Miscellaneous

Interesting Creations

by fli on June 23, 2009

Stumble upon some Asian inventions and was amazed at the creativeness and ridiculous of their existence.  Do they really work, we can’t really comment on it.  But at least get a smile on your face seeing them out there and we are sure that people are buying them too.

1)  The left image is a set of nail covers.  Why?  You’re probably not a girl if you ask why.  They’re to cover the nails after putting on nail polish.  If you have put on nail polish before, you know how annoying it is not being able to do much trying to avoid scratches on the not-totally-dry-yet nails.

2)  The middle invention, a face massager.  It goes outward to three directions.  It claims that the more you massage you face with it, the more slim your face gets.  (hmm…)

3)  Last invention to introduce here, a pair of eyelid clamps.  In the Asian world, the general rule is the bigger your eyes are, the prettier you are.  (Generally it applies only to girls).  The eyelid clamps are to be used for 5 minutes everyday and you can get double eyelids.

All these are inexpensive tools.  To get prettier, it doesn’t need to cost a lot.  (That is if they really work, of course)

If all of them not working that well, maybe Botox is next on the list?

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Great Customer Service

by admin on June 22, 2009

kodak

Of course, the best customer service is no need for customer service.  If everything goes well, that’s the best customer service you can get.

But accident happens.

One legacy service that evolved over the years, Ofoto, was bought by Kodak in 2001.  This service was before all the other free photo album services were around.  It has been a very user friendly service that let you share albums with your friends and along with Kodak’s acquistion, you can now purchase prints from the site directly.

This used to be a free service and until a few years ago, it required users to have a minimum purchase every year.  It startled us at first but since the minimum purchase is only $4.99 USD per year and the prints on the site priced reasonably, in order to keep the account around, we used the service once a year.

Last month, it was time to do the annual purchase again.  We put in the order and we expected delivery in about 10 business days.

One month later, nothing.

We sent an email out to the customer service email address on the order receipt.  (Every easy to find for sure)

Immediately, we got an automatic response back saying they got our email.

Within an hour, we got a direct response back from an agent trying to confirm our mailing address.  Apology was heavily sensed in the email.

After the confirmation, within an hour, we got another email (sounding apologizic again) informing us that another order is on the way with no extra cost.

Another automatic email was received informing us that the new order is completed with a new confirmation number.

Customer services emails within an hour

Customer services' emails within an hour

Wow.  This has been our most impressive CS experience ever!

See how important the customer service is.   At the end of the whole incident, we totally forgot about the reason we contacted the CS and was just impressed with their prompt reaction to the problem.

Only if all the services can have this kind of response level.

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The few minutes of Fame

by fli on May 12, 2009

fame

A lot of people want to be famous.  In this world of technology, it’s getting easier.  Just do something in public that is out of the ordinary, someone on the street will capture it on their phones and the next thing you know, it’s on the web everywhere.  With the rapid development of Web 2.0, it’s spreading out even faster.  Today, I got on Facebook and the clip of this woman who danced in front of the music store was posted by several people already.  This clip was taken in Hong Kong.  The woman was amazingly concentrated on her own performance that I find it adorable.  One observation is actually about the people who took the clip.  How comfortably people these days just take their phones out and record others in public.  How people shamelessly zoom into people’s life to capture the moment they find it funny.

Is this how this world’s turning into?   A place where surveillance is everywhere?  A tip here:  beware of these web distributors on the street!

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