Walmart TV

Just walking through Walmart… Can’t believe it but they installed flat screen TVs at every 4th isle. They run ads and short episodes of this cartoon family.

I can see where they can take this with RFID capable credit cards to personalize ads… Bit far fetched but who knows what the future will bring. Reminds me of that movie… Minority Report.

What was even funnier was the women on the PA reminding us there was “only 4 months remaining before the holiday season” … !?!

Napoleon is dead, long live… The Borg?

Been doing a lot of traveling for work these days which gave me a lot of airplane time to listen to my audiobooks.

Currently in the middle of the book, The Starfish and the Spider, by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom

The book relates the hierarchical style of an organizations vs. a flat or community style. Lot’s of storytelling here including how the advanced hierarchical Aztec society was taken down easily by the Spanish by walking into each city and the killing their king. However, when they encountered the Apache Indians who were a distributed community society, it wasn’t so easy.

It then relates this to today with what’s happening thanks to the internet and entities like eMule and Skype.

… and the disruption they’ve caused in the music and telecommunication industries. The music industry successfully sued Napster out of the free P2P market, but only to be replaced by others who were lawyer proof.

Chop a spider’s head off and it dies… cut a starfish in half and you end up with 2 starfish. The benefits of a distributed neural network.

iPhone Finally Coming to Canada!

After a long wait, Rogers announced they have an agreement with Apple to start selling the iPhone in Canada later this year. As you can tell, I’m eager to get my hands on one.

Only problem is according to rumours, sounds like the price of the phone itself and the plan will be ridiculously expensive. Making it still worth the trip to Buffalo (or other neighbouring US city) to buy and then simply unlock.

Wondering if the plan is to wait until the next generation iPhone is out before the Rogers release. Makes (business) sense. Apple also wouldn’t want to screw with their customers and release it in Canada, shortly before releasing the next gen iPhone and upsetting a bunch of new Canadian iPhoners. Well, us Canadians don’t get that upset. We’ll just limit our iTunes spending to 85% normal and won’t join the iPhone Facebook fan club. That’ll teach you Apple! Almost as affective as our protest to get a better Toronto Maple Leafs team by buying up all the season tickets for the next 8 years.

iPhone: All-in-one wonder?

You can see it happening… one single device that will do everything: phone, music, video, gaming, internet, and who knows what else.

Still not sure whether the iPhone will be this ultimate device, but with the announce of its SDK this week, it’s one step closer.

I’m curious to see how the device/internet big boys (Sony, Google, etc) are going to react to this.

Life: The Movie .. starring you!

While listening to The John Moore Show on the radio, John made an interesting comment about the relationship of music and commerce and its evolution. The fact that merchants have moved recently from muzak form the 20’s to more current theme based music in their stores.

The idea behind this movement is to throw you, the customer, into a scene. For example, when entering Abercrombe & Fitch the background of Alternative Rock is meant to carry you into a music video, and the background jazz playing at a Starbucks places you in one of the scenes of When Harry Met Sally.

Are we looking to escape? There could be some truth to that. It could explain why the iPod is carrying Apple to new heights. And why more and more people are strutting through most of their days with white earbuds in their ears.

We all just wanna be stars.

Odds are…

I crave McDonald’s once in a while.. who doesn’t.

The restaurant chain is running the Monopoly promo game once again, and at my last craving I actually started dreaming of winning the $10,000 prize given with one combo I acquired both Illinois and Indiana Ave (the reds) and missing just one.

… until I found the odds of winnng and was brought back to reality. Damn you Kentucky Ave.!

If anyone has Kentucky.. I wanna be you’re friend. :)

Though I did hear about one McDonald’s promo that was cracked. BestBuy’s promo where they gave away $ off coupons through McDonald’s items, similar to Monopoly. Bestbuy though gave away a min prize every time, but they didn’t do the math.

With these types of promos, they need to provide a way to play without the purchase of a product (by law). All you need is a self-addressed stamped envelope and they’ll mail you back a sticker. Well.. the cost of mailing the envelope was always less than minimum prize ($1 off). So as long as you needed something from BB… :)

I don’t think BB will repeat that promo, but I’m sure Canada Post won’t mind if they do.

Don’t forget to tip Radiohead

Last week, Radiohead released their latest (7th) album called In Rainbows.

Why is this worth a blog post besides the rave reviews it’s receiving? Well, now that they finished their contract with record label EMI, they decided to distribute this album in a unique way. The album is currently only available in DRM-free digital format, and let’s you the consumer, decide the price. Yes, the site accepts $0.00. However, many fans did appreciate the gesture and were willing to pay an average price of $8 for the album. This is apparently not a new thing. This phenomenon is dubbed “tipping”, or also referred to as “warm glow“. Could this be the business model that the music industry is looking for?