Archive for February, 2007
Smile
Feb 6
This week’s winner of the site of the week contest was FindAGrave.com While the over arching theme of the site is a little dark and morbid, the site is defintely loaded up with some great information and serves as an excellent compliment to another previous site of the week winner, The Birthday Database. Find a grave allows you to search through 14 million cemetery records and locate where someone is buried.
It allows you to search for graves in a number of ways. You can look up someone by their date of birth, when they died, the state that they are buried in and of course by name. When I first saw the site, I mostly used it to oggle all of the celebrity graves that they had, but having the ability to look up people that you have known turned out to be a much more powerful feature for the site. I didn’t find everyone that I was looking for, but I found enough people for the site to impress me.
One of the cool features about the site is that if you have a photo of someone’s grave or a cemetery, they allow you to upload the picture so that people can actually see the grave from the internet. They don’t have anywhere near 14 million photos, but they do have a lot of the celebrity grave photos and for those who’ve uploaded photos to the site, it really helps to personalize the graves.
Congratulations to Find A Grave for winning this week’s site of the week contest. Here are the nominations for next week’s site. You can vote for your favorite in the sidebar. To nominate a site, you can email me at Davis
Star Wars In The Hood
Feb 1
This highly entertaining NSFW mashup combines Star Wars with gangsta rap in an East vs. West rivalry between the rebellion and the dark side of the force that any true geek would absolutely love. There is also a second mashup floating around out there that is even more NSFW, but still worth checking out, especially if you ever wondered what Star Wars would have been like, had Spike Lee been hired to direct the film.
Most people don’t think about what happens to a check once you deposit it at the bank, but during the late 90′s a friend of mine worked for a company that was responsible for processing many of these checks. During that time, electronic checks still weren’t mainstream, but as technology moved forward, she had a first hand look at how dangerous technology can be to an industry that doesn’t quite know how to evolve.
As electronic banking has continued to grow in popularity, it’s had a devasting effect on the check processing business. While this trend, eventually cost my friend her job, it’s also made it easier and quicker for consumers to be able to pay their bills. As more and more transactions have moved to an electronic format, banks have seen significant cost savings from not having to physically process these checks.
In an effort to make it even easier for their customers to deposit their checks, USAA bank is initiating a program where you can scan a physical check and have it deposited electronically into your account by emailing it to the bank. USAA has adopted this strategy in part, to address the limited number of physical locations that they have, but I’m sure that it will also help to reduce their costs.
While I hate to see technology impact people’s livelihood, at the same time when consumers can win and businesses can save money, there are real advantages to these sorts of technological shifts. Initially, USAA may be the only one experimenting with this new form of depositing money, but if their program proves to be a success, we could see more major banks jump on board in order to save on costs. As the internet continues to radically transform every industry that it comes in contact with, it will be fascinating to watch how different industries react.
Blockbuster video announced today that they will be bringing back their lovable Carl and Ray campaign for this year’s Super Bowl spot. If you haven’t seen the clips, you can find them on YouTube or most of the other video sharing sites. I’ve never been a big fan of renting from Blockbuster, but I have to admit that I love these ads. The spots do a great job of infusing humor into the marketing message and the cuteness factor of digitally animated pets has an especially broad appeal for a spot that will be seen by such a large audience.
I’m still not convinced that advertising during the Super Bowl gives Blockbuster the biggest bang for their buck, but at least this year’s commercial should be much more entertaining, then the lackluster spot that they produced for last year’s Super Bowl match up. Blockbuster’s press release only mentions, the upcoming Super Bowl spot, but I wouldn’t mind if they extended the campaign even beyond that, so that more viral ads will show up.
The Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) ran a study where they looked at PVR usuage in the US and in Canada and determined that only 5% of all Canadians are currently using PVRs and only 38% were even familiar with how they worked. When they surveyed American consumers, the number of people who have PVRs jumps up 15%, but even at that level, it’s still a pretty small number given how powerful the technology really is.
The crazy thing about a PVR is that it’s really tough to demonstrate the benefits to someone without seeing it first hand, but once a consumer experiences the power of time shifting, it’s very tough for them to go back to live TV.
When I bought my first TiVo, it was actually on accident. I had gone to Best Buy to buy a home theater system, but the sound set up that I wanted was a little too expensive. Rather than go home empty handed, I made an impulse decision when I saw the TiVo and after taking it home was immedietely floored with how transformative the technology was. Going from a world where you had to schedule your TV to a world where everything was available on my own schedule had a huge impact on my life and instantly made me an evangelist for the company.
Not only was I able to watch more TV, but I found that I starting hanging out with friends more on week nights, because I didn’t have to race home to catch my favorite shows. I also found that my TV became more engaging because I stopped missing episodes and found it easy to stay caught up on my favorite shows. After only a month, I was already telling everyone I knew that they needed to get a TiVo, so that they could take control over their own television viewing, but had limited success in convincing people I knew to try the product. The few friends who did go out and buy a TiVo still love their boxes today, but it wasn’t until they had already spent the upfront money and signed up for a subscription with TiVo before they realized how amazing DVRs really can be.
The US cable market has helped spread awareness of the DVR by renting it directly to consumers, but even without the up front cost, it’s still been surprisingly difficult to convince consumers to adopt the technology on a mass scale. TiVo has also experimented with a stripped down basic version that DirecTV users can demo before upgrading to a paid package, but it hasn’t solved the problem of getting consumers to pay for their box. When the TiVo/Comcast/Cox download is finally ready to go live, I’m hoping that TiVo will be able to offer consumers a free month, so that they can experience the benefits of TiVo over a generic DVR before committing to a purchase, but I’m not sure how difficult it would be to unistall their operating system, in case consumers wanted to go back down to the stripped out generic box. As time goes on, I have no doubt that the PVR will continue to gain in popularity, but given that it’s been 8 years since TiVo first launched their DVR box, it still surprises me when I see how few consumers have really tried it out.