tom matrullo's consumer dreams blog

Mon, 14 Apr 2003 16:05:02 GMT

Entertainment like AOLTW thinks it oughta be:


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Sold on Sam's

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 23:59:11 GMT

Sold on Sam's

So, I'm shiftlessly rooting around in the fruits aisle of Sam's Club -- or maybe it was the Brobdignagian Meats aisle - all you and your 50-foot-tall hubby and clan can chow down on. I know it was near the wines.

A woman cut a sharp corner and bore down at produce apparently relevant to the vector I was headed in.


See larger image

I could see she wasn't about to slow down. Her cart was Loaded for Bear. Two or three young giants tagged along behind her. All gave me the battle cry look: "You are no match for us. We shop at Sam's. We eat at Sam's. We roll over unexuberant types like you with irrational exuberance. Eat our dust."

They got to whatever it was they so desperately wanted. I had no urgent agenda. Yet something in the woman's expression, imaged in her young'uns, said Bush. Said cowpoke. Said "This is eye-raq and we're having it for breakfast."

I pulled out my 45 and shot them. Her first, then the boys. Blood spouting from heads lent a dusky pallor to the melons, or loins of pork, or whatever they were.

Clerks from the butcher's dept., and from hardware, and from electronics, converged on the scene.

"I'll pay for it," I said, meaning the damage.

"You won't leave without it," said one fellow in a white butcher's frock, bloodied and slimed by tussels with tripe, concatenations of saucisses.

No free lunch at Sam's.

At checkout, I was presented with a bill for $4,687. For the pleasure. It seemed fair to me. And I had to sign a waiver holding Sam's free from harm in case any legal muscle -- or the woman's husband -- ever thought to sue them for damages.

I signed and told them to ship her cart to her home.

I used to think Sam's was just another bogus merchandising outlet. Now I know better. I'm sold.

Wed, 19 Mar 2003 14:01:43 GMT

Convergence: The War Game Advertainment

Branding, as we know is about submerging our story inside the world of the consumer, inside motivationally relevant advertising vehicles attached to targeted entertainment. Entertainment is about creating a world for the consumer, this is the place they identify with, the birth of their aspirations, inspirations, goals and motivations. Cocojambo.

For the Gamers among us - you know it's coming. Ted (or Gary) Turner has to be working on it:

1. Hire some budding media convergence geniuses - grads, say, of Mandalay Branded Entertainment's advertainment auteurism workshops to build (ta-da)

Reality TV: Operation Iraqi Freedom, The Brand :

[Screenshot of stars of stage and screen sitting around real campfires with real US combat troops, making faces at the bad coffee and saying "Where's the Starbucks?"]

2. Since that would be boring after a few minutes, offer

Gulf War II: Branded Reality TV on Pay-Per-View, Let's Roll!

with the Topscene military simulation tool:

[On the ground in Baghdad!...Streaming realtime first-person shooters featuring 3-D avatars that look Uncannily Like You!]

3. Viewers - your sons and daughters, for example, or subscribers to Soldier of Fortune, lock on to their joysticks and get Hot MUD, MMORPG or MOO Action in Real Time, with Pop-up Flash Ads:

Brighter Whites!

!! Rescuing suffering servicemen and women in sandstorms. (Get the Red Out!)

!!! Getting signed autographs of George Clooney. (Blog it to your SmartMob!!)

4. If you fail to make your number, the game calls you up at dinner time and berates you.

[You blog that.]

Avant Hammock

Sun, 02 Mar 2003 02:28:38 GMT

Frontgate has the best rich fuck catalog title. Its metonymy picks up the one thing that, if you have one, sort of says, "I can afford shite like the...

Avant Hammock

Contemporary relaxation in teak and stainless steel

	Life just seems a little clearer while you’re totally relaxed our new hammock, an uncommonly comfortable yet sleek design in all-weather Textaline, stainless steel and teak. It’s made for gentle side-to-side as well as back-and-forth rocking motion, and owes its clean Danish style to award-winning designer Jesper Moller Hansen. Rotates 360°. Assembly required. 52" wide and 158" long 50 lbs."

Avant Hammock ($1,995.00)

I so much want my Avant Hammock.

I will pay the Front Gate fee, so long as

one end of the Hammock ties to my lovely old sycamore tree,

and the other

to the far side of Arcturus

Fri, 31 Jan 2003 21:23:01 GMT

IRAQ - DATE PALMS, OIL, ETC. CHEAP!!

Item # 2909539751

Everything Else:Weird Stuff:Slightly Unusual

(to seller)
(to bidder)

If you are the seller or a high bidder - now what?

Current bid

US $1.80

Starting bid

US $0.99

Quantity

# of bids

3 Bid history

Time left

Auction has ended.

Location

Middle East, out Euphrates way

Country

Jordan

Started

Jan-30-03 16:33:12 PST

Mail this auction to a friend

Ends

Jan-31-03 11:49:35 PST

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Seller (rating)

watsondogg (127)

View seller's feedback | view seller's other items | Checkout summary

High bidder

powerbbs (0)

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Buyer pays for all shipping costs, which are provided in the Payment Details section below. Will arrange for local pickup only (no shipping).

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Make a Second Chance Offer

Description

Your Own Personal Paradise!!

Help your planet and improve your portfolio at the same time
by purchasing the nation with the location - IRAQ!!

Comes with:

A world-leading collection of date palm trees
Millions of relieved citizens
Warm, sunny weather whenever you need a break from the stresses of life
The world's biggest sandbox
Historical sites, some authentic
Camels, camels, camels!!!!
More attention from George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, etc. etc. than any human being could ever want
Absolutely no trace of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, etc., etc. for thousands and thousands of miles
Many interesting 'science' experiments to test your knowledge and astuteness
Hundreds of presidential palaces for your luxuriating pleasure, some actually larger than Bill Gates's swimming pool
Conveniently located on the Uzbekistan-Syria super-freeway
And need we point out:

OIL, OIL, OIL!!!

Hurry - supplies of this fantastic country are LIMITED, so bid early, bid often, bid today!!!

Offer only valid with coupon. Your mileage may vary. Not valid in Province of Quebec. Do not eat this packet. This is a joke. If you can afford to buy Iraq, maybe you should just do it and spare us all the hassle.
On 31-Jan-03 at 09:55:47 EST, seller added the following information:

Pay me securely with any major credit card through PayPal!

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IRAQ - DATE PALMS, OIL, ETC. CHEAP!!
Item # 2909539751

powerbbs (0) is the winner.

powerbbs, please send your shipping and payment information to the seller. See item description for payment methods accepted.

Note: The seller's payment address is not on file for this item.

Payment Details

Item price US $1.80

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Buyer: powerbbs, If you're not sure how much to pay, you can request the total from the seller.

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Mon, 13 Jan 2003 02:58:39 GMT

Many of us have homes, and most of those homes have shower stalls in them. Much fewer of them have aviaries. But even in those homes with both showers and aviaries, how many have a combined shower/aviary?

This is hardly an unwarranted question. After all, birds love to bathe. Go to any public square that has a working fountain; go to any garden with a birdbath that has water in it: you will find birds hopping in and splashing and shuddering as they dip themselves in the water. What is needed is a shower in the aviary, which iteslf is not unlike the one in Busch Gardens in Tampa - open to the sky, filled with trees and rocks and running water.

Stand in your shower, and watch the birds swoop down and fly through the water. by the end of a good long week of long showers, several of your birds will be able to say "Shake yourself off" or whatever you tell them, or maybe you sing in the shower. A while later, exotic birds know that when you arrive, they will get to have a bath.

You enjoy your shower, with its warmth, and trees, and birds. When you step out, Bola Sete is playing some mellow Brasilian guitar.

Sun, 12 Jan 2003 18:23:27 GMT

New Name for 2003

I am changing this blog to reflect all the things which I would consume, if they existed. (The loathesome term "consumer" is used advisedly.) This is part of a larger problematic. It might only be me who has this problem. Which is, I tend to wish to consume only things which do not exist. In direct contradiction to that predicament, I plan to describe my dreams here in hopes that somehow, this will help make them realities (in which case I guess I would no longer wish to consume them).

Wed, 04 Dec 2002 01:32:19 GMT

Ignorance on Fire

In view of comments posted here on my discussion of Flash and videoconferencing, I've written the following, a sort of open letter to Macromedia:

(Note: I hadn’t planned to write more about this topic. Believe it or not, I have a great admiration for Flash as a tool. I am not attempting to outdo anyone’s stream of urine. I imagine what I am about to say will provoke even wider misunderstandings, so I’m going to try to be brief.

Unfortunately, it won’t be easy to be brief. The issue here goes far beyond Flash 6. It has to do with the social contractual relation created by the convergence of smart technology, real time networks, and a broad, technologically naive community of end users. And the issues go well beyond the PC – in a short time, every device, from telephones to HDTVs to GPS systems will be networked.)

A New Techno-Social Contract

The network brings highly sophisticated technologists and their multiple commercial agendas into close proximity to relatively innocent end users, of which I count myself one. There is a vast discrepancy in knowledge and power here, as more and more software, advertisements, marketing surveys, auto-updates, etc. etc. flow from corporate business outfits that aspire to be on every machine, performing multiple tasks, some of which impinge on issues of user control and user privacy. Without a rich grasp of communications challenges, this knowledge gap will foster a climate of distrust and paranoia. What is needed is a clear template, a new social contract to build understanding and trust between sources of technology and non-technical end users.

Your only hope is to communicate up front. Flash is a brilliant program, as I tried to make clear. It is doing major things for creative folks like Fiore et al and those who enjoy their work.

If you want to reside on half a billion computers, if you want your users to update to the latest versions, if you wish to introduce code that might not be ready to use now, but will be later, when we update to Flash 8.4 or whatever, then be up front. Before we download it, tell us what’s in it, what it does, what it can’t do. If it can do something now, but needs a $2 million server, say so. If it is designed to work with bits of code that will come later, so that it will someday darn our socks, say so, UP FRONT.

You are subject to a history of maladjusted geek relations with nongeeks. Microsoft has already poisoned the water for you, along with other companies that assume that the end user is subordinate to their architecture, their control, and their parameters for privacy.

I refuse updates from Microsoft, precisely because they tend to forget to tell me what exactly they are bringing into my machine.

The more you keep us in the dark, the more likely your arse will be burned with the fire from the candle we light trying to see.

Invasion of the Personal Computer Snatchers

You are not only in control by understanding technology that the end user can only accept on trust. You are allied with the most rabidly intrusive partners imaginable - aggressive advertising and marketing outfits who think my desktop, my screen, and my bandwidth, paid for by me, are theirs to use ever more imperialistically.

Whose “personal computer” is it, anyway?

Your valued partners with whom you are strategically allied obstruct my access to information I want by forcing me to endure increasingly invasive pop-ups, and bandwidth-hogging ''rich media'' ads. Expect your alliance with spam meisters to influence how you are perceived.

Humans don’t use Calculus to Talk to Each Other

I’ve always admired engineers. They work in a real world frame, use math and other sophisticated tools to cause things to come into being that actually work. Perhaps it is that truly awesome ability that has caused some in the engineering community forget that human communication, fundamentally, is not an engineering problem.

Every reservation I have expressed about Flash’s videoconferencing facility – and the weaknesses of its permission feature – is extrapolated from the paltry information available through Macromedia sources. Go to the links in my post here. And peruse the Macromedia Flash groups on Google. Time after time, you will find queries from users who work with Flash, curious to know more about two-way videoconferencing. You will find lots of speculation, a few chary hints from Macromedia representatives coupled with a fair amount of coyness.

See, for example, this thread, or this one. Meanwhile, other folks are working on figuring out Flash videoconferencing on their own.

Summing up:

1. You are in two ways virtually ubiquitous – you sit on half a billion machines, and you are an increasing presence as a rich media tool on thousands of sites that use games, animations, flash intros, art, and rich media advertising.

2. You are allied with imperialistic and invasive uses of the network.

3. You have not been upfront, and do not have a clear grasp of what a truly rich communicative environment the tools you are developing need.

This market is yours to lose. You are creating one of the richest communicative tools out there, and communicating very poorly with your end-user community. You just might blow it.

Mon, 02 Dec 2002 14:55:00 GMT

That Local Video Object looks a lot like me...

One might enjoy the wit of Total Information Awareness by Mark Fiore while still sensible of the irony of its being created in Flash 6, the application with its very own surveillance capabilities.

This weekend I looked a little more closely at how the real time videoconferencing ability of Macromedia's Flash 6 is explained, or not explained, via corporate press releases, white papers, tech media, Google groups, etc.

It's pretty clear that of the nearly half-billion owners of machines that contain Flash, very few have any idea that Flash 6 can turn your computer, via its camera and microphone, into a large bug in your home or office.

It's also fairly clear that Macromedia has gone out of its way to downplay this fact. Nowhere, for example, does the download page for Flash 6 mention this new facility is being added to your computer's repertoire of tricks. Support info obliquely calls this power to see and hear you the "ability to create a local video object."

At the same time, there is the realization that as Flash becomes an increasingly powerful invention - one that can bring talents like Fiore's to 491 million screens worldwide and counting - its growing complexity opens it to ever more powerful hacks:

Because Flash use is growing quickly. Flash MX is challenging Java and DHTML in an attempt to become a true universal client of the Internet. MX is the designation used for the latest release of Macromedia’s Web design tools, and Flash is becoming much more than just a nice way to design banner ads. Flash MX can add real content and power to Web pages through what Macromedia calls Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Nevertheless, the floodgates are now open, and I expect to see a lot of attackers paying attention to Flash in the future, looking for vulnerabilities they can exploit maliciously. We simply cannot afford to ignore the Flash threat any longer. John McCormick, "Vulnerabilities in Flash pose a major threat," CDNet Asia.

Why is it that elaborate presentations of new features in Flash 6 fail to mention two-way videoconferencing? I don't know, but here's an observation that might carry a clue: Flash 6 is not a program we choose to run, but one that appears unannounced as a feature of ads, games and "rich content" scattered across thousands of sites, pages, accessed by millions of users, whether they are perusing the Wall St. Journal, Odd todd, or some new game.

Macromedia's privacy FAQs tell us that it's our responsibility to control the settings built into Flash 6 to prevent unauthorized use of our cameras and microphones. Speaking of responsibility, when were we advised that Flash 6 even had this capability?

Macromedia is in a tough spot. It wants everyone to download Flash. Its Rich Media Advertising partners, like DoubleClick, also want this, because they are paid to believe their own bullshit that rich media ads attract more clicks, dicks, chicks - something.

The confluence of a brilliant piece of software with the demands of web advertisers to "prove" there is a future for ads on the Web could be one reason the videoconferencing feature of the Flash 6 package has had a rather soft opening. Ad partners are probably more focused on when Flash 6 will run on PDAs, phones and other devices.

Your thoughts welcome.

More on this here and here. I'm also talking about this with John Dowdell of Macromedia over on his blog, JD on MX.

Fri, 29 Nov 2002 13:55:44 GMT

Spooks and Geeks

Continuing the theme of Adventures in Alleged Privacy:

Over a year ago, I pointed to Safeweb's Triangle Boy, which was attracting great attention in China because it provides surfers a cloak of anonymity.

Recently someone from there inquired about whether I could send them the software. It seems they're having trouble accessing it. I checked, and found that SafeWeb suspended its free download for consumers last November, claiming economic pressures, ISP problems, etc.

Interestingly, well before that - back in February 2001, SafeWeb announced it had received an infusion of dollars from the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.

SafeWeb did not specify the amount, but Robert McMillan reported in Newsbytes (via Google's cache) that the CIA actually dropped $1 million on SafeWeb early in 2001. (It seems one motive was that its agents in Saudi Arabia needed to shroud themselves from meddling by the Saudi government.)

When it announced the CIA cash infusion, SafeWeb took considerable pains to make this out to be an ''arm's length'' deal:

According to the agreement, SafeWeb will develop privacy and security technology to In-Q-Tel specifications and will deliver it in two phases. The agreement between SafeWeb and In-Q-Tel is an arms-length, pure licensing agreement, involving no technology or IP transfer. In-Q-Tel will not have any board representation, management representation, or equity stake in SafeWeb. However, SafeWeb has issued warrants to In-Q-Tel, which In-Q-Tel may exercise and convert into equity in the future.
SafeWeb's core product will remain separate from any future government use of the SafeWeb technology.

Yet maybe not so oddly, it was this "core product" which then was removed from the market for rather vague reasons last November. It remains suspended, limited to a Voice of America project "to free the Internet in China."

So at the moment, I can't download Triangle Boy and send it to my correspondent in China. And in the era of Total Information Awareness, I am left to wonder about the confluence of Spooks and Geeks, as is the Economist.

That magazine noted that in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, "Security is likely to play a bigger role in the design of technology." Investments like In-Q-Tel's make it clear that the intertwining of government in security issues is likely to grow in intimacy:

The rapprochement will, in any case, settle the question of whether the high-tech industry and government can remain at arm's length.

More on In-Q-Tel here. More on Triangle Boy:

SafeWeb also has a kewl presentation, in Flash 6. What a tangled web we weave...

Your thoughts welcome.

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