Disney on Facebook

Years ago when I worked at Bing.com, I got frustrated at Microsoft for not taking advantage of social marketing and not making it easy for their customers to find their products in the “social world”. Specifically, almost none of their product websites had social media icons that would allow consumers to find THE official pages for Microsoft’s various products. See my post titled “Zune on Facebook”. I see the same issue today with Disney. They have a TREMENDOUS following, with amazing potential for reaching out to fans (consumers, …

Groupon feature idea…

Hey Groupon – here’s a feature idea for you, if for some reason it isn’t already on your list… Create a “Watch list” for products. There’s already a “Follow” feature to follow specific companies to see what deals they have, but that excites me less than if I’m looking for a deal on a certain product in the future. Google Alerts lets me keep an eye out for words and phrases that I’m interested in, and sends me a message when that item gets indexed in their search …

Netflix to lose business to Redbox

Netflix just announced that they’re raising prices again. It seems that they are trying to phase out DVDs for streaming. Of course, discs ARE dead, but they aren’t quite gone yet. And that includes Blu-ray. (That’s part of why the studios are pushing Blu-ray sales so hard right now, because they know it’s got a short sales-life.) Even with that in mind, I’ll say that Redbox has a good shot coming up here very soon… I was a big fan of Redbox when they first started, and rented …

Mobile data throughput – agency or application?

I’m no fan of “big government”, but I do like the idea of a government agency monitoring, reporting and holding accountable any company that sell products or services based on measurements – or an application that can do the same thing. In California there’s an agency called the “Office of Weights and Measures”. They make sure that 1 gallon of gas at the pump is actually 1 gallon – and that is actually costs what the posted price says it does; They also make sure that a grocery …

Microsoft Live ID system fails again…

About a year and a half ago, I wanted to transfer my XBox achievements and credits to my primary Microsoft Live ID account. Sadly, I was told that it was impossible. About a year after my frustration with the XBox Live ID issue, I decided to spend more time using my Microsoft Zune player. When I first got it (about about two years earlier,) I was required to sign in with a Microsoft Live ID to track my music purchases and plays. But now, I wasn’t using that …

Google’s ‘Sidewiki’ feature…

Back in the mid-1990’s when I was working on the MSN Engineering team at Microsoft, one of the projects we started to work on was a tool that would allow people to post comments about web pages "on" the webpage. That is, it was a feature in Internet Explorer very similar to the "Comment" feature in Microsoft Word. As with far too many Microsoft products, they started it, then shelved it. I was really excited about it back then because of the great potential for true customer service …

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