Observe Business

LoJack people tracker has a great order page

vicparekh — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:13:13 +0000

LoJack Ad

Notice how it says ‘Apply Here’ not ‘Order Here’. They are creating the illusion of a membership instead of a product. Very smart.

New ‘Black Card’ from Visa. Not AMEX Black, and not exclusive.

vicparekh — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:02:18 +0000

Amex has a ‘Black’ card that all the rappers get giddy over. So Visa, in its attempt to move itself from Toyota Corolla status up to a BMW status, has come up with a ‘Black Card’. They call it being exclusive. How exclusive is it? Not very.

Here is the ad:

Not very exclusive...and a waste of money.

So where does the 1% come from? They promise to limit it to 1% of the USA population. That’s about 3 million people.

If they get 3 million people to accept this card, their marketing team will be garlanded in gold and bathed in caviar. It will never happen.

Why? Let’s analyze their marketing.

1. To catch your attention, they have a pretty woman say she likes being in the 1%. But she is a no-name model/actress/whatever. Her IMDB shows her as doing NOTHING. Could they not get anyone better? With better name recognition?

2. 1% of the population is 3 million. That is a huge amount for a card. It also shows that they prey on people’s ignorance to apply for this card.

3. Exclusive Rewards Program: They offer 1% cashback or airline points. Nothing exclusive about that.

4. Patent Pending Carbon Card: This is the biggest joke of all. Patent Pending means nothing, it just means someone scribbled on a sheet of paper and sent $1,800 to the patent office. Anyone who thinks this is cool is a total tool.

Anyone who ponies up $500 to get this card, should have their brain examined.

Citibank gives a shout out to Indians, 20% of the world’s population

vicparekh — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:40:47 +0000

I like it that Citibank is accepting that not all of us are blond and blue eyed with perky smiles:

Citibank landing page Indian couple

Student Loan recipient is a dummy

vicparekh — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:48:24 +0000

So, here we have someone who ostensibly was able to get student loans to STUDY. And they can’t even figure out how to find out, with a few Google searches, what to do?

I also find it completely unbelievable that any collection agency would make an actual threat like that. Most of them just don’t care…they try, they fail, they write you off, and move on.

Student loans are a multibillion dollar business subsidized by the taxpayers of the United States. And like most government run programs, they rate little more than a C-. In this case, they rate an F. This person should never have received a student loan.

Wunderkind Twitter has a bug

vicparekh — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:42:51 +0000

So I tried to upload a pic to my twitter account…and it says that my tiny little favicon is too big. I expected more from a company that could have squeezed half a billion out of Facebook.

Another reason why Microsoft Messenger stinks

vicparekh — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:34:28 +0000

MSN says someone loves me

Microsoft Messenger has always been my least favorite IM app. I hate them all actually, with their two hundred buttons, endless ads, etc. But MSN Messenger is the worst because it has no antispam protections. Everytime I log in I get one or two of these popups.

Mybluedish gets it right, puts up phone number and wait times on the website

vicparekh — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 06:32:27 +0000

Most websites go to lengths to hide their phone number. I think that’s silly. Most people are looking for your number for a reason. Here is one website that gets it: they prominently display their phone number, and make it clear that you won’t be on hold forever.

Mybluedish banner

The comments are where it’s at

vicparekh — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 01:01:49 +0000

I like reading articles, but I definitely like reading the comments more. Here is an example of a comment putting the article in a whole new context. We read a standard puff piece, how company ( Caterpillar ) is having tough times, but they have a hot new product, analyst says it will do well when ‘economy turns around’. Then you read the comment and figure out that the company is actually behind their competitor ( Komatsu ) and they are playing catch-up. I wonder if there is a sophisticated software program that pulls in a bunch of quotes and churns out these ‘articles’.

BusinessWeek : Comment outshines article

Webex home page has no LOGIN button

vicparekh — Fri, 22 May 2009 03:12:01 +0000

Cough up 40 bucks or so for webex…and then try to figure out where to login. Yeah, people can claim that ‘Host A Meeting’ is the login button, but why not say that?

Google Search Engine goes nuts

vicparekh — Thu, 21 May 2009 03:01:56 +0000

Much has been said about Google having some kind of algorithm that predicts when employees will quit. There were 83 articles on this at Google News. But this is really not that big a deal. Google has thousands of employees, it gives them surveys, questionnaires, etc., and feeds that info into a data warehouse. Then, after a bunch of people quit, it takes that data, analyzes and figures out who else fits the pattern of those who quit. A complex problem, but hardly rocket science.

More surprising to me is how GMail comes up with these wacky results, as shown below:

So….chemistry.com equates to gonorrhea and car crash photos. hmm.