Tag: consumer
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Fee or Discount
In this day and age, I find it surprising enormous corporations have not figured the difference in the perception of a fee vs a discount. Adding a fee causes consumer uproar. They feel the faceless no good bully is trying to make money unfairly. Even people who probably will avoid ever paying the fee on…
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Stalking Students
On the BLKBRD-L email list is a discussion about proving students are cheating. Any time the topic comes up, someone says a human in a room is the only way to be sure. Naturally, someone else responds with the latest and greatest technology to detect cheating. In this case, Acxiom offers identity verification: By matching…
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Bottle v Tap
Its funny what people think about something we take for granted. Brown tap municipal tap water was stated as the reason for drinking bottled water. Is it a corporate v goverment thing? Is it because bottled water is so much more expensive than tap water so it must be better? From Coca-Cola’s letter to the state…
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The Digital Switch
The Long Tail claims consumers, given more options, will reflect their widely varied interests. Physical stores cannot fill all of the demand, so bytes stored on disk are the fastest, cheapest method for getting stuff to consumers. We see a mostly example of this shift in the shift to digital music. Vinyl records were the…
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The Outsourced Brain
I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic. The Outsourced Brain – New York Times Facetiousness aside, it does point out how others are consumed by these tools rather than consume them. Tom-Tom is…
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We all lose
Survey: Consumers lose to online schemes – Yahoo! News: [C]onsumers lost $630 million over the past two years to e-mail scams. That is nothing compared to the $7.8 billion people spent on computer repair. I’m interested in how many consumers are victims of email scams. Also, the median amount lost. Guess I’ll have to do…
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Sushi Means Rice?
This came up a while ago. Now I need a food category…. SushiFAQ.com – The Sushi FAQ – Sushi Information Technically, the word `sushi’ refers to the rice, but colloquially, the term is used to describe a finger-size piece of raw fish or shellfish on a bed of vinegared rice. This can be eaten as…
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BellSouth vs. Google – Round 1
What about the customers? Companies all too often play chicken. It is the consumers who get screwed. A few years ago, a Sun vs. Microsoft disagreement meant no adequate Java Runtime Environment for the brand new Windows XP personal computers for months. Developers for online classes often tap Java for mini-applications (HTML editors, chat, file…