Filed under: Bad news, Competitive strategy, Circuit City Stores (CC)

Although Circuit City Stores, Inc. (NYSE: CC) reported a horrible December in terms of sales and profits, the second-largest consumer electronics retailer in the U.S. was one of the top three online consumer electronics retailers in December, trailing leader Ideal Buy, Inc. (NYSE: BBY), but ahead of on the web auction giant eBay, Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY).

Nielsen ratings figures put one-of-a-kind web visitors like this: Best Purchase at 23.99 million, and Circuit City at 19.61 million. Figures for eBay weren’t available (as some separate categories have to be measured together), but the real news was that Circuit City’s December 2007 website traffic growth increased more than 20% from 2006’s level. Ideal Buy’s December 2007 visitor count rose only 9%.

Why couldn’t Circuit City capitalize on such an impressive amount of one-of-a-kind holiday retail traffic? The failure of the retailer to make any sales gains this past holiday season just seems endemic of multiple failures and problems the company has at this time. While we wait on Circuit City CEO Phil Schoonover to be sacked from the corner office, perhaps a lingering, potential sale of the company will force the issue and Circuit City can get back to business. Profitable business, that is.

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Filed under: Competitive strategy, Wal-Mart (WMT)

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) was an early proponent of the tracking technology known as RFID years ago, but seems to have lost patience with vendors that are taking too long to equip their merchandise pallets with the inventory tracking and shrinkage tags. As opposed to bar codes, a reader can track a package or pallet with an RFID chip without scanning anything; a two-way radio chip is used instead.

2008 is now here, and the world’s largest retailer has apparently grown quite frustrated with the slowness some vendors have displayed in adopting the new technology. It will, as such, be charging suppliers $2.00 for each pallet that does not contain an RFID tag as of yesterday. This only applies (so far) to its Sam’s Warehouse distribution center in Texas.

Wal-Mart is making it clear that the $2.00 surcharge some suppliers will see is quite a bit more than the estimated $0.20 per RFID tag per pallet. With an estimated 15,000 suppliers still not complying with Wal-Mart’s three year-old RFID mandate, company will probably be forcing the hand of slow-to-adopt vendors and suppliers this year as it ramps up to have all products tagged with RFID in all 22 nationwide distribution centers in the U.S. by 2010. Until then, it can make a nice side of change with these non-compliance fines. Perhaps an analyst will ask how much the company has made on the next Wal-Mart quarterly results conference call.

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dratcw writes “The first commercial LAN was based on ARCnet technology and was installed some 30 years ago, according to a ComputerWorld article. Bob Metcalfe, one of the co-inventors of Ethernet, recalls the early battles between the different flavors of LAN and says some claims from the Token Ring backers such as IBM were lies. ‘I know that sounds nasty, but for 10 years I had to put up with that crap from the IBM Token Ring people — you bet I’m bitter.’ Besides dipping into networking nostalgia, the article also quotes an analyst who says the LAN may be nearing its demise and predicts that all machines will be individually connected to one huge WAN at gigabit speeds. Could the LAN actually be nearing the end of its lifecycle?”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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ficken writes “The great conversation about micro vs. monolithic kernel is still alive and well. Andy Tanenbaum weighs in with another article about the virtues of microkernels. From the article: ‘Over the years there have been endless postings on forums such as Slashdot about how microkernels are slow, how microkernels are hard to program, how they aren’t in use commercially, and a lot of other nonsense. Virtually all of these postings have come from people who don’t have a clue what a microkernel is or what one can do. I think it would raise the level of discussion if people making such postings would first try a microkernel-based operating system and then make postings like “I tried an OS based on a microkernel and I observed X, Y, and Z first hand.” Has a lot more credibility.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Filed under: World wide web, Video, Web services, web 2.0

Hulu might have an amazing selection of videos from Fox and NBC available for streaming on the web. But there are at least two problems with the service right now:

1. Hulu is in private beta, meaning you can only access videos if you’ve an account or if someone’s been kind enough to embed the video player on their site.
2. You have to search through videos using a mouse and keyboard as if you were looking up directions, not using an on-screen program guide like you would with a TV.

Hulu Media Player attempts to deal with both of those problems. Paul Yanez, the guy who brought us a browser-based Joost clone, plus an Apple-TV inspired video player for all sorts of web video content.

Hulu Media Player is still a tiny rough around the edges. For example, we found that we would occasionally click on one episode of a TV show only to have a different one begin playing. And once you’re watching a video, there’s no way to go back to the list of episodes for that particular Television show. Instead, you have to click the “show guide” button which takes you back to the main menu. And it’d be nice if you could control the player using your keyboard instead of a mouse. But it’s still a pretty neat twist on Hulu.

While you don’t need a Hulu beta account to access Hulu Media Player, only a small portion of the Hulu library is available for viewing right now.

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Filed under: World wide web, Utilities, Web services, Social Software

We’re large fans of Mint, Shaun Inman’s web stats tracking tool. Even though the default Pepper (Mint’s term for plugins) will track the basics, the beauty of Mint (aside from the interface, which IS beautiful) is in the various Pepper’s developed by Inman and the Mint community for further tracking web statistics.

Till Kruss has just released the first stable version of his Pepper, Tweets (which you can download here) which combines Damon Cortesi’s Tweet Stats script with Mint. Not only can you “Tweet” from within the Mint dashboard (and view recent tweets from those that you follow), you can also display and track your Twitter usage statistics.

A look at the frequency of Tweets per hour using Tweets in Mint

The Pepper is still in development, and there may still be some bugs — not to mention Twitter’s own erratic behavior as of late — but we think this is still a very, very cool tiny tool.

[via Peppermint Tea]

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Filed under: Competitive strategy, Wal-Mart (WMT)

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) was an early proponent of the tracking technology known as RFID years ago, but seems to have lost patience with vendors that are taking too long to equip their merchandise pallets with the inventory tracking and shrinkage tags. As opposed to bar codes, a reader can track a package or pallet with an RFID chip without scanning anything; a two-way radio chip is used instead.

2008 is now here, and the world’s largest retailer has apparently grown quite frustrated with the slowness some vendors have displayed in adopting the new technology. It will, as such, be charging suppliers $2.00 for each pallet that does not contain an RFID tag as of yesterday. This only applies (so far) to its Sam’s Warehouse distribution center in Texas.

Wal-Mart is making it clear that the $2.00 surcharge some suppliers will see is quite a bit more than the estimated $0.20 per RFID tag per pallet. With an estimated 15,000 suppliers still not complying with Wal-Mart’s three year-old RFID mandate, company will probably be forcing the hand of slow-to-adopt vendors and suppliers this year as it ramps up to have all products tagged with RFID in all 22 nationwide distribution centers in the U.S. by 2010. Until then, it can make a nice side of change with these non-compliance fines. Perhaps an analyst will ask how much the company has made on the next Wal-Mart quarterly results conference call.

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Filed under: Competitive strategy, Dell (DELL)

Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) will be closing all 140 “Dell Direct” retail kiosks in malls and shipping centers across the U.S. within a matter of days to more acutely focus sales in high-volume retailers like Ideal Purchase, Inc. (NYSE: BBY) and Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT). This is a good move, as I’ve always wondered if the point of Dell’s mall kiosks was just a branding and mind share technique more than a sales channel.

Dell’s kiosks employees will be given a severance package and outplacement assistance as the world’s second-largest PC maker closes down these shops by perhaps this weekend. The kiosks have been around since 2002 as a way for Dell customers to get a feel for its products before calling or ordering on the Dell website.

In a sense, these Dell Direct kiosks were what the personal maker needed in a larger ways years ago — the capability for retail consumers to “look and feel” its products before buying sight unseen from a website. Hewlett-Packard Corp. (NYSE: HPQ) leapfrogged past Dell in 2007 as the world’s largest computer maker squarely on the back of strong consumer retail sales, and especially in the laptop Computer segment where consumers like to see the product in person before buying. Good move, Dell — but this retail shift should have come at the end of 2006 instead. Better late than never, eh?

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Filed under: Audio, Internet, Features, Windows, Macintosh, Web services, Mozilla, web 2.0

Yesterday we posted a short article about Pandora’s Box, a desktop client for Pandora that lets users access the streaming music service without opening a web browser. And our intelligent Download Squad readers instantly started sending us suggestions for alternate clients. So here’s a roundup of some of the best applications for listening to Pandora without a web browser.

OpenPandora

One of the oldest and most feature-packed desktop Pandora clients is OpenPandora (picture above), which we first mentioned back in 2006. OpenPandora lets you do pretty much everything you can do at Pandora.com including listening to multiple stations, using the QuickMix feature, and giving songs a thumbs up or down. OpenPandora also has a few features that most other clients lack, like a mini-player mode that just displays the player/pause, volume, and next track buttons. It also packs a built-in proxy feature allowing users outside of the US to access Pandora and global hotkey shortcuts allowing you to control playback while OpenPandora hides in your system tray.

Continue reading 7 ways to listen to Pandora without a web browser

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Filed under: Audio, Internet, Features, Windows, Macintosh, Web services, Mozilla, web 2.0

Yesterday we posted a short article about Pandora’s Box, a desktop client for Pandora that lets users access the streaming music service without opening a web browser. And our intelligent Download Squad readers instantly started sending us suggestions for alternate clients. So here’s a roundup of some of the best applications for listening to Pandora without a web browser.

OpenPandora

One of the oldest and most feature-packed desktop Pandora clients is OpenPandora (picture above), which we first mentioned back in 2006. OpenPandora lets you do pretty much everything you can do at Pandora.com including listening to multiple stations, using the QuickMix feature, and giving songs a thumbs up or down. OpenPandora also has a few features that most other clients lack, like a mini-player mode that just displays the player/pause, volume, and next track buttons. It also packs a built-in proxy feature allowing users outside of the US to access Pandora and global hotkey shortcuts allowing you to control playback while OpenPandora hides in your system tray.

Continue reading 7 ways to listen to Pandora without a web browser

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