Filed under: Marketing and advertising, Best Purchase (BBY)

Ideal Buy, Inc. (NYSE: BBY) is ditching the warehouse-blue store format that it’s grown famous for. Well, not really — but in some newer stores in Denver, that cheery blue is being supplemented by earth tones and skylights as the largest consumer electronics chain in the U.S. sets its sights on the female demographic. That’s right — the anti-gadget crowd who rolls both eyes when guys begin salivating over that 50-inch flat screen television.

Women do have a large (indirect) impact on consumer electronics sales, although the merchandising most retailers push definitely fits the male buying persona. So, instead of the gray, techie feel where those large flat-panel displays generally reside, Ideal Buy will be placing some (if not all) of those TVs into staged rooms that look like a set from a typical home. What a superior way to visualize that new purchase than by seeing how it looks in the real world, right? Ever sold a home and staged it to sell? Same thing.

Ideal Purchase even asked 40 local female customers to work with its employees to help them form ideas. In other words, merchandise your products in a way that makes them comfortable to be around and use, not as cold hard hunks of steel, plastic and chrome. Serving the needs of women shoppers better is a perfect way to grow sales in this economic state (if that’s even doable) — Ideal Buy certainly has the right idea here. There’s nothing better than involving your customers in decisions that affect how they buy, right?

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Filed under: Internet, Productivity, Web services, Apple, Freeware, iPhone

My wife and I both have iPhones, and we want to be able to share grocery and honey-do lists with each other. Most task list applications are not very well-suited to sharing lists, and most of the internet solutions we tried weren’t much better. But then we encountered Zenbe Lists (iTunes link), which is an iPhone application that synchronizes with a web-based version. But even better, Zenbe Lists allows you to share your lists with other Zenbe Lists users.

Voila, my wife and I have the ability to share a few easy lists, and now when I’m on my way home from work and need to halt at the store, I have the ability to swiftly check to see what we need and pick it up. Rather than a list pinned to the fridge that’s never with you when you need it, it’s right in my pocket (and her’s) all the time.

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Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Freeware, Browsers

Joel Spolsky’s name is well known and highly respected in the software community. When he talks, people listen. So it was with a bit of interest that I noted his blog post about his truly cross-platform password management method.

Joel uses the recently-graduated-from-beta DropBox on each of his Windows, Mac, and Linux machines to share files amongst them. He then uses Password Safe on his Windows machine, and Password Gorilla on his Mac and Linux machines, since it is compatible with Password Safe files. He stores the encrypted password file in his DropBox folder, making it available on each machine, and even superior instantly synchronized on each machine.

This looks like a slick approach to an age-old problem, and it’s great to see an accomplished developer hacking together a useful approach out of existing tools rather than feeling the need to go to the drawing board and write their own solution.

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