Author: rakesh

Amy’s Ice Cream really knows how to do ice cream. They hire the right people and they train them to be generous and fun and responsive to customers. I read an interview with their founder once and she said something to the effect of, “Our job as an ice cream shop is to take care of you — whether you are here because you just aced a test or because you just failed one.” It’s a simple strategy for an ice cream shop and one the Amy’s executes extremely well on. (And, yes, their ice cream is pretty darn good too.)

(photos courtesy of shozu and my cingular 2125 telephone)

(P.S. when I say Amy’s is in a category of its own among ice cream shops, I’m comparing it to Baskin Robbins, Marble Slab (don’t get me started), and TCBY.  Cold Stone comes close.)

So I spent a little bit of time playing around with Marc’s new PeopleAggregator product (built largely by Gaurav‘s team at Tekriti Software)… some thoughts and questions:

– So what is exactly is this thing?  Is it a proof of concept for a social technologies platform from BBM that  draws together all these open standards?  Or is it / does it aim to be something that mass consumers adopt and use a la Facebook or MySpace?

– Some of the menu navgation wasn’t clear to me… For example, I think “Create content” should definitely be visible at a higher level.

– At least one feature is, um, unfortunately named… “relations” (as in, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman!”).  For example, I added IrinaSlutsky of geek.tv fame (can it be called fame!?) as a relation just so that I can say “I’ve had relations with IrinaSlutsky” 🙂
– I would have loved to try the flickr integration but it wasn’t clear that this is actually working at this point.  And even if it is working there needs to be a wizard for this kind of thing — don’t make me think!

– I liked the simplicity of it all and I like the idea of it all being open standards-based.  I also like the idea of having everything in one place.

– SXIP is cool, but it’s also something I know, well, nothing about.  How do I create an SXIP account?  Where else can I use my SXIP account once I’ve created it?

I get the feeling that there’s a lot more here, and that it’s just not so well packaged / explained so I have more digging to do.  I’m looking forward to digging deeper (I’m sure Marc’s demo later this week at Gnomedex will help too) and seeing continued development on this product.

Today, when I got home, I had this lovely piece of mail waiting for me:

It was one of those physical/offline world things that I felt had to be captured and memorialized.  If this envelope could talk, I’m sure it would have a GREAT story to share.

I’ll be at Gnomedex again this year, late next week. If you’ll be there and would like to meet, drop me a line.

Posts from Gnomedex last year:

• http://blogs.snapstream.com/2005/06/22/see-you-at-gnomedex/
• http://blogs.snapstream.com/2005/06/24/gnomedex-update-mid-day-friday/
• http://blogs.snapstream.com/2005/06/25/gnomedex-day-1-ends/
• http://blogs.snapstream.com/2005/06/26/the-second-and-last-day-of-gnomedex/

Welcome to my WordPress blog hosted by Yahoo! The blog is now accessible at http://rake.sh/ and all of you feed subscribers should automatically be redirected. I’m happy to have moved to my own domain and I’m surprised at just how easy it was!

One question: will his new show be on before or after HDNet’s Bikini Destinations? 🙂

Props to WordPress 2 for its import feature! It effortlessly imported all of my posts and comments from my blogger.com blog.

I’m moving my blog from lambipooch.blogspot.com to this wordpress blog and this is my first post!

Since I heard that Apple had curtailed plans to build an Indian operation, I’ve been wondering why and BusinessWeek claims to have found some answers. In short, it was a cost thing, India’s getting too expensive and turnover’s too high. I wonder if we’ll see this as a larger trend. I tend to believe this is an exception limited to Apple and the fact that their focus was strictly technical support.

I liked Mark Cuban’s idea for a rebirth of the 30-second ad spot. Great out of the box thinking.

So I was reading a review of the new Jack Black movie, Nacho Libre, on my drive into work this morning (yes, I’ve gotten into the unsafe bad habit of reading email and news on my cell phone while driving) and doing some out-of-the-box thinking myself, it occurred to me that the moviemakers should respond to reviews of the movie. Most of reviewers, based on a quick skim of the 300+ reviews of the movie on Google News, try to deliver some sort of intellectual commentary/analysis of the movie. Come on folks, who wants an intellectual dissection of “Jack Black’s coming of age as an actor vis-a-vis his performance in Nacho Libre”? This is Nacho Libre (and Jack Black) we’re talking about!!

So not only would this make for a great publicity stunt but it would be sure to galvanize fans of the movie. I mean, let’s face it, no one goes to see a movie like Nacho Libre because of what Roger Ebert had to say about it!

In general, apart from Nacho Libre, moviemakers should respond to reviews of a movie and engage their customers in a conversation about their product. Why not? It seems to be working for everyone else. Da Vinci code, for example, got panned by reviewers. Why not let moviegoers hear from the moviemakers and have them defend themselves, speak up about where reviewers are wrong? Extras and interactive features on DVDs are popular, why wouldn’t they be popular while a movie is still in the theaters? And with the high-cost of advertising in newspapers, engaging customers in a conversation about a movie would deliver a high bang-for-the-buck.