Ikea, the Mecca of stylish furniture that falls apart before you finish the last payment (sooner if you move it) has hired Forsman & Bodenfors to create the best web interfaces for sales I have seen in years (here is the website). It isn’t the animation which many have done, nor the simplicity of the layout or the contained and orderly navigation. It is the fact that these and other aspects have been done so seamlessly that the everyday consumer can enjoy the “shopping experience” in ways that they don’t need to be aware of. It is almost the futuristic, animated, informative, do-it-all site that web 1.0 2.0 and sadly 3.0 will all brag about offering.

This is the future of sales, advertisements, weekend grocery flyers everything. It’s not a question of if but when.

Wal-Mart is willing to do anything to get in your cities, it loves you and wants it bad. It see’s all the money goodwill and hope that it can bring to your life if you would only let it open its door and let you walk into its warm gooey goodness.

Like a abusive spouse Wal-Mart is droping all its bad habbits (like beating you) so that you will let it back into the home.

Over the past few years when it was trying to get into major metropoliton city limits and got MASSIVE resistance it spent money repainting its facade and getting rid of its garish 1980’s blue/white colors for warm and rich browns and vanilla. It spent money reflooring and bringing new fixtures into its worst stores. Places where money hasn’t been spent on looks since it was initially built. Oh and they gave some money to local school districts agian. All in order for you to like them and let them in………….it didnt work.

Phase 3 (really more then that this has been a planned growth for over a decade) is now in the works and you have seen it in your news just might not have noticed all the little things they are doing as a whole (like I said they want you‘re money in a bad way). The following is just the start.

Wal-Mart will scale back sales of guns : see bad PR especially in major cities

Wal-Mart to build in depressed urban areas : lose money in hopes of wooing voters and inter-city officials by showing that they can revitalize an area as opposed to being a parasitic drain.

Walmart Upgrades Health Benefits for Employees : Read close the wording of those agreements

Walmart Plans to Start its Own Bank : The original idea years ago was brick and mortar buildings now its small, only to do instore transactions.

I have watched Wal-Mart fight this fight for almost a decade to no avail but I know that they will get what they want. I know that one city will bend under the bribes pressure and let them in, then the next city and so on each city falling faster and faster. The thing is that whatever they offer will be phased out asap once they get what they want. So please whatever you do if you work for any metro municipality get it all in advance. Don’t alow a fiscal quarter at a time payment or investment. Don’t fall for a based on profit returns donation. Get the money fast and first and by the love of God don’t give them a tax break to build them. PLEASE.

And then there is Kinkade’s proclivity for “ritual territory marking,” as he called it, which allegedly manifested itself in the late 1990s outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.

“This one’s for you, Walt,” the artist quipped late one night as he urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Sheppard, a former vice president for Kinkade’s company, in an interview.

“The Painter of Light”â„¢ formally know as Thomas Kinkade has not been loved by many people both in the arts and in the business world for quite some time and not all because of his “popular” paintings. There have been stories of abuse, fraud, manipulation and vulgarity for quite some time but now they are in the from of a court recorded oath bound statement. Mr. Kinkade has had over 5 lawsuits filed against him over the past few months and the first one to find against Mr. Kinkade has just ended. With more information coming out with each case a portrait of sorts is getting fleshed out depicting Thomas Kinkade as a Drunken, Lecherous, Foul, Manipulative & Religiously Opportunistic Businessman who left his supporters and gallerists in the lurch by over saturating the retail market and abusing those who work for him. More can be read at the LA Times article here.

“In determining priority for shipping and inventory allocation, we give priority to those members who receive the fewest DVDs through our service,”

Over the last few weeks there has been an on going argument in the media and most assuredly with customers of Netflix over the seemingly obvious use of a discriminating allocation of company resources towards it’s users. I and many other people have noticed and commented on this since around October of last year, noticing that the speed of shipping had taken a considerable delay on the Netflix side of the postal system (the delay of emails stating arrival of a DVD and emails stating the shipment of a replacement). This fact has been covered by many others not least of which CNN. The part that kind of gets a glossing over is the once debated and now fact use of throttling of high demand DVD’s. Where once before you would set a list of over 30 DVD’s (a policy that Netflix encourages in writing all over their site) and get them largely in order one at a time now has become a race for the bottom of that list where if you are flagged you can wait indefinitely at the end of the pack.Since October I and many others have had a complete lock on top choice films if they are in High Demand. Not a slowing down or a throttling but a slam on the brakes lock. I have waited almost 2 months without change in status for such films as The Brothers Grimm, Flightplan, The Wedding Crashers & The Island. As you can notice the term High Demand is basically a side term for New Release.
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The Weapons of Tomorrow Today?

Click image to play movie. 19mb takes time to load.

Be in any industry long enough and you have to sit through a film crudely produced by a company in hopes of selling you some product, idea, or entirely new paradigm (or even the use of the new word paradigm). They often have graphics produced by preschoolers with clip art books and Elmers glue. Then add music ripped from a movie theater pre-show trivia soundtrack. One of the more interesting a friend sent me was for the “new” Dread Gun that is being produced in hopes of eliminating the need for chemical ammunition. Watch, enjoy and see the future of tomorrow just as the previous generation did when they saw the Jetsons.