jvanderwal

The same exact thing is happening with businesses on Amazon.

A few years back Wendy's had an offer where if you got a medium or large drink there was a coupon on it. 32 coupons got you a one-way flight in the continental US, 64 got you a round-trip flight. Being a poor college student at the time, a few friends and I went dumpster diving at all the local Wendy's and over a couple nights ended up getting about 4 round-trip tickets. The only drawback was having to throw out those clothes..

My friends and I got a few round trip plane tickets once. Wendy's had a deal where their largest drinks had coupons to cut off their sides. I think 60 coupons got you a one-way domestic ticket on AirTran and 120 got you round trip. We were kids so we went dumpster diving at a couple local restaurants, found hundreds and hundreds of cups, and walked away with 3 or 4 round trip tickets. Not nearly as amazing as 1.25 million air miles, but we were pretty proud of ourselves.

I've just used vanilla extract before.. it doesn't take much, treat it like cologne. It smells much better than bug sprays and you don't have any weird residue.

It'll be interesting to see which company Google's autocomplete ends up suggesting when someone types "Moz".. right now it's Mozilla, but with SEOmoz's abilities I wonder if that'll change.

I wonder if there's any sort of somewhat even distribution to the winning tickets. If it's entirely random, there's shouldn't be. However, I knew a guy who worked at a gas station and he'd watch whenever people bought a bunch of tickets. If they scratched them off right there and didn't win anything, he'd buy the next few tickets. I believe he spent about $50-$100/week, but regularly won about $150/week.

We use TVEyes.com in our news monitoring product and it's very close to real-time. It does make mistakes sometimes, but I'm not aware of any perfect transcription software.

I was just looking for this kind of information the other day. Is there a way to give it a budget?

I'm actually looking into this a little right now since I happen to work for a media monitoring company. I can tell you there is a definite correlation between them, but haven't been able to determine if it's a leading or lagging indicator.

I had never heard of these "atmospheric rivers" prior to this article and started doing a little reading.

"Atmospheric rivers are typically several thousand kilometers long and only a few hundred kilometers wide, and a single one can carry a greater flux of water than the Earth's largest river, the Amazon River." [1]

That's really impressive. I'm curious about their density and whether airplanes have to avoid them, or if they're able to fly through.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_river

He's right.. even seasoned sales people don't understand their own pipelines a lot of the time. Try coming into a sales-person oriented company with the job of building a marketing/lead gen system for them, and then introducing them to their first CRM (previously saving all their data in personal Excel spreadsheets). Then convincing them of the value of a marketing program to drive them leads, and how giving me their sales data actually helps them in the long run... It's a common problem in a number of corporations. There's a funnel to the pipeline and sales people often just focus on chasing their one or two current hot leads.

UniKey is doing the "iPhone door opener" idea. Very cool tech - can't wait until it's available.

http://www.unikeytech.com/

The beauty of golf is people spend a lot of money on it. I'd charge people a premium to use it. Couple recommendations: Lose the pop-up for Facebook sign-in. Optimize it for mobile (you're probably going to use this while you're in the cart). For marketing, try going directly to some clubs and getting in front of some of their members. Some exclusive clubs probably won't let you, but start small. Can't hurt.

I would be very interested in seeing some traffic stats once this is over.

>>In other words... I'm still not convinced that tablets or phones are very good for "coloring" or "painting" for children.

My personal experience has shown they can be very beneficial. My little sister has Down Syndrome and never did well with regular book coloring. I downloaded an app that used tap-to-fill and what she learned from it has carried over to real life. She learned the lines are the edges for colors, different sections can be different colors, etc. I fully credit the app with teaching her that.

A friendly fyi: simplyhired.com might make a case that you're infringing on their trademark.

Thanks, I'll have to look into the third-party tool option. Mostly I've been running ads with external links and it would only let me do CPC, but I did do it all thru fb's dashboard.

With a click-through rate of about 0.051% on Facebook ads [1], I'm not too surprised by this. They also made some changes over the past month to their ad payments, in particular removing the option to manually set your CPM (which is the only option to pay to promote your fan page - it's CPC for an external site). So put together a poor CTR and losing some control over how much you're spending, and this is what happens.

[1] http://www.kikabink.com/news/facebook-ad-click-through-rates...

My email is down, but gchat in the same tab is fine.

How about another one.. "Takes too long to get to the interesting parts."

i.e. learning Obj-C and taking until the very last chapter to give even a cursory intro to apps. By the time they get there a ton of people will be burnt out / disinterested.

I just interviewed with them and they stressed very heavily that they do not guarantee any sort of job.

As a business, I like TwitterContests. On a personal level, I just got done with a long road trip and had been thinking it would be nice to have something along the lines of Re:Trip. Maybe an interactive map of the route with pictures I took at diff locations tagged all along it.

I'm very interested. One question: Do you have some place to put people up in, or would we be responsible for lodging, food, etc?

Maybe have points become visible after you upvote a comment? That way there's no influence on which comments to upvote, but you get some validation.

Looks like this is a common problem and Amazon's starting to take it seriously: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/amazon-cracks-down-...