On Moving from One Life to Another

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” --Anatole France

Statue of Soldiers

During World War I, Arthur S. Mole and John D. Thomas made some incredible human pictures by using thousands of sailors or soldiers in uniform to create images. Check this out and click on the photo to blow it up:

Retrevo's Matchmaking Service For Consumers & Electronics

Client Retrevo is unveiling their brand new site today, the first matchmaking service between consumers and electronics.

Americans will spend upwards of $48 billion on consumer electronics this holiday season -- but not without first getting overwhelmed by the vast range of products with far too many complex features.

The only site dedicated to consumer electronics, Retrevo is unique in that it provides real-time, impartial recommendations on which products offer the best value. This unique value rating combined with both user input and expert reviews pinpoints the most appropriate fit for individuals, one which best meets their brand, price, and feature preferences.

Up-to-the-minute independent information is amassed and translated into unbiased answers that can be easily understood by all consumers, technically savvy or not.

Unlike search engines that return piles of information for users to sort through, shopping sites fixated only on price, or retailers beholden to select manufacturers, Retrevo provides unbiased and up-to-the-minute answers on all things consumer electronics. Well-organized in one central location, consumers have at their fingertips value comparisons, user and professional reviews, and numerous retailers.

Retrevo crunches up-to-the-second data on hundreds of thousands of products, millions of facts and millions of user and expert reviews from thousands of publisher sites, user reviews, blogs, forums across more than 40 categories, including Digital Cameras, HDTV, Camcorders, and GPS devices.

It then places them on an interactive value map to help people decide what to buy. To further aid an intelligent buying decision, Retrevo presents the overall community sentiment as determined by combing through millions of user reviews, expert reviews and other articles, forums and blogs – all a click away  if the consumer wants to read them.

For consumers looking for support or how-to usage tips, Retrevo provides instant access to hundreds of thousands of blogs, forums and user manuals, even landing users directly on the page inside the manual, to help fix hard-to-solve problems or get the most out of their electronic devices.

Wal-Mart: Bigger than the Big Apple?

At some point in the last fiscal quarter, Wal-Mart’s total U.S. retail square footage surpassed the land mass of Manhattan, at 22.98 square miles versus 22.7.

In addition to the mind-bending image that this creates, this development is interesting because the two giants don’t like each other. Wal-Mart’s efforts to gain a foothold in the borough have been vigorously repelled by the natives. In response, the Wal-Mart CEO had the following to say in a March interview with The New York Times.

“I don’t care if we are ever here.” With which gestures do you think New Yorkers let him know the feeling was mutual? “It’s too hard to make money here.” You don’t say. Nobody in New York ever worries about this.

And this particularly fine piece of plain-folks pique: “You have people who are just better than us.” Do you think his favorite song begins with, “Start spreadin’ the news…”?

The biggest criticism of Wal-Mart is that it ruins communities by pricing local retailers out of business while offering only low-paying jobs with no benefits. Another complaint is that Wal-Mart is just too big; even investors are grumbling about store saturation.

Put all this together and you have a very plausible conspiracy theory: Wal-Mart intends to transplant all of its stores to Manhattan, completely covering the island and forcing everyone and everything to leave.

They could assemble the stores and with a very large winch – available at Always Low Prices – lift them over the borough and just drop them. A considerable one-time expense, but it would be sweet revenge and a clever way to reduce by a large number the liberal media and union workers, two of Wal-Mart’s most pesky foes.   

I’d like to propose a more constructive strategy. Move the stores to Tuvalu.  Tuvalu is the fourth-smallest country in the United Nations, a collection of nine coral atolls halfway between Hawaii and Australia. At 10.04 square miles, the nation’s land mass is less than one third of Wal-Mart’s worldwide retail space.

Tuvalu has become a global warming symbol. The island’s high point is 16 feet above sea level, and some climate change models anticipate that rising ocean levels will likely swamp the nation and its 12,000 residents at some point in this century.

(Have you noticed that climate change research is full of “may,” “likely,” and “probably”? “Sea levels may rise ten feet.” “I may win the lottery this week.”  “The planet will probably see air temperatures rise three degrees." "My husband will probably take out the garbage tonight.”). So for the environmental crowd and our fear-loving media, the plight of Tuvalu has become a favored citation of our certain doom.   

The benefits of such a move would be considerable for the company.  Labor costs would plummet and sluggish same-store sales growth figures would vanish. As a green maneuver, it would please and confuse liberals and at least for a time stop them from burning crosses on Wal-Mart’s lawns. As the only employer on the island, Wal-Mart would have considerable leverage over the local population. “They want unions? Let ‘em eat kelp.”

For the islanders, the benefits would be even more pronounced. In addition to full employment, adding the stores would raise the island’s elevation by at least 30 feet. Everyone could live in low-cost company housing built on the roofs. As sea levels rose, provisions would simply be moved to higher shelves, easily retrieved via low-cost trapdoors and ladders.

Wal-Mart Travel would deliver to the South Pacific - in low-cost planes and cruise ships - bereft American shoppers, longing for the opportunity to again experience Always Low Prices, and now in a spectacular single package destination. “It’s a small store, after all.”

Perhaps it would make sense to expand the operation to the nation of Nauru, also in the South Pacific and at 8.11 square miles even smaller than Tuvalu.

That would leave a few square miles of U.S. stores, which could be exported to the only two members of the United Nations smaller than these islands. At .75 square miles, Wal-Mart Monaco would replace Europe’s most fashionable casinos with a much-needed dose of low-end American retail, leaving plenty of store footprint for Wal-Mart Vatican City, featuring the PopePourri product line. 

There are innumerable cost inefficiencies in The New Testament, what with fig trees that don’t produce fruit when desired and swine being cast into the sea. Imagine what Wal-Mart could do for all of us if it expanded its reach beyond the secular realm with the help of its new partners in Rome.  Heaven is long overdue for re-branding.

The downside would be the loss of about 1.4 million American jobs. But the liberal politicians can solve that problem.  And we can start complaining about Target.

Beware the Friendly Skies

Every week I hear another negative story about United Airlines, whether it's an experience at the airport, in the plane or on the phones. Some are amusing, others horrifying, many surreal.

Trying to book a mileage flight this morning, I learned that they won't even check availability unless your account has enough miles for that itinerary.  However, they'll be happy to sell you the miles to meet the threshold and then tell you there are no flights available.   

I spoke to a supervisor in Chicago who said the agents couldn't confirm or hold reservations, but could at least check availabilty.  So I tested it with three different agents, but none would search.  Fly the unfriendly skies.

A Soggy Stroll Over Golden Gate Bridge

Ever walk over the Golden Gate bridge in the rain? The pouring rain? There's a happy ending, the kind you feel when you finish a race, but visualize a scene if you will before you have reached the finish line.

Think: three female soggy rats who are unable to see through thick white mist -- a great way to spend an afternoon :-)

Spock's New Flash Widget

Today, client Spock, the leading people search engine, announced a new widget that displays a slide show of an individual or a selection of people from a specific search. If you do a search for American astronaut or Democrat, the top people from that search result query can be instantly turned into a flash widget, which can be embedded inside any blog or website that supports flash.

For example, you could instantly create a slide show of film actors, tech bloggers, golfers, real estate brokers, World Series players, political activists or cardiologists. You can also create a widget for yourself, which presents a centralized view of all aspects of you. Check out mine in the upper left hand column of my blog under the Search Bar. Pretty cool, eh? And it only takes a minute to do.

Free to use, it is also easy and fast to create a widget. I did mine in just a couple of minutes. Simply go to Spock.com, do a search for yourself or a descriptive tag, i.e., San Francisco politician or tech blogger and when the results show up, click on "widget."

Spock will provide you with the HTML code that you simply copy and paste into a blog, any MySpace or Facebook profile or your own personal website. Most popular blog hosts such as Typepad and Wordpress support flash.

This is a great way for any small business owner or creator (i.e., artist, author, photographer, web designer, animator, etc) to use the new Spock widget as a way to promote themselves on their own site or elsewhere on the web.

Enter the World of eSnips Social DNA

Client eSnips just unveiled a brand new concept called Social DNA, a service which connects like-minded people by matching their digital genes. Bet you didn't even know you even had digital genes eh? So, what do we mean?

People seek intelligent and intriguing interaction around interests. Imagine walking into a cocktail party, full of strangers. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, each person is wearing a name tag that tells you where and how you connect in different areas of your life, i.e., 67% alike on politics, 74% alike on eating habits, 4% on workout habits and so on. Enter the world of Social DNA.

A key premise of Web 2.0 services is the ability to discover like-minded people through common friends or tags. eSnips Social DNA takes this ability to the next level by matching people with others who resemble them most based on thousands of defined aspects of their lives.

Last night TechCrunch compared it to an online dating service. eSnips isn't about dating nor is Social DNA - its about connecting with people who share similar interests and passions. This is why people join eSnips, not to date. Any social networking site could yield that result, including eSnips, but it's not their primary purpose.

I've tried numerous online dating services in the past, including Match, Matchmaker, eHarmony, etc. and none of them give me the Social DNA experience. They also seemed to think that it confuses the purpose of the site. HUH? There's not a zillion things you could do in FaceBook and other social networking sites?  They wonder, is eSnips an online storage service, a social network or a promotional tool? You betcha and much more. That's the beauty and the value.

On eSnips, not only do people connect to people with similar interests but they upload content that they are passionate about....in other words, their creations. Unlike sites that limit you to a specific file type, eSnips encourages any and all of them.

The result? An interesting cross selection of painters, photographers, independent musicians, dancers, designers, poets and countless others sharing files, photos, and videos and in many cases selling them through eSnips Marketplace.

eSnips also gives users 5 gig of free storage - how cool is that? So in one centralized location, you can share content, sell it, connect with others with similar interests and use it as a promotional tool in ways that is easy and more viral than other sites.

Here's a great example. Take one Boston-based eSnips user who is a DJ. No longer a user of MySpace or Facebook, he says, "With eSnips, gone is the spam, gone are the crazy people, no bots, no ads for porn/webcams, no spam with people promoting their shows. Because of eSnips, I am on Acidsamovar Records out of Moscow and the U.S. Manager of Distro here in the the states. I love the fact that eSnips helped me achieve my extremely long awaited goal of bringing my music and my DJ skills to countries that are deemed "oppressed" by America."

Social DNA merely takes their connecting to like-minded people concept to the next level, so before people dump it into a dating category or other sites that only offer a fraction of what eSnips does, perhaps they should try it out and see how their results compare to others from around the world as well as to friends they already know?

On top of beta users already having a ball with the service and finding it incredibly addictive, Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb comments about eSnips growth and suggests that they may monetize better than Digg.

He says that the new Social DNA feature should carry individual and aggregate eyeballs right into the hands of the eSnips ad sales team, ready to place them directly into the gaping maws of just the right advertisers.

WebWare's Josh Lowensohn also has a great write-up on Social DNA as does Mashable's Kristen Nicole. CBS Radio's Larry Magid interviews eSnips Hagit Katzenelson which should be available to listen to today on the CBSNews.com website.

On Moving from One Life to Another

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” --Anatole France

AdAge's Power150

Down the Avenue just made AdAge's Power 150, which is a ranking of the top English-language media and marketing blogs in the world.  It uses a basic multimetric algorithm to obtain a final ranking based on the sum of four sources, three of which are Google, Bloglines and Technorati. 

Google PageRank (0 to 10): Google PageRank is a link-analysis algorithm that interprets web links and assigns a numerical weighting (0 to 10) to each site. High-quality sites receive a higher PageRank. The actual PageRank number was used in the Power 150 ranking algorithm.

Bloglines Subscribers (1 to 20): Bloglines displays the number of feed subscribers. Subscriber ranges were determined (i.e., more than 20, more than 30, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 20) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.

Technorati Ranking (1 to 30): Technorati ranking analyzes the number of sites pointing to a particular blog. The more link sources referencing your blog, the higher the Technorati ranking. Similar to the Bloglines Subscribers value, Technorati ranking ranges were determined (i.e., top 9,000, top 10,000, top 20,000, etc.) and each range was assigned a number (1 to 30) that was used in the Power 150 algorithm.

Todd Andrlik Points (1 to 15): As the only subjective measure in the Power 150 algorithm, 1 to 15 opinion points were assigned to each blog. Todd Andrlik values frequent, relevant, creative and high-quality content. The use of audio, video and graphics is also heavily weighted in the Todd Points.