• Supersize Returns to McDonald’s
  Winston Smith’s new job is in product naming, as the Supersize is now called the Hugo. Rhymes with Peugeot?

The next issue of Ambidextrous Magazine features an article (PDF link) that I wrote about my Museum of Foreign Grocery Products.

Update: link to the article fixed

Jesus Said

is a line of gift-shop-y products (t-shirts, caps, etc.) that combine pedestrian slogans with a vaguely humorous religious message, where each phrase is prefaced by God/Jesus Said. Spotted on vacation in Coupeville, WA.

These are the controls for reclining the new first-class seats on American Airlines. Luxury

equals complexity, apparently.

Driveway is brand new online file sharing service. But Driveway was an online file storage service that shut down in 2000.

Driveway, 2000

Driveway, 2007

Driveway’s original heights and crash weren’t as spectacular (except perhaps to the players involved) as other web 1.0 flameouts (ahem, learning experiences), so it’s reappearance (owned by an entirely new company) won’t be as buzz-worthy as the Second Coming of Boo but I still thought it was worth a mention.

Perhaps we’re in for a wave of remakes in the dot-com space. WebVan 2.0, anyone?

• Everything good for you is bad for you
  Grapefruit linked to increased breast cancer in women (“more research is needed”). Paging Miles Monroe (aka Woody Allen) – “Those were the charmed substances that some years ago were felt to contain life-preserving properties”- but are actually unhealthy
• President’s Choice – Home products
  During my days in Canada, this was a great success story of a premium house brand that did very very well. Now it’s become a lifestyle brand; they aren’t selling just grocery products, but furniture, too! Nice line extension.
• President’s Choice Financial – Memories of Credit
  Another line extension! Financial services. Not just dipping sauces and Decadent chocolate chip cookies, it’s now a bank. How cool and weird.
• Joe Fresh Style (Frais)
  Another line extension from Loblaws/President’s Choice – fashion!

As Japan prepares to switch to a jury system, the government has been running mock trials to expose people to the idea. There’s a big cultural challenge, though.

“I think there is also the matter of how much he has repented,” one of the judges said. “Has he genuinely, deeply repented, or has the defendant repented in his own way? What’s the degree? I mean, some could even say that he hasn’t repented at all.”

Hoping for some response, the judge waited 14 seconds, then said, “What does everybody think?”

Nine seconds passed. “Doesn’t anyone have any opinions?”

After six more seconds, one woman questioned whether repentance should lead to a reduced sentence. “The way the defendant expresses himself and such, it could be viewed as someone who’s not good at it,” she said. “So there’s no way for us to know what is the degree of repentance from how he has repented in his own way.”

I’m reminded of our work with consumers in Japan; we got a lot of warning from people about what kind of answers the Japanese wouldn’t give us. I was somewhat nervous that things would tank entirely, but in fact, an open-ended conversational approach (with lots of follow up) worked out very well. The two situations (trials and design research sessions) are completely different; we didn’t represent the state, for one thing! Still, there’s a cultural layer to this story that many will no doubt recognize.

“Is that for your kids?” asked the Sears dude as he handed me the box. “Uh, my kids?, heh heh, it’s for me!” I managed as I headed out of the online-order-pickup station. [Yeah, Sears.com actually has something in their store if their website says they do; unlike Circuit City that shows an item available when you look on their website but when you visit their store it’s not on the shelves and if you can find a human who’s willing to help you, all you’ll hear is that they don’t have it. You lost a customer, Circuit City!]

Just last week I saw leaked footage (since pulled down) of an upcoming video game called Rock Band where a group of people perform a song (using guitar controllers, a drum accessory, and a microphone) and it just gave me chills. I realized I needed to get Guitar Hero, the existing predecessor.

I grew up playing video games. As a kid, we’d find any bowling alley or arcade and spend hours pumping in quarters. I used to hang out a dry cleaners (!) after school, playing whatever game they had. I got an ATM card and moved my bank account just so I could go next door to get $5 at a time in this afterschool activity. So why was I not doing it still? I had a PSX for a while; it was amusing, but it never really fit.

But this – the idea of a game that was about performing…I’d been hearing about it for a long time; stumbling across the video and subsequent conversation with friends was the motivational tipping point for me.

Wow.

The game is fun. It’s really really fun. This is an innovation around the notion of what a video game can be. Musical and performing games have been appearing for many years, such as PaRappa the Rapper, and Dance Dance Revolution, or the various precursors of Guitar Hero that one could find in a Tokyo arcade 5 years ago.

The idea of the game isn’t new, but is definitely novel. You hold a guitar, with five different buttons where frets would be. Instead of strings, there is a strumming bar. On screen, notes come towards you on a fretboard. When the note gets to the bottom, press the corresponding button on the fretboard and strum, zapping the note. Each level is a different song and the notes that play (or don’t, if you miss) as you zap ’em make up the guitar parts of the song. You are essentially playing the song, with enough realism that you get a real charge out of it.

Some nice touches make it really work. There is a great tutorial that explains how to play and how to use the controller. No need to page through the tiny print in a book and figure out what the heck is going on; they’ve designed an explicit learning interface.

As well, there are various levels, to enable you to have some success. We played on Easy, and it was tough at first, then become somewhat less tough with practice. And more fun, the better we got. We dabbled with the Medium setting and it was more fun to play. This blew me away. Instead of simply increasing the challenge (more monsters, smarter monsters, faster moving monsters), the game gives back more. The more intricate the pattern of notes you are sent, the closer you are to “playing” the song. It’s more fun and more engaging.

There’s a nice mode where you can go through any of the songs at a variety of slower speeds and practice the guitar parts. The songs are broken down into intro/chorus 1/verse 1/bridge/solo etc. so you can really focus on what you are trying to learn.

This is the best game I’ve ever seen and it’s a really nice implementation of some fresh thinking about what video games can enable.

We were amused to see the game featured in the New York Times today (although they referred incorrect to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Texas Flood” as “Texas Blood.” Nice).

Finally, the SF Chron featured this image, full-size, on their real estate supplement.

Kids? Sheesh. This is the perfect game for my generation, young Sears dude.

I recently found myself at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, where I discovered that the outdoor amusement park industry has been continuing to push the snack food envelope.

I’ll start with my personal favorite:

Deep Fried Twinkies

Hey, and if you can deep fry a Twinkie, why not . . .

Deep Fried Cheesecake

Treat someone who’s named you as the beneficiary on their life insurance policy to a couple of those!

And then, there’s the cutting edge in frozen dessert:

Dippin’ Dots, the Ice Cream of the Future

It may be hard to imagine if you haven’t experienced it yourself, but these are tiny dot-sized balls of ice cream, served in a cup.

Call me old-fashioned, but amidst all this Food 2.0, I was heartened to see an old favorite still going strong.

Burgers

• Be Careful What You Ask Your Customers
  Research shows that choice of how you ask for feedback influences the feedback itself. In principle, everyone would agree, but this article is much more specific about the “what” and “how.”
• Phil McKinney and the “Trend Safari”
  Kind of like what we’ve tried to do with CultureVenture – get into environments that you don’t normally get into and try to figure out who, and what, and why – more exploratory and experiential than ethnography typically is. Also see JanChipchase.com