Did The Internet Just Break Christmas?

Hundreds and possibly thousands of presents did not get delivered on time and did not get placed under the tree for friends, family and children to open on Christmas morning. This act, or lack there-of, potentially killed the spirit of giving, Christmas and not to mention Santa’s reputation.

Hundreds and possibly thousands of businesses lowered prices, advertised new deals, and promised last minute, just in time, delivery of what everybody wanted to buy for Christmas.

Hundreds and possibly thousands of people bought into this hype and helped enable this online Internet retail thing to break Christmas.

Of course the Internet was not the real culprit, people were – and still are. Greed, instant gratification, broken promises, lack of planning, lack of resources, and the easy click of a mouse button all contributed to the breaking of Christmas. The Internet was just the latest delivery mechanism.

In my real job, I work with technology – and people – every day. I understand how technology can and often does make things better for people and businesses alike. I also work and deal with the risks involved with using this technology. But the ironic thing is, I spend most of my time, not dealing with the technology, but with the people.

And that is what is really important, not the technology, not the money, but the people and the relationships we build together.

Eventually retailers, vendors, logistic companies, technology geeks such as myself, and consumers will figure out what went wrong, make improvements and enable the system to work even better to deliver even more, even faster and – hopefully – time.

But that has nothing to do with Christmas.

Manti Te’o Girlfriend Bobble-Head Night

I’m sorry, this has gone too far.

Hilariously too far, but none the less – too far.

An independent baseball team, the Florence Freedom of the Frontier League, are having a Manti Te’o Girlfriend Bobble-head Night.

They are giving away an empty box.

Yes, the imaginary bobble-head can be what ever you want it to be.  And to top it all off, fans who receive said bobble-head, can sit in a reserved section where they will have the opportunity to blow air kisses, play air guitar, and have imaginary food fights.

I hope Manti Te’o is of sound mind.  All of this ridicule online could push somebody of suspect emotional stability over the edge.  I hope not, he really is a good football player.

 

 

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder = Swoopo

Internet Shopping at it’s best / worst…
These folks are fiendishly cunning.

Too bad I didn’t think of it…

Oh yeah, I remember now…

Damn ethics, morals and basic good principles…

From: The Big Money By Mark Gimein
Sunday, July 12, 2009

Imagine for a second that you’ve set out to come up with an online shopping site that would take advantage of everything we know about consumer behavior.

Your goal is to separate people from their money as efficiently as possible. What would you do? You’d probably try to draw buyers in with bargain prices. You’d pit them against one another in an auction. You’d ask them to make snap decisions without taking much time to figure out just how much money they’re spending. On top of that, you’d ask for only very small amounts of money at any one time, letting payments of a few cents build to hundreds of dollars.

But relax. Someone’s beaten you to it: the folks at Swoopo.com. It’s an online auction site that fiendishly plays on every irrational impulse buyers have to draw them in to what might be the crack cocaine of online shopping sites.

I discovered Swoopo through an online ad plugging its latest deal, a fancy desktop computer at more than 90 percent off. If you are already saying to yourself that there is a catch, you are right. Swoopo, which bills itself as an “entertainment shopping” site, combines the addictiveness of auctions and the chance of lotteries into what may be the most devious way to separate folks from their money yet devised.

At first glance, Swoopo.com — which began in Germany as a phone and TV-based auction site called Telebid, migrated to the web as “Swoopo,” and launched its U.S. site last year — looks like an auction site patterned on eBay, with prices for most items starting at a penny and rising as members “bid” up the price. Like eBay, Swoopo has a full panoply of auction tools, such as comprehensive records of all completed auctions and an electronic bidding system (“Bid Butler”) that will put in last-second bids to keep you in the auction. Unlike eBay, however, on Swoopo you pay 60 cents each time you make a bid.

Sixty cents? Sure doesn’t sound like much when a $1,000-plus camera or computer is at stake. But consider the MacBook Pro that Swoopo sold recently for $35.86. Swoopo lists its suggested retail price at $1,799. But then look at what the bidding fee does. For each “bid,” the price of the computer goes up by a penny, and Swoopo collects 60 cents. To get up to $35.86, it takes a stunning 3,585 bids — and Swoopo gets its fee for each. That means that before selling this computer, Swoopo took in $2,151 in bidding fees. Yikes.

In essence, what your 60-cent bidding fee gets you at Swoopo is a ticket to a lottery, with a chance to get a high-end item at a ridiculously low price. With each bid, the auction is extended for a few seconds to keep it going as long as someone in the world is willing to take just one more shot. This can go on for a very, very long time. The winner of the MacBook Pro auction bid more than 750 times, accumulating $469.80 in fees.

What makes Swoopo so fiendishly compelling is the tendency of people to think of the bids that they have already put in as a “sunk cost” — money that they have already put toward buying the item. This is an illusion. The fact that you have already bid 200 times does not mean that your chance of winning on the 201st bid is any higher than it was at the very beginning. A new bidder can come in at any time and at the cost of a mere 60 cents jump into the auction in which you’ve already spent more than $100. The money you’ve put in has gotten you no closer to the goal than a losing raffle ticket.

Some of the ideas behind Swoopo have been explored in a theoretical way by game theorists. The reluctance of bidders to say goodbye to their “sunk cost” has been explored by economists such as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky — and has been found to draw bidders deeper into the game. Swoopo plays off those insights to efficiently get people to make bad choices. It’s the evil stepchild of game theory and behavioral economics.

Another irrational impulse Swoopo plays off of is an urge to believe that there must be some strategy that beats the system. As Swoopo’s own business development director, Chris Bauman, told one blogger: “Winning takes two things: money and patience. Every person has a strategy.” Indeed, they undoubtedly do. The problem is that none of those strategies will actually work. Just remember that no matter how many times you bid, your chance of winning does not increase. And the bigger Swoopo gets, the worse it will be. The more people sign on to bid, the lower your chances become — and the more Swoopo collects in bidding charges. The only winning strategy is not to play in the first place.

Comcastic !

And I mean this in a good way!

OK, so we have been on Comcast for over a week now and so far I have nothing but good reviews for them, their service and overall customer satisfaction!

Truely 3 for the price of 1 and new and improved internet speeds.

Certainly beats the 768 Kbps download and 384 Kbps upload speeds I used to get with my DSL!

3 for 1

I like bargains.

Who doesn’t.

So when I saw a Promotional Package from our cable provider for their HD Triple Play deal for about the same price we are currently paying for cable alone; it got my interest.

You see, HD Triple Play is cable service, Internet service and unlimited local and long distance digital phone service all rolled into one package.

I had actually started looking into all the VOIP service providers out there with the intent on getting rid of our current phone bill, and there are certainly plenty of them out there. Just do a search for “Internet voip providers” and you will get plenty of sites which compare plans and providers.

There was also a company which has a phone device / system which can be purchased in many local retail stores such as Best Buy. They are called OOMA.

So anyway, back to my cable provider and their deal. The more I thought about this, the more I liked the idea of giving them a try.

For the price of my current cable bill, I get the following:

– The exact same channels and options I currently have from cable, HD channels, and programming.
– I greatly increase my bandwidth for Internet access from my current DSL connection to that of Cable.
– I get to use the same phone number I always have with all the same call waiting and caller ID features including voicemail.
– I get to do away with my DSL Internet service bill.
– I get to do away with my Phone bill.
– Yes my new cable bill is a combination of all those, but as I said at the beginning. I am not paying much more to the cable company for all of these service than I already am. The difference is literally 7 whole dollars.
– 3 for the price of one.
– And their voicemail is accessible not only from the phone but from the Internet as well. You can even respond back to a person who left you a message via email.
– I also have one belly button to push should something go wrong.
– And everything is on one bill, which will be paid automatically.

Hopefully the biggest hassle will be to adequately change all my Internet email addresses.

Perhaps I will technically keep the DSL Internet access going for a few weeks. That way I can still access the old email via the web just to make sure.

Oh and an interesting side note. While I was researching all this, I naturally had some questions for my cable company. So, one evening while watching the kids and TV (sort of) I figured I’d go online and try out their support pages. They give you the option of opening a secure chat window with a service representative, so I figured I could watch one more thing and try it out. When I connected the window said I was 18th in the queue. Great, I’m on hold. I probably should have turned the sound up on my laptop to find out if their was also the obligatory elevator waiting Muzak.

Anyway, it was not too bad a wait. About 10 – 15 minutes. The interesting thing was that twice I noticed that my number in line went back up! In other words, one minute I was 7th, then the next I was back up to 8th! I wondered who could be more important than me?

Well, when I finally decided to purchase the package deal, I naturally did it all online. As a last confirmation part, they automatically open up a secure chat window with a representative to confirm everything and answer any questions.

Guess What?

I was now one of the important people…

I entered the queue next in line and I realized that new service payment customers, new money, are more important than current old customers, old money, with nagging questions and, that I just bumped everyone else waiting online back up another number… 😉

Anyway, it seems to be a great deal. I’ll see just how great after next Tuesday when they come to make the actual switch and installations.