Mike Lee, Author at BizThoughts

Top Gear, Fifth Gear, and Now: Just Plain Ole’ Gear

Top Gear and Fifth Gear I’ve been drooling all weekend. Drooling over videos of BMW’s new M3 and it’s convertible counterpart. Can I just say: HOT!

The M3 video is a clip from the British show Fifth Gear. That, and the original BBC car show Top Gear, cover all kinds of cool cars. Unfortunately, the shows are only available in the UK, unless you have a satellite TV that’s able to pick up the BBC.

Both shows are popular among car enthusiasts. YouTube may have made them even more popular in this country by introducing them to US audiences (correct me if I’m wrong about that). The shows generally feature cars from BMW, Mercedes Benz, Audi, Jaguar, Porsche, Aston Martin, Lamborghini, Ferrari, Maserati, Bentley, as well as a few from Honda, Volkswagen, Dodge, Ford, and General Motors. There’s been some criticism that the shows don’t feature enough “affordable” cars, however.

After talking to a friend about these shows, my mind started wandering. And wondering. Since these shows are so cool, why aren’t they in the US? Or perhaps: what if there were a US version that included American hot rods, pick-up trucks, and SUVs, since those are generally more popular in the US? What if there was a segment for off-roading, where pick-up trucks and SUVs could battle it out on rocky terrain and hills?

As with all seemingly good ideas, I was not the first to think this. According to Top Gear’s Wikipedia entry:

In April 2007, the BBC reported on a Sun story that Top Gear had been in talks about creating an American version. The current presenters would remain as hosts, but the show would focus on American cars and include American celebrities. The Sun reported in July, however, that plans for an American version had been shelved, partly over [Top Gear host Jeremy] Clarkson’s misgivings about spending several months in the U.S., away from his family.

Ah. And then I found this bit of news from The Hollywood Reporter:

The popular BBC car show “Top Gear” is revving up a U.S. edition.

NBC has ordered a pilot for “Gear,” to be produced by BBC Worldwide Prods. Like the original, it will be a mix of cars, humor and celebrities.

There’s some trepidation of this remake, however. The hosts of Top Gear, Clarkson, Richard Hammond, James May and the anonymous & mysterious Stig, are considered a large part of the show’s success. Without their wit and knowledge of cars, some wonder how NBC’s Gear will succeed.

My prediction – if they can:

find funny, witty hosts who actually know what they’re talking about,
are as entertaining as Tom and Ray Magliozzi (otherwise known as Click and Clack) of the NPR radio show Car Talk,
can test drive these cars well enough to give informed opinions,
and are camera-friendly (hey, this is Hollywood, after all),

…then they will have a serious shot at success. There will always be purists who dislike an international translation of a great piece of art. But US audiences are fairly different than UK audiences. Some kind of translation is going to be necessary (like pick-up truck and SUV off-roading, I tell ya!).

I’ll be anxiously awaiting this new show. I hope they don’t screw it up!

UPDATE 4/3/2008: Here’s Jay Leno’s opinion on the US version of Top Gear. Pretty dire. I hope he was kidding when he related this anecdote about Gear being about building cars:

I ask: what’s the plan for the show? “Well, like, one week you build a car that flies and the next week you make a car that goes under water.” So I said: you know you can’t build these things in a week.

Building cars? How did they go from Top Gear to Pimp My Ride? Damn, I hope that’s not what Gear is going to be…

London’s Padded Lampposts

Padded Lampposts Have you ever been texting on your phone while walking down the street? Then BONK! you crash into a lamppost or mailbox?

Um, me neither, and certainly not yesterday on 3rd Ave. But people in London have. That’s why 118 118, a UK phone directory and information service, has begun experimenting with human-sized pads on lampposts, according to FOXNews.com.

A study… found that one in 10 people has been hurt while focusing on their cell phone instead of where they were walking. … The study claims that 68,000 people were injured in the U.K. last year while chatting or texting on their cell phone.

That’s a lot of people! Take a look at ten of your friends. At least one of you has BONKED into something while texting. Maybe it was YOU.

This isn’t just an altruistic move by 118 118 though. They’ll get to place advertising on these pads if this experiment is successful. So far, they’ve been testing this product in London’s East End on Brick Lane. If all goes well, it will be rolled out in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool too.

That means 118 118 gets a lock on a new market – lamppost pad advertising (or whatever they’re going to call it). What’s next? Mailboxes for one. Maybe building corners, trees, gates, benches, trash cans, and heck, pigeons too – whatever people can bump into.

Of course, plastering the sidewalks with pads and ads has its limits, both visually and logistically. How would you wash them if a dog or person peed on it? Would they culture mildew after the rain? Would homeless individuals steal pads so they have something on which to sleep?

Aside from the logistics, which 118 118 is no doubt trying to sort through, I could see a number of advertisers going for this medium. Say this was going to happen in the US, for instance:

Sleep Train – So soft, you could sleep walk right into bed.
Verizon – Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Can you – BONK – ah, soft. Verizon. Providing you with total coverage, easily and painlessly.
Nokia – Easy to use, easy on the eyes, and now, easy to text, even if you’re on the street. It’s just that simple.
AMC Theaters – Watch where you’re going! Or better yet, sit down and relax at AMC, just down the block.
Honda – Oops! Wasn’t that soft? With Honda’s reliability and safety features, a car accident could be just as easy.
Hanes Underwear – Didn’t Momma tell you to watch where you’re going? I’ll bet she told you to put on clean underwear too. Like Hanes underwear!

Interesting idea. If you happen to be in London and see these padded lampposts, let me know how they work!

Via: Steve Webel

Online Competitive Analysis Services

Not knowing your competition is like not knowing who you’re fighting in World of Warcraft. Is it Alliance? Horde? Night Elves? Blood Elves? Goblins? Oh my!

When analyzing your competition, you’re assessing their strengths and weakness. Your analysis should include direct and indirect competitors as well; any alternate method of solving the same problem your product or service solves is a competitor, even if it’s not a formal business entity. Online Marketing Software and Marketing Experiments Journal both have nice primers on doing competitive analyzes.

For web-based businesses, there a fair number of online competitive analysis services out there. Some are free, some require subscriptions. Here are a bunch that I’ve come across.

Free Online Competitive Analysis Services

One of the more popular services out there, Alexa ranks websites against each other based on traffic. Additionally, it provides data on rank trends (up or down), download speed, reach, page views per user, visitor origins, related links, and in some cases, business information like number of employees, annual revenue, and business contacts.

Alexa gathers its data from users who’ve downloaded the Alexa Toolbar. There is some controversy over this method as some websites have gamed Alexa’s rankings in the past. Also, it only provides this data at the domain name level; data for sub-domains and directories not offered.

For a general idea of popularity trends, this can be a useful service. Just give the Alexa ranks some margin of error.

Compete is also a traffic ranking service like Alexa, though it offers slightly different data. It aims to provide the number of unique visitors to a website, in addition to time spent, pages per visit, and top search keywords driving traffic to the website. Compete also makes it very easy to compare several sites at once.

Compete gathers its data by recruiting users, much like Nielsen Ratings did for US television viewers. These users come from the Compete Toolbar, ISPs, and opt-in panels. Its number of unique visitors metric isn’t accurate, it’s an approximation; use your traffic analysis tools for a more accurate number. Also, Compete only provides data for US users; non-US users are not counted.

Like Alexa, Compete can be useful for general popularity trends and comparisons.

One of the newer traffic ranking services on the block, Quantcast also provides demographics data, such as gender, age, household income, ethnicity, head of household education, and children in household. This data is all from US users only.

Quantcast gathers its data through research panels (essentially, anonymous surveys) and beacon tracking on websites which need to be installed by website owners themselves. Their demographic data is obtained from their research panels, which they acknowledge isn’t entirely accurate.

Like all online traffic ranking services, Quantcast can be useful for general demographic information, but assume some margin of error.

Competitious is a new offering that aggregates the data from traffic ranking services into one location. So far, it only pulls ranking data from Alexa. It also provides a way to compare features across competitors and store news clippings. Your analyzes are saved as “projects” and multiple people can be added to a project.

Although its offerings aren’t very comprehensive yet, Competitious has a lot of potential for being a hub for your online competitive analyzes. I’m anxious to see what features they add next.

Not really a full-fledged service, SearchStatus is an extension for the Firefox web browser. It provides a quick snapshot of any website’s Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, and Compete Rank. There are also a lot of other features, such as showing nofollow links, number of links, meta tags, a whois report, the robots.txt file, keyword density, back links, pages indexed in popular search engines, and other SEO-relevant information.

All of this data is freely available. This extension simply aggregates all of it onto your web browser. It’s an extremely handy tool and very popular among SEO specialists.

Paid Online Competitive Analysis Services

One of the most widely-cited sources, comScore is the Nielsen Ratings of the Internet. It provides traffic rank data in addition to typical marketing metrics such as engagement, reach, frequency, demographics, and daypart reporting. Many journalists and bloggers use comScore’s numbers as a gauge of market share.

comScore gathers its data from users who’ve opted in and downloaded their usage tracking software. Since self-selected populations can be biased, comScore adjusts the data using weights to make sure that different demographics are adequately represented.

comScore is fairly expensive and probably out of reach for most small-to-medium sized businesses. The free traffic ranking services like Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast can provide adequate competitive data for now.

Andiamo Systems is a new service that aims to provide a measurement of a business’s word-of-mouth reach. It does this by collecting mentions from blogs, forums, review sites, message boards, PR newswires, news, and other web sites. A lot of your customers could be sharing their opinions about your products & services online right now, good or bad. This service acts like a targeted search engine to aggregate all of those opinions for you.

Pricing is set on a monthly basis and increases as you get more mentions, starting at $79 for up to 50 mentions. This scale makes Andiamo more affordable for small businesses. A 14-day free trial is offered.

Not every mention out there is equally important, but this new service could provide an effective way to monitor a tiny negative word before it explodes into a PR nightmare.

Watch360 is a new service that keeps an eye on your competitors’ websites and reports every little change they make. It’s a way to monitor announcements and new product offerings from your competitors on a daily basis.

Pricing is on a monthly or yearly basis and increases as you monitor more companies, starting at $29.95/month for 10 companies. The top pricing tier, $99.95/month, allows you to monitor an unlimited amount of companies. A free trial report is offered for one company.

Assuming that your competitors update their website and blog regularly, this new service could give you the information you need to react to their moves.

Ever use any of these free or paid services? If so, what did you think? And do you know of any others that are also good?

Homemade Restaurant Prank Videos

Now for some Friday fun.

Eric:: I dare you to walk up to a restaurant table and start eating off of someone’s plate.
Me:: How about I give you… fifty bucks to do it?
Eric:: I’ll bet if you had a video camera, you could do with no problem. All you’d have to do is walk up, eat some food, and as soon as they start getting mad, jump out with the camera and tell them they’re on TV. People will let you get away with anything if they think they’re on TV.
Me:: Hey, that’s true.
Eric:: I’ll bet you could even make a business out of it. Go around taking food off of people’s plates and pretending to film it.
Me:: After a few weeks, you might even get a good ROI for your camera.
Eric:: Or you could be really cheap and return the camera at Costco.
Me:: This could be done for all kinds of pranks too. You could go around pretending to sample people’s dishes, drink their wine, all kinds of stuff. It could be made into an ongoing series, or maybe into a funny way to do restaurant reviews, sort of like Yelp, YouTube, and CollegeHumor having a threesome.
Eric:: You should totally do this, man.
Me:: Hmm, where’s the nearest Costco?

Plush Designer Roadkill Toys

Grind the Rabbit Now for some Friday fun. I wish I had seen this before Valentine’s Day. But Easter could do just as nicely.

Need a plush toy to give to that special someone? Special as in “twelve donuts short a pack of dozen” special. Or want a furry & squishy toy for your cubicle, the kind that will get your cubemates to inch their chairs away from you or request transfers?

Why not get a Roadkill Toy!

What’s a Roadkill Toy? It’s a plush stuffed animal resembling, um, roadkill – complete with popped eyeballs, extruded guts, and tire marks. How adorable!

The founders of Roadkill Toys describe themselves as ~~avant-garde toy designers~~ “Toy Terrorists”.

We take standard toys and we mess with them. We like toys that don’t take themselves too seriously. Toys with a bit of humour. Toys with a twist.

The founding team is made up of three buddies from a school in the UK (the place where they funny spellings for words, like “colour” and “humour”): Adam Arber, Mike Velcro, and Charlie Bradshaw.

So far, they have one toy that’s ready for sale: Twitch the Raccoon for £25.00. It’s not just a furry plush toy that you can place next to your ultra-soft Gund bear either. They’ve taken pains to create a “realistic squidgy effect”. Squash-plush, they call it. The outside is made of a special material to give it the “tactile quality of mangy fur” and the guts (or Gut-plush) are made of “stretchy thin material that squidges and bulges under your fingers”. Similar to a Japanese Barbapapa plush toy, apparently.

This kind of attention to quality is admirable. Sick, but admirable. Their next product will be Grind the Rabbit, which they’re aiming to have released for Easter.

The toy business is tough. It’s controlled by trends, marketing, holidays, and the fickle demands of hyperactive kids. Well, except maybe for that last part. Traditionally, toy designers have aimed at children. Now, there’s an increasing number aiming at adults too. Roadkill Toys is one. Uglydolls is another, with, well, ugly dolls. ThinkGeek carries a bunch as well (for the more techie-minded adults). And Happy Worker’s action figures are targeted toward working professionals.

It’s a market that’s clearly growing. And lots of toy designers are clawing for a piece of these consumers. Which makes me wonder: what will this market be called? Adult toys, as opposed to children’s toys? Happy Worker’s founder Kris Schantz gave Entrepreneur Magazine this piece of advice on creating toys for adults: “Don’t call your products ‘adult toys’. We made that mistake the first week. Now we say we make ‘toys for big kids.'” Oh. Ha, oops.

So Easter is coming up! That special someone is really going to appreciate the thought and attention you’ve given toward selecting a very special, quality toy! Whether it be a semi-realistic Squash-plush Twitch the Raccoon, which sold fast back around December, Grind the Rabbit (whenever it will be available), or an Uglydoll or Happy Worker, I’m sure that special someone will enjoy your gift of an adult toy. Er, I mean, toy for big kid.

Wireless Security for your Laptop

Do you practice safe wireless? If you don’t, you might catch something and your OS will shrivel up and, um, get a bad rash.

Okay, bad analogy. But still, if you’re like me and work in cafes with free wifi all day long, you’re going to need to make sure your laptop, web surfing, emails, and instant messages are safe & secure.

How secure are they currently? Well, a script kiddie could be sitting right next to you with a packet sniffer, which allows him to read all of the emails and IMs you’re currently writing and reading. And if you, Heaven forbid, log onto an unencrypted website, he could steal your username and password too. This is especially common in Silicon Valley, where there’s a high concentration of free wifi and malicious script kiddies.

Freaked out? You should be. Not afraid? In my best Yoda impression: Oh, you will be, you will be…

After doing a quick search online, I found this article by Scott Granneman: “Coffee shop WiFi for dummies“. It’s one of the better columns on laptop security using wifi connections. In it, he suggests:

Secure Connections: Using a wifi connection with WEP or WPA encryption. Unfortunately, they aren’t that secure, and most cafes with free wifi don’t offer it anyways.
Secure Web Browsers: Using Firefox, Opera, or Safari for your web browser, instead of Internet Explorer, because of all the security holes that have been found in IE.
Secure HTTP: Using websites that use the encrypted protocol https instead of plain ole’ http (without the “s”). The “s” stands for “secure” – well, to be accurate, it stands for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), but you get the point.
Secure Webmail: Using Gmail instead of Yahoo! Mail or MSN Hotmail, because Gmail allows you to use it over https. However, you have to manually change the URL and add the “s” before the “http”, unless you install the Customize Gmail extension for Firefox (sorry Opera & Safari users).
Secure Email Protocols: Using secure POP3 or secure IMAP for receiving your emails, if you don’t use a webmail service like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, or Hotmail. Unfortunately, sending emails is tougher because most cafes don’t offer secure SMTP. Those webmail services solve this though.
Secure Instant Messaging: Using ~~GAIM~~ Pidgin for instant messaging, since it supports AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, etc., as well as encrypted IMs using SILC.

All of that adds to up quite a bit of work and extra software. And even with all these safeguards, your web surfing still isn’t secure. If you don’t have https set up for your blog, logging in to post a new entry could potentially expose your username and password. Jeepers creepers, what’s a cafe-working entrepreneur to do?

That’s where VPN could be the answer. A VPN (Virtual Private Network) would basically encrypt your entire online activity. You wouldn’t need to bother with all of Granneman’s safeguards if you could use a VPN.

The downside is that getting VPN not free. Most businesses offer VPN for their employees. But if you’re an entrepreneur, are self-employed, or don’t have access to a VPN, are you out of luck? Fortunately, no. Another search turned up Mark Ratledge’s article “Make Wi-Fi safe with private network“, where he discusses three commercial VPN services. Glenn Fleishman’s article “The Latest VPN for Rent” adds a fourth choice.

PublicVPN.com: $5.95/month or $59.95/year, no software download required.
JiWire Hotspot Helper: $24.95/year, software download required.
WiTopia personalVPN: $39.99/year, software download required.
HotSpotVPN: their pricing scheme is complicated. $10.88/month for 128-bit encryption, $11.88/month for 192-bit, and $13.88/month for 256-bit, software download required.

Ratledge recommends PublicVPN because it doesn’t require a software download, despite it being the most expensive option. I don’t really mind a software download, so I’m going to give the cheaper options a try.

If you also depend on free wifi, I’d strongly suggest you use wireless protection (which makes me wonder: is wificondom.com available? Why yes, it is, as of this post!). Any of the free methods above could work. Or, if you want to pay for blanket protection, consider one of the commercial VPN services listed here. If you have used one before, what do you think of it? Any good?

Nothing hurts more than catching something that could have been easily prevented, especially from a dirty, stinking script kiddie. Don’t be high, use protected wifi!

Constructive Team Conflict is Good

During his lecture “Top Ten Mistakes that Entrepreneurs Make“, Professor Jeff Pfeffer said something that made me go, “Ah!”

If two people agree on everything, then one of them is redundant.

It’s a quote from a colleague of his. What he’s saying is that constructive conflict is good, even necessary, for highly-functional teams. When team members disagree, each is forced to defend his/her position. In doing so, facts are surfaced, assumptions are challenged, alternatives are analyzed, and everyone walks away more enlightened than before.

To put it another way: two heads are better than one, right? The more diverse your team is, the greater the variety of solutions they can offer. If everyone in your team thought the same way, however, then why do you need that team? Why not just keep one person and fire the rest?