CapitalOne sent me this 9.5″ x 6″ package to try to get me to sign up for one of their credit cards. I know we all get several of these a day in some cases.
I’m just increasingly amazed at the amount of waste these companies will pump into landfills. What pushed me over the edge was the inclusion of a square of bubble-wrap to give the package bulk , and make it seem like there was an object inside. However, there was nothing but several slips of paper.
Does CapitalOne really think I’m going to want to do business with them after deceptive and wasteful actions like these? It’s like how spammers fill the subject line with H4X0R language to bypass spam filters. Do these companies not realize that they lose credibility?
I understand the industry built around direct mailing, but as our culture becomes more sensitive to waste and responsibility in our consumption, I hope these companies will catch up, or be held accountable when they don’t.
The contents of the package:
Joost is using March Madness 2008 to do a large-scale test of live P2P video streaming. I just loaded it up, and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed. I put the feed next to the same game on CableTV, and Joost was only about 5 seconds behind. The resolution wasn’t much compared to even analog cable, but it was certainly good enough to follow the game. You can see a screenshot of the two to the right, Joost is on the left and CableTV is on the right.
Here’s the Joost information page on the March Madness test.
I’ve got Time Warner Cable internet service, also known as Road Runner. Recently, they’ve replaced the standard HTTP 404 error page with a new Road Runner search page, searching off of keywords in the domain you tried. That’s annoying enough, but now I’m frequently getting their custom (ad-loaded) HTTP 404 page when I try to go to perfectly valid websites. (Check out the screenshot to the right)
I’m sure it’s an issue with their DNS server being flaky, which shouldn’t be happening in the first place. It just makes things that much more annoying when, instead of the site you want to go to, you get a bunch of ads thrown at you.
Of course, there’s also the fact that the first ad is the site I’m trying to go to. Is it possible that Time Warner is using this to extort ad revenue from big clients like Amazon? I know 90% of cable internet customers will just click on the ad link to get to the site they’re trying to go to and not question the whole thing. (I know several people still type full URLs into Google to go to a website)
[Update] Another example, we all know downloadsquad.com exists… so why did I get this page several times while trying to go to the site?
[Update 2] If you go to http://ww23.rr.com/prefs.php you can apparently disable this “service”. The link to that page is found in the very bottom-right of the error page. Of course, 99.5% of Time Warner’s users are never going to see that link, so Time Warner will be taking in extorted ad revenue as it redirects (and confuses) users as they try to go to perfectly valid URLs. Good game Time Warner.
Is there anyone in the telecom industry that isn’t inherently dishonest?
