Lets strip this back to the fact that these websites are a new hurdle* for consumers to jump through in order to get something at a lower price. These hurdles are nothing new and have had various guises over the years from the simple cut-out coupon in a magazine to signing up to a mailing list to get 10% off your next order.

These hurdles have been around for ages however still only a small portion of consumers use them on a regular basis, this has probably been as the mechanic has never been easy enough. Let’s face it how many times have you received a voucher and forgotten to take it, let it expire or found that the terms don’t allow you to use it? When that happens most people will simply decide to pay the full price instead.

So if there was a perfect mechanic that suddenly meant every single consumer could save on something with no effort to jump the hurdle first, what would happen?

Businesses would stop accepting it surely, as a voucher normally lowers price which normally results in less profit for the business. So can these businesses centred around a pricing hurdle really sustain all this growth?

*There’s a big chunk about pricing hurdles and price sensitivity in the Economic Naturalist by Robert H Frank, which explains it all in English rather than economic theory terms.

Aside from taking far too long and missing out on sales over the last seven years that the iTunes store has been running, where the only way to get the songs without buying a CD/Vinyl was to illegally download them.

The main mistake was releasing them the whole back catalogue at once.

If the releasing of the albums had been staggered to one per week, they would have concentrated sales of individuals songs/albums into each week’s chart slot. However by releasing them all at once (around 300 songs) meant that the sales would be too widely distributed across the back catalogue to have any decent impact on the charts. They also would have been able to spin the PR and any potential halo effect on CD sales over a longer period.

Also if they had decided to enter the digital world at the same time as their Rock Band game release they could have seen a decent halo effect and benefits of being able to do lots of cross promotional activity. Retailers could have even bundled iTunes vouchers with copies of the game.

PS: This blog post was inspired by reading Martin Belam’s recent blogpost about the Beatles

I’m an avid Foursquare user and have been for a while now, I’ve taken it upon myself to try and set up a meet-up of people who use Foursquare in the Norwich area, as a way of gauging what the take up of the service has been and how people use it. Also to try and unlock the swarm badge too.

So if you are a Foursquare user and live in the Norwich area why not come along, details can be found on the meetup.com page or Facebook page.

So this is my desk and where I edit my photos, write blog posts, design things and beaver away at code, on the evenings and weekends. I’ve finally got it almost the way I want it in the lounge, with a bookcase of books full of inspiration and near the stereo (which was playing The Kinks when this was taken).

Back when I was a scanner operator, before the days of everyone having a digital camera and broadband, you had to scan all the photos of houses for the property pages in newspapers. This was a mind numbing task at times however my iPod got me through it. I still stick the headphones in when I need to block out distractions and get on with it. Above are some of my favourite albums to get me through work.

The two biggest things that you notice are the resolution of the display and secondly the vastly improved camera. The display packs a whopping 326 dpi resolution which is higher resolution than most magazine photos are printed in. The camera steps up to 5MP, with auto-focus and LED flash/light also the HD (720p) video option is an added bonus.

Example of the HD footage

I’ll leave you with the thought of, what if the 326 dpi is included in the next iPad at nearly magazine size?

However the most impressive of all so far has to be Disney’s Toy Story digital book app, which is like one of the old books with the sound board that you used to have as a kid. It allows you to either read it to you, read it yourself or even record your own version for playback. Some pages allow you to colour the pages in, allowing for multiple touch so more than one set of little hands can play at once. Click read more to see some screen grabs.

It also becomes a great way to gauge popularity if you run a search or follow a hashtag through the show, as you can see how many posts are made every 30 seconds as the searches refresh.

The world cup has become a great example of this with the launch of Twitter’s own world cup site which uses the nation specific hashtags to filter a running commentary of matches (if you dodge the spam posts). Other sporting events give great live insights and commentary such as Lotus in the formula one racing who post pit lane and garage photos all through some races.

I just wonder how long before all live shows allow a ticker of Twitter posts along the foot of the screen?