Birthday Automation

One of the simplest automated emails that any company can send out is a birthday (or anniversary) email. ING Direct embeds a nicely simple video ("What Matters Most", 189k YouTube views) in its birthday email sent to customers.

Sprint sprints ahead

This week I've been researching the US telecom market and had been looking into the merger between Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile's parent company) and MetroPCS. While I was comparing stock performance of top telecom providers, I noticed something unusual... what is Sprint doing that the others are not. The attached chart is just a YTD look at stock price. It compares Deutsche Telecom, Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T. I think it's just a math thing, for Sprint's stock performance; which today trades for $5.47/sh while Deutsche Telekom trades at $10.61/sh, Verizon at $42.82/sh, and AT&T at $33.68/sh respectively.

And then, between Deutsche Telekom and MetroPCS:

This chart makes me wonder what happened in mid-2011. The drop happened 
on July 22, 2011 at a stock price of $17 and fell to $9.53 by Aug 5, 2011.

Bring Your Own Device Strategy

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is an interesting customer acquisition strategy that is currently in use by T-Mobile, whether it is regarding a tablet, a SIM card mobile device, or other portable device such as a next-gen handheld GPS, wifi-enabled A/V, etc. The BYOD concept emerged just a few years ago and is gaining more traction among security software providers, as well as corporate and government work environments. 

By 2016, Gartner predicts that more than 1.6 billion smart mobile devices will be sold, two-thirds of the workforce will own a smartphone, and 40 percent of the workforce will be mobile. Mobile will change applications and how they are delivered.  By the end of the decade, more than 30 billion devices will be permanently connected (to the internet) and 150 billion will be occasionally connected. It will soon cost more not to monitor devices than to monitor them.

Zynga: Words With Friends

Saw an ad on Hulu. This one is targeted at the adult women demographic; at least that's my impression after seeing the ad.

At 13.3 million monthly online users, Zynga's Words with Friends is one of those online social games that has breached the offline barrier with Hasbro bringing it into the modern board game audience. How is this not just a knock-off or modern refresh of Scrabble?

It is an interesting notion, but the people who already play the online game aren't the right audience for this type of game play. After all, one of the reasons why the online game has so much traction with adult players is that we don't live near our friends.

The future of smart glass

This is a concept video from Virgin Media Business. A lot of these technological components, like smart glass, holographic imaging, and gesture navigation already exist. Holographic imaging for a variety of applications from cooking to video conferencing to remote medical diagnostics from a healthcare provider is not just for science fiction.

The Tale of Two Bookings

For the first time on an extended road trip (longer than a day, shorter than a week), I did something that I thought was reserved just for the unplanned and spontaneous. I traveled without reservations for half my trip. Traveling in the off-season (autumn or spring) to places usually visited in the summer does offer some travel discounts on the basis of supply and demand.

I planned to end day 1 of the road trip at Forks since it was at the midpoint of two places where I wanted to see the next day: the Cape Flattery lighthouse at Neah Bay and the Hoh Rain Forest in the Olympic Nat'l Forest. I booked a room at the Forks Motel in downtown Forks, mostly because it was the only non-Twilight-themed lodging place that had rooms available on a Saturday. Their online reservation system was easy to use and even sent me an email confirmation immediately after booking. When I got to the motel to check-in, the front desk already had my key ready. Checking out was just as easy. I'd say that for such a low-key motel that attracts a lot more fishermen (this season it's coho salmon), it did a lot of things right for customer retention. When I filled out the guest comment card, I only put my room number on it. What I didn't expect was a personalized note from their guest services manager thanking me for choosing their motel:

This is the first motel where I received a personalized response by email. It's awesome. Sure makes me want to stay with them again. 

When I drove further along my mostly planned route to Lake Quinault, it was already dusk. I had a few options available for Sunday night's lodging. Lake Quinault Inn was on the other side of the lake and had no cars in its parking lot. How safe would you think a woman would feel booking there. That one got skipped. The parking lot at Lake Quinault Lodge was decently full. A cashier at a local grill recommended the Rain Forest Village Resort for its more reasonable prices.  It's a fancy name for an inn with motel-styled rooms. It was apparent after getting my room key here that it was the sort of place one goes to escape from the city and possibly the summer heat. The room itself was designed to let air in and didn't have a heater. It was cold and brisk indoors. As for the other standard amenities that resorts are supposed to have? This place had none, not even have a telephone nor an alarm clock radio. It did, however, have a mostly working TV that received four local stations. Good thing I packed a library book. For the most part, it was on par with the Forks Motel; except the customer retention part. Maybe it's an oversight, or maybe it's because there are very few lodge-styled places next to the lake.

Who needs amenities with a view like this?

Would I stay at the Forks Motel again? You bet. Not only is it inexpensive, it satisfied every requirement I had in a motel room. I travel a lot domestically and internationally, and the amenities, however insignificant they might be, are worth a lot to a tired traveler. The Rain Forest Village Resort? Don't know. There are other lodging options I would check out if I'm in the area again. Also, this isn't based on price. The two lodgings were equally priced and both were in desirable vacation locales.

Hulu's Ad Targeting

Ordinarily, Hulu has been spot-on for serving up content that I like or that my fellow Huluians enjoy watching. Except for tonight. Earlier I had been surfing the web for recipe ideas for a Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) themed potluck, and subsequently hit a few culturally Spanish-oriented websites. Hulu usually presents users with one-question surveys about their viewing preferences. Sometimes these ads are represented in a way that is purely a commercial play where an advertiser pays a viewership fee and essentially hosts the entire video feed with one extended commercial at the beginning; or with regular commercial interruptions.

Tonight's pop-up ad was a user preference survey targeted at the Spanish speaking audience. Why I was targeted for this survey can only be traced to the cookies on my laptop. I have no problem with Hulu's surveys; it's a fair exchange of time, considering that I watch videos for free on Hulu. The experience is no different than a cable-tv subscription service where you pay to have to watch the commercials. I digress. This is where Hulu really should have used its own data warehouse for survey targeting instead of relying on web cookies. I haven't even watched a Spanish tv show or movie on Hulu. 

This was the survey ad that popped up:

Here's what's weird about the popup. There is a disclaimer on it, even though it is entirely in English. When you click through from "yes, let's get started" it warns you again that the survey is in Spanish and that you can "opt out" from the survey. Uhmmm..

If Hulu advertisers really wanted to know more, wouldn't it be more appropriate to have served up the popup in a bilingual format; or in formal Spanish intended for an American audience?

At it's core, it is a strangely written survey letter which started off great but leaves you wondering what is the real purpose of the mailer. Perhaps this was the least offensive demographic targeting method available to Hulu's ad agency (or in-house marketing team) since there isn't an ad choice in the user settings for foreign language movie preference.