This Will Blow Your Mind

Posted on February 6, 2014 by loiswhitmanhess

You have to try this at home yourself. This is not magic. But it’s pretty darn close.

Everyone has been talking about the Cycloramic ever since its founder, Bruno François, appeared on Shark Tank last week. This is going to be one of the most amazing things you have ever seen. A new app is capable of turning a series of photos into a panoramic photo or video. And the phone can even do it by itself using the iPhone’s vibrate feature which has been specially calibrated by the app to spin the device smoothly around on its own steam. You can then view the photo or video on Cycloramic’s 3D viewer.

You have to watch the videos to better understand this amazing feat.

The Sharks loved the Cycloramic. Mark Cuban gave Cycloramic $500,000 at a $3 million valuation. François was only seeking $90,000.

After researching information about the app, I found out that the episode was filmed over the summer. At that time, Cycloramic had 660,000 downloads and cost $.99 on the App Store. Today, it has more than eight million downloads and costs $2.99, although it is currently offered on special at $1.99. François is also developing a rotating base to allow the app to work on non-iPhone devices.

About 100,000 new downloads took place within an hour of Cycloramic’s debut on Shark Tank. The power of television? No, the power of a great product.

Driving Me Crazy

Posted on February 5, 2014 by loiswhitmanhess

Every time we get in our car, I remind Eliot that his job is not just to drive but to watch out for others. I guess you can call me a backseat driver. In my estimation, I have good reason to be a nervous wreck when we go out for a drive. Driver distraction has increased dramatically thanks to texting. I have watched more and more cars weave in and out of lanes. It is so unnerving I beg Eliot to be extra careful.

I am all in favor of requiring automakers to equip new vehicles with technology that lets them warn each other which way they are going. That would be such a great relief for me. I spend all my time navigating and directing. Eliot hates it.

A radio beacon can be placed on each car to continually transmit a vehicle’s position, heading, speed, and other information. All automobiles would receive the same information from other vehicles. The car’s computer would alert the driver to an impending collision.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates vehicle-to-vehicle communications could prevent up to 80 percent of accidents.

I’m all for it.

Timing is Everything, What Else is New?

Posted on February 4, 2014 by loiswhitmanhess

Yesterday, I told you about the fate of Egreeting cards. Today, I want to shed light on how the now defunct company Excite@Home paid $780 million for a digital greeting card business, bluemountain.com, when they really could have started one on their own for a tenth of the price.

That’s the story of my former client, Susan Polis Schutz, when Excite@Home came prancing by in 1999 and handed her and her family a whopper check for the digital part of their business that was just a few years old.

Susan and her husband Steve Schutz originally started Blue Mountain Arts in 1970 as a greeting card, poster, and gift book publisher. Twenty-five years later, their son Jared suggested they enter the digital world by offering e-cards. At the time, Blue Mountain was generating around $35 million in printed greeting cards. I am sure you have seen or even bought their cards. Susan was the poet who wrote the flowery words and they were designed with lots of pastel colors. Blue Mountain usually had its own display rack and the cards were sold in a wide variety of stores.

Steve Schutz, who had a doctorate in physics from Princeton, and son Jared worked together to build one of the first e-card sites. It was fortunate that they did. The timing was perfect. As I mentioned before, the family sold the digital division of Blue Mountain Arts in 1999 for $780 million. It wasn’t long after that, in 2001, that Excite@Home went bust and American Greetings grabbed up whatever was left for just $35 million in cash.

Today, Susan is a documentary maker, Steve runs an educational website, and Jared Polis is a United States Representative from Colorado and the first openly gay man elected to Congress as a freshman. The Schutz’s have two other adult children besides Jared.

I met Susan in 2004 and helped her promote Blue Mountain: Turning Dreams Into Reality, the story of how her publishing company, Blue Mountain Arts, and electronic greeting card website bluemountain.com were founded and developed. In the book, she describes some of the experiences she and Steve had from the time they silk-screened their first posters and lived in the back of their pickup-truck camper to when their poetry greeting cards became the number-one-selling card line in America.

I can remember sitting across the table from Susan at one of our meetings thinking about all that money in her bank account. It didn’t change her and her family very much. By the time they had gotten that big check, their print business had already bought them everything they desired.

A lot of the new money has been donated to good causes and helping those they love.

Egreetings Folds

Posted on February 3, 2014 by loiswhitmanhess

I was sad to learn that Egreetings is going out of business next week. It was announced on Twitter without any explanation. After so many years in existence, just a little tweet announced its demise. I remember some of the first Egreeting cards I received from friends in the late 90s. I thought they were so progressive using digital cards for all occasions.

Egreetings was one of a number of eCard companies who made a fortune during the first Internet gold rush. Big brands wanted to own Internet businesses and were willing to pay astronomical fees for promising companies.

Egreetings took a different route. It went public in 1999, even though it lost $1.5 million on sales of $22 million over a nine-month period. Egreetings was valued at more than $350 million. While folks were cheering at first. they became disillusioned over time. The business went nowhere fast.

In February 2001, American Greetings bought Egreetings for what they thought was a great deal at $28 million. This year American Greetings generated $1.8 billion in sales and a $50 million profit.

Guess what? Most of that money came from paper cards. To learn more about the financial transaction that took place, read what the tech site Re/code had to say about the matter.

Tomorrow, I will tell you about Blue Mountain Arts. They became my client after they got a check for $780 million for their young digital business.

Repeating Email Alerts Out Loud Can Cause Painful Reactions

Posted on February 3, 2014 by loiswhitmanhess

Philip Seymour Hoffman

So there I was shopping for one-of-a-kind, clip-on earrings in Pomegranate, an upscale, edgy boutique in La Jolla Village, CA, when I heard my iPhone chirp. That meant I had received an email alert. I usually don’t rush to check news flashes, especially when I am picking out accessories to wear.

Something made me do it this time. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The CNN alert said “Philip Seymour Hoffman Found Dead.” Then without thinking, I repeated what I had read out loud. “No!” yelled a very attractive, silver-haired woman in her late 60s who was just a few feet away from me. “That can’t be. I am friendly with his mother. I just spoke to her. I live right near her in Rochester.”

I felt so awful. My outburst had thrown this woman into a frenzy. I watched her drop the clothes she picked out to buy and reach inside her handbag for her cell. She quickly walked out of the store.

Everything seemed so surreal. I was the reason why someone else was in pain. I didn’t mean it but still felt like I did it on purpose because I wanted to share the horror of what I read.

I think a lot about email alerts because I get so many: CNN, AP, USA Today, Huffington Post, NY Times, WSJ, People, Twitter. I voluntarily sign up for all of them. When something happens in the world, they all go into action. The problem with email alerts is that they get flashed so fast you can barely read them. It is impossible to retrieve an alert because most of the time the site that sent it doesn’t even have it posted. This drives me crazy.

I looked outside of the store for the woman, but she was nowhere in sight. I walked back in to finish up the transaction I had started to purchase three pairs of earrings. There I had been joyfully buying jewelry when something tragic had just occurred. I started to feel very strange.

We just don’t know what is going to happen from one minute to the next. Scary, isn’t it?

Hope This Isn’t My Third Strike

Posted on February 1, 2014 by loiswhitmanhess

Something went wrong with my DigiDame email blasts for the last two nights. I am checking to see if I screwed up some setting. Anyway, I hope this works. Do let me know. And be sure to always check http://www.digidame.com if the email connection doesn’t work.

Until I am sure this works, here are some of my favorite digital signs.

By the way, I miss my mother more and more each day. So much of what she told me has really come true. Rats!

The Death of the Shopping Mall

Posted on January 31, 2014 by loiswhitmanhess

If you want to visit a ghost town, take a trip to your local shopping mall. I knew retail was in trouble, but I really didn’t understand the severity of the situation. On a recent trip to Las Vegas, I stopped by the Fashion Show Mall on the strip. It was early Saturday night. This place is usually packed because it combines traditional boutiques plus the gaudy ones that Vegas is so well known for. It was really empty. Maybe I saw 15 people on each level. I thought it was unusual but didn’t focus on it.

Then I learned that approximately 15% of all U.S. malls will fail or be converted into non-retail space within the next 10 years. Green Street Advisors, a real estate and REIT analytics firm, just released that figure. It will probably get worse. Green Street Advisors thought that only 10 per cent of malls would fail less than two years ago.

The report never revealed the reason why shopping malls are doing so poorly, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. The economy coupled with the increase of people shopping online is killing the mall experience. It had to happen eventually. Rich or poor, Americans are looking for the best online deals. Even my friends over the age of 60, who wouldn’t use a computer a few years ago, now spend hours online looking for the best values

The biggest insult to retailers today is something called “show-rooming.” I am pretty sure I explained this to you before, but it is worth going over again. Today, more and more Americans will visit a store just to see and touch a product they are interested in. Once they’ve decided what they want, they go back to their computers to find the best possible price from a variety of discount e-commerce sites. Retailers hate this with a passion. They threaten manufacturers that if they sell to online discounters, they will not carry their brand. Some retailers insist on custom made models so customers can’t shop around. This is too costly for all sorts of manufacturers, so everyone continues to suffer.

I remember when going to a shopping mall was my big Saturday night out. This was long before the Internet. We would visit the Roosevelt Shopping Mall in Garden City, Long Island with great anticipation for what new stuff we would find. We spent hours there. It was our social life.

There are about 1,000 malls in the U.S. They say the lower-end ones are doing worse. Anchor stores like JCPenney, Macy’s, and Sears have all recently announced closures and layoffs. JCPenney is closing 33 stores, Macy’s is closing five, and Sears is closing its flagship in Chicago. Mall owners are going after movie theaters, restaurants, and discount retailers like TJ Maxx, Ross Stores, and Marshalls to take up the slack. Green Street Advisors think that community colleges, business offices, and health care facilities will take over the vast properties.

No one knows for sure. But if it eliminates all these random shooting sprees, I’m all for the change.

A Night with Michele Lee

Posted on January 30, 2014 by loiswhitmanhess

I am taking a night off from writing about tech because we were out pretty late with our good friends Chuck Steffan and Ron Abel. They are both major talents in the world of music. Ron was the musical director tonight for the cabaret act of actress Michele Lee at 54 Below. Her rare NYC appearance continues for the next two nights.

TV and radio personality Joe Franklin stood in the way of my picture of the stage.

Ron with Liza Minnelli, Michele Lee, and Sandra Bernhard

Chuck and Liza

Eliot, Sandra, and me

Eliot entertaining the women

Ace Young and me

Ron and Liza

Critic Rex Reed and me

Twitter Breaking News

Posted on January 30, 2014 by loiswhitmanhess

I get giddy when I read about a new development in technology that I’d hoped for. I’m around this stuff so much that I’m always saying to myself, “Wouldn’t it be great if . . .” One of my greatest wishes was granted a few months ago when Downpour and Audible started offering issues of Vanity Fair on audio. It is so great to be able to close my eyes and listen to so many wonderful articles. I already devoured December, January, and February.

Another wish has come through. Well, almost. Twitter. CNN and a social analytics company called Dataminr have been working on a new service that will deliver breaking news information from Twitter. I just want to remind you that many of the posts on Twitter come from ordinary folks who just happen to witness news in the making. They continue to post tweets about the developing story but get over shadowed when the big news organizations jump in.

Called Dataminr For News, the service will monitor tweets and immediately distribute breaking news via email, mobile alerts, and pop-up alerts. News organizations are being targeted first because they are the ones who will pay big money for the scoops. Dataminr For News will also offer analytics data like who broke the news and how it spread.

I can’t wait to have access to a service like this because I always want the news first. It will be so cool to be the first in the know.

CNN claims they have no financial interest in Dataminr and no commercial interest in the product. They will just be happy to have early access to the big news when the service is finally completed.

So will I!

Exploring the Ocean

Posted on January 29, 2014 by loiswhitmanhess

Here’s something for your bucket list. For the man or woman who has everything, you can ride on a personalized submarine that lets users “fly” underwater. The DeepFlight Super Falcon is a two-seater submarine that takes passengers on undersea joyrides.

The DeepFlight Super Falcon is designed to dive below the surface, allowing you to explore marine life, caves, hidden treasures, and vegetation. The submarine is 21 feet long and has a wingspan that stretches nearly 9 feet.

The Super Falcon currently retails for $1.7 million, and includes on-site pilot and operations training.

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