Filed under: Law, Dell (DELL), Marketing and advertising, Scandals

Dell (NYSE: DELL) is known for its terrific customer service and catchy ads but the New York State Supreme Court has found that some of those ads were fraudulent and misleading.

Judge Joseph Teresi wrote that the company “engaged in repeated misleading, deceptive and unlawful business conduct, including false and deceptive advertising of financing promotions and the terms of warranties, fraudulent, misleading and deceptive practices in credit financing and failure to provide warranty service and rebates.”

Dell will be prohibited from engaging in such conduct in the future and may also have to pay an as yet undetermined amount of restitution to consumers.

A lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo alleged that the company’s ads falsely led consumers to believe that they qualified for low- or no-interest financing when, in reality, many consumers didn’t. Following the ruling, Cuomo said that, “For too long at Dell the promise of customer service was a bait and switch that left thousands of people paying for essentially no service at all. We have won an important victory that’ll force Dell to live up to its responsibilities and pay back its customers for profits that were pocketed but not deserved. This decision sends an important message that all corporations will be held accountable for the promises they make to consumers.”

Dell says it’s confident that only a small number of customers were effected — the company’s latest 10-K does not specifically refer to this risk factor, which indicates that the company does not believe the damages could be material. The market seems to concur, with shares of Dell flat on the news.

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Filed under: Business, Design, Internet, Productivity, Adobe, Google, Yahoo!, web 2.0

Let’s pretend you read this column and agree that it’s time to embark on a Web site overhaul for your small business. You comprehend a little about Web 2.0-ness, want some interactivity, are considering using new on the web tools and have created a real job for the webmaster to do site updates. What’s on your Web Overhaul Due Diligence To-Do List? What steps should you take to ensure that your site gets architected, designed, programmed, launched, and updated correctly?

HOMEWORK - let’s begin browsing sites and making favorites/bookmarks out of the ones that catch your eye. Note that you like the drop-down menu in one and the fading background in another. Make a “how did they do this?” list of snazzy features to ask your designer about implementing. In fact, build a spreadsheet and make column headings such as: URL, feature, forms, Flash, menus and more so you can keep your design notes and questions in a handy electronic document to share with all the design firms you interview, and we want you to talk to more than one.

Continue reading Seven Web Redesign Planning Tools

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Filed under: Press releases, Products and services, Consumer experience, Apple Inc (AAPL), Marketing and advertising

The CD single is dead. At least that is what British supermarket giant Woolworths Group plc (LSE: WLW) is predicting as the company drops the format due to declining sales and with hopes of creating a download store. The chain will remove CD singles from shelves starting in August, but will retain the format for one-off releases like the British Television show X Factor, similar to American Idol in the United States.

Billboard reports that this move could end the use of CD singles across Britain altogether, but figures for CD singles sold versus digital downloaded single tracks were not made available. Woolworths stores sold 25.5% of singles in 2006, while the format has dropped from 55 million units sold in 2000 to just eight million last year.

Playing on the sentiment that “Everyone remembers buying their first record at Woolworths,” the director’s of the company hope the new download store will create the same sense and feelings of nostalgia that CD singles offered customers. But the size of the store won’t compete well with other store’s like Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iTunes Store, since Woolworths will offer only 1.2 million tracks. iTunes offers more than four million, but pricing might become the battleground where Woolworths competes ideal.

CD singles in the United Says are rare products, and are often primarily used by American Idol winners (since the one-off releases seem to be their only viable products). Stores such as Virgin Megastores and the former Tower Records regularly import British CD singles, but with Tower Records gone massive cache’s of available singles are no longer available outside of direct importing from British retailers. Unfortunately, Woolworths attempt at creating a new digital store seems very late in the competition, like Tower Records store was just over two years ago. With the growth of digital downloading in the last year alone, store’s like iTunes have gained a significant foothold in the market, despite criticisms and new competition from other major on the internet stores like Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN).

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Filed under: Internet, Marketing and advertising

In what looks to be a pretty desperate attempt to revive its failing business, Borders Group Inc. (NYSE: BGP) has officially cut its ties with Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) and launched its own e-commerce website. Under the previous arrangement, shoppers at Borders.com had their orders fulfilled by Amazon, with Borders taking a small commission.

Check out the site here. It offers some great incentives to switch over from Amazon — like free shipping on orders over $25! Oh wait. Amazon and Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) already offer the exact same deal. Never mind.

Borders invested a lot of money in developing a site with no particular competitive advantages. Most Amazon customers are pretty happy with the service they get, and I just don’t see any reason for anyone to switch. The duplication of effort probably makes Borders less attractive to potential strategic buyers like Barnes & Noble, which might have preferred that the company pay down debt instead of building another website.

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Filed under: Consumer experience, Marketing and advertising, Gap Inc (GPS)

In a move designed to make it easier and more appealing for consumers to shop at its websites, Gap (NYSE: GPS) is consolidating operations to allow for the purchase of clothing from Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and Piperlime using one shopping cart, paying one shipping fee.

The Wall Street Journal reports that “By integrating the sites, the San Francisco-based company hopes to encourage shoppers to buy products from more than one of its brands. Gap states about a third of its online orders are placed by customers who shopped at more than one of its Web sites in the past year.”

Since this seems like an obvious way to spur sales growth, you have to wonder what took so long. One concern might be that keeping the sites separate kept the brands more distinct in the eyes of the consumer. Will having expensive Banana Republic merchandise in the same shopping cart as the more budget-oriented Old Navy detract from the value of that brand? It’s possible. It may be why a more successful retailer like Abercrombie & Fitch (NYSE: ANF) has chosen to keep Hollister and its namesake brand entirely separate.

But with recent cost cuts aimed at improving profitability, Gap’s recently-anointed CEO Glenn Murphy appears focused on improving performance now rather than building brands. With its shares trading at about half of where they were a decade ago, shareholders are probably ready for that.

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Filed under: Design, Productivity, Search

When it comes to tracking down some icons for a project — nothing real fancy, and preferably under some kind of open license — image searching on Google doesn’t always do the trick. ICONLook is a search site that you can try instead: it’s specifically for icons, and it has some useful features that make it worth a peek if you’re in a pinch. These are generally OS-type icons, for stuff like apps, documents and search buttons, so don’t get your hopes up for anything too fanciful. Heck, we couldn’t even find anything as wild and crazy as a cat icon on ICONLook.

Selection is not ICONLook’s strong point. Even within the categories it’s designed for, there’s not a lot of variety. On the plus side, many of the icons are available in a number of different sizes, and there are links to the source and the license for each one. This puts to rest any worries that this might be some kind of hack job, or the work of nefarious icon pirates. Instead, what you get is a legitimate, middle of the road selection of licensed icons that’ll hopefully expand to become more useful.

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Filed under: Text, Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity

A lot of digital cameras are great for taking pics, but pretty shoddy for naming files. Sure, it’s alright to have them listed by date and time — at least that keeps them in order — but we think it’s a lot nicer to rename a batch of photos so you remember what they’re actually of. That’s where NameChanger comes in. It’s a lightweight renaming app for OS X, with a focus on images.

NameChanger can append, prepend, replace, or rename all kinds of files with whatever input you give it, but it really shines when it comes to photos. Drag a batch into the image browser, switch to sequence mode, and “DCP_16739″ becomes “Hawaii01,” or whatever you want it to be. Let NameChanger keep the numbers straight for you. And, at a tiny 1.9mb, you probably have photos that take up more disk space than this useful tiny app.

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Filed under: Internet, Text, Utilities, Macintosh, Blogging, Productivity, Commercial

Do you often repeat the same HTML code, form emails, or text? jfSnips might be up your alley then. With jfSnips you can manage all of the text you regularly paste over and over again, as well as re-use everything you’ve copied in a clipboard, much like Windows does. Except this is for all of you Mac OS X lovers out there.

You can place clips of text in whatever categories you like, so you could have one for PHP code, Javascript, HTML, or whatever tickles your fancy. Just don’t tell us about your fancy tickling, that’s way TMI.

Keyboard shortcuts make it even easier to insert text wherever you like. A easy SHIFT-CTRL-V pops open the jfSnips drop-down that sits up in your menu bar. Easy.

So if you repeat multiple email signatures that go a tiny something like “Sincerely, Thurston Howell IV” over and over and over, then give jfSnips a whirl. You can download it and give it a 15 day try or pay $15 for a full license. If you’re looking for a free option, or a commercial utility with a different feature set, check out our recent rundown of clipboard applications for OS X.

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Filed under: Macintosh, E-mail, Productivity

Although Mail Badger sounds like a small woodland creature trained to deliver packages, it’s actually an OS X app that allows you to add extra badges to the Apple Mail dock icon. For some people, it’s good enough to have one single red badge, proudly displaying the number of unread messages from all their email accounts. The developers of Mail Badger didn’t want to cease there: why not have a different badge for each account?

Once installed, Mail Badger lives in your Apple Mail preferences. There are a few preset shapes - hearts, stars, circles and the default starburst. You can adjust the color, size and font on these easily, and even upload your own. For power users, Mail Badger will assign a badge for messages that meet search criteria you specify, and it will also badge the results of an AppleScript. This app is definitely worth installing for anyone who keeps mail across more than one folder or account.

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Filed under: Products and services, Apple Inc (AAPL), Marketing and advertising

As Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) continues marching into consumers’ lives with iPods, iPhone and iMacs (and iEverything), is the company ready to take over the iLivingRoom too? Although the company’s Apple TV product has been received not-so-hotly, it’s a great product in the second generation form. But will it, with other products, provide the centerpiece of the digital living room within five years? According to some analysts, yes.

Apple isn’t perfect and has made several product mistakes, but those are the kinds of things that the media gushes on when iThis and iThat are released to the market and sell well. Still, a claim that Apple can come out of nowhere to “take over” the living room seems a bit dubious. A home server (without being called a server) and a universal remote, using iTunes as a central control and collection point for media — these will transform Apple into the Microsoft of the living room?

I am a huge Apple fan, from a marketing, design and usability perspective, but don’t own a single product. This is mostly because the freedom I like isn’t supported in the ways I like. Are you that way? Maybe, maybe not. But analysts, always the ones to grab headlines with large predictions, have this one dead wrong. Apple may be the centerpiece for some future digital living rooms, but it’ll be the vast minority in five years only.

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