For those bored by the traditional process of buying something (select a product, find the best price, make the purchase) there are many options for added excitement these days.

American Express is currently running its Going Once promotion, where you can watch the price of a “dream vacation” drop into your price range before pulling the trigger. The risk is that you can’t predict when inventory will run out, so if you wait for the price to go too low, you’ll be shut out.  It’s essentially a reverse auction.

While Going Once adds intrigue but creating uncertainty around the price and availability of a product, some companies take it to the next level by adding uncertainty about the product itself.

Alex Rainert wrote a great post on EverydayUX about “Blind Faith” a promotion where Coudal Partners is offering early access to its latest product. The catch: you pay before knowing what the product actually is. Alex draws a great parallel to Monty Hall of “Let’s Make a Deal” fame.

Another site, Something Store, builds an entire business of selling mystery products. You pay them $10 bucks and they send you a product. You don’t find out what you’ve paid for until it arrives.  The site provides examples of the types of things other people have received (hand made earings, goggles, a knife set) and some firm guidelines on what you will not receive (body parts, alcohol, an endangered species).



So far, 11,727 “somethings” have been delivered. Interestingly, other than showing a ton of real examples, the site doesn’t do much to fluff the value of the products. There is no claim that you’ll receive something worth far more than $10, rather the site issues the sober statement that “we believe eventually it’s your perception that will decide what your something is worth.”

Regardless, in these three cases, the value of the product takes a back seat to the thrill of the transaction.

Kiasma Stairway, originally uploaded by bender_todd.

Another photo I took, this one from the national modern art museum in Helsinki. The Kiasma housed in a great modern building designed by the American architect Steven Holl.

Sam’s Restaurant on Court Street, originally uploaded by bender_todd.

A photo I took of Sam’s on Court Street in Brooklyn.

A  recently concluded research study that tracked the whereabouts of 100,000 European cellphone users concludes that people move around in boring and predictable patterns, staying close to work and home.  The data, which was scrambled of personally identifiable information for privacy reasons could have huge implications in fields like disease tracking and urban planning.  Typically, there is concern over the study from privacy advocates.  Privacy concerns continue to be a huge stumbling block for technological and academic progress - even when data is used in an anonymous and aggregate fashion.

Here is a fan-created video of Radiohead’s Nude (Don’t Get Any Big Ideas).  Skip to about the one minute mark as this starts quite slowly.

Here’s a great music video for Salt the Skies by Tortoise:




Has anyone seen any other really good music videos recently? Let me know and I’ll post them.

This month’s wagon is a classic Volvo ES 1800:



Some misguided souls might insist that this isn’t a true wagon due to its sporty coupe profile and lack of rear doors. To these narrow-minded traditionalists, I offer a safer option: the ‘97 Ford Escort… in teal.



Me? I’ll take the elegant lines and agressive stance of this yellow Scandanavian beauty. Thanks to Alan Katz for finding her.

Great post at Signal vs. Noise on the artist Robert Rauschenberg, who passed away on May 12th. Any business person who aspires to creativity or innovation would learn a lot by studying the careful thought processes that the great modern artists used to create original and meaningful work.

Take Garfield out of Garfield and things get dark.  

I was poking around on Plaxo this morning and the process of importing my contacts from G-Mail got me thinking…

Anyone who has signed up for a new social media service recently has probably gone through the process of importing contacts from their web mail account. This process fuels many up-start social services for good reason: For all the scale of Facebook, most regular people still have most of their contacts stored in places like their e-mail accounts and mobile phone address books. Given the tremendous value of these “old” systems for storing and managing contacts, I’m surprised that more effort has not been directed at improving them.

For example, G-Mail currently groups my contacts into ‘frequently mailed’ and ‘all contacts.’ Neither set reflects the group of people I have real relationships with. ‘All contacts’ is a laundry list of every address that has come through my account and includes names I’d never contact again. My frequently mailed list includes 20 names out of 351 total contacts. This means that every time I export my contacts to another service I need to go through the 351 person list by hand to separate out my actual friends.

Now, with some simple rules it would be easy to use my e-mail history (or “social graph”) to develop a view that reflects well on those contacts that I have an active relationship with. For example:

These are probably not the right rules, but my point is that it wouldn’t be difficult to generate a list of contacts that more accurate reflect my real world relationships. From there, I could better manage contacts on G-Mail itself and more conveniently port my data to other services. If Google were to introduce logic anywhere near as accurate as that which drives Facebook’s ‘people you may know’, they would have an enormously valuable tool on their hands.

I love G-Mail as a mail and chat product, but given Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and their enormous investments in social media, I’m surprised that they haven’t built out this piece of functionality in their most “social” product.