Restaurant's Retaliation to No-Shows

(3/27/2013) Taking reservations is common in the service industries: restaurant, airlines, spa, doctors, dentist, lawyers, etc. We know taking reservations is one way to improve the resource utilization of the service provider because the wasted time of the doctor or lawyer is losing potential revenue. If the patient or client doesn't show, some doctors or lawyers may still charge you fees for no show. But most restaurants don't charge for no show customers. The owner of one Vietnamese restaurant is so pissed by no show customers, (s)he posts their names and grumpy complaints on the twitter account. Will that get them even? See the video below

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T-Mobile Goes No Contract with Subscribers

(3/26/2013) T-Mobile decides to take down the contract with its subscribers, and its starting monthly rate of unlimited phone, txt and data is $50 (well, with download speed limit). Will it be a game changer? Or it is the last survival approach that T-mobile (the smallest major wireless service provider in the U.S. and they keep losing subscribers to other carriers) can have now? Since T-Mobile won't subsidize subscribers high-end smartphones by locking subscribers with contracts, subscribers will have to pay a high-end smartphone with several installments (say $15-20 monthly). Let us wait and see.

My bet is T-Mobile will transforme into like TracFone or Virgin Mobile. Price is not the only criteria that consumers care.

Starbucks Tell Anti Marriage Equality Investor: Buy Other Companies.

(3/22/2013) What a brave and great response from Starbucks' CEO, Howard Schultz, when an investor challenged Starbucks' position for supporting marriage equality! The followings are from the NPR's report:

At the company’s annual meeting Wednesday, shareholder Tom Strobhar suggested that the boycott had indeed bled the company of value.

“In the first fill quarter after this boycott was announced, our sales and our earrings — shall we say politely — were a bit disappointing,” he said.

CEO Howard Schultz shot back that the decision to back gay marriage was not about the bottom line, but about respecting diversity. He said the company had delivered a healthy return last year, boycott or no.

“If you feel, respectfully, that you can get a higher return than the 38 percent you got last year, it’s a free country. You can sell your shares of Starbucks and buy shares in another company. Thank you very much,” he said, to loud applause from the audience.

Cruelty of Product Innovation

(3/18/2013) Though Samsung Galaxy S4 is not a total WOW, but still some market researchers think Apple needs to go big with the iPhone 5S, or go home. Apple's iOS has not wowed the marked for a while and its days of leading ahead of Android is numbered (or some say over). That's the cruelty of product innovation.

Product Failure

(3/18/2013) How can we say a product is a failure? Is Apple iPhone map a failure? Is Microsoft Vista a failure? or its Surface tablet? Microsoft's hotmail has been transformed for many years, and now it will be eventually merged to outlook. The most recent victim of a failed product is the CEO of Electronic Arts (EA). EA's recent launch of SimCity received an overwhelmingly 1 (out of 5) star review on Amazon (1862 users give 1 star out of 2146 users on 3/18/2013). The major reason: EA totally underestimated the server capacity required from purchased users who choose to play in the "multiplayer online mode" instead of "offline single-user mode." What will be next failed product on this list?

When you play online game, you HATE this message.

Social Media Ecology

(3/11/2013) Remember Farmville on Facebook? The company, Zynga, struggled recently to maintain a sustainable revenue (a scandal of copying game ideas from competitors) after this once an everybody-play game on Facebook lost its ability to catch eyeballs. Facebook is a big fertile land for application developers to harvest but only if Facebook is consistent in supporting their apps. It looks like Facebook is so big that it does not care little app developers. Will this karma eventually come back and give Facebook some lessons in the future? Time will tell.

(4/21/2013) This is a news talking about the gloomy future of gaming on social media (e.g., Facebook). I am not a gamer of farmville when it was popular on facebook and I don't understand why people play games on social media. This news provides several insights for the gaming on social media hype. Three days later, this news says Zynga lost 21% of its daily gamers. Wow, gaming industry is as tough as movie studios: one day sunshine, another day blizzard storm.

Leap Motion's Air Touch

(3/11/2013) You don't need mouse anymore to control your computer. Now Leap Motion's Hands-In-the-Air Controller will allow you to control your computer without touching. One thing I am not that sure is whether your gestures will always need to be around or above the sensor bar. We are getting there.