Category Archives: Technology

Customer Service, Technology

How I Repeatedly Broke My WordPress Web Site

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In the beginning, I was a support tech at a vertical market startup. The developer asked me to try to find issues with the software, and I found some – including one major bug. He dubbed me Bug Buster, and the nickname stuck.

Before WordPress

It was only logical that my first site was called BugBuster’s Best. It was a very simple site, and I prided myself on hand-coding it using Notepad. The next incarnation was Steve Case’s Place. Since it was still a simple, hand-coded site, it was easy to migrate to the stevecase.org domain when I acquired it. I completely gutted it soon after that, because my original content had been pretty random.

Twitter’s 140-character limit was far too little for some topics, so I decided it was time to compliment my microblogging with a full-on blog. The hosting company where my site lived offered WordPress as a free blogging platform, so the obvious choice was to start with that.

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Marketing, Technology

When Next Day Shipping Takes a Week

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I previously wrote about how Amazon is Taking Over the World. Amazon‘s Prime Day (which actually ran 30 hours this year) only underscores that impression. The marketing and sales bonanza “surpassed Black Friday and Cyber Monday, making it the biggest day ever in Amazon history.”

Can You Have Too Many Choices?

Amazon Prime members can chose from a variety of shipping options that may include same-day, one-day, next-day, "Standard" and "No-Rush"
Amazon Prime members can chose from a variety of free shipping options

Amazon’s Prime members can chose from a variety of shipping options that may include:

  • Same-day
  • Next day (“One-Day”)
  • Second day (“Two-Day”)
  • “Standard”
  • “No-Rush”

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Marketing, Technology

Think Twice about Crowdfunding Technology Products

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Many say crowdfunding is a great way to support a cause or product that you believe in or want to encourage. It’s the financial version of crowdsourcing. I have supported over a dozen crowdfunding campaigns myself, ranging from movies to mine removal.

Crowdfunding lets you experience The Thrill of Victory… and The Agony of Defeat

As suggested by the opening to ABC’s Wide World of Sports, you win some and you lose some. When it comes to crowdfunding, the project can go any of three ways:

  • Doesn’t raise enough in pledges and they are never collected
  • Collects the pledges and accomplishes what they said they’d do
  • Collects the pledges and doesn’t accomplish what they said they’d do

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Marketing, Social Media, Technology

15 Minutes of Fame

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Andy Warhol famously suggested that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” In time, the phrase 15 minutes of fame came to more generally refer to short-lived media publicity or celebrity of an individual or phenomenon.

Lightning Strikes

Out of the blue, I received a tweet from the Think Tank Media Group that I’d made their “list of top 50 Twitter influencers!”.

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Customer Service, Marketing, Social Media, Technology

How Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence Change Everything

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I started to really appreciate futurists Robert Scoble and Shel Israel through their 2013 book Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy . It focused on emerging interactive technologies, and shared some companies to watch. Wearable computing, one of the key focus areas of that book, plays a huge part in their new one.

IN THE BEGINNING, there were mainframes

The book’s introduction starts with an overview of three transformations that followed the mainframes:

  1. From mainframes to interacting with desktop computers using a keyboard
  2. The graphical user interface (GUI), and specifically the mouse
  3. Touch interfaces, including mobile devices

The Fourth Transformation? That would be “Spatial Computing.”

The Fourth Transformation didn’t initially seem especially interested in discussing the actual technology. The focus was more on how retailers and marketers had better get with the program of augmented reality /virtual reality / mixed reality technologies. “If you are part of a big brand, you need to know about this now so you can understand how your customer relationships are about to change and so you begin to adjust course.”

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Customer Service, Marketing, Technology

How Amazon is Taking Over the World and Why You Might Want to Help

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Amazon is taking over the world, or so it sometimes seems. They convinced the US Postal service to bring back Sunday deliveries. Sometimes people casually refer to having “tons of stuff,” while Amazon sells tons of stuff every day. Their building boom in the Seattle area includes everything from conventional offices and warehouses to biosphere domes. Increasingly, Amazon is entering the shipping business as well.

Amazon Prime Air

Prototype of an Amazon Prime Air package delivery drone
Prototype of a Prime Air delivery drone. Photo courtesy Amazon.com

The Prime Air brand initially launched with their delivery drone project. Evolving US regulations relative to UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have contributed to development challenges.

The brand made it to the real world sooner than anyone expected. Their first cargo aircraft, dubbed Amazon One, is prominently labeled Prime Air. It was revealed to the public with a flyover at Seattle’s annual Seafair festival. The prime number in the aircraft’s tail number is a subtle nod to the observant.

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