order

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5574937/starbucks-is-slowly-reviving-the-coffee-nerding-of-america

Starbucks Is Slowly Reviving the Coffee Nerding of AmericaThe Clover was a nerd’s way to make coffee. Every parameter precisely, digitally controlled, for the most of tweaky of experimentation—or you can make the exact same cup over and over. Then Starbucks bought the company.

What happened next: Waves of independent coffee shops ditched their $10,000 Clover machines, for practical and philosophical reasons. Starbucks rolled them out to 50ish stores across the Northeast, Seattle and San Francisco. Then expansion stopped. That was almost two years ago.

Starbucks’ first Clover showed up in New York around two months ago, in a nearly 20-year-old location that’s been converted into a concept store. The thaw is beginning. Starbucks plans to finally expand the Clover’s footprint gradually over the next 6-8 months, as they figure out how to integrate the machine into the natural rhythm of stores—which is basically dominated by Frappuccinos these days, not coffee.

In a way, it’s a hard sell. The kind of people who would be most interested in coffee made via Clover, designed to pull the most out of a coffee—so shitty coffee would taste shittier—don’t go to Starbucks. Starbucks is so reviled by people who actually like coffee that they’ve experimented with burying the Starbucks name two pilot stores in Seattle which are designed to look more like the kind of place that serves Intelligentsia or Stumptown coffee. So it’s heartening to see them try to live up a bit more to the ideals of caring about coffee and how it’s served.

Starbucks Is Slowly Reviving the Coffee Nerding of AmericaFor instance, while 30 days is what Starbucks considers the expiration date on beans in a store—16 days longer than any self-conscious shop would serve them—if you order a cup made with Clover, you’re far more likely to get beans roasted within the 2-week mark. (In part because there are limited quantities of some coffees served using Clover, like the Jamaica Blue Mountain they’re offering starting tomorrow.)

They’re also making use of their spin on Clovernet, which was one of the big hype points of the machine: Shops and their baristas could share, upload and download recipes for coffees made via Clover. Starbucks pushes recipes for each coffee it serves on the Clover—around 4-6—to stores via a similar network, so there are custom parameters for each coffee. African coffees get a different treatment versus South American ones, as they should.

For all the technology in the Clover, though, it ultimately comes down to the guy (or girl) handling it. Hopefully, it’s someone nerdy enough to know what the Clover was before it landed in front of them at Starbucks.

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Monday, June 28th, 2010 Uncategorized No Comments

Nielsen IAG Top Ten Most-Recalled In-Program Placements: Dramas/Comedies

Sex sells … well, sex .. but not much else. Victoria’s Secret was the most recalled product placement on TV — fortunately they sell products related to what was recalled. Not so sure about the mayo and cell phone.

Source:  http://adage.com/madisonandvine/article?article_id=143808

iaglogo415x29 Nielsen IAG Top Ten Most Recalled In Program Placements: Dramas/Comedies
Rank Brand In-Program Placement Description Program Airing Info Recall Index
1 Victoria’s Secret Michael interrupts meeting to offer Donna a retail store’s catalog The Office (NBC, Apr 29) 214
2 Ford Cole Austin points to his Mustang and says he still owns it Cold Case (CBS, May 2) 190
3 Skype Joyce tells Benson and Stabler that she talks to Andrew online Law and Order: SVU (NBC, Apr 7) 183
4 Yamaha Susan explains to Mike that she has inherited a piano Desperate Housewives (ABC, May 2) 181
5 Rolex Provo tells Fin that Jack stole his watch; member of the cooking staff is wearing it Law and Order: SVU (NBC, Apr 7) 178
6 MedTec Name is visible on the ambulance doors Trauma (NBC, Apr 5) 176
7 Toyota Mitchell and Cameron park their car at Charlie’s house Modern Family (ABC, Apr 14) 161
8 Chevrolet Winston drives with Guerrero, who identifies the car as a Camaro Human Target (FOX, Apr 7) 155
9 Porsche Zack asks Nick where he got his car from Accidentally On Purpose (CBS, Apr 21) 152
10 Chevrolet Pres. Hasaan rides in a black SUV after turning himself over to terrorists 24 (FOX, Apr 5) 147

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Friday, May 14th, 2010 Uncategorized 1 Comment

Offermatic Gives You Sizeable Discounts Based on Your Spending Habits

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5532835/offermatic-gives-you-sizeable-discounts-based-on-your-spending-habits

Offermatic Gives You Sizeable Discounts Based on Your Spending HabitsThe best discounts are for things you actually buy. Free web service Offermatic uses your credit card, through the same back-end as Mint.com, to offer 40-90 percent discounts on products similar to what you’ve already purchased.

If you’re not squeamish about providing financial information to financial scanning sites like Mint.com, Offermatic is a pretty sweet deal. You register your credit cards with Offermatic through their secure system, which then scans your purchases and spits back out high-discount offers from their advertisers, made to match your interests. You won’t necessarily get coupons for the exact stores you shop at, but the examples seem to be highly related.

Depending on how much you spend, you can also make up to $15 a year back per card (though, to be honest, we’re not about to spend $1,000 a month just to get $15 back at the end of the year, and we wouldn’t recommend you do either). But getting 40-90 percent off some pretty popular stores isn’t bad for a free service. For the folks on the fence about how Offermatic makes their cut, here’s what their FAQ has to say:

  • If your service is free, how do you make money?
    We make money by saving you money. We get a commission from the advertiser when our users purchase their offer through us.
  • Do you sell my personal or individual data?
    Never. When we send you an offer from one of our advertisers, it’s based on your anonymous purchase history. Advertisers do not know your name, email address, or location. Only if you choose to purchase an offer will that information be provided to the offer merchant so you can redeem the offer with them. We do not – and will not – provide or sell any personally identifiable information in order to present you an offer.

So, if you’re less than frightened about card-watching sites like Mint or Blippy, Offermatic is a deal you’ll want to take a closer look at.

Offermatic [via TechCrunch]

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Friday, May 7th, 2010 news No Comments

How Google Crunches All That Data

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5495097/how-google-crunches-all-that-data

500x datacenter How Google Crunches All That DataIf data centers are the brains of an information company, then Google is one of the brainiest there is. Though always evolving, it is, fundamentally, in the business of knowing everything. Here are some of the ways it stays sharp.

For tackling massive amounts of data, the main weapon in Google’s arsenal is MapReduce, a system developed by the company itself. Whereas other frameworks require a thoroughly tagged and rigorously organized database, MapReduce breaks the process down into simple steps, allowing it to deal with any type of data, which it distributes across a legion of machines.

Looking at MapReduce in 2008, Wired imagined the task of determining word frequency in Google Books. As its name would suggest, the MapReduce magic comes from two main steps: mapping and reducing.

The first of these, the mapping, is where MapReduce is unique. A master computer evaluates the request and then divvies it up into smaller, more manageable “sub-problems,” which are assigned to other computers. These sub-problems, in turn, may be divided up even further, depending on the complexity of the data set. In our example, the entirety of Google Books would be split, say, by author (but more likely by the order in which they were scanned, or something like that) and distributed to the worker computers.

Then the data is saved. To maximize efficiency, it remains on the worker computers’ local hard drives, as opposed to being sent, the whole petabyte-scale mess of it, back to some central location. Then comes the second central step: reduction. Other worker machines are assigned specifically to the task of grabbing the data from the computers that crunched it and paring it down to a format suitable for solving the problem at hand. In the Google Books example, this second set of machines would reduce and compile the processed data into lists of individual words and the frequency with which they appeared across Google’s digital library.

The finished product of the MapReduce system is, as Wired says, a “data set about your data,” one that has been crafted specifically to answer the initial question. In this case, the new data set would let you query any word and see how often it appeared in Google Books.

500x google data centers 4 How Google Crunches All That Data

MapReduce is one way in which Google manipulates its massive amounts of data, sorting and resorting it into different sets that reveal new meanings and have unique uses. But another Herculean task Google faces is dealing with data that’s not already on its machines. It’s one of the most daunting data sets of all: the internet.

Last month, Wired got a rare look at the “algorithm that rules the web,” and the gist of it is that there is no single, set algorithm. Rather, Google rules the internet by constantly refining its search technologies, charting new territories like social media and refining the ones in which users tread most often with personalized searches.

But of course it’s not just about matching the terms people search for to the web sites that contain them. Amit Singhal, a Google Search guru, explains, “you are not matching words; you are actually trying to match meaning.”

Words are a finite data set. And you don’t need an entire data center to store them—a dictionary does just fine. But meaning is perhaps the most profound data set humanity has ever produced, and it’s one we’re charged with managing every day. Our own mental MapReduce probes for intent and scans for context, informing how we respond to the world around us.

In a sense, Google’s memory may be better than any one individual’s, and complex frameworks like MapReduce ensure that it will only continue to outpace us in that respect. But in terms of the capacity to process meaning, in all of its nuance, any one person could outperform all the machines in the Googleplex. For now, anyway. [Wired, Wikipedia, and Wired]

Image credit CNET

Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.

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Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 Uncategorized, news No Comments

Two viral campaigns – one drove sales, the other probably didn’t

Samsung’s extreme sheep LED art video went viral and was definitely passed along as the bit.ly stats show below, but whether it drove sales for Samsung, or whether people even knew what it meant (Samsung makes LED lit LCD TVs), no one will really know.

Whereas JetBlue’s All-You-Can-Jet Pass also went viral (similar order of magnitude of shares, again by way of the bit.ly stats) and it led straight to the page about the All-You-Can-Jet Pass where users could then go on to buy it.

In the case of Samsung, the video was cool, entertaining, and unexpected and went viral. But the link to sales was tenuous at best. In the case of JetBlue, the product itself went viral and the link to sales was direct.

Hmm…  which had a larger business impact?  you tell me.

samsung extreme sheep LED art Two viral campaigns   one drove sales, the other probably didnt

jetblue all you can jet Two viral campaigns   one drove sales, the other probably didnt

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Friday, September 11th, 2009 Uncategorized No Comments

How NOT to design a web page

a great technique to use to see if your website design is too cluttered or busy is to shrink it down to a thumbnail (like below).  You will quickly see that your eye is trying to find something to focus on in each case.  If you can’t find the thing to focus on, then you need to go back and simplify the design. Only in rare and specific circumstances should your site deliberately have multiple points of focus.  Even then, there should be a sequential order to what the user is led to see.

website design How NOT to design a web page

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Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 Uncategorized 3 Comments

Samsung 52 inch HDTV $9.99 at BestBuy – purchase receipt below (6:21a eastern time August 12, 2009)

Buy Link at the bottom of the post

best buy hdtv receipt Samsung 52 inch HDTV $9.99 at BestBuy   purchase receipt below (6:21a eastern time August 12, 2009)

Click for product page: Samsung – 52″ Class / 1080p / 120Hz / LCD HDTV LN52A650 SKU: 8749287

product page samsung hdtv pricing mistake Samsung 52 inch HDTV $9.99 at BestBuy   purchase receipt below (6:21a eastern time August 12, 2009)

Order is still good as of 12:23 pm EST August 12, 2009.

bestbuy order details still good Samsung 52 inch HDTV $9.99 at BestBuy   purchase receipt below (6:21a eastern time August 12, 2009)

BestBuy knows digital and social media. CMO Barry Judge tells it like it is.

Related:

http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/smartspending/archive/2009/08/12/customers-irate-about-10-hdtv-ad.aspx

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=8311580&page=1

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/12/AR2009081202660.html

http://adage.com/article?article_id=138469

http://www.nbcwashington.com/around-town/shopping/Best-Buy-Bummer-999-HDTVs-an-Error-53043522.html

http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=6697

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/08/13/bestbuy.mistake/index.html

http://www.myfoxdc.com/dpp/news/081209_best_buy_offers_999_hdtv_by_mistake

http://industry.bnet.com/media/10003678/jetblues-all-you-can-jet-promo-shows-power-and-peril-of-free-media-channels/

http://www.kktv.com/home/headlines/53067682.html

http://www.wftv.com/countybycounty/20371068/detail.html

http://www.shoppingblog.com/blog/8120912

http://www.cepro.com/article/best_buy_accidentally_lists_1700_hdtv_for_10/

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Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 Uncategorized 2 Comments

How to manufacture a viral video sensation and make viral profits – Post 2 of 2

Related: The JKWeddingDance video was real; the viral effect was MANUFACTURED – Post 1 of 2

It was originally discovered and reported that while the jkwedding dance video was real, the viral effect was manufactured by Chris Brown and Sony’s marketing and public relations poeple.

Chris Brown and Sony PR made an unconventional, but really really good, decision to promote a home video on YouTube to drive massive increase in sales and also polish Chris Brown’s tarnished image in the process.

See ReadWriteWeb’s initial article — http://bit.ly/KA3HI

The video of JKWeddingDance was funny and it used Chris Brown’s “Forever” song. Instead of suing them and issuing a take-down order, Sony’s PR department promoted it instead and added an overlay ad to purchase the single from Amazon MP3 or iTunes.


jkwedding video ad overlay itunes1 How to manufacture a viral video sensation and make viral profits   Post 2 of 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0

jkwedding video ad overlay amazon How to manufacture a viral video sensation and make viral profits   Post 2 of 2

This case reads like a how-to guide to create a successful viral video that drives sales.  They (Chris Brown) did everything right.

By promoting the video (instead of suing to get it taken down), they got the video past the first tipping point of  X thousand views, after which the video remained on the front page of YouTube which gets about 30 million unique users in a day.  Most people don’t look through the ocean of videos on YouTube. Instead, they start with the ones listed on the front page as “most popular, top favorited, or most viewed.”

Then real people continued to amplify the snowball effect — social amplification — and passed along to their friends. This added a viral halo on top of the original promoted views. The viral halo is low to no cost to the advertiser so any profits derived from it is pure viral profit.

For a step-by-step guide to creating a viral video, see

http://go-digital.net/blog/2009/08/how-to-make-a-viral-video-a-5-step-guide

Viral hits can be manufactured. A group which has done this successfully and reproducibly is ImprovEverywhere (see their YouTube channel below). They have MANY YouTube videos which have hundreds of thousands of views, and their latest hit — No Pants Subway Ride – achieved 8 million views in 3 months.

http://www.youtube.com/user/ImprovEverywhere

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Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 Uncategorized 4 Comments