Virtual Properties

Kurt MacKey on Best Buy's attempt to use technology to weed out their least profitable customers:

The adage "the customer is always right" goes, Best Buy doesn't buy it. The massive retailer is being vocal about something that at first might sound a little uncouth: frankly, they'd rather not have 20% of their customers as customers. In an age where it seems like everyone casts their nets as wide as possible to bring in more eyes, feet, and wallets, Best Buy is doing the opposite. They believe that a small portion of their customers are bad for business, and they're looking to shut them out. Of course, Best Buy loves their "angel" customers who buy things regardless of price, and load up on high ticket items. The problem is that the details are about the devils.

The devils are its worst customers. They buy products, apply for rebates, return the purchases, then buy them back at returned-merchandise discounts. They load up on "loss leaders," severely discounted merchandise designed to boost store traffic, then flip the goods at a profit on eBay. They slap down rock-bottom price quotes from Web sites and demand that Best Buy make good on its lowest-price pledge. "They can wreak enormous economic havoc," says Mr. Anderson.

Some see this as Best Buy trying to "have its cake and eat it too," by wanting to keep rebates, loss leaders, and massive promotions going, but exclude those who make routine use of them.

Dan Fost:

Now, just in time for the Web 2.0 conference, which gets under way Tuesday at San Francisco's Sheraton Palace Hotel, we bring you The Chronicle's list of... the Top 10 Lies of Web 2.0. (We had a little help but, hey, Web 2.0 is all about sharing, isn't it?)

1. We learned our lesson last time. And we're going to cash out before this bubble pops.

2. This is not a bubble. Hot parties, overheated PR pitches, and five or six dozen social networking sites are just healthy indicators of a new boom.

IAG Blog:

We have never had anything bad to say about this airline. They seem to be doing remarkable things. Only 17% of South America's people use the Internet. In Brazil its 13.9%. Now consider this as you read the next data points.
Brazil’s low-cost, low-fare airline GOL shared that it finished 2006 as one of the largest e-commerce companies in Brazil. The company managed R$ 3.7 billion in gross ticket sales through its website, http://www.voegol.com.br/. Internet sales accounted for 82 percent of the company’s R$ 4.6 billion total gross sales during 2006. Gross operating revenues from passengers flown in 2006 were approximately R$ 3.7 billion, and total net operating revenues were approximately R$ 3.8 billion.

Michael Miller discusses Scott Rosenberg's new book: Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software:

Rather, Chandler is a rhetorical device with which Rosenberg takes on the big questions: How do software development teams work (or not)? Why does the reuse of software modules rarely work altogether correctly? Does open-source development by volunteers on the Internet lead to innovation or just insanely bifurcated chaos? Chandler helps his readers think more clearly about all of these issues; however, "answers" to these questions are, of course, not to be had, which is one of his points.

The problem with books about technical subjects that aspire to appeal to a general audience, particularly computers and software, is that such subjects are so far outside the realm of familiarity of most people that the prose bogs down in analogy and metaphor. Rosenberg manages to avoid too much of that and deliver a readable account of software development and culture. --David Wall

Tom Abate:

Fremont resident Rakesh Guliani likes to say that a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner saved his marriage.

Messy floors had been causing friction, says the 41-year-old Guliani (pronounced Goo-liani). His wife, Kavita, 35, was particularly annoyed by the footprints he and their daughters, Ashna, 10, and Rhea, 6, tended to track through the house.
"I am soccer coach to both of them, and when we come in with our dirty cleats, I am more tolerant of that because I am tracking dirt, too," says Guliani, vice president of the job-placement firm Park Computer Systems. He vacuumed several times a week but it never seemed enough to satisfy his wife, a technical writer for Google.

"I was sucking the thread out of the carpet," says Guliani, who bought a Roomba last fall and programmed it to scour the carpets for dust, dirt and grime. Regular cleanings by the Roomba restored household harmony. "It never gets bored and it never complains," he says.

The Guliani family is at the cutting edge of what may be the next technological revolution - the emergence of software and hardware capable of performing tasks once reserved for that race of toolmakers called Homo sapiens.
"Sometime in the next 30, 40, 50 years we will have human-level machine intelligence," predicts Marshall Brain, a computer science teacher turned author and technology forecaster.