
July 9th, 2009
In an economic downturn, prepaid mobile is big business
Why pay $100 or more each month for a two-year cell phone contract when you can pay $50 and keep yourself off the hook?
At least that’s the thinking behind the latest ad campaign by Boost Mobile, a prepaid, or “no-contract,” mobile service provider whose parent company is none other than Sprint Nextel.
In an economic downturn, consumers are reevaluating the privilege of paying mobile service providers — including Sprint — $50 to $150 (or more) per month for their cell phone. And according to Boost Mobile president Matt Carter, that’s a revolutionary idea worth calling someone about.
ZDNet: How much have sales of prepaid phones increased since the beginning of the economic downturn?
July 2nd, 2009
Tailoring Web technology to a bespoke dress shirt business
It’s not easy to mix up the monotony of putting on a shirt and a tie every day for work, but what if the shirt was made-to-order, with details of your own choosing?
Fashion startup ShirtsMyWay allows you to spruce up your tired work uniform and customize your own dress shirt from nearly-limitless options — from the color of the stitching around buttonholes to the shape of the breast pocket — and ships it to you for the price of an off-the-rack shirt from Brooks Brothers.
Always liked the look of the white-collar, blue-body banker dress shirt, but preferred the reverse? It can be done in two clicks. Like to keep things on the outside crisp and white, but prefer to have a little private bling on the inside? A few more clicks and you’ll have brown and white “French Rails” lining your collar and cuffs (see image below).
Or better yet, 20 copies of your new favorite shirt.
I spoke with Shanghai, China-based founder Michael Yang on how his startup is addressing the increased demand for custom clothing on the Web.
What gave you the idea for ShirtsMyWay?
Michael Yang: [Co-founder] Peter [Crawfurd] and I both wanted to start a company, and we had both been to Asia and had shirts made there for ourselves. The idea evolved over a very long process: we did some research online and saw that the customization wave was going up and online clothing sales were going up and put two and two together. We looked online and realized that people were only doing online tailoring, and no one was really doing design.
There are so many components to a shirt, and we thought you should be able to customize them all. You have the collar, the cuffs, the contrast fabric inside the cuffs, the sleeve, the placket, the yoke, the pocket, and you can go on. So we made every component customizable, down to the buttonhole thread.
That level of customization sounds daunting. How do you help the average customer choose?
MY: A lot of people simply love the level of customization — and some people are overwhelmed by the amount of options. We have a shirt model on the site that helps a lot with the visualization, so they can see what, say, a placket actually is.
Right now we’re working on a “shirtpedia,” where we try to educate people who don’t know so much about shirts. What kind of customers are we looking for? People who are interested in tailored or custom-fit shirts. We’re aiming for mass customization so that the average person can go in and do this. It’s a trend that’s going to spread to habit – rather than go to JCPenney or another offline store.
Your focus is only on men’s dress shirts. Is there interest in expansion to women’s shirts or pants?
MY: The natural progression that not only would come to mind would be to expand into customizing a whole wardrobe – shoes, pants, shirts, blazers, suits and so on. But it’s difficult to say right now. Originally that was our vision, but right now we see that there are things happening in our market — we’ve shaken it up a bit — and we probably have to take it as it comes.
We only launched in February, so we don’t have any pre-global economic downtown basis to compare to. Surprisingly, we are doing very well. The amount of sales we’re able to generate actually corresponds to our original goals. How is the economic downturn affecting the online industry? I’ve been looking at reports and some numbers indicate that online commerce hasn’t gone down.
So we’re already looking to expand. Right now we’re still tossing ideas around. We are currently shipping internationally — [North] America, Europe, Australia, Asia — but we pick certain countries because of the shipping costs. We have a policy of free shipping for most countries, so we’re already doing that.
You mentioned a “trend” in online custom clothing and a push away from brick-and-mortar stores. Is that really true?
MY: There are a lot of men who go online to buy clothing, and our initial idea was that men can’t be bothered to go into stores and shop around. There are a lot of men who want to just do it and get the package shipped to their door.
The current discussion right know concerning expansion is if the next step is to target women or to diversify into another product. Women buy practically 90 percent of the items in the household. We have gotten quite a few requests from women to make dress shirts for women. It’s quite a complicated process to diversify into women’s clothing. Peter and I have only have experience in men’s, rather than women’s, clothing. So we’ll possibly stick to what we’re good at. But you never know – my sister’s a clothing designer; maybe I’ll take lessons from her.
You and Peter are based in Shanghai, but you’re both from Denmark. How do you navigate the right channels to keep your business afloat?
I’m of Chinese origin; my parents are Chinese. They moved to Denmark and I was born and raised in Denmark. Peter and I went to high school together in Denmark and then the same university. I studied computer science and business administration and Peter studied international business. He worked in India for some time and I was in Denmark. As we started to itch, that entrepreneurship, we put our heads together in Denmark and moved to Shanghai to do the groundwork.
I speak Shanghainese, the native dialect, and I also have quite a big family here, around 20 family members, and they’re all entrepreneurs themselves. Beyond that, we have a consulting company here that is helping us with legal and accounting issues.
Peter supervises the operations and does the marketing, and I do the IT and supervise the accounting. We work quite differently, Peter and I — he does day-to-day work, while I do project work.
How does ShirtsMyWay function in the background? What happens behind the scenes?
MY: We use open source, which was a relatively natural choice for us. We run on PHP. When we started doing this there was a choice between Flash and AJAX, I picked AJAX. AJAX makes more sense if you want to do SEO — Flash is hard to control. AJAX is sort of like a lego box that you can piece anything together however you like it.
How does it work? People go online, customize their shirt, put in in the shopping cart and click order. We save the details so they can be retrieved later — users will be able to retrieve their own data soon. We have a back-end system that pulls up the order and sends it to the factory. We have an alliance with one factory that we’ve been working very closely with, which has only been getting better and better. They produce the shirt, quality control it and give it to us. We actually go in and quality control it ourselves. If it’s OK, we ship it out. If it’s not, we send it back to the factory.
We source our own fabrics because we don’t want to just put whatever the factory has up on our site. A lot of those fabrics are not so good, so we go out and handpick high-quality and stylish fabrics.
We’ve had around 0.2 percent or even lower return rate. For every 500 shirts we sell, maybe only one is returned. People are pretty happy.
The U.S. is our biggest market, for good reason. I think that in the States, people are quite far ahead on the innovation curve in order to be able to embrace the kinds of things that we’re doing. In terms of customizing your own clothes online, certainly I think that more people in the States do and would love do do these kinds of things than, say, Europe or Australia or other parts of the world. We do have a pretty good market in those other areas, but combined. The factor of embrace in the States is equal to the rest of the world put together. That’s the feeling that we get.
June 30th, 2009
Helping corporations leverage the Web, using open source and the cloud
What do open source and cloud computing have in common?
For Navid Safabakhsh, principal at San Francisco and Philadelphia-based interactive web development agency Freshout, it’s that both technologies are low-cost, high-yield solutions to help corporations leverage the customer data they collect on the Web.
I spoke with Safabakhsh about how his company’s mix of open source, collaboration and the cloud helps companies innovate by plugging into the Web — and their customers.
June 23rd, 2009
Building high-performance, luxury computers in a recession
When the world is caught in a global economic downturn, exactly how does one build a business around the fabrication of high-performance, luxury computers?
I spoke with Chris Morley, chief technical officer of Maingear Computers, to find out. When it comes to external circumstances, Morley says success is all about working with the hand you’re dealt — and remembering to play your strengths.
ZDNet: How do you position luxury, high-performance electronics in economy? What’s your strategy?
Chris Morley: Luxury goods have a flexible demand curve. Our ASPs (average selling prices) have actually shot up, and we’ve actually have had some pretty darn good months. This economy has taught us that we need to focus on our core competencies: focusing on the best experience and customer service that we can provide.
We are standing in a field with few others. Demand isn’t going away, but companies that are playing this field are leaving, falling off, or just flat out giving up. While business was very good before this economic downturn, we’re asking how can we increase our brand awareness, how we can expand.
The past year we have done very well with the ePhex, which is our Halo [desktop] product. Reviewers, I hope, will take note that a killer review really makes a difference. If you love their product, have nice things to say about it!
June 11th, 2009
U.S. CTO: Infrastructure growth needs private sector investment
The technology backbone of the United States needs a major overhaul and government alone can’t do it, the nation’s first chief technology officer said today. It’s going to take a cooperative effort, including a massive influx of “hundreds of billions” of private capital dollars, for the U.S. to catch up to its global peers.
CTO Aneesh Chopra delivered a keynote address this morning at the Consumer Electronics Association’s Digital Downtown event in New York City. The U.S., he said, is “dead last” on the global stage when it comes to the tech infrastructure and yet bandwidth usage in the U.S. is expected to increase five-fold by 2013.
“We’ve stood still while the rest of the world has caught up or exceeded us,” he said.
The U.S. is going to have to bring “all stakeholders to the table” for this discussion, he said. “We want equity, growth, application value…we have multiple public priorities, and the bulk of capital [investment]…will be a private sector endeavor.”
In his keynote, Chopra outlined the four areas, or “pillars,” of growth in need of attention: harnessing the potential for economic growth; innovation and policy reform in areas such as energy and education; increasing secure connectivity across the nation; and using “retail 2.0″ strategies in government efforts, such as in employment and social services.
June 10th, 2009
Wrangling banks' security architecture to allow transactions anywhere
If only bank websites were as simple and easy to use as an iPhone app.
Believe it or not, that wish isn’t far from fruition.
Earlier this year, banking provider Waterfield Technologies and application infrastructure guru WorkLight teamed up to offer secure, widget-based banking solutions for financial institutions and their customers.
Combining the WorkLight Application Platform with Waterfield’s financial know-how, the companies are enabling consumer banking — such as tracking account balances, transferring funds, paying bills and more — in the Windows Vista Sidebar, Mac OS X Dashboard, Facebook, iGoogle, Twitter, Apple iPhone and other channels.
I sat down to chat with John Marino, the president of Tulsa, Okla.-based Waterfield Technologies, about how his company plans to wrangle financial institutions’ security architecture to make secure banking possible from almost anywhere.
March 9th, 2009
A $79.16 MacBook? On Swoopo, if it sounds too good to be true...
Depending on who you are, Swoopo is either 1) the greatest thing since sliced bread, 2) the biggest scam since the pyramid scheme or 3) a business model that’s pure evil genius.
Swoopo - an online auction site that’s pretty much everything eBay is not - is a place where real, in-the-box, fully warrantied items like laptop computers, video game consoles and other products that otherwise might cost hundreds or thousands of dollars can be found for a fraction of the regular retail price. The bids - which raise the price of the item by 15 cents - cost the bidder 75 cents each time he raises his virtual paddle. It doesn’t sound like much - but when bidding wars begin over hot-ticket item, Swoopo (and its investors) turn out to be the winners - 75 cents at a time.
February 12th, 2009
Microsoft to open retail stores. Yeah, good luck with that
Buried in a late-in-the-day press release announcing a new executive, Microsoft revealed plans to open branded retail stores as part of its effort to raise awareness surrounding Windows 7, Windows Mobile and Windows Live.
The time frame for opening the stores, as well as locations, will be the first order of business for David Porter, the company’s new corporate vice president of Retail Stores, who was a 25-year Wal-Mart executive before his most recent stint with DreamWorks Animation SKG.
OK, I can understand Microsoft taking a tip from Apple, which has seen success by putting their products - from iMacs to iPods - on display for customers to test drive at Apple-branded retails outlets. I can even understand Microsoft wanting a presence in communities - and what better place than retail centers - so people can familiarize themselves with the products. (Isn’t that kind of what Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld were talking about during the second of two really bad commercials last year?)
Also see: Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft to follow Apple with its own family of retail stores
In a release, the company said, “The purpose of opening these stores is to create deeper engagement with consumers and continue to learn firsthand about what they want and how they buy.” So is the retail store plan an opportunity for Microsoft to learn more about the customer or the customer to learn more about Microsoft? Either way, the intention is a good one.
But retail stores? What will they sell? Boxed software? Xbox? Zune? The stuff that Microsoft wants you to know more about - Windows 7, Windows Mobile and Windows Live - aren’t products that you would buy at a Microsoft store. Windows 7 is an operating system that will come on a computer you buy from Dell, HP or someone else. Windows Mobile is a operating system that comes on a mobile phone made by companies like Motorola and sold via wireless carriers. And Windows Live is, well, on the Internet. In a statement, Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner said:
We’re also working hard to transform the PC and Microsoft buying experience at retail by improving the articulation and demonstration of the Microsoft innovation and value proposition so that it’s clear, simple and straightforward for consumers everywhere. David (Porter’s) unique and diverse background, coupled with his deep retail roots and distribution understanding, will be an invaluable asset in this long-term effort.
One might argue that Apple has done very well for itself with retail stores. But much of that success is due to the instant gratification that comes with walking out of the store with an iPod or Macbook in-hand.
The other side of the argument, of course, is Gateway. The once-strong PC maker, which is now part of Acer, tried desperately to make a retail store work years ago. It added training classes, a service department and even made room on its shelves for other electronics devices that interacted with a PC - such as mp3 players and digital cameras. But nothing paid off. I don’t know if Microsoft - which really has no brand cachet for physical products other than Xbox (and maybe Zune, too) - can pull off a retail model any better than Gateway.
I certainly don’t think it can emulate Apple’s success.
November 25th, 2008
A rare occurrence: Macs on sale
If there’s one thing about Apple products that you can pretty much always bank on, it’s that they rarely go on sale.
Best Buy launched some pre-Black Friday specials that discounts a whole lineup of Macbooks, iMacs and even the Mac Mini. (Nope, iPods and the iPhone are not on the list.) Of course, these aren’t huge discounts - mostly $100 off, but up to $150 on a couple of models - but the fact that Macs are being discounted says something about what retailers are willing to do to get people to shop during this gloomy economy.
Not to be outdone, Apple itself has reportedly authorized its managers at the Apple stores to price-match competitors discounts, according to ifoAppleStore, a blog that follows information about the company’s retail stores. The details are sketchy but apparently you have to bring in the competitor’s ad to get the price-match. As far as Apple’s own specials, the company has put up a Web page advertising a one-day sale on Friday on the online store - but there are no specifics about what will be marked down.
Ah! Price wars. If there’s any silver lining to a holiday season caught in the middle of a bad economy, this is it. I suspect this isn’t the only pricing war we’ll see this season.
November 19th, 2008
Can a price cut, TV ad give Zune a lift?
This holiday season, if you can’t afford an iPod, will you consider a Zune?
Microsoft is announcing a price cut today to its flash-based Zune models: $99 for the 4GB model, $139 for the 8GB version and $179 for the 16GB player. That prices the devices less than the iPod Nano, though Microsoft said that wasn’t the reasoning behind the cuts. Zune marketing director Adam Sohn told CNET this week that the cuts “take into consideration what the realities of the market are” and are times to “”ensure hopefully we have a good holiday season.” 
In addition, the company has kicked off a TV ad campaign designed to get people to download the new Zune software, even if they haven’t yet picked up a Zune player. It sounds a lot like what Apple did way back when with the iTunes software. Initially, iTunes was part of the iLife software package. But as iPod sales continued to grow and an online music store was added, the software was offered for free to anyone who wanted it and taken out of the iLife portfolio.
It may be a bit late for Microsoft to follow Apple’s lead - but I suppose it’s worth a try. And who knows? Maybe in this cost-conscious climate, a price cut and free software could be enough to convince some shoppers to give the Zune a try.
November 10th, 2008
Is tech headed for a Bah Humbug holiday season?
In this video clip, ZDNet correspondent Sumi Das and I talk about what sort of forces - everything from Circuit City’s Chapter 11 filing to news that Windows 7 will make its debut in time for next year’s holiday season - will dictate the mood of this holiday season. Even the state of Las Vegas hotel reservations for the Consumer Electronics Show in January is keeping a dark cloud over the industry.
October 24th, 2008
Take Stock. Turn Off The Tech. Turn Off The Echo Chamber. Think.
Didn’t happen. The market did have a bad day, losing 3.6% of its value, again. But the loss was “only” 312 points, with about 100 of that coming in the last 20 minutes.
Once again, we’re at a weekend. Hoping for a breather. But the NYSE had the right idea with the lockdown on futures trading.
Time to take a timeout.
Now, the tension never stops. Once the
But we live in an echo chamber now. Screaming on screen begets more screaming on screen. Markets follow other markets. Traders don’t trade, they let machines figure it out. Automated trading turns on the slightest whiff of bad news – and amplifies the result. Algorithms have replaced a lot of brain waves.
Which is how we got to the subprime fiasco and the credit crisis in the first place. Determining who could really pay off a loan ceased being a matter of human judgment. Bankers, ratings agencies, investment houses no longer look the customer in the eye or eyeball the financial justification for a loan. They let the algorithms do the work.
The way things are set up now, it would take a 1,100 point drop in the Dow to halt trading on the NYSE.
Unless some human judgment intervenes. This whole mess has spun out of control because there’s been no adult supervision. There’s good news out there (leading indicators up, oil prices plunging, decent earnings in tech — think Apple — and non-financial sectors). Retail sales went down 1.2% in August. Nobel winner Paul Krugman says that is falling off the cliff. By most accounting, 98.8% remains. That’s a decline that is not anything like the end of the world for the world’s largest economy.
Heads need to get back into the game.
Setting up what looked likely to be a freefall on Friday was former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan admitting, basically, to being asleep at the switch. Who’da think that corporate executives would think about their own personal equity (i.e., compensation and bonuses) instead of the equity of their company’s shareholders (i.e., retained earnings and market capitalization)?
The world will not end if the current Fed chairman or the current president or the current NYSE chairman just calls a timeout. Tell investors to calm down.
We never know the future. So how much demand is disappearing as the echo chamber reverberates is basically impossible to predict.
But, in an era where the echoes never stop, the best way to start putting the investing economy back on something approaching an even keel is to stop trading, for a day or week. Stop automated trading, for a longer period. Force traders to actually think, not react or let the algorithms do their work.
And in so doing, stop the echoes.
April 14th, 2008
Chart of the day: Blockbuster and Circuit City vs. Apple, Amazon, Best Buy
The reaction to Blockbuster’s attempt to buy Circuit City has ranged from the comical to the downright negative.
I don’t get this deal, but at least I’m not alone. On the bright side, Blockbuster has provided us with a few charts of the day.
First up, Blockbuster compares itself to other retailing juggernauts assuming it buys Circuit City. Competitive advantage?
And stores will be everywhere.
And there’s the shareholder value part (as if there will be any). I’m still scratching my head on this one.
January 25th, 2008
Another great contribution to humanity from the folks who brought you Chuck E. Cheese and Atari
Guest post: Chris Matyszczyk explores the latest high-tech concept in dining from Nolan Bushnell, of Chuck E. Cheese and Atari fame.
We all have our bad waiter stories. I confess that recently, in Europe, I sat in a restaurant for almost an hour waiting for a bill that never arrived. Yes, I do mean never.
And last year I was in a restaurant when a waiter delivered a plate to me and mused beyond his ganja haze:
“What did you order?”
“Fish,” I said.
“Well, I got you chicken,” he said with a smile that vaguely reminded my of the sincerity of Senator Larry Craig.
But now we have uWink. This is a new restaurant chain that doesn’t eliminate waiters as much as castrate them. uWink advertises itself with three words that make any techie salivate: Food. Drinks. Media.
The latest venture from Nolan Bushnell, former CEO of those very similar companies, Chuck E. Cheese and Atari, uWink dispenses with the need to give your order to a waiter. Instead, you have a touch screen, very similar to the ones wait staff use to transmit your order to kitchens. Or airlines use to make you do their work for them.
Clearly, the idea is that no theology student or highly talented out-of-work actor/dancer/comedian can possibly get your order wrong. So the tech world contributes yet another joist to the sturdy foundation that is world efficiency. In fact, uWink’s claims that its software approach to ordering will reduce labor costs by approximately 5 percent.
However, uWink goes further in its attempt to improve human interaction. Because it is more than likely that the people you are having dinner with are duller than a Wisconsin pond at midnight, you can also use the ordering screens to play video games. (It’s what Bushnell calls “social gaming,” which includes basic rules such as “the game controller must be as easy to use as a fork,” and “games must be classy or funny, not coarse or vulgar.”)
“Darling, you said you had something special to say to me tonight,” she said, looking lovingly into his eyes. “Damn, the red square touched my black square! I lost!” he replied looking hatingly at the screen.
Squares is just one of the games your ordering screen has to offer. There is Zillionaire, which is, apparently, just like Who Wants to be a Millionaire “only a zillion times better.”
What, we get a zillion Meredith Vieras? A zillion Regis Philbins? Or perhaps we get the chance to phone a zillion friends around the world to get our answers? Can we poll everyone in the restaurant in an Ask the Audience feature?
Then there is the utterly engrossing Trielevator. I cannot compete with the power of the sell on uWink’s own website: “This is a fast paced game where you stack cards on top of each other in numerical order from least to greatest or greatest to least. As you clear the levels you get extra points!”
I have always wanted to stack cards on top of each other in a restaurant. Just as I have always wanted extra points. But I am not sure the uWink method is the way I would ideally choose.
To be fair to uWink (oh, please, I am able to do this) the games do have multiplayer options. The screens, however, do not appear to have a “does the cabernet come out of a box?” option. Or a “is this meat beef or horse?” option. Or even a “is tonight’s chef sober?” option.
I imagine one of my greatest dilemmas, were I to inadvertantly stumble into a uWink franchise, would lie in trying to decide whether to tip the person who brought my food out (as it appears they have not managed to co-develop food-carrying robots with David Levy or any other disciple of singularity) or to tip the machine for its never-ending supply of card-stacking entertainment.
Yet as the world hurtles in the never-ending quest of lowering costs and heightening entertainment, I would love to see the concept taken up by restaurants of a more elevated nature.
I can just see the famous French Laundry allowing you to take Mensa tests while waiting for Hubert Keller’s kitchen to raise your palate to a Pavlovian pitch.
I can definitely imagine Alain Ducasse using the screens to teach dumb foreigners for once, just once, to pronounce ONE French dish correctly. “REPETEZ! FWA GRA!! NOT FOYE GRASS!!!”
And wouldn’t you just adore it if Gordon Ramsay, a man who uses the f-word even more than your average offensive lineman, got together with those adorable entertainers at Ultimate Fighting and used the screens to show you the optimal maneuvers involved in punching out a slapdash sous-chef?
For those of you who wish to hotfoot it this instant to have a quick uWink, it appears from their Web site that there is only one franchise, situated in the Westfield Promenade in Woodland Hills, California.
I am heartened that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the dominant business sector in the area is “Professional, Scientific and Technical Services.” By a margin of two to one.
November 9th, 2007
Barbie Key Signings
If the upcoming Christmas season goes according to Mattel’s plan, your pre-teen daughter might be spending their post-holiday week at her friend’s houses doing what amounts to good, old-fashioned key signings.
Mattel has a free virtual world for pre-teen girls called Barbie’s World that let’s friends talk to their virtual friends using a feature called Secret B Chat. In order to protect these innocents from the bad guys, Mattel only let’s girls chat with people they know in real life.
How do you prove you know someone in real life? Mattel sells a $60 MP3 player that CNN Money lists as one of the 12 best toys of 2007. The MP3 player can be used with an array of fashion accessories (sold separately, I’m sure).
The player also contains an unique identifier. If Betty wants to prove that Veronica is her best friend, they plug Veronica’s Barbie Girl MP3 player into Betty’s docking station and the (Window’s only) Mattel software then links Veronica as one of Betty’s “best friends.” Once Veronica is linked to Betty, they can chat.
Mattel could, of course, do the same thing by letting parents control a whitelist of friends, but that would actually put parents in touch with their kids and avoid an incredibly viral way of selling $60 toys. I can hear Betty whining to her parents already: “But I have to have a Barbie Girls MP3 player or Veronica won’t be my friend and my life will be ruined!”
Phil Windley is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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