Business Strategy, Personal Development, Marketing
I am a big fan of Woot. Like many others, I like their deal-of-the-day and follow it on a pretty regular basis. Refurbished Roombas are very common on the site. Refurbished Roombas on Woot In case you aren’t familiar with it, Woot.net offers deals every day. When deals are sold out, it is gone. Sometimes … Read more
They call it “fees.” The reality is that it is false pricing. The airline industry, through consolidation and relentless cost cutting, has turned itself, with few exceptions, into an indistinguishable commodity. For the average, non-million mile, traveller, there is little difference between United Airlines and American Airlines. Both charge you to check a bag, neither … Read more
There are a lot of articles out there this week about Amazon raising the minimum purchase for free shipping. This is not a price increase, so much as a price cut for Amazon Prime. Consider that Amazon Prime makes up a lot of Amazon’s revenue these days. It’s similar to the model that Costco uses … Read more
Last month, Tesla’s general council gave an explanation to the FTC about why Tesla sells its cars directly to customers instead of using the traditional car dealership model. Of course, the remarks were carefully researched, vetted, and tested so as to not create any unpleasant blow back. That also made them slightly less truthful than … Read more
A 60 Minutes tweet and report suggest that the latest Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, needs to make $1.5 BILLION to be considered a success. That number seems pretty high considering the movie cost just $220 million to make, and even a huge marketing number gets you nowhere near $1.5 Billion. Frankly, one wonders … Read more
So, here is an interesting idea. Uber needs drivers to drive around the customers who book a ride on the Uber app. Traditionally, that means having your own car, and not just any car. The car has to meet Uber’s standards. While these standards have been loosened recently, they do still require a relatively newer … Read more
Several years ago I bought a netbook. At the time, there was no iPad, there most certainly was no such thing as a Chromebook. There may have been the first iPhone, although I do not recall for certain. I liked my netbook. It was underpowered compared to other computers around, and certainly compared to other … Read more
Recent news reports suggest that Sprint is looking into the possibility of buying out rival wireless carrier T-Mobile. On one hand, this is a possibly strategic merger between the number three and number four wireless carriers. Even with the buyout, Sprint would remain the number three carrier beyond the much bigger Verizon and AT&T. On … Read more
After sleeping on it over the weekend, I can’t help but think that traditional television has committed suicide, and doesn’t know it yet. In the traditional television model, a producer puts together a television show and sells it to a TV network. Occasionally, the process works the other way around, but for the most part, … Read more
One of the things that makes Mozilla’s Firefox browser so versatile is the wide array of add-ons and plugins users can use to customize exactly how the browser looks, works and feels. Plenty of addons, like Firebug, add functionality that goes above and beyond what is necessary in a standard web browser. However, all of … Read more
Here is something very interesting. Warner Bros. is trying out offering movie rentals via Facebook. Using Facebook’s own Facebook Credit payment system, the company is offering online movie rentals of The Dark Night. What makes this new business strategy so interesting is that it completely cuts out the middle man companies that Warner Bros. currently … Read more
Someone complained when I made the comment that shoppers may tire quickly of Groupon’s daily deals now that the initial buzz has worn off. My point what that when Groupon started the idea of a sky diving lessons or massages for low prices was compelling because those were things that many people wanted to do … Read more