Amazon marketplace: sorry, your purchase has been sold
Yesterday I bought 27 books from Amazon - mostly from the marketplace. Why not? The book are almost new, and they’re easily half off or less.Today I got a notice that a book I bought via the marketplace was previously sold.
No biggie - I just went back to Amazon, chose the next available seller for the book, and bought it again.Here’s the deal: when Amazon sends out that kind of email, they should include a link to re-purchase. That would probably increase their sales from people whose purchases are no longer available.And would make an already very usable store even more so.
Google has much better …
. . . Excel help than Excel.Every single time I need to find out how to do something in Excel, I try to figure it out from Excel help. Search usually gets me nowhere, but sometimes gives me a clue what I should actually be searching on. But the help I usually get is not very helpful.So I turn to Google, and usually on the first page of results, using the search terms that make sense to me (an admitted Excel weenie, and proud of it) I find the answer.Isn’t that bass-ackwards? Shouldn’t the best source of information about your product come from your company?
More music industry madness
So, Universal wants to invent a new model for music sales:
Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest record label, is looking to mobile hardware makers to foot the bill for a free music subscription service for buyers of a certain mobile phone or music player, The Telegraph reported Saturday.
Think. What does a model where you buy a piece of music-playing equipment and then the music itself is free remind you of? Oh yes, radio!Hmm … so they’re trying to reinvent radio here? Nice “new” model here.I wonder what other parts of the radio experince they’ll try to replicate? The lousy music choice? The annoying DJs? Maybe. But there’s another piece of the radio universe that I predict will come along with the “free” music, if this model actually makes it out the door.Advertising.That’s the only way there could possibly be enough revenue in this ridiculous model to support a continual flow of new music. But isn’t the 20 minutes an hour of radio advertising one of the reasons we bought iPods in the first place?No worries. As Dr Phil would say: this dog won’t hunt.PS:Why are the labels so fixated on hardware revenues? They are constantly complaining about the money Apple makes on the iPod … but they never complained before about not getting revenue from radios and stereo equipment. If only they would fixate on being best at what they’re supposed to do: find and promote great music.
Second life just like first life
Well, I’m unhappy to report that Second Life is just as big a pain in the you-know-what as my first life.I’ve had an account for years, but haven’t used it much. However, now I’m doing a paper for my master’s program in educational technology, and thought I’d get back in for some hands-on research.Only problem? Bugs, bugs, bugs.After downloading and installing a fresh client right from the Second Life servers, I’m told during start up that I need the latest version. Clicking the download update button crashes with an unknown error (twice) … so now I’m re-downloading Second Life … all 90 MBs of it.Fun, fun, fun. If this wasn’t for a good cause …
Updates, ETEC, CrowdTrust, Life
In case you’re wondering what’s going on with this blog, I’m currently taking 2 courses for my Master of Educational Technology program at the University of British Columbia.
Plus doing some home reno, plus I have 3 kids, plus my wife seems to feel that somehow I ought to spend some time with her (odd, that), plus I have a full-time job (money: it’s a love/hate relationship).
So some things suffer.In any case, for my ETEC 522 course “Ventures in Learning Technology” we’re reviewing educational technology ventures: start-up businesses. Since one of the profs for the course is behind a social knowledge storage/management start-up called CrowdTrust, we’re putting most of our thoughts and comments into that system. (Here are mine.)
One thing I wanted to share here is a memo I wrote concerning a company’s pitch for VC money.
Hopefully I haven’t been too savage.
Customer service
Perhaps a no-return policy on guns and ammo is not the best policy …
It’s Walmart’s policy, clearly visible on their website and in their stores, that all sales of guns and ammunition are final. One San Diego man didn’t like that policy so he tried to return the ammunition in another way. By firing it in the Walmart parking lot.
Seriously … be extra-nice to these customers.
Monster security fiasco - literally
Job warehouse Monster has had an ongoing security nightmare, with hackers infiltrating the database and pilfering usernames, passwords, and email addresses with which to launch phishing attacks.The worst part? Monster doesn’t know how bad the problem is! From an email sent to me this morning (note the bolded portion):
As you may be aware, the Monster resume database was recently the target of malicious activity that involved the illegal downloading of information such as names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses for some of our job seekers with resumes posted on Monster sites. Monster responded by conducting a comprehensive review of internal processes and procedures, and notified those job seekers that their contact records had been downloaded illegally.The Company has determined that this was not an isolated incident. Despite ongoing analysis, the scope of this activity is impossible to pinpoint. Monster believes illegally downloaded contact information may be used to lure job seekers into opening a “phishing” email that attempts to acquire sensitive financial information. This has been the case in similar attacks on other websites.
Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.
Pay more, get less
These are the options if you want an Education Week subscription:
As you’ll quickly see, you actually pay more to get the online version than the print+online versions. Probably has a lot to do with advertising revenue and subscription counts.
Major rip-off … and it isn’t doing trees any favors either.
iWork needs Appleworks import
Dan Knight of Low End Mac fame has a well-researched article on the abandoned Apple office suite AppleWorks, which used to be ClarisWorks.Most of it I’m taking with a bit of a grain of salt, since I know Dan is a keep-my-old-computers-til-they-rot kinda guy, but he makes a number of good points, and one very important one:
However, iWork isn’t AppleWorks. It’s not an integrated word processor, database, spreadsheet, paint, and drawing program. It’s much more like Microsoft Office, where Word and Excel are separate programs that can work together.And while iWork can open PowerPoint, Word, and Excel files, for some reason Apple has ignored compatibility with its own AppleWorks program, which is used by millions upon millions of Mac users on both the Classic Mac OS and OS X.I know Steve Jobs has a general disdain for things not created on his watch, and he’s allowed AppleWorks to languish, but if he wants Mac users to migrate to new hardware and iWork, he needs to make it easy to convert .cwk files into iWork documents and spreadsheets
An import function … that would be useful for people who have documents in AppleWorks. I know I have a few on my home computer.
SCO, SCO, SCO: no good news in 10 months
If anyone’s still following the SCO/Linux trials these days, SCO just lost bigtime.Having briefly met and known SCO CEO Darl McBride, I was interested enough to check out SCO’s website. Clicking on the News link was amusing …
Apparently there hasn’t been any good news in 10 months.
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About
Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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