January 2011 - Otis Regrets... or not

Who pays for this mistake? Not the client.

I’ve been writing a complex series of emails for a client. I finished one series, then had to modify them for a new audience. The right way to do this would be to save each of the emails with a different name, then do the versioning. But I was distracted so I saved the new email over the old one without changing the name. I did this twice. It then took me about two hours to go back and recreate the original emails and fix my boneheaded mistake.

This is a retainer client: we agree to a certain number of hours each month, and I account for how I spend my time. So do I include these hours in my billing? I say no. It would be different if I were billing at minimum wage in which case I’d expect to get paid just for showing up. But my client is paying for a certain level of professionalism, and this ain’t it.

Back in my suit days, I’d have to account for every hour of agency time. There was an “administrative” bucket where non-billable time would go but I better not use it too often. I’ve occasionally seen (not participated in) systems with no such catchall which means that inevitably every minute gets billed back to somebody.

If you’re hiring an agency or a freelancer by the hour, it’s fair to ask how they keep track of their time and if they have an accounting category where they put non-billable time. If they don’t, then you may end up paying for mistakes.

This Quality Inn is a poor “choice” for weary road warriors

I visited a client in Irvine, CA last week and stayed at the Quality Suites John Wayne Airport, an establishment I’ve used on several previous occasions. I like this place because it’s modestly priced yet has plenty of room to spread out when I’m working for several days. Evidently lots of road warriors feel this way, judging from the number of single guys in the breakfast room at 6 am.

When I checked out I half-heard someone else complaining about an illegitimate charge on their bill. I couldn’t get my own bill because the printer was broken and they promised to email it to me. When I received the email I saw my own illegitimate charge, a daily fee for a safe I didn’t know was in the room.

I emailed the general manager (who had sent me the invoice) asking for a correction. Nearly a week later I’ve heard nothing. After a few days I went on the website of the parent organization, Choice Hotels International, and filled out a tedious form asking for help. Though they say “we appreciate that you took the time to bring these matters to our attention” and promise a response within 72 hours, nothing from them either.

Isn’t this a great example of terrible customer service? There’s no excuse for the invoice trickery to begin with, but if it was unintentional the management should have corrected it and apologized immediately. And I’m now seeing that there is nobody behind the curtain at Choice International, a somewhat toothless affinity organization since all their hotels are independently owned.

A lost customer to this establishment and more than likely any other hotel in the chain… plus nasty whiny blog posts and tweets… seem like a poor trade off for somebody’s desire to stuff a couple of extra bucks in their pocket. Bad choice, Quality Suites John Wayne Airport and Choice International.

On the floor at Fancy Food Show 2011

The Fancy Food Show was jam-packed at San Francisco’s Moscone Center…. good news for business but making it difficult to navigate during a truncated visit this week. Here are some highlights:

Trending up: cured meats, especially Serrano and Parma hams. I remember when it was a rare treat to get a slice of one of these beasts; this year they are everywhere. Though oddly enough, the salt content of most seems significantly reduced from classic preparations. There was also a jerky stand advertising 50% less sodium than traditional jerky. Also, lots of high-end sodas.

Trending down: nuts. Once a massive snack category, the vendors showing fancy smoked and salted nuts are today few and far between, Too much fat for today’s snacker? Baja Bob’s, a low calorie cocktail maker, can pour you a margarita for 60 calories vs 240 calories for a regular margarita. The benefit of which, they explain, is that your date will have more than one.

Down and out: gluten free everything, All of last year’s signs were gone. Also, vendors trumpeting the ‘USDA Organic” certification were rare even though a pavilion was set aside for them. May be that, as some of the folks at Terra Madre Day speculated, the designation is cumbersome and simultaneously lets in questionable products while not defining a level of quality that is actually useful.

Paul Bertolli and his wonderful head cheese

Product of the year: Testa di Porco (head cheese) from Fra’mani. Paul Bertolli has been threatening to bring this product to market for several years and last Sunday it happened. Ethereal. It’s not little bits of this and that like traditional head cheese but nice big chunks of celery-cured ham held together with a clove-y gelee. People were standing in line for this one.

Trend to watch: consolidation. NYC-based Rick’s Picks, to take one example, is now shipping 10 standard products rather than 14 in the past. In a tough economy retailers can’t be asked to stock that many SKU’s. Rick says there’s a demand for “spears” but that yen is now satisfied with a classic dill sour (really crunchy and good) and the green bean and asparagus spears have been put out to pasture.

Most popular giveaway: showgoers who traveled across the country, and could have all the food they wanted, stood in a long line to get a tea press with the Tea Republic logo. Starbucks take note.

CES 2011: the chef has left the building

I did not have much luck finding a convection oven with multiple zones controlled from your iPad; in fact I had quite a bit of trouble locating the simple iGrill mentioned in my previous post on remote controlled household technologies. (If you happen to be at the show still, it’s in the Dr. Bott booth in the North Hall.)

Turns out there are just not a lot of technologies for controlling your home appliances remotely, not now and not in the immediate future. The closest I found to what I was looking for was a concept group from LG called the ThinQ; the ThinQ oven will tell you when its recipe is done and can be turned off or switched to warm from your handheld device. The ThinQ refrigerator knows what’s inside, so you can check in from the store if you forget whether you need milk or eggs. I also saw a Samsung refrigerator with a touchpad that accesses the internet and will check the weather or look up recipes; these are the key applications mentioned by a panel of working moms. But communication is one-way; you can’t input your own recipe for example. And all these devices are just ideas; they’ll never come to market in their current form.

If all you want to do is control electrical usage, we’re quite a bit further down the road as many manufacturers get ready for SmartGrid solutions that will adjust your power flow or delay electrical functions based on time-of-day metering. These devices talk to the utility’s smart meter via wireless or a powerline connection. Seems like it would be an easy enough thing to have the appliance accessible to the consumer, as well, via that same interface. And I hope some manufacturer or consortium of manufacturers will try that out soon. In the meantime, the IGrill looks pretty hip after all.

That’s it for CES; back to non-tech subjects in my next post.

Product wrapup from CES 2011

A product I didn’t expect to like, but impressed me, is the $449 neo-I from Optoma. it’s an iPod dock that has a sweet sound system and a picoprojector that projects a reasonable size image (say 3×5 feet) on a wall). They demo’ed it in a mocked up college dorm (beer bong not included) which looks like a great user case.

The product most likely to go nowhere: the Atrix suite from Motorola. In a year where everybody is selling a unified device in a do-it-all tablet, Motorola wants you to buy a component set that includes a phone that hooks into a dock that turns into a PC with a wireless keyboard that turns into a content input device for your HD TV. They call this a “PC in a phone” but it’s really an internet device with a few specialized apps; the demonstrated benefit was being able to show your vacation videos wherever you go. Nobody is going to want to buy and organize all these pieces of equipment. And to make it worse, their wireless partner is AT&T, master of dropped signals and a no-show at CES.

Under the radar technology that was getting the most attention: Hand gesture input for televisions. Like the Xbox Kinect, the Asus TV with PrimeSense has a microcam pointed at the viewer that reads your hand gestures so you can, for example, change channels by waving your arm up and down. A lot more elegant than yet another remote, even if it has a motion sensor like the Wii.

User interface design at CES 2011

There’s always a nice buffet at the ShowStoppers press event at CES. This year it included a beautiful arugula salad with orange slices. Trouble was, the long strands of arugula fell off the tiny plates they gave us. So by the end of the evening the kitchen was chopping the arugula into pieces that didn’t fall off the plates. User interface problem, solved.

It is not so easy for a consumer electronics company to change direction with its user interface, and I think that a lot of worthy products never get a foothold in the market because of poor or simply unfamiliar choices about the way the consumer interacts with them. This is allegedly the “Year of the Tablet” at CES, and indeed it is with hundreds of models on display. Tablets don’t have keyboards, so you have to design a way for consumers to manipulate the on-screen icons that is intuitive.

Most copied the iPad model with a grid of apps icons that you can select by touch. BlackBerry’s new PlayBook did something different and I liked it. There is a horizontal band of icons actual running applications [thanks to Peter Hansen, below, for this correction] across the middle and a dock of smaller favorite icons at the bottom. It’s a cleaner interface with much less on the screen. You can flick the band to left or right to expose more icons. When you want to activate an icon enlarge an application’s window you tap it and it fills the screen, but you can get back to a desktop by “rolling in” the edge from any of the four inner edges of the bezel. After a minute I was using it with ease. I wish RIM success with this device, although I’m a little nervous that they have not announced a battery life.

Apps menu on LG TV — Apps menu on Samsung TV

Less successful are the TV Apps I saw from Samsung and LG; I’m sure they are available from other brands as well. High-end “smart” TVs have a menu screen that looks like an overgrown iPad with big icons for sports programming, partner channels, and their own version of apps, mostly games and kid activities. The whole idea seems like a non-starter to me. How many people fiddle around with their TV menu instead of going right to the menu of the TiVo or set top box they’re familiar with? And tabbing among the icons with a handheld remote was awkward and reminded me how much more intuitive a touchscreen is.

A giant electronics company can absorb a mistake, but the same may not be true of Anti Sleep Pilot, a device that mounts on your dashboard and monitors the driver’s performance and alerts you if it’s time to take a break. This is a very serious subject and a worthy thing to do but I wondered how they went about deciding how exactly to alert you and nobody at the booth could inform me.

The demo video shows a melancholy Dane who looks like he’s quite willing to cooperate but I wondered how it would be sold to Americans who are distracted to begin with. Here’s where the user interface makes a real difference. I’m told the warning sign, after you fail a certain number of tests, is a “chime”. Did they test that vs a buzzer or siren? I hope so. This is a product that truly will live or die by its interface. I watched it at ShowStoppers while munching my arugula.

GadgetTrak scribes best press release of CES 2011

GadgetTrak is a service that, if your smartphone or laptop is stolen, will snap a picture of the perp using the webcam and identify their location within a few yards, then forward the information so you can turn it over to law enforcement.

They could have told me about this with a standard press release that begins, say, “GadetTrak expands innovative protection service at CES 2011” but instead they sent this one which starts “Don’t Come to Vegas without Bringing Protection”. Smart and relevant double entendre. Then, they deliver the product pitch in a personal context a blogger can appreciate: a reporter had his backpack stolen, and all the products he was going to review were lost forever… something that would not have happened if they were registered with GadgetTrak.

And finally, an offer: journalists can get a free month of GadgetTrack protection during the show, so they can try the product for themselves. This is followed at the end of the press release by contact information, web address for the presskit and so on…. all material that I know is going to be in there so no reason to lead with it.

Contrast this with a journeyman effort such as this which came from Westinghouse, but might have been sent by any of 500 TV brands here: “Westinghouse Debuts New LED And LCD HDTV Lineups At CES 2011: Super-Thin, Energy-Efficient Westinghouse Lineup Flagshipped By 60” LED And LCD Models.”

See the problem? With competition like this, GadgetTrak wins the “flack of the year” award with a first-round pin. And they demonstrate why you always need to sell your reader on the benefit of paying attention to your message… whether it’s a press release, a direct mail letter or a job application.

What’s cooking at CES 2011?

On the plane heading to CES in Las Vegas, I decided to think about innovations I’d LIKE to see prior to reading my sheaf of press releases to find out what I actually am GOING to see. This year I’m not looking for any dramatic product category breakthroughs. Instead I’m on the prowl for stuff that makes our life easier, especially when it comes to food and eating related tasks.

The iGrill Bluetooth thermometer mentioned yesterday is a good place to start. It’s pretty intuitive how it works without knowing much more than the name. You can be sitting in front of the game indoors and still monitor the temperature of your meat (or perhaps the internal temperature of the grilling chamber) and when it’s done, get up and waddle out into the sunlight to collect your perfectly smoked brisket.

At $99, the iGrill seems a bit pricey for a one-trick pony. It would be nice if, after reading the temperature, it can do something for you… like turn off the heat (if it’s a gas grill) or dump a fresh supply of wood or charcoal on the fire. And hey, how about a really smart convection oven that can show you temperature and airflow in your oven in a heat map diagram on your iPad and you can move your finger around to adjust things? Or, a device that releases an even supply of steam inside the oven to produce a perfect loaf of crusty bread? That doesn’t need to be electronic, probably, just a fancy teapot with tricky vents and valves. I’m digressing a bit…

Lots of devices are integrated systems these days…. think of your dishwasher, or clothes washer, and the multiple functions that happen at the touch of a button. These things are controlled electronically, so theoretically it does not seem to me complicated or expensive to add a software interface that lets you monitor and modify what’s going on. Then add the Bluetooth connection and software on the computing device, and you’re in business, right?

Every year there are a number of platform areas at CES…. a number of vendors following a common standard such as X-10 or Zigbee. The booths often seem kind of sad and underfunded and it’s hard to see them starting a revolution. Meanwhile some of the big vendors, often Panasonic, will develop a technology on their own and if it takes off then others adopt it. Such is the inefficient platform development system in conumser electronics.

I’d also like to see a solution that lets you retrofit a remote control, software based interface to legacy gadgets… like Slingbox, but for my bread machine. I have been fiddling with one of these devices and it shows promise. So, what if I want to set it from the road to turn on and have a hot fresh loaf waiting when I come home? Slingbox’s secret is that it uses infrared technology,… a communications channel between the home entertainment system and a remote that is already there. The only interface to the bread machine is your finger. But, you’re saying, I could do all the programming and have some kind of delayed device to give power to the machine. That might work on some models but not mine; you have to unplug then plug it back in to input cycle instructions.

I am eager to see if some smarter soul has figured out some of these things for me…..

Blogger preview: CES 2011

Tomorrow I head west for this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The word is that LAS is packed, hard to get a taxi or a hotel room just like in the glory days. I’ll be attending press events on Thursday and Friday night, visiting a couple of clients, and trolling the floor for new and noteworthy things to write about.

In last year’s preview post (inexplicably titled “On my way to CES 2009”) I talked a little about my philosophy of working this show. I also predicted that 3D TV would be a non-starter… you read it here, and many other places, first. This year is supposedly “the year of the tablet” which also happened in 2003; I am more interested in things you can do with the tablet, such as iGrill, the world’s first bluetooth cooking thermometer you can monitor from your iPad.

My task on the plane is to scan some 300 press release emails and see if there is anything promising enough to follow up. Tip to flacks: like most people who will be writing about the show, I’ve been filtering my CES emails into a special folder. So if you don’t say “CES” in the subject line, you’re not visible to us.

Wearing my consumer hat, I am going to find what the ^% is happening with the content side of streaming video. Was excited to get an HD Roku for Christmas. Not so excited to discover that Netflix has just 20,000 streaming titles available, NOT including anything by the Coens, or Dumb and Dumber, or the Southland series from TNT. I’ve read that the studios seriously underestimated the appeal of streaming and delivered their content to Netflix at a bargain price, but if they’re going to just pull it back then we don’t have a seamless entertainment experience, do we?

Stay tuned…