shannonsays.com

Innovation

Finally caught up on some of my RSS feeds this morning... there were some great post about this week. This one from Tom Asacker got me thinking (quoting Steven Reinemund):

"Innovation is what consumers are looking for, particularly in the small, routine things in their life."

He then desribes an innovative milk shake (yes, a milk shake):

Take a look at Indianapolis-based Steak n Shake's new "side by side" milk shake. Thanks to a special pouring technique, customers can order any two of the chain's eight shake flavors and the two vertical columns never quite mix together.

Cool, huh? And . . . the chain reports that the shake has helped drive a 17% jump in sales in the first quarter.

As Tom says, this is a great example of a business using people, products, and technology to make customers happy while simultaneously increasing sales and profits. Which is exactly what I have been trying to think about within our business this week. How can we turn a seemingly routine service delivery process into something that will WoW our customers aswell as WoW our sharholders....

Needless to say, been thumbing lots of Tom Peters this week, and this article from Tom Asacker is also pretty cool.

Mike Moore on our Island Regime

Mike Moore is a pin head. His latest documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, was madebecause he wants to get rid of President George Bush. But he also wants Australian voters to get rid of John Howard.

At a press conference in New York, Moore said he hoped his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 would encourage Australian voters to seek "regime change".

The SMH has these quotes:

"I get a lot of mail from Australia," Moore said. "I probably get per capita more mail from Australia than from any other country. A lot of angry Australians. I never realised how angry and I don't think just because they are living in Australia, right?

"No, I mean, I realise, it's like, you're living on an island, but you're also a country, but you're also a continent. So I know there's a lot of confusion there, right?

"But what's confusing to me is, how is it that someone like John Howard could get in bed with George W. Bush?", Moore said of the Australian Government's decision to join the war in Iraq.

"Not to give Mr Howard too much credit but he at least appears to have half a brain. Half, I said. Half. I'm being generous. But what is he doing with George W. Bush? It's really disgraceful.

"And the Australian people, according to all the polls, don't approve of being part of the coalition of the willing.

"I hope the same thing happens to him [Howard] that happened to the leader of Spain, when he decided to be part of the coalition of the willing."

Not surprisingly, Moore won't be leaving the US to promote the documentary because he wants to concentrate on his anti-Bush campaign ahead of the presidential elections in November.

And anyway, wasn't Bowling for Columbine all about gun control? Given that John Kerry wouldn't dare push for the sort of gun laws John Howard did, Moore should just back off, and show us a bit more respect.

Memo: JetStar

I have posted a fair bit about Jetstar recently (like here, here and here), so it was interesting to read Robert Patersons post about his experience on Westjet, who appear to be Canada's JetStar, but obviously do it infinately better than Jetstar:

What we all experienced was that the real service issue is not doing things - there are no meals on WestJet. It is how you are and how you related to each other and then with the customer. At WestJet we are all called "Guests" . Words mean something. A Guest is someone you legitimately care for. A passenger or a customer is someone you are paid to do things for.

Not too many Jetstar customers would say they felt like guests!

(Thanks Johnnie)

Latham the bully plays the victim

Matt Price put it beautifully: It was part West Wing, part Jerry Springer ... and pure Mark Latham.

Having defamed, insulted and accused more people than anyone else in the Federal Parliament, Mark Latham yesterday decided to play the victim, holding "an emotional press conference" (ie there were longish pauses as he fought back the tears) to deny various rumors being put around about him.

It was bizzare. Has a major party leader has never held a press conference quite like what Mark Latham turned on yesterday? The whole saga followed a 40-minute profile by the Nine Network's Sunday program, which aired allegations that he had "king-hit" an older constituent 15 years ago when he was on Liverpool Council in Sydney's west. Not to mention remarks by friends of his former wife claiming she apparently feared him, as well as bucks' party video and sex harassment charge rumours.

Faltering with emotion as he stumbled through his press conference, Latham yesterday adopted a style and demeanour different to last Friday when he joked as he denied punching out a constituent when a Liverpool councillor 15 years ago, and boasted about his sex life before and between marriages.

And of course there was no reminder of his comment to The Bulletin magazine in 2002: "Look, this idea that politics can be too rough and too personal is a bit rich."

But has all this "dirt" damaged him in the way his political opponents might have liked? Probably not. So to come out in a near-tearful defence hardly seems necessary.

While his wish to protect his family is understandable, Mr Latham only a year ago was Labor's parliamentary attack dog who savaged Tony Abbott over actions after he had a child out of wedlock as a young man many years ago. Mr Latham can dish it out but can he take it?

The Opposition Leader says he trusts Australians to judge him by his policies, not his private history. So he should spare us the Bob Hawke-like emotional ordeals.

And as the Hun asks: if he lets transparently grubby tactics upset him this early, how would he deal with a real prime ministerial crisis?

They know what I am thinking...

Thanks (I think) to Tony Goodson & Dave Weinberger, for pointing 20Q out to me.

20Q is an online game of 20 questions that apparently starts off with no knowledge base, but learns from the answers you give it to guess what you are thinking!

Try it, I used fork, pen, matchstick, light... and it worked by asking an average of 22 questions.

Buggered if I know how it works, but it's impressive. And addictive (you have been warned!)

Whats with the SMH sub-editors?

I have posted in the past about what an odd city Sydney is. Flashy, fast, self-centred and smutty are words that come from the Shannon word associated computer.

Even the Sydney based paper sub-editors' seem to have a penchant for delving into titillation... or whatever you would call this.

I doubt this actually would have made it into print, but I wonder about the sub-editor who produced this headline...

That's Sydney, I guess

Re-imaging the power plug

Thanks to strategize, I stumbled across a cool new blog; Thinking by Peter Davidson. Peter has some great posts about a whole gamut of things from the realms of advertising, branding, marketing, technology and culture. Whilst that isn't remarkable, Peter uses a very unique perspective to comment on his topics that really got me thinking.

Take yesterdays post for example that introduced a new design for an electric plug (yes... an electric plug):

This fantastically simple design from The Design Center of Toyama is an award winner for universal(accessible) design. The idea is that people can hook a finger in the ring to push or pull the plug in or out of electrical outlets.

Hmmm... wish I had thought of that! It is so simple, so logical. But great ideas often are aren't they?

Tom would like it too. Granted it's only a bloody electrical plug, but the idea that someone looked at it, thought about it in terms of it being just another widget, and a widget that wasn't really satisfying to use. So they then re-imagined it. Re-imagined it as being something better, re-imagined it terms of being something to solve some of the inconveniences associated with it. Inconveniences we don't even think about. Older folk, people with arthritis or other mobility problems would love plug.

If it can happen with a power plug, imagine what else we could do if we took time to look at things in those terms...

New MSN Search Engine

On Monday I posted about Bill Gates tackling Google and Yahoo in the web search stakes. Well, yesterday Fast Company Now reported that Microsoft has unveiled a trial version of its revamped MSN Search.

I had a look and it certainly has a cleaner, simpler look. And as part of the clean-up, Microsoft has reduced the number of ads that it serves up and displays them in shaded boxes with clear labels that tell them apart from search results.

I thought I would give it a go. I visited the trial site and entered “shannonsays” in the search bar. I did the same on Google, so that I could compare the two. Microsoft didn’t tell me how many matches it found, only displaying results 1-15 on the search page, while Google gave 564 and showed the time spent on searching (0.29 seconds). I then tried something of a more commercial nature, so I enetered “holden” Microsoft again gave me the firt 15 of an unknown quantity of matches, but no ads. Google put all of its sponsored links on the right-hand side bar, and returned 2,140,000 matches.

Although the Microsoft Search is clean, and quick, Google is still better. At least with 2 140 000 matches I know I need to refine my search, but Microsoft seems to be happy to let me scroll through matches 15 at a time without knowing how many pages I am looking through.

The advertising thing is interesting. FC Now says that advertising tied to keyword searching was the fastest growing and the biggest of all U.S. Internet advertising categories in 2003, according to a report published in April by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. It showed that keyword search revenue made up 15 percent of online ad revenue in 2002 and jumped to 35 percent in 2003.

But at the same time, I hate paid ads. Advertisers grapple for my eyeballs but have only paid for me to turn away from them. It seems that Internet portels have a game of balance to play -- between cleaner search results and more clicks on sponsored sites

Avoiding forced registration

I read a fair bit of news online, both from here in Australia and Internationally. But I get annoyed at being forced to register to view even the most basic content and news, or even yesterday's articles. Some sites even try to make me pay to have a quick squiz at their archives.

And now I will have to register to access local Fairfax sites. Surely they sells enough papers at $1.20 each to let us have a look at yesterdays articles.

But what makes me laugh is that these sites always say that they want me to register so we can improve their service to me.

Rubbish. What they want is for me to provide them with information so that they know who I am. This profile is then used collated to give an overall profile of their readers and enable them to pitch to potential advertisers. Then when I log on, I get to see advertisements that are apparently of interest to me.
So, when I read about bugmenot.com on the BlogFather, I thought I would check it out.

Essentially Bug Me Not maintains a list of active logins and passwords for various sites that require registrations to read content. I tried using the login and password for the The Age site and it worked beautifully. Check it out!

Just say "No!"

The Australian often gives the ALP a beating in its editorial pages, and certainly did so today:

"The art of opposition is to oppose everything and propose nothing, according to a 19th-century British prime minister, the Earl of Derby. Perhaps, but a political party that denounces government policies for no better reason than because its opponents support them is demonstrably not ready to govern"

Pretty strong stuff, but given that the context was Labors continued blockading and unwillingness to support the US-Australian Free Trade Agreement, I think it is fair enough.

Latham has been fence sitting on the issue since the FTA was announced, refusing to back it pending a Senate committee's inquiry into the deal, that is not due to report until early August.

What makes Latham's heel digging look worse is that Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry yesterday endorsed the FTA. You'd think that if the Republic & Democratic presidential candidates could put political point scoring behind them, you'd think the same would happen in Australia.

There are some great benefits to be had from the FTA, sure it isn't all one-way traffic, but on balance I think it is a good deal for Australia. According to Centre for International Economics Report, Australia’s annual GDP could be up by around $6 billion (about 0.7 per cent of GDP) as a result of the FTA a decade after the Agreement’s entry into force. Total GDP increase over 20 years is expected to amount to almost $60 billion in today’s dollars.

Interestingly, one of the Latham's concerns is apparently the exclusion of sugar, (or is the concern for the 5 marginal "sugar" seats in Queensland?). But lets be honest, anybody who thinks the USA market could ever be the salvation of Australia's sugar industry has rocks in their head. Maybe Latham could just support the FTA and tell Queensland sugar producers to get a grip on reality, and then check out the market potential for sugar in China and India.

But it seems that saying "no" is just convenient for Latham sometimes. I don't really know why. Does he think it makes him look like a hard-nosed political fighter? Does it help him gain support from the Anti-American's within Labors rank and file? Who knows.

But Latham should do what Peter Garrett did, do some amazing back flipping, come out and support the agreement and stop putting his short term interests above those of our country.