Common sense would probably tell you that stealing a bicycle using brute force in a high traffic area was nigh on impossible without being stopped or challenged. Well, think again. This video shows how easy it was for a guy to steal his own bike in busy NY using a bolt cutter, hacksaw and electric saw. And not just once but several times. He did this to try and understand how his bike kept getting stolen despite the fact that he secured it well. There’s a couple of funny bits towards the end: a police van drives right past him attempting the theft in plain sight, but intercepts the camera guy and cautions him not to stand in the car lane. Also, one person does eventually bother to intervene but there’s a twist that you really have to watch to believe. The result is a revelation not just for the guy himself but also for those manufacturing security chains and locks as it changes the assumptions they often work to.

via dvorak.org/blog

Series:MarketingTalk

Sky News Technofile is a weekly segment on the UK satellite news channel.

Around nine minutes long, the latest edition provides a roundup of shopping technology from the likes of Infosys and Fujitsu and focuses on how it benefits consumers as they shop in physical stores. There’s some useful stuff including a mobile app that provides shopping ideas (a la amazon).

You can find this and other episodes of Technofile here (also available in podcast form).

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If you think this is in bad taste, just wait for the bit where you say to yourself “No, she’s not seriously gonna do that!”

via AdFreak / Brief Blog

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Image credit: smaku/flickr

Every day we scan hundreds of blogs and mainstream media for choice content that we think you should read/imbibe.

We’re picky and deliberately avoid articles that make it to the mainstream because this just adds to the echo chamber. The result is a manageable set of hopefully useful links that you may not have ordinarily come across.

To get these in real time, subscribe to the special Trends & Insights RSS feed or the daily email.

If you haven’t already subscribed then here’s what you’ve missed over the last couple of weeks:

Is Unilever running out of ideas? (31 July)
Thinking about design research? (31 July)
How big is the free economy? (31 July)
Portugal signs up for 500,000 Intel Classmate laptops (31 July)
Segment Watch: the businessthlete (31 July)
On broadband and oil (30 July)
P&G goes for design thinking (29 July)
Insight (27 July)
The World is Flat, for free (24 July)
The magic of marketing (24 July)
Ted Mininni: newly minted expressions? (22 July)
NEC technology identifies person’s age and sex, delivers targeted ads (22 July)
30 somethings & Age: a generation of denial (21 July)
John Steel "Planning at 40" (21 July)
The accountability of research (21 July)
Emily Bell: If Google should falter, how many others will follow? (21 July)
New face recognition system helps stores to identify VIP customers (18 July)
Nudge (18 July)
Georgie in Campaign (18 July)
Is user-friendliness a sure marketing bet? (13 July)

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For control freaks like Apple, partnerships must be really frustrating. Famous for wanting to control every aspect of their product - hardware and software - plus sales, service etc., the torrid iPhone experience over the last 24 hours must have sent Steve Jobs fuming to say the least. It’s not absolutely clear who is to blame, but the guns are pointing at Apple’s partner, AT&T (and other carriers overseas).

So even though many decry Apple for being a relatively closed platform, the events of the last 24 hours may have brought some people round to Apple’s way of thinking, or at least made them more sympathetic.

But the reality is that partnerships in most sectors are an increasing necessity. As markets mature, product life cycles and development lead times shrink in today’s ever competitive landscape, organisations have to pair up to provide services they couldn’t do themselves, or at least not cost/time effectively.

Apple clearly sees the mobile market as a crucial one. So would it make sense for them to become a mobile carrier to control the experience end-to-end? Well, that would seem overkill. The bad experience involves activation, the general experience using AT&T and other carriers doesn’t seem to be a particularly big issue (or is it?). Apple is not in the pipes business, so why worry about the mobile pipes if it doesn’t worry too much about the fixed broadband pipes?

So, this got us thinking. As the title of this post conjectures, is the Apple/iPhone brand damaged by having a partner that is a weaker link in the brand experience chain? Anecdotal evidence from people being interviewed outside Apple/AT&T stores would seem to suggest (a) many folks attributed the blame to AT&T, and (b) the diehards waiting in line, sometimes for hours, love the iPhone so much that hurricanes probably wouldn’t have stopped them. And although mainstream news covered the travails, we can’t really see it denting iPhone desirability or demand.

But then you wonder, did Apple anticipate this beforehand and decide to accept the consequences because to have improved it (the back-end systems supporting activation) significantly may have cost too much or been too much hassle? Was there a trade-off?

We are, of course, drawing a parallel here with the BAA/BA fiasco a few months ago at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, where some believe BA may have skimped on the staff training to try to save a bit of money. If that were true, it would have been a spectacular own goal given how much it’s cost BA in compensation and negative publicity, not to mention the senior heads that rolled.

Conspiracy theories aside, it seems we need a clearer way of showing senior decision-makers the short and long-term costs of making key decisions like those discussed above. Because just as environmental costs are starting to be factored into the price of goods, businesses need to be aware of the full hinterland affected by the occassional short-sighted decision.

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Our March ‘07 Spotlight column in ESOMAR’s Research World magazine.

Being prepared and empowered to take risks is fundamental to true innovation and progress.

Anyway, I’ll leave the final word to Brad Garlinghouse, a Yahoo! senior VP, who recently issued the infamous ‘Peanut Butter Manifesto’ to address his employer’s poor performance: “…the employees that we really need to stay [are] leaders, risk-takers, innovators, passionate….”

Read the rest of this entry »

Update: This post is getting around 3-4 visits per day or over 100 per month via search engines against the query ‘pc specialist’ or similar. Assuming even a small proportion of these have decided not to use PCS as a result, it just goes to shows how short-sighted they have been: they’d rather lose thousands of pounds worth of business than pay out a few pounds under warranty - I’m sure that’s a sensible business strategy on some planet!

This post is aimed at those considering a purchase from custom PC retailer PCSpecialist.co.uk and should serve as a warning.

A couple years ago we were looking for a high end PC and our natural instinct was to look at Dell and other well known brands/retailers. It quickly became clear that while these brands were very competitive at packaged systems, customization attracted a hefty premium.

We happened to mention this at a client meeting and this immediately triggered a recommendation. You guessed it, PCSpecialist.co.uk.

The recommendation was from someone who could be trusted - he had bought two systems from there himself. And sure enough their pricing was competitive against the better known brands. They even compared favourably to the cost of the underlying components so there didn’t seem to be any real financial benefit in self-building.

The next couple of months were spent deciding on the configuration (in which PCSpecialist.co.uk were helpful) and waiting for the ‘best’ time to buy. We then took the leap and ordered.

That’s when the PCSpecialist.co.uk nightmare started.
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The beauty of the internet for those keen to understand consumer needs and desires is that people naturally express these in social networks and other social media.

iWant is a simple, experimental tool we’ve built to mine this info from the twitter stream. Give it a spin if you dare

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That’s the question conductor Benjamin Zander asks in this, yet another beautifully powerful and funny session from TED.

We’re not massive classical music fans. But if we had Benjamin Zander teaching us things may have been different. Not content with simply creating classical music fans, Benjamin talks of creating a better world through the power of music.

Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it — and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.

A leading interpreter of Mahler and Beethoven, Benjamin Zander is known for his charisma and unyielding energy — and for his brilliant pre-concert talks.