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Praized weekend
Friday Afternoon Humor: Having Fun with User Reviews
source: XKCD.com
Friday Afternoon Humor: History of Blogging
5 Things You May Not Know About Me
I was just “blogtagged” by Peter over at Local Onliner. Blogtagging is the equivalent of the old chain letters (see Mitch Joel’s description here) but done through blogs. In this case, I now have to disclose five things you may not know about me.
1) My first job was as a parking attendant in Quebec City in the 1980’s. I lasted three weeks…
2) I was selling stuff on the Internet before eBay even existed (circa 1994)! Should have moved to Silicon Valley then. Proof here…
3) As bullet #2 shows, I used to be a comic book geek. Nuff Said! 😉
4) I spent the second year of my life living in France, while my dad was attending university.
5) The first Provencher that came to North America was named Sebastien Provencher, like me. He’s the Sebastien Provencher that keeps beating me in the Google results!
I now tag Harry Wakefield, Sylvain Carle, Michel Leblanc, Eric Baillargeon and Martin Lessard.
How (NOT!) to get a Nintendo Wii on Launch Day
In my circle of friends, people know that I’ve been a video gamer for a long long time (since the launch of the Apple II in fact… Ah! Odyssey!). I’ve also worked a couple of years in the videogame industry at the end of the ’90s. I’m also what they call a “Nintendo FanBoy”, someone who has tremendous brand loyalty for Nintendo and everything they do.
Today was the launch date of the Nintendo Wii, the new Nintendo console. Suffice to say I’ve been wanting to get one since they demoed their amazing new controllers at E3 2006 in May. Usually FutureShop and BestBuy are pretty reliable and they allow you to pre-order. Not this time. I read somewhere that they would have more than enough for everyone and that’s why they were not taking pre-orders. Fair enough. So, I stopped my shopping, relying on these two guys to get enough consoles for me to order on launch date.
I suggest you DON’T believe everything you read on the Internet unless it’s from an official source! 🙂 I did not manage to get a Wii this morning even though I tried buying it when they went on sale at 8am on BestBuy.ca. I had one in my shopping cart but the site slowed down to a crawl and, by the time I got to payment options, they were sold out and I was kicked out of the buying process. Sigh… I tried ordering one from Sears. It worked but they cannot confirm its availability yet. Re-sigh…
Now, it seems like the only place where I can get one online is eBay. Interesting! But it’s double the suggested retail price. No good for me as I’m not ready to pay that much… I also just found out that I could have gone to my local Microplay store (five minutes from my home) and pre-order one as late as two weeks ago… Well, I’ll just wait until they receive a new batch and buy it from them.
Update: it seems like Nintendo was surprised by the level of sales on launch day and sold out everywhere.
What it means: even though most consumers will tell you in focus groups that they know their neighborhood, I don’t think they realize the amount of information they’re not aware of. That information gap is waiting to be bridged and I can see a future (not a FutureShop hopefully!) where you will be able to more efficiently shop in your neighborhood via the Internet. You’ll be able to express your needs through some sort of RFQ system and merchants will bid for the right to sell you what you’re looking for. Ah, that will be the day!
Harry says: Totally agree re: not aware of what’s in the neighborhood, however I would also posit that there is enormous potential in our neighbors, not only for what’s local, but for rest of our “worlds” too. McLuhan called it the global village.
World of Warcraft in Comedy Central’s South Park
One of the topics we’ll occasionally be covering in the Praized blog is Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). Online video games such as Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft and Linden Labs’ Second Life have created virtual universes and economies that have critical mass from a user point of view. They are a new kind of social network, where people gather to meet, play and kill some bad (or good) guys. And they might represent a business opportunity as well. I was watching the latest episode of South Park on YouTube (warning: South Park is not for all tastes). It’s called “Make love, not Warcraft“. In it, a renegade player threatens the game World of Warcraft and the fate of the game lay in the hands of the South Park gang. It’s interesting to see how these MMORPGs are now entering the pop culture through TV shows. I wonder if Blizzard was involved in the development of the show.
What it means: in my opinion, this South Park episode is a good way to get introduced to the concept of MMORPGs (although some purists might disagree…)
Seb Provencher's Blog 