Advertising & Fruit
When you buy fruit, what do you do before eating. You peel off any sticker(s), price or product SKU, wash the fruit if needed and bite into it.
Well…recently I bought some bananas and was about to eat one until I noticed the sticker on one of the bananas. It was not a product SKU. It was an advertisement for the movie “Space Chimps”. I was amused that now Dole is using the fruit for advertising! I haven’t gone to examine other fruits and vegetables but I wouldn’t be surprised if advertisers aren’t doing more of this.
I can see this concept can stretch too far and now any product that offers a surface for advertising becomes a platform for reach you. As it is we have too much information coming to us, do we really need our food products to be advertising billboards. Of course, cereal boxes, chips bags are already full of advertisements but I think this is a new trend.
I wonder how does a marketer keep track of such advertising campaigns! How do they track return on investment? That is some food for thought 
Helium balloon law in California
Recently there is some legislation debate, in the state of California, on imposing a fine on sellers of Helium balloons if they sell balloons without a weight. The law makers are saying that balloons cause a problem when they get tangled in electrical lines and they want to fine $100 to anyone selling helium balloons without a weight on the string. I don’t know if the fine will apply to sellers or it will be expanded to include buyers.
While this may be a legitimate problem for utility companies, what is the cost for the taxpayers to pass a bill through legislation vs. the benefit it provides? Sometimes the work pipeline gets filled with similar tasks. We need to pay attention to the cost/benefit analysis so that we work on those things with highest impact.
If you want to read the news article, visit Wall Street Journal
Is Yahoo doomed?
All the press articles like to use superlatives and forecast a scenario which may or may reflect the truth. Lately Yahoo has the target of such articles. Granted that Yahoo is trying to find focus in the current market scenario with Google leading the way. Microsoft’s bid put the wrong kind of attention on the company. Microsoft wanted to buy Yahoo because Yahoo represents something to them. It is not like the company is worth nothing and Microsoft isn’t throwing its money.
I don’t really know how people inside the company feel but if they were to read the articles they may get the impression that the company is going down fast. This will likely make people jump ship to ensure that they have a secure job.
It may be healthy for Yahoo to go through such a cleanup process so that all the people who are not interested in the company can leave. Of course there will also be some collatral damage with loss of good passionate people who think they can’t fulfill their dreams at Yahoo. Others may leave just to avoid all the distractions at work of the uncertain future of the corporation and lack of direction in the day to day initiatives as senior management focuses on possible outcomes. The folks that remain have a change to re-focus and try to keep the company going. It is going to be an interesting year to see what happens at Yahoo.
Sometimes public perception can decide the fate of the company without any basis on factual data. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy of doom. Let’s see what happens.
Air Travel and associated costs
Recently I read an article saying that US Airways now charges $2 for a bottle of water on the flight. What I find really annoying is that you are being charged for every little thing or rather they are itemizing your charges.
At first it was charge for second checked baggage. Now you have to pay for even the first checked bag. Since the price is for 50 lbs, you need to be extra careful as it is really dependent on the mood of the person who weighs your bags. If you are a couple of pounds over, you could be asked to fork over more money.
I also heard from friend that another airline charges you $4 for a blanket. Though some people are joking that tickets will be priced per pound of weight (not the bags but the passengers)!
Why don’t they just raise the ticket prices and have the customer pay just a single amount. This will really allow customers to see the costs upfront and they will decide whether to go on that trip or not. I guess that will be bad for airlines as most people will get a sticker shock and decide to choose alternate modes of travel unless it is a must.
I guess airlines really need to reexamine the workings of their business and figure out how to be in business. After 2001, the 911 excuses could be used for ever. Now we have the rising fuel costs, I wonder what excuse will be use to account for the bleeding bottom line.
Metered internet
With soaring gas prices and huge profits for oil companies, some big internet service providers (AT&T, Comcast) are now thinking of charging customers based on the bandwidth consumed to get more revenue. The argument is that while one person is using minimal bandwidth for occasional emails vs. there are those who download movies and other rich media thus consume more bandwidth.
Having a limit on bandwidth usage will restrict or even change the usage patterns for internet users. Guess what consumes least bandwidth, pure text based traffic. Will websites be rewritten to optimize bandwidth usage? I don’t think so.
You would think that due to competitive markets, large companies would do everything in their means to woo customers. Instead they follow suit and thus impose similar metered policies on their customers, if one player begins metering. Wouldn’t it make sense that they observed over a period of time if the users are really abusing the service and then work out an altenate arrangement with specific users. I guess that would be too much work to deal with customers on a case by case basis. My local internet service provider is now offering fiber to the home with unlimited usage and their policy is to enable people to develop businesses and when the bandwidth usage is way out of line, then ask them to pay business rates. If you are in the service area for one of these large companies, please make sure you voice your opinion otherwise you might get stuck with a service plan that will make you think twice about which sites and content to view.
Here is an article from NY Times on this topic: http://tinyurl.com/4de2ro
Update 6/17:
Most home users may not be using much bandwidth but home office workers may not want to think about bandwidth for the convenience of working from home. In other countries internet usage is already metered so it is a matter of getting used to tiered pricing but I doubt the base rate for minimum usage will be very low.
One side effect of metered downloads might be that people may start using internet at work to download large files such as Linux distribution images or other software.
Amazon.com Outage and Cloud Computing
If you are a regular Amazon.com user or you have read about outage of Amazon.com’s public facing site, then you might assume that cloud computing (i.e. web services) were also affected. Web services and international sites were not affected.
Unfortunately the way news gets reported, such important details are buried in the long body. See http://tinyurl.com/5jh4w7 The fact that web services and international sites were not affected is noted towards the end of the article.
Personally I would like to see a summary format where important details are communicated within the first few seconds. Here is an example:
BREAKING NEWS SUMMARY
AFFECTED SERVICES
CONTACT DETAILS FOR MORE INFORMATION
How do you get your news?
How do you go about reading your news? I don’t say that news is always worth reading/viewing but if you are interested in current affairs around the world, what are your sources? The following video of a TED talk (< 5 min) gives an interesting map of the world according to the news stories presented on major networks.
I think it is also interest level in understanding the world scene that drives the news ratings. The major news networks are driven by pure economics. What sells is sensation and not thought provoking articles! What’s your take on this topic?
In case you are unable to view the video, the original link: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/248
Baggage rules - more changes
Back in March 2008, I posted an entry on Domestic US Travel – Baggage rules changed!.
I just read the news article that says that American Airlines will start charging $15 for first checked bag (effective June 15). I wonder if additional bags are going to be charged more per bag. I suspect other airlines will soon follow suit.
The other day I saw an advertisement by Air India offering tickets for $600 for trip from NY to any destination within India that is serviced by Air India. While this looks very tempting, the fine print read out all the extra taxes and fees which were about $500. Pretty soon the airlines will start advertising the fare is only $x but the fees and extra charges amount to $2x.
<sarcasm>Instead of charging more for each checked bag, perhaps each airline should put a collection jar - asking for donations to offset rising fuel costs!</sarcasm>
Perhaps it is time for companies to reward workers (full time or part time) who can telecommute and save the companies some money. Technology provides many choices for telecommuting and unless a face to face is a MUST, companies should encourage people to work remotely.
AVG 8 - Free AntiVirus kills performance
I was using AVG 7.5 Free Anti-virus program on one of my machines. AVG 7.5 is being phased out in favor of the new AVG 8 so everyone is being notified to upgrade. I upgraded and guess what the performance of an XP machine is down to a crawl. The Resident Shield component of the program takes over CPU time and other processes are brought to their knees. One of the options is to turn off Resident Shield but then Windows Security complains that anti-virus is not turned on. Finally I got tired and decided to give PC Tools – Anti Virus a try. Looks like I might switch and pay for the PC Tools versions which allows 3 licenses for a low price of $50.00.
If you are using AVG 7.5, beware of the upgrade.
Domestic US Travel - Baggage rules changed!
Did you know that beginning May 5, some of the larger airlines are going to charge for the 2nd bag? Yes, those are some changes coming your way. Here is a sample from United: United Airlines Baggage Allowance
If you are traveling for a short business trip it may not matter. If you are traveling on your nickel and going for economy fares, then you will be restricted to free baggage allowance of 1 bag weighing 50 lbs or less! Also, all the airlines making this change are making it effective May 5! Is this a racket or what?