I was thinking, if I was Best Buy or Circuit City, how can I take advantage of the situation that people are buying the PS3 and Wii consoles and reselling them for 5x their original cost, but also not garner bad press in doing so. The answer: donations. People are willing to pay $1500 – $2500 for the PS3 as eBay and Craigslist listings have shown. Have a minimum donation required of lets say $500 (just a random figure) and this donation will guarantee you a PS3 on launch in front of all the people who have been waiting in line for a week. Of course they could also do allotments where 1/3 goes to people waiting in line and 2/3 goes to people who have donated.
Donations of course since it’s in the spirit of Christmas will go to Toys for Tots or hospitals.
Of course, I’m thinking as a consumer and not a money hungry corporate business. Maybe they see that $500 donations as $500 that could’ve been theirs if they used it to buy games and accessories. But given that the fact that there has been less than 1 game per PS3 sold so far, most people are buying to resell, so to them, making $500 less wouldn’t be much of a problem, when their profit will still be between $500 to $1500. As shown in my previous entry, businessmen were hiring bums in Japan to line up to purchase the PS3s. Each homeless person was paid ~$200 to do the job and in return the businessmen will be making a hefty profit.
Random Crap:
Samsung develops machine gun sentry robot costs $200k – Samsung has partnered with Korea university and developed the machine-gun equipped robotic sentry. It is equipped with two cameras with zooming capabilities one for day time and one for infrared night vision. It has a sophisticated pattern recognition which can detect the difference between humans and trees, and a 5.5mm machine-gun. The robot also has a speaker to warn the intruder to surrender or get a perfect headshot. The robots will go on sale by 2007 for $ 200,000 and will be deployed on the border between North and South Korea. I didn’t know it was that hard to distinguish a human from a tree… Do check out the video.
CAD Animation (from Digg) – Looks like Ctrl+Alt+Del is making an animation/cartoon. The trailer is actually rather good. However, they’re charging a membership fee which isn’t cheap. Then again, I guess you can wait for all of season 1 to be done, get a month subscription and download all of them since you have access to old episodes and archives. Currently a month subscription is $2.95 and the remainder of season 1 (expiring 1/31/2007) is $14.95. Which is interesting… If I get monthly subscriptions till 1/31/2007, it’ll only cost me $8.85.
Robot Chicken: Calvin and Hobbes – a hilarious take on Calvin and Hobbes and how people would really see him in today’s world if he believe he had a pet tiger.
T-shirt turns air guitar into music – The T-shirt has motion sensors built into its elbows that pick up the wearer’s arm motions and relay them wirelessly to a computer which interprets them as guitar riffs, said Richard Helmer, an engineer who leads the research team from the government’s Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.
Hacking the XBox 360’s HD-DVD for the PC (from /.) – Want a cheap HD-DVD drive for your PC? Apparently, it’s been hacked to work with XP and OSX already.
America Freedom to Fascism Authorized version (from Deadlock) – a very interesting documentary on income taxes and how it began and if it’s even legal or not… I was shocked to find out the Federal Reserves weren’t even controlled by the government, but instead in the hands of a few bankers.
iPod shuffle – Ars Technica does an awesome review of the new iPod shuffle clip.