marketing

Vendor Games with Subscriptions

I have subscriptions to a number of services, not just magazines. These include things like computer programs, hosting services, home supplies, groceries and so on. I’m sure vendors love this. Within the past two weeks though, I have canceled three subscriptions when the vendor started playing games at renewal time. It usually went down like this: I get notification of a renewal at an (often substantially) increased price. Increases of 30%+ are not uncommon.

De-Activating My Evernote Account

I’m kind of sad today. I erased all of my notes from Evernote and then de-activated my account. I had been a Premium user for years and had thousands of notes. I used it on the web (when using Linux), on the desktop under Windows, and on my iPhone and iPads. I liked that the data was available on all of those devices. I really liked the web clipper. But the killer feature that got me started on it in the first place was the ability to search in images.

Removing CDNs

(Update: 27 Mar 2018, Despite what the rest of this blog post says, I have reinstated CDNs. This site now uses the Cloudflare CDN due to the inability of raw GitHub Pages to serve sites with custom domain names over HTTPS. See this) Everyone wants their web site to load quickly using as few resources as possible. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are a very attractive way to achieve this. You can put parts of your web site on someone else’s servers.

Advertising at the Movies

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to the movies, something we don’t do very often. (Arrival, which I highly recommend, just like the short story it is derived from.) We arrived at the theatre, one of those multi-screen megaplexes, about 15 to 20 minutes before the advertised start time for the feature. Of course, while waiting, we were exposed to the various advertisements shown before the start of the film.

What's the Deal with Flash Sales?

We have some pretty amazing communications technology these days. One way we seem to be wasting it is on the phenomenon of “Flash Sales” – offering items on sale for a very short time. That’s all we need – more advertising – often for trivial discounts – with deadline pressure. I have never understood the allure of such things. It seems that people who have a “Fear of Missing Out” (FOMO) are most susceptible to this stuff.