ETD: 912 Giftware Designer Georges Briard; Can You Hear Your
Target?; Spammer Convicted
E-Tailer's Digest
etd_post at gapent.com
Tue Aug 16 01:10:59 GMT 2005
E-Tailer's Digest --- Everything for the Retailer
Issue #0912 August 16, 2005
George Matyjewicz, Moderator mailto:georgem at gapent.com
Published by: GAP Enterprises, Ltd. http://www.etailersdigest.com
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CONTENTS
[1] Greetings
[2] Giftware Designer Georges Briard
[3] Can You Hear Your Target?
[4] Spammer Convicted
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[1] Greetings.
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Hi All:
Jules Kaplan reports on the death of his uncle, famed giftware designer
Georges Briard. Our sympathies to Jules. Jascha Brojdo a/k/a Georges
Briard will be sorely missed. A great designer.
Finally, somebody is listening to the public. Vodaphone has listened to
their customers who said they don't want a cell phone with all the bells
and whistles - just one that allows calls to be received, sent and stored
in voice mail, along with a phone book. Maybe other companies will follow
suit.
It reminds me of the palm when it was first developed. Palm inventor Jeff
Hawkins may not have invented the expression "Keep It Simple, Stupid"
(KISS), but he sure lived by it. The Pilot had only a few simple
applications, including calendar, address book, to-do list, and short
memos, but it was great at the few things it did. Jeff walked around with
a piece of wood the size of the Palm in his pocket to get the feel of the
product. Then they ruined it with all the gadgetry. Same is true with
cell phones.
And a spammer was convicted of 123 counts of stealing personal information
from data seller Acxiom Corp. for direct-marketing purposes. Sentencing
will be January, 2006. This should send a clear message to all who misuse
the Net.
Now, let's get to everything for the retailer.
Sincerely
George Matyjewicz, PhD
Chief Global Strategist, GAP Enterprises, Ltd.
mailto:georgem at gapent.com
http://www.etailersdigest.com
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[2] Giftware Designer Georges Briard
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I don't know if you know Jascha Brojdo, also known as giftware designer
Georges Briard. He was an uncle of mine and he died on Thursday, August
04, 2005. He died of natural causes in New York City, at age 88, after a
long illness.
Russian Ukraine-born Brojdo, known for vivid glass and porcelain tableware
and serverware designs, was an influential contributor to the deco-modern
design movement. His designs helped define the cocktail and home
entertaining culture from the 1950s through the 1980s.
Authentic Briard items today are among the most coveted "retro"
collectibles in giftware and tableware.
Jules Kaplan
Inovium Corporation
www.inovium.com
Tel: 702-254-6385 FAX 702-926-9629
+++ [Moderator's Comments] +++
I didn't know him personally, but do know his work. If you Google Georges
Briard you get 37,600 sites all with his products - glassware from the 50's
& 60's, napkin rings, antiques and collectibles. All vintage stuff. He
was a true artiste, and will be missed. You have our sympathies.
George
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[3] Can You Hear Your Target?
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Verizon is famous for their ads "Can you hear me now?" What they, and most
other companies fail to do was listen to their customers as to what they
want.
Finally, Vodaphone, cell companies are listening to their audience. I hate
those phones with all the gadgets. Just let me store tel numbers, call and
receive calls and voice mail. That's it. Forget these photos, text, etc.
I have a global phone from Verizon that I got since I travel out of the
country a lot. It has all the bells and whistles, which I don't use. One
day somebody sent me a picture, and I didn't know what to do. The same
lady sent a text message, and I didn't know how to reply.
I believe in the KISS system - Keep It Simple Stup[id.
WSJ article below.
George
----
At a time when cellphones are letting users do more tricks, from video
calling to downloading digital music, one of the latest models from
Vodafone Group PLC has no camera, no browser and hardly any icons. Instead
of being sleeker and cooler than ever, the phone is large and ordinary-looking.
What it is, though, is easy to use, and if Vodafone is right, the market
will love it. That's because of who its market is: people getting up in years.
If the battery on the Vodafone Simply, as it's called, gets low, the phone
doesn't signal this with a tiny icon somewhere. Instead, on its screen, the
words "please charge" appear. If a message is waiting, a light flashes,
like in old-fashioned answering machines. To help people who tend to lose
their phones around the house and let the battery run down, this one comes
with a stand that serves as a place to stow the thing, and charges it while
it's there.
Ann Ridley is the kind of customer Vodafone has in mind. A 65-year-old
ballet teacher in Claygate, near London, Ms. Ridley rarely gives out her
mobile-phone number, never uses text messaging and doesn't store her
friends' numbers on the phone. "I can't see the numbers, and it's too
complicated," she says. The result is that she uses the cellphone for fewer
than a dozen calls a year, spending less than $18 annually.
The Vodafone Simply handset.
The hope at Vodafone is that when people like Ms. Ridley, who said she
wasn't familiar with the Vodafone Simply, hear about it, they'll find its
ease of use so comforting they'll start to use their cell service more. If
so, Vodafone, which collects a fee for each cellphone call, can expect more
revenue.
Vodafone isn't the only company -- nor cellphones the only industry --
trying to shape some products for older consumers or to simplify them. At
Ford Motor Co., designers who test-drive prototypes sometimes wear a
"third-age" suit that gives them a sense of an older person's experience by
means of stiff fabric at the elbows and knees and thick padding at the
waist. Ford has made many modifications to cars as a result, from wider
doors to more-comfortable seats, says one of its technical specialists,
Jeffrey Pike.
Philips Electronics NV, whose many products range from beard trimmers to
X-ray systems, has a "Simplicity Advisory Board" of outside experts, and
next month will bring out the first products of a companywide simplicity
drive. Consumers are saying, "Many products complicate my life instead of
making it easier," says the head of Philips's global marketing management,
Enderson Guimaraes.
The Vodafone Simply isn't an attempt to match certain ultra-simple phones
sold to the elderly for emergency use, such as one from a France Télécom SA
unit that has no keyboard but just three big color-coded buttons linked to
preprogrammed numbers such as that of a doctor. Instead, Vodafone is trying
to appeal to a large market of middle-aged and older people with a handset
they won't find intimidating. The company's European target market is
everyone who's 40 years of age or over and isn't issued a cellphone by an
employer.
That's a sign of how young the usual market for cellphones is -- and what a
change this move is for an industry that keeps adding features to get
customers to upgrade. Vodafone's plan reflects the need for new sources of
growth. Cellular markets in much of Western Europe and Japan are becoming
saturated, so that the middle-aged and older are among the few places to
look for new growth.
HEAR ME NOW?
Vodafone is offering the Simply in nine countries so far, not including the
U.S., a market in which it participates through a 45% stake in Verizon
Wireless. The U.S. cellphone market still is growing briskly, although its
growth, too, is expected to slow before long. The countries where Vodafone
Simply is available are the U.K., Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden,
Spain, Portugal, Greece and New Zealand.
Other European cellular operators have ideas similar to Vodafone's for more
effectively tapping into the older market, says Kai Oistamo, a senior vice
president at Nokia Corp. The Finnish manufacturer of handsets is in
discussions with some other service providers now, he says.
Vodafone's initiative began two years ago, after the company surveyed 5,000
Europeans about what they wanted from a cellphone. What it heard from
consumers aged 35 to 55 shocked executives of the Newbury, England,
company. Many in that age range didn't know their cellphone numbers or how
to use basic functions.
One-third, for example, said they didn't know how to tell when they had
received a text message. Some thought the envelope icon that signals a
message meant their phone bill had arrived.
One woman in Italy told Vodafone she didn't know how to reply to a text
message, so she would send back handwritten notes through her son, on his
bicycle.
Many 35- to 55-year-olds also didn't like going into Vodafone retail stores
because the young staff -- average age 24 -- talked in acronyms they
couldn't understand. These consumers said they weren't interested in the
cameras, Internet browsers and many of the other features that are becoming
standard on the latest cellphones. "Our biggest customer segment turned
round and said: 'You haven't been listening to us,' " says Guy Laurence,
the company's consumer-marketing director. "It was an industry for kids."
As the Vodafone Simply project took shape, company executives debated how
much emphasis it should get. The company's chief executive, Arun Sarin, a
silver-haired 50-year-old who once headed a Silicon Valley start-up, was
convinced the appetite for a simpler handset was substantial. "It's not
tiny. It's a chunk," he said at a recent news conference.
At an industry gathering in early 2004, Mr. Laurence invited manufacturers
to build a basic handset that could make voice calls and handle text
messages and do little else. "They looked at me like I was from Mars," he
recalls. "They said: 'It's not needed.'"
Eventually, Vodafone found a supplier in Sagem SA, a Paris-based
electronics maker. Vodafone also engaged IDEO, a London design agency that
had worked on the Palm V personal organizer, widely acclaimed for ease of use.
During development, young Vodafone product managers kept trying to add
features, like software for sending picture messages. Mr. Laurence said no.
He showed them an old TV comedy sketch about an elderly person being
humiliated by a hi-fi salesman who delighted in the customer's technical
ignorance.
Vodafone ran the ideas of product managers past groups of over-40
consumers. One finding was that the consumers tended not to enter many
names into their cellphone contacts books because they thought they might
lose the handset and have to do it all over again on a replacement. This
wasn't good news for Vodafone, which finds that the more names in a phone's
contacts book, the more the phone gets used.
To allay people's concerns about the hassle of re-entering numbers in a
replacement phone, Vodafone made it easier to copy the contacts book onto a
personal computer for storage. The handset automatically transfers contacts
to a PC when connected to it, something that with most handsets can't be
done unless owners first install special PC software. It is then
straightforward to transfer the numbers from the PC back to a replacement
cellphone.
Based on what older customers told it, Vodafone also installed dedicated
buttons for volume control and for locking the keypad, to prevent
accidental redialing of the last number called. It added a 'tips' function
to give users guidance if they got stuck in any of the menus. The handset
is bigger than most and has a spacious keypad.
Gary Sheehan, a 38-year-old director of a London information-technology
company, likes that keypad, along with the phone's simple menus and large
screen. He replaced his Sony Ericsson camera phone with a Vodafone Simply
in July. "It was all singing, all dancing," he says of his old phone. "But
if I wanted to change the ringer volume, I couldn't find it."
On his new one, "I can see what I am typing without squinting," he says.
The downside is that his colleagues at the IT firm, mostly in their 20s,
frequently mock his choice of handset. He says his wife, using British
slang for "idiot," calls it the "Vodafone Wally phone." But he doesn't
care: "I just wanted a phone that phoned," he says.
The simple handset remains a work in progress. In the 2½ months since
Vodafone launched it in mid-May, the company has decided it needed to make
about 60 tweaks to the software.
The company's Mr. Laurence was wary of permitting advertising agencies,
typically staffed by young people, to create a commercial for the phone,
fearing it would be too flashy or complicated. The company first
commissioned a print ad to run in a European edition of Good Housekeeping
magazine -- not a usual venue for cellphone advertising. Its print ads,
which also ran in Golf Monthly, picture the handset and describe what each
button does.
One of them, highlighting the volume-control button, says: "No mucking
about in menus to find the right setting. So no excuses for letting your
Vodafone Simply phone ring in the middle of your cousin's wedding."
Mr. Laurence ran the ad by product managers working on fancy multimedia
handsets for young people. "The more they hated it, the more we knew we
were on the right track," he says. Vodafone eventually ran television
commercials for the phone in four of its markets.
It won't say how many of the phones it has sold, but Mr. Laurence says the
company expects to at least recoup its investment through added revenue.
The average age of the phone's users is 45.
Many young staffers in Vodafone's retail stores don't seem to grasp the
concept, because they keep pushing older customers to buy phones with fancy
features, Mr. Laurence says. So the company has taken to lending their
parents a Vodafone Simply. "If their parents say 'this is the best thing
since sliced bread,'" Mr. Laurence says, "they are going to learn to sell
it properly."
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112405683280612725,00.html
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[4] Spammer Convicted
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Snipermail Owner Is Found Guilty Of Acxiom Theft
The owner of a defunct bulk-email marketing company was convicted of 123
counts of stealing personal information from data seller Acxiom Corp. for
direct-marketing purposes.
A federal jury in Little Rock, Ark., convicted Scott Levine, 46 years old,
the owner of Snipermail.com Inc., on 120 counts of unauthorized access to a
protected computer, two counts of access-device fraud for cracking
passwords, and one count of obstruction of justice for the attempted
removal and destruction of computer hard drives. He was found not guilty on
15 counts, including 13 counts of unauthorized access and one each of
conspiracy and money laundering.
The breach of personal data engineered by Mr. Levine ranks among the
largest ever disclosed in the U.S. Prosecutors accused him of stealing 1.6
billion records with names, addresses, telephone numbers and other
information to be used for direct-marketing campaigns. Evidence presented
by the government at Mr. Levine's trial suggested Snipermail easily
downloaded a file containing encrypted passwords of about 300 Acxiom customers.
In a statement, Acxiom said the verdict "sends a clear message that
cybercrime will not be tolerated." The Little Rock company said it has
taken several steps since evidence of the crime was uncovered to strengthen
its security, including improving its encryption systems, audit practices
and ability to detect intruders. The company said only one external server
had been accessed in the Snipermail breach, and its internal databases
hadn't been accessed.
Mr. Levine's lawyer, David Garvin, couldn't be reached for comment.
Sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 9, 2006.
Separately, in a case related to another in the string of high-profile data
breaches that has fueled identity-theft concerns in the U.S., a Nigerian
man who pleaded no contest earlier this year to a role in an identity-theft
ring involving ChoicePoint Inc. faces six additional charges in that breach
of personal data.
The man, Olatunji Oluwatosin, 42 years old, was charged Aug. 8 in Los
Angeles County Superior Court and pleaded not guilty to the six additional
counts of identity theft, conspiracy and grand theft. The new counts, filed
by the Los Angeles district attorney, allege Mr. Oluwatosin unlawfully used
personal data to obtain cash and property valued at $2.5 million.
Mr. Oluwatosin pleaded no contest in February to one felony count of
identity theft and is serving a 16-month prison sentence. The public
defender who represented Mr. Oluwatosin on the previous charges couldn't be
reached for comment on the additional charges.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112406416615412935,00.html
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