Photo Stamps
For a little more than double the regular price you can buy USPS approved stamps with your picture on them! They might find some buyers amongst the Ark boarders:
Via Chaos Digest.
Marketing
Nielson Media
The Modulator family received a card today from Nielsen Media Research telling us
…that your household has been chosen to be a “Nielsen Family” …for a one week TV survey.
Cool. We’ll probably do this. We appreciate that they contacted in advance and, of course, their positive response rate is probably much higher than if they did not send the card.
For instance, I did not respond well to the outfit that called a couple weeks ago asking me to participate in a survey about current issues. They called while we were eating dinner and wanted to ask 80 questions. Yea, I’m going to sit there and answer 80 questions for a complete stranger and they didn’t even offer any compensation for my time.
I’m not going to ask Nielsen to pay for our time. However, their customers are not going to be real happy when our TV viewing habits are projected nationally. In the past week TV has garned 5 hours of my time and 2.5 of those were watching the PBS showing of The Grateful Dead movie a couple nights ago, .5 for the Canadian version of Antique Roadshow, 1 for 2 editions of Jeopardy and the rest for portions of the NBA finals. By the time we get set up for their survey the NBA will be done and, well, we probably won’t watch much.
On the other hand the Tour de France will have started and we’ll watch a couple hours/day.
If You Liked Paris Eating Burgers…
..why, then, you’ll love this (turn your audio down a bit if at work). Heck, you’ll laugh even if you haven’t seen the original.
Via Good Morning Silicon Valley.
No More Netgear Equipment
Tegan will not be buying any Netgear equipment in the future:
So that’s it. I’ll never buy another one of their products again. And if anyone asks me, I’ll tell them to avoid Netgear like the plague, because Netgear doesn’t care about its customers.
I used to be a happy Netgear customer as well but the last Netgear wireless router I bought was incredibly flaky so I spent $60 on a newer Belkin model which has been just fine for the last year.
This equipment is becoming so inexpensive and so widely distributed that I don’t believe vendors can really afford to provide much direct customer support. So, the product better work out of the box, be well documented both online and with a local copy (hey, if it is broken you may not be able to get online) and the software upgrade process should be a snap.
Hey, when my $39-$69 phone breaks I just toss it in the trash and go to the nearest store and buy another one which may not be the same brand.
Same with home routers.
Chicago Crime
This is good stuff!
I expect that we will see this propagate across the country and I expect that this kind of stuff is the smallest tip of the iceberg. For this specific application I’d like to see a map of arrests as well. Something that shows where the arrests are happening and how effective law enforcement is in resolving real crimes…like, murder, burglary, theft, battery, etc.
There will be many, many more creative add-ons to the Google interface. I’d be shocked if Google didn’t have more really hot stuff in the pipeline.
With just a little thought it is possible to identify applications that could change some significant markets and greatly enhance peoples lives.
Via beSpacific.