Category: Uncategorized (Page 24 of 26)

For as regulated as some industries are, I am continually amazed by the brazen obscenity with which auto insurance companies treat its customers.

My insurance rates went up this month.  Yet I have not personally been involved in an accident, received a ticket, moved or purchased a new hummer.

Instead, someone filed a fraudulant claim on a minor fender bumping that occured when someone else was driving my car.  The driver of my car reported the claim as fraduluant, since there’s not a physical way for an Acura to demolish a trucks’ back bumber while only denting it’s own license plate.  This is an obvious case of a guy with a crappy beat up car taking advantage of a tap on is back. 

But the insurance company’s response is, "Too bad.  I know we shouln’t have paid it out, but we did, so the owner of the car is responsible." 

Any advice? 

ESPN the Magazine came out recently with the "Ultimate Standings."  In it, they rank every pro team in the 4 major sports (yes, they included hockey) on a number of characteristics,including ownership, players, stadium, value, beer prices and more.

Unsurprisingly, the Seattle Sonics ranked 111 out of 121 teams.  Until now, I really hadn’t thought about the Marketing efforts the Sonics have undertaken lately, but would you repeat these if you were running a company:

1) Alienate your evangelists by moving your games off of the sports station and onto a conservative talk radio station. 

2) Allow an executive (in this case the head coach) with 20+ years in the organization to leave for an arch-rival.

3) Have 50 of the most influential sports fans in town cut ties with the team, and make a killing on their investment.

4) Ask fans who enjoy some of the closest seats to the court, to give those up in order to pay higher taxes, sit further away and drive to Renton.

5) Take arguably the greatest play by play caller in the NBA today, a guy who can paint a picture of a basketball court in 4 words, and move him to TV to be replaced on radio by a guy that drives some fans crazy (honestly, I actually like Locke as a reporter but I see why he drives some guys nuts).

6) Now, couple all this with a sub-standard product

You either need a great product or great salesmanship to get people to buy something, and unfortunately the Sonics have failed to show much of either.  Now the strategy seems to be to threaten to leave. 

So, given that the Sonics owners are smarter than I am, I see a different view.  We’re simply not the target audience.  They don’t really care about what we think.  The target customer is the representatives in Olympia that can get a deal done without our vote and the corporate sponsors who will spend money to fill up the luxury boxes and acreage of advertising. 

That’s not a bad strategy I suppose.  But when your target market is legislators and business people, it’s not hard to imagine how you become 111th on the list of sports franchises.

This article about Internet Advertising from the TimesOnline.co.uk is definitely worth reading.  Here’s an excerpt:

Advertising on internet soars as world follows British lead

The internet will overtake radio by next year and become the world’s fourth-largest advertising medium, a year earlier than forecast.

Global spending on internet advertising increased from $18.7 billion in 2005 to $24.9 billion (£12.6 billion) last year, according to ZenithOptimedia, the media-buying agency.

The Middle East and Asia are driving a boom in global advertising spending. Zenith predicted a spike of 7.7 per cent in spending in Asia in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

Only in Vegas.

I’m not sure why I’m so late to the game on Prosper.com, a web site designed so that people who need loans can receive funds from ordinary people who are looking to make a return on their reserve cash.

The concept is pretty simple, people with money become parts of "mutual fund-like" loans to individuals who can’t or don’t want to go through a bank.  There is research that people are more likely to repay loans when they know there is a human behind it, and they know who those humans are. The lenders get good returns – 10-25% and their money is spread among a bunch of different loans so the risks are mitigated.   

My initial thought was that there is an issue where people who need the loans may not have the broadband or even Internet connection to take part, but that’s probably a subtle qualifying factor.  If you can’t find a broadband internet connection these days, I probably don’t want to loan money to you.   

From the Seattle Times:

Summarized: John Cornwell graduated from Duke University last year, and built a refrigerator that can toss a can of beer to his couch with the click of a remote control.  It took about 150 hours and $400 in parts to modify a mini-fridge common to many college dorm rooms into the beer-tossing machine, which can launch 10 cans of beer from its magazine before needing a reload. With a click of the remote, fashioned from a car’s keyless entry device, a small elevator inside the refrigerator lifts a beer can through a hole and loads it into the fridge’s catapult arm. A second click fires the device, tossing the beer up to 20 feet — "far enough to get to the couch," he said. In developing his beer catapult, Cornwell said he dented a few walls and came close to accidentally throwing a can through his television. He’s since fine-tuned the machine to land a beer where he usually sits at home, on what he called "a right-angle couch system."  For now, the machine throws only cans, although Cornwell has thought about making a version that can throw a bottle. The most beer he has run through the machine was at a party, when he launched a couple of 24-can cases.  A video featuring the device is a hit on the Internet, where more than 600,000 people have watched it at metacafe.com, earning Cornwell more than $3,000 from the Web site.

I love it.  Guy builds a totally usueless contraption.  Films himself using it.  Posts it online – makes $3k for his troubles.  Also, talk about something that doesn’t make any sense – a guy too lazy to walk 10 feet for about 15 seconds of travel time, spends the equivalent of a week building a solution to the problem.  And they say American ingenuity is dead…

Update:  He also has his own Web site: www.beerlauncher.com  

Last Friday in Dallas, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell shared a stage, and Jobs blasted the teachers unions.  (How many politicians wish they could have said the same thing?)

Jobs lambasted teacher unions, claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers."I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," Jobs said. 

"This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy." At various pauses, the audience applauded enthusiastically. Dell sat quietly with his hands folded in his lap.

It’s refreshing to see a businessperson stand up and say what many people think.   A good friend of mine is a teacher, and has this to say about his own union.  "They’re ridiculous.  You can’t claim, ‘alll teachers are good so none of us should be fired’ and in the next breath say, ‘we are paid too little to attract talented teachers.’  Which one is it?  Are we good or bad? Because we can’t be great and crappy at the same time." 

I love teachers.  I think the work they do is admirable.  But let’s face it, if you can’t evaluate and eliminate underperformers, no amount of money can fix a problem.  Guaranteed employment and a paycheck based on seniority, not merit, is a sure way to encourage mediocrity.  Teachers unions will hopefully take this to heart and in the next levy for increased wages, I hope there is some sort of control for grading the graders, rewarding the strongest ones, and pushing out those who can’t pass the eval.

I’m not terribly well versed in political marketing, but my sense is that My.BarackObama.com is the first social networking site developed by a Presidential candidate of import.

It’s not hard to understand why connecting freinds of Obama together through chat rooms and message boards would be a powerful thing.  But it will be interesting to see if the web site allows free form of ideas, or moderates posts it finds unconstructive.  For example, if two Obama supporters debate opposite sides of an Obama platform, will we all see the debate, or will it be stricken?  If sections of the Message Boards are over run by Hillary supporters, what is the protocol?

Every candidate who runs a site faces these political attacks on blog comments, and it’s never been a big deal to just keep them from beng published.  But a social network is designed around the free form of ideas and thoughts, which is counter intuitive to edits and review.  I’m interested to see the editorial decisions that get made.  

I stumbled across PicNik today and here’s a place I could end up wasting a lot of time. It immediately went into my favorite links at the right.

It’s probably an insult to call them this, but it’s essentially Photoshop for Dummies, and I mean that in a great way.  Photoshop can be a pain for simpletons like me who just want to manipulate an image in some really easy way.  PicNik probably isn’t the only photo imaging site out there, but if you need to make some tweaks to anything in your photo library, give it a whirl.

The U.S. beat Mexico in a friendly tonight 2-0.  It’s an otherwise unremarkable event for a Wednesday night.

Except the George and Dragon Pub in Fremont was packed to the gills.  Univ of Phoenix Stadium in Arizona had 63,000 people – I’d say mixed pretty half and half US/Mexico fans.  And the game was on ESPN 2, not relegated to Fox Soccer or some other channel up north of Channel 400.  Again, all of this for a friendly.

So when a bunch of smart tech guys sit in a bar with hundreds of people watching an inconsequential soccer match, the conversation always comes up – How do you make a pro soccer league work here? 

I’ve purposely not commented on the Beckham signing.  There are people who get paid lots of money to run financial analyses that say that was a good idea.  There’s no mystery there.  You can’t round up 250 Million smackers from smart, global marketers with a pitch of, "I have this idea…"

So a few people on different Web sites have thrown out interesting concepts about what will make soccer work here.  This post will be continued for years, as more and more good thoughts get fleshed out.  So here are some things I’ve heard from the man on the street:

1) Investment from NBA and MLB players – Kobe Bryant and Alex Rodriguez are soccer fans.  It’s easy to presume many others are as well.  MLS, Division 1 and Division 2 teams are well within their capabilities for financial investment.  Kobe Bryant’s Inner City Soccer Organization would bring crossover kids from basketball to soccer.  It’s arbitrage for them.  Buy a part of a team cheap, make the sport more popular, team increases in value.

2)  More regionalization –  The EPL works because every team can be reached by train.  The European Professional League would not work.  No one in Newcastle cares about  Marseilles or Hamburg.  The U.S. is just too big. MLS doesn’t need New York vs Salt Lake.  It needs Salt Lake vs LA 1,  LA 2, LA 3, LA 4, Denver, Seattle, San Fran, Oakland, San Jose, etc…You need separate regional leagues that come together in a more Champions League-like way every so often. It’s not a national TV show, it’s a regional one.

3) Become the preferred place for South American players – US Pro Soccer should not ever compete with the EPL and Serie A.  It needs to feed them.  But not with kids who play US college soccer.  We need to bring up the best young South Americans, train them in 1st class facilities, and feed them to Europe.

4)  More overlap with Mexican League – The short-term wins are with Hispanic speaking US residents and other international imports.  Continue to build the rivalries between teams like Chivas and Real Salt Lake.

5) Radical idea: Blow up the NCAA soccer programs – I heard this from a drunk.  But there’s no need for college soccer.  Loses money for the University and dilutes the talent pool.  Get the top players into these regional leagues.  They can still go to school, but not play for the school. 

6) A week of EPL games in East Coast Cities every year – It’s a fairly short flight.  Why not set a week in the EPL schedule where you put togther all the crappy non-rivalries, and ship the games to the U.S?  Try a few Spurs vs Bolton or Newcastle vs Fulham games in New York one year and just see what happens. 

Good soccer in the U.S. will happen eventually.  EPL-like soccer in the U.S. won’t.  The continuing question is how do we replicate the 63,000 fans at a friendly into some sort of consistent soccer crowd?