I thought those of you who follow Homestar Runner would appreciate the Videlectrix site. This is the video-game company that made most or all of the games on the HSR site. I’m guessing it’s made by the same guys, but they at least pretend to be separate.

It’s a little bittersweet, since I’m not the kind of person who really likes to revel in the destruction of competition unless it’s Microsoft. But this article backs up what I’ve been saying all along. Other music stores are gonna have a horribly difficult time keeping up with iTunes.

I know some of you have been Firebird users. Well, they’ve updated and changed the name, just for the heck of it! Check it out.

PS> It’s better than Internet Explorer.

I had an interesting idea last year while looking for a hard-to-find product with my Dad while he was visiting California, and it’s come up again, so I’m saying it here in the hopes that someone will read this and figure out how to do it, and take all the credit for my idea and go and actually do it and become a millionaire. Then I can use the system and be happy for having used it. That’s the plan.

OK, so we can all shop online and have those products shipped to us for an extra shipping fee. And we can all call up a local retailer and go “Do you have _____” and shop around for a particular product that way by using online yellow pages to figure out who is closest and call them up, one by one. That’s really slow and you have to bother a lot of people to find the answer.

I think we need to have a system that takes it one step further and really takes advantage of capitalism.

We need a system that would be online and searchable by any Joe Schmoe, and would know the current inventory of every store who decided to install this system. The system would also keep track of the current price of the item, and obviously it would know the location of the store itself. So if this is a national chain, it wouldn’t just give me a cover-all Best Buy price and say “Yes, Best Buy tends to carry this product”, but it would give the price and availability at a particular location, and tell me if they have it in stock or not. So I can go into the system and type in my address and type in “Braun PowerMax MX2050” and it would list all the systems within X number of miles that carry that blender, how many are in stock currently, how much they’re selling it for, and how early/late they’re open.

Wouldn’t that rock? I mean, haven’t you ever been searching for a product and had a really hard time finding it locally, but you didn’t want to pay for shipping and wait three days for it to get there when you could just go a few miles away to some unknown store and get it immediately for less money?

Stores that were further away from urban populations could even use this system to increase traffic to their stores by reducing the prices on their products. So if I see a DVD available for $20 two miles away, but I see the same DVD available for $14 twenty miles away, I might be willing to drive the extra distance to get it for less. Obviously that would work better on products with wider margins than DVDs, but you get the idea.

That website would get a lot of traffic if it existed. Yep… it sure would.

Update on February 8th @ 11:58pm: I should respond to some of the comments I’ve been getting. I’m not at all convinced this idea couldn’t work due to the stiff necks of the big stores. I mean, who thought the record industry would be willing to undersell CDs online? You’d think they would have made them cost more simply for the convenience, no? But instead, they cost less and they’re immediately available on iTunes. Same price as everyone else, of course, but it was done.

Here’s what would have to be done. You’d have to start with smaller chains and Mom-and-Pop shops who wanted to compete with the Best Buys and the Targets and the Wal-Marts. Tell them they can use this system to compete more directly with those other stores and drive traffic away from their competition and through their doors. Maybe people will be willing to pay a few cents more at their store because they know it’s in stock and it’s a few miles closer than a Target might be. Start really dominating that sector. Get it in the “low-end” 80% of stores out there. Then, it’ll be obvious to Target and Wal-Mart that they’re the only one’s who aren’t using it by that time, and they might be willing to talk. The big boys are always the most cautious. They’re scared to go first, and although I think that can be dumb, I can understand that.

Sure, Wal-Mart is probably going to be able to out-do the little shops by about $1.50 on most items above $50, but who cares? That doesn’t mean you’ll always go to Wal-Mart. You just go there because you know the name and you know where it is because you can see it from the freeway. And you know they probably have it in stock because it’s huge and they’ve got lots of shelf space.

I think this system would be an equalizer, and would be kind of a grass-roots kind of retail movement.

The real trick, in my opinion, is to make the kit affordable and still automatic. It would have to tie directly into their cashiering system, so the moment one of those items goes across the checkout, it clicks down by a count of one on the website.

Maybe that’s another selling point. Help keep track of inventory and “shrinkage,” a.k.a shoplifting.

Ah! And another selling point. You could always provide local stores with feedback about what the most common product searches are, so that they would know what their local customers are looking for. I mean, no store can know what you’re looking for before you walk in, right? And if they don’t have it, they’ll never know because you look for it and leave when you don’t find it. This site would at least partially solve that problem too, by telling the store owner “A person searched for this product, and your inventory came up zero even though it’s in within at least one of the product categories you sell.”

Very interesting… I don’t think this idea should be given up on yet.

If you’re a geek or follow technology closely you may have heard that AOL and Apple just did a simultaneous release of new chatting clients. iChat 2.1 beta and AIM 5.5 for Windows are now able to do video chat with each other! I don’t know how many of you Windows users out there have a video camera you can hook up to your computer (or a webcam) and a broadband connection to the ‘Net, but if you do, feel free to send me an email and we can video chat sometime. It’s fun!

This is so odd, but leave it to the Internet to have something like this happen. Some of you may have seen a little Flash game out on the ‘Net recently where you’re playing a little white Yeti creature with a big white baseball bat, and a penguin jumps down from above you and you swing the bat and send the penguin flying as far as you can. I have no idea what the game’s official title is, or who actually created it originally, but I’ve discovered something dastardly about it, and I thought I should alert you all to this particularly concerning fact.

I began playing the game at the following location. Go ahead and give it a swing. I’ll wait. Maybe try ten times and see how high of a score you can get:

Penguin Baseball : Version A

Then, through a link that Neal had posted I discovered this second copy of the game. If you pay attention to the comments in that entry, there are stories of scores there that report numbers much higher than I believed to be achievable with Version A of the game. It’s important you’ve already played Version A before you play this one. But notice how much higher your scores are!

Penguin Baseball : Version B

I’ve been able to get a decent high score there, although it’s not the stuff of legend spoken of on Neal’s blog. Still, I thought I should alert you all to that fact, so that if you’re having high-score discussions with others you can at least know there are two (or more) different versions floating around out there.

Well, you may have seen the sort-of okay ad that Apple and Pepsi (but mostly Pepsi) aired during the Super Bowl. I didn’t watch the game because this was the only ad I really wanted to see, and I had already seen it, but the announcement is significant. Free music! One in three bottles wins. Not a bad deal. You could get a fair amount of music this way. I found this funny little clip in the official rules posted online:

To receive one free game piece and a copy of Official Rules, while supplies last, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope postmarked on or before 3/31/04 to: Pepsi iTunes Game Piece, P.O. Box 9205, Young America, MN 55558-9205. Residents of the state of VT may omit return postage. Limit one free game piece per request per stamped outer envelope.

The only problem is that postage costs $0.37 per envelope. If it was $0.33, you would statistically break even, and run a chance of actually coming out ahead (or falling behind) but you don’t get the soda (for extra money). If you can find a way to get it to them for less than a stamp somehow… you might make out well. I mean, $0.99 is already cheap for a song, but hey, if you can get the same quality of service, etc. for less than that, it’s worth a shot!

Unfortunately there’s probably no way to do it. Oh well. It was fun to think about.