latoga

Starbucks Coup Times Two

February 12, 2008 Leave a Comment

I recently become aware of two great coup happening in Starbuck’s land. Both of which will have a ripple effect through the business community…but probably not how you think.

The first one being some inside information from my local Starbucks manager I heard this week. Starbucks will be discontinuing their breakfast sandwiches starting this fall. I think this is a huge mistake on their part and I bet is being made by some recently hired corporate executive from the fast food chain industry. Sit in a Starbucks on any morning and see how many people order those sandwiches. How many of them are business people or regulars who probably double their spending at Starbucks because of that sandwich? A lot (I have done this field research).

I only go to Starbucks now because of those sandwiches (personally, I lost the taste for Starbucks coffee after an extended trip to Italy two years ago). The reason is rooted in the fact that now that McDonalds is serving premium coffee they don’t want to be seen as competing with them. I find this thinking ridiculous; unless those sandwiches are adding less to their bottom line than my back of the napkin field calculations have come up with, this decision will hurt Starbucks more than it will help them.

The second one I read about this morning, Starbucks Switches to Free AT&T Wifi , or will be starting this spring. As all road warriors will know, Starbucks is the go to location for getting on line while on the road. There have been times that I have spent more time at starbucks in a day that I did at my hotel. As they break away form their 6 year relationship with T-Mobile, this changes will have multiple economic ripple effects:

T-Mobile will be taking a huge hit to their bottom line. The majority of their 8900 wifi locations in the US were at Starbucks’ 6800 company operated stored (from Starbucks PDF Fact Sheet). T-Mobile’s wifi business will just about starve if they don’t strike a deal with some other retail outlet. Not to mention that most T-Mobile customers I know that have a T-Mobile phone have it primarily for the discount on the wifi access, which they use mostly at Starbucks.
AT&T will gets a huge boost to their Wifi business (their bottom line is so large, I’m not sure how much of an immediate impact this will have.). With costs much lower for the service than T-Mobile, and Starbucks debit card holders getting 2 hours of free access per day, and with all 100,000 US Starbucks employees getting free wifi access, and with the service eventually being expanded to AT&T wireless customers, let’s hope that the AT&T infrastructure is able to handle this better than it has been handeling their Uverse roll out (which isn’t going smoothly, I hear).
Starbucks should see a boost to their debit card transactions since holders of those cards get free wifi. This has trickle through to the credit card companies as they process the transactions for these cards, and of course take a percentage fee. (I believe Visa is the processor behind these cards, so this boost in revenue will help with their upcoming IPO).

It’s amazing how interconnected the business decisions at this scale can become. One just has to be able to look past the headline and connect the dots.

Wanted: Voting Machine by Apple

February 8, 2008 Leave a Comment

Tuesday was the primary election here in California. Luckily, my polling place is litterally two blocks from my house in a neighbor’s garage. On Tuesday morning, as I waited in a line of 3 people at 7am for the wonderful folks who run the polling station to figure out how to turn on the optical scanning machine, I realized what could be the greatest risk to our Democracy.

Technology and electronic voting machines.

If you were to take a survey of the age of the people who volunteer their time to run most of the election polling places in America, the vast majority of them would fall into the category of senior citizen. This, in its own right, is not a bad thing. But, think back to the challenges that most of the senior citizens you know have with setting the clock on their VCRs. And that’s not even taking into account much more recent and sophisticated home electronics like the latest TVs or DVRs.

And yet, once we start rolling out electronic voting machines, these will be the same people who will have to run them. In general, I feel confident in saying that the technology industry as a whole doesn’t have the best track record for making things easy to use. So, even thought I have not ever seen nor worked with any electronic voting machine, I feel that we (the technology industry, voting machine manufacturers, society in general) may be setting up our democracy for a huge failure.

One of the common statements in high tech revolves around describing what you do for a living: “Describe it so that your mother would understand it.” So, on a similar note, our future electronic voting machines need to be designed such that our mothers (and fathers) could not only cast a vote on it, but also set them up and deal with any production issues that may arise.

This is why I think Apple should make a voting machine. The common statement from nearly ever modern day Mac owner is “it just works”. If Apple can do that for something as sophisticated and mutli-purpose as a modern day computer, image what they could do with a single purpose voting machine!

An Apple voting machine combined with an open source voting software would be a stellar combination.

Which brings up an interesting point. Are there any open source voting software solutions? We never hear about this topic in the media. We only hear about which states have decertified which voting machines or which voting machine was recently deemed ‘hackable’.

Interestingly, after a quick search, I came across the Open Voting Consortium (which I had never heard of before). They describe themselves as a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the development, maintenance, and delivery of trustable and open voting systems for use in public elections. The interesting thing to note is that they don’t seem to be developing an open source voting system. Neither does VoteTrustUSA nor their parent organization Verified Voting Foundation.

In the true sense of democracy, we should have our voting systems be completely transparent. So that anyone who was interested could look in and see how it worked, including independent experts.

I’m shocked that there doesn’t appear to be a true open source voting software initiative yet. But then again, I’m sure Apple isn’t working on their own voting machine either. Probably for the same reasons…just not enough money to be made by making either of these two items in the fashion that has our society’s best interests at heart.

Super Bowl Traffic Rush

February 3, 2008 Leave a Comment

On the same topic of my previous post, I expect that the website admins at GoDaddy.com are currently watching their own traffic graph “go up and to the right”. They used their rejected ad from the Super Bowl to drive people to their website with a teaser ad during the game. It would be interesting to see what their traffic graph looks like from the minutes before their ad ran through the following hour….

BTW: After the first quarter of the Super Bowl…the FedEx carrier pigeon ad was the funniest.

Update: 4:25pm PST: Ok, looks like I’ll be real-time blogging my comments about the commercials from the game. The Garmin Napoleon commercial has to get special mention due to the fact that we have a Napoleon as part of our family. –>

Update: 5:20pm PST (Post Half Time): So far during the game, there have been a few humorous comercials, but the FedEx carrier pigeon one still received the largest laugh. I think it had to do with the build up and then the over the top nature along with the visual details in the punch line.

I think the best commercials for grabbing you and building on the suspense were the Audi R8 ad (viewable on their site) and the SoBe Life Water ad (also viewable on their site). Both commercials were visually simplified, built up to something that you knew was going to happen, but had no idea what, and then cut to the product in the last 5-10 seconds of the commercial. Simplicity is the key to both of them.

Update: 7:30 PM PST (After The Game): So, the last 2 minutes turned out to be the best part of the game with an exciting ending, hence the single wrap up post. I wasn’t really that interested in the game (until those last 2 minutes) since the Packers weren’t playing, hence the time to write these comments. The second half tends to not have the best commercials. There were only two sets that I found interesting. The Coke commercials (both the parade balloons and the political debate ads) were cute and had subtle humor built into them that I appreciated (did you notice in the parade balloon ad, the little girl looking up at the balloons…holding the football and looking like…). I also thought the E*Trade commercials with the baby trading stocks to be perversely humorous (viewable on their site).

Of course, you can view all the commercials from the game on the Super Bowl Ads Myspace page.