chris.keller - Dr. Blip's PC-Doctor Blog

Tech Support in a Web 2.0 World

nospam@example.com (chris.keller) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:26:00 -0400

This morning, I came across Brian White's blog post praising Best Buy for their efforts to connect their customers with a Geek Squad branded http://fixya.com site. It is a model built upon the backs of thousands of technical support evangelists operating under web 2.0 do-goodisms and according to fixya.com since 2006, their site has grown to over 700,000 pages.

While I find it quite interesting, I just don't get it. What motivates these do-gooder techs to spend their evenings and weekends helping strangers?

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Apple MacBook Air Hacked In Two Minutes

nospam@example.com (chris.keller) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:40:32 -0400

Apple's MacBook Air was hacked in just two minutes at the CanSecWest security conference's PWN 2 OWN hacking contest, with former National Security Agency employee Charlie Miller walking away with a $10,000 prize.

My thoughts - Charlie Miller and others live in an interesting dichotomy of worlds between good and bad. They make good money exploiting digital weaknesses and for now, do good by reporting weaknesses to manufacturers. The pull to exploit others for their own benefit must always weigh on their mind.

This reminds me of a marketing principle - one's best creativity comes when reflecting on one's most mischievous or devious past actions. Digging up those memories reminds us how we broke the rules then and gives us ideas how we can properly break the rules of "in-the-box" thinking today to create new and innovative marketing ideas.

Goes to show that little devil on my shoulder isn't so bad after all.

Netflix uses One Million Dollar Prize to Solve Customer Recommendation Software Problem

nospam@example.com (chris.keller) — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 08:04:59 -0500

I found this Netflix article just fascinating - Netflix has found a way to extract value from knowledge experts thousands of miles away who are giving the company value before ever getting paid.

We at PC-Doctor have our own software development challenges and we sure should look closely at the way Netflix is innovating. To sum up the problem. Netflix is trying to improve upon Cinematch, its movie recommending software, in an effort to increase and retain subscribers. To do so, it didn't hire more developers, it outsourced the work . . . sort of . . . or at least their model seems to work like outsourcing. Yet, their model is many times better.
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Must-have 150" TV at CES

nospam@example.com (chris.keller) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 13:34:10 -0500

Can you see all of CES in a day? I tried, but of course I knew I couldn't see all of the 2,700 vendors. I saw about 20 and boy was it worth my time!

CES claims it would take me 2.5 years to meet all 2700 vendors outside of the show. That is an average of 3 visits each day for 890 days straight. Ah, needless to say I was glad CES brought everyone together for me and allowed me to see some competitors, the major PC manufacturers, and a lot of other cool stuff.

CES is the show that, at least for the last few years, has been known as the place to launch the biggest and best wide screen TVs. And one specific product captured more than the 140,000 attendee eyes and, in my book, wins the "King of the Hill" award: the announcement by Panasonic of the 150" TV, the World's Largest Plasma TV. It is a mammoth TV and spanned almost 12' by 8'. It isn't in production yet. Panasonic is building a fifth factory in Japan to manufacture this movie screen. Prices are not public but one can get some idea of its pricing by looking at its little brother, the Panasonic 103" plasma TV that sells for between 60 and 70k USD today. Who has that kind of cash when they can pay less than 10k and get a beautiful projector and at least a 150" display screen. Hmm. . . I just don't know.

Needless to say, I was impressed and captured a Panasonic employee demonstrating the enormousness of this new plasma that some day may be exactly what I need in my living "movie theater" room.