Blog dedicado a la formación en todos sus ámbitos: presencial, online, a distancia
It’s been awhile since we’ve heard anything about Groupon, but it appears the company — which has struggled with both unhappy customers and ticked off retailers — is trying to take a new tack. It’s launching a service called Freebies, which is exactly what it sounds like: A whole bunch of free stuff.
Of course it’s not just handing out brand new products or entire meals for free, but instead, Freebies will compete with sites like RetailMeNot.com that already offer discount codes and other coupons, notes the Chicago Tribune .
The new national campaign will offer promotion codes and coupons that don’t require customers to buy anything upfront. Groupon says 5,000 brands including Best Buy, Reebok, Land’s End, Nordstrom and Sephora are signed up.
Here’s how it works: Customers will simply browse a grid of deals and then click on the one they want, say 15% regularly priced orders at one place or $25 off an order of $70 or more. You’ll either be taken directly to the sale or a coupon code will pop up that you can use, although it’s unclear if it’s just for online ordering or if you can print out discounts to take into the store.
So what does Groupon get out of this, warm fuzzy feeling? Well, that, perhaps, as well as commission when the orders are redeemed, that are “directionally consistent within the industry,” a spokeswoman said. Even better for retailers fearful of the usual Groupon deal snafus — they won’t have to offer a traditional Groupon deal.
If you act fast, there’s a free tap water deal marked as a “Groupon exclusive.” Hurry!
Groupon launches Freebies, entering the coupon segment [Chicago Tribune]
As of right now, the petition on Change.org has 450 signatures. Sure, the signatures are important, but the worker’s introduction is especially damning.
The few holidays that grant Mall employees the ability to enjoy a day away from work should not be jeopardized or completely relinquished by corporate greed, because quite frankly while the corporate employee is relaxing with their family, we will be suffering from a slap in the face.
The petition’s humble proposal? For the mall to open at 2 A.M. on Friday, or at least to stay closed until the end of Thanksgiving Day.
Will the petition change decision-makers’ minds? No, not at this point. Neither will our posts on the subject, but maybe if enough members of the public find the idea repugnant, shoppers will stay home and the bosses will realize that most people are opposed to the idea. A blog can dream.
Simon Malls-Menlo Park Mall : Remain Closed on Thanksgiving Day or Open at 2AM on Black Friday, Not Open Both Days! [Change.org]
If you live in Florida you might want to start checking under the car seats, between the couch cushions and in the pocket of those pants you haven’t worn in awhile — there’s a $16 million Powerball jackpot sitting around just waiting for someone to claim it. But time is running out.
Lottery officials say if no one steps forward by tomorrow with the winning ticket, purchased last May at a suburban Tampa convenience store, it’ll be the largest unclaimed jackpot in Florida since 2003. Back then, a $53 million (gulp, sadness) went unclaimed in the Florida Lotto game, reports the Associated Press. STOP THE INSANITY! Do you not want to be rich, rich beyond your wildest dreams?!?!?
Residents in the neighborhood where the ticket was bought have come up with a few reasons no one has come forward: Maybe the winner is dead, or lost the ticket or just forgot and doesn’t live in Florida. We’d like to add reasons such as: Person got knocked on the head by a falling window A/C unit and is now suffering from amnesia; winner fell into a pit of snakes and has yet to climb back out, and a whole lot more.
No one wants to see the money wasted, including the owner of the store who says she wonders every day who it could be. She’s posted signs in her store’s windows reminding customers to check their Powerball tickets.
“The store is a neighborhood store, and pretty much 90 percent of our customers are regular customers,” she said. “We still have a little bit of hope that somebody will come before Thursday.”
So what’ll happen to all that cash if no one steps forward? It goes back into the state’s bucket.
“The funds to pay the unclaimed jackpot will be returned to the lottery members in their proportion of sales for the jackpot rollover series,” reads the state’s site. About 80% of that will go toward Florida’s education enhancement fund, while the rest will fund new games and promotions from the Florida Lottery.
In case you think you might be the winner, the winning numbers are 02, 06, 19, 21, 27 and a Powerball of 25, and the drawing was held Saturday, May 25.
I’m sad in advance. I hope the winner didn’t really fall into a pit of snakes or forget who they are because that’s just upsetting.
Lottery ticket worth $16 million about to expire in Florida [Associated Press]
Costco’s had some explaining to do after the pastor of a non-denominational church in California happened upon a particular display of Bibles at his local Costco store. He says he was shopping for a gift for his wife when he found a bunch of Bibles with price tags reading “fiction.”
He of course snapped a photo and tweeted it out to his congregation, telling KTLA-5 News that tried to find somebody to ask about the books, but couldn’t.
His tweet included the caption: “Costco has Bibles for sale under the genre of fiction…hmmmm.”
“I checked to see if the other Bibles were like that, and they were,” he explains.
As for his tweet and his congregation, he tells KCBS-TVthere’s been a range of reactions.
“A lot of people were upset. Some people were fine with it. To me, I don’t know why you’d label something as fiction,” he said.
The pastor says Costco reached out to him and said that the problem was an error by distributors. The company has since issued an apology, saying:
“Costco’s distributor mislabeled a small percentage of the Bibles, however we take responsibility and should have caught the mistake. We are correcting this with them for future distribution,” Costco said in a statement. “In addition, we are immediately relabeling all mislabeled Bibles. We greatly apologize for this error.”
Whether you believe it’s the word of God or just another work of fiction, the pastor says it can be a learning experience, telling KCBS-TV he thinks any discussion of the topic is good.
“It’s caused a lot of controversy, it’s caused a lot of conversation, which I think conversation is good,” says.
We’ve embedded the newscast that doesn’t have autoplay below.
The boy who lived is a Brit.
“Black Friday is our Super Bowl and we plan to win,” the company’s chief marketing and merchandising officer said in a statement, presumably while coaching employees through wind sprints while pushing hand trucks full of game consoles.
Of course, this only applies to local stores. That means you can ask Walmart to price-match the Best Buy and the Target across the strip mall, but not Newegg or Amazon. And yes, Walmart reserves the right to verify those other stores’ prices.
If you bought something from a real-life Walmart, this works like any other price match: bring in the ad and your receipt, and get the price difference on a gift card. The price match policy applies to any advertised price between November 1 and December 24, except during Thanksgiving and Black Friday. During those two shopping frenzy days, Walmart will match other retailers’ prices…but only if you show up with your ad during those two days.
The method of getting a refund for online Walmart purchases is the new part, and might have the potential to go wrong. You just send an e-mail with your receipt and the other store’s ad to Walmart, and they send you an e-gift card back. Like the in-store price match, though, you can only send in advertised prices from your local stores.
Christmas Ad Match [Walmart]
We know how many of you feel about the McRib, even after seeing it in its frozen form. It’s special, it’s almighty, it’s your heart’s desire every year for the short time it’s available. But there’s no guarantee you’ll get your mouth on one this year, as McDonald’s isn’t launching a national rollout of the sandwich but instead is leaving it up to individual franchises.
It’s too hard for Mickey D’s to push its plethora of new menu items and focus on the McRib, reports the Associated Press, so it says franchise groups will have to decide if they want to offer the pork sandwich.
In the last three years, McDonald’s put the McRib on the national menu in order to boost sales in the last part of the year.
But this year, a spokeswoman says the company had “other national priorities,” effectively turning the McRib into a regional offering.
It’s unclear how franchise groups will decide or how the McRib will be marketed, but if you’re really set on getting it, it probably won’t hurt to tell your local McDonald’s that you want it. Or just start tuning the tiny violins you’ll have to play for yourself when there’s no McRibbing to be done.
No national launch for McRib amid menu changeup [Associated Press]
What is it about airplane bathrooms that is so enticing to gold smugglers? Yet another plane lavatory has been revealed as the dumping spot for more than $1 million in gold bars, again on a flight from Dubai to India. Start checking those toilets, people. It’s easier than panning for gold. [via CBC.ca]
The hack happened earlier this year and was only detected after the site started seeing “suspicious activity,” but it appears no one knew about the hack until KrebsonSecurity started looking into it.
While officials thought everyone had been notified that their email addresses, names and plaintext passwords had been breached, they’re now looking at everything again.
All that personal info was found on the same servers that were breached in separate hacks on sites like Adobe, PR Newswire and others.
“In January we detected suspicious activity on our network and based upon the information that we had available at the time, we took what we believed to be appropriate actions to notify affected customers and reset passwords for a particular group of user accounts,” Andrew Bolton, the company’s managing director tells Krebs. “We are currently in the process of double-checking that all affected accounts have had their passwords reset and have received an email notification.”
It could be one of the biggest password breaches in history, especially in light of the information sitting around in plaintext. It’s always a worry when one site is hacked, because many of those 42 million users might reuse the same passwords at multiple sites with the same email address, giving hackers access to those other accounts as well. Jackpot, essentially.
Even more troubling is that many Cupid Media users didn’t think out of the box when they created those passwords — more than 1.9 million accounts used the passcode 123456. Another 1.2 million went for the always creative 111111.
Now’s a good time for a password refresher: Don’t reuse passwords on multiple sites, and choose passwords that are either randomly generated by a password keeper or just make sure each one is a unique combination of letters, numbers and symbols. Otherwise you’ll be left scrambling to change your login info on every site you use, from banking to social media.
Cupid Media Hack Exposed 42M Passwords [KrebsonSecurity]
A blogger who calls himself DoctorBeet wrote in a blog post earlier this week that he’d run a traffic analysis on his home router and found that whenever he switched the channel, his LG Smart TV would ping LG’s servers with the name of the channel, along with his TV’s individual identification number.
So whenever he switched from say, the BBC to Scuzz, his TV would report back to the mothership. Err, LG. Even when he went to his TV settings and switched the “Collection of watching info” that was set to “on” by default to “off,” it still sent that information to LG’s servers.
“This information appears to be sent back unencrypted and in the clear to LG every time you change channel, even if you have gone to the trouble of changing the setting above to switch collection of viewing information off,” he writes.
The company touts this ability to advertisers, as it allows marketers to target ads according to what the person watching the TV might like, based on your favorite channels. DoctorBeet found examples of this in a corporate video:
LG Smart Ad analyses users favourite programs, online behaviour, search keywords and other information to offer relevant ads to target audiences. For example, LG Smart Ad can feature sharp suits to men, or alluring cosmetics and fragrances to women.
Furthermore, LG Smart Ad offers useful and various advertising performance reports. That live broadcasting ads cannot. To accurately identify actual advertising effectiveness.
But that’s not all, DoctorBeet writes. Sometimes his TV would upload the names of personal files he’d stored on an external USB drive that was plugged into the TV. Even though the upload didn’t include the actual files, those names could relay private information, like a video with his kids’ names as the title. He tested it out by creating a file name called “midget_porn.”
“This file didn’t really contain ‘midget porn’ at all, I renamed it to make sure it had a unique filename that I could spot easily in the data and one that was unlikely to come from a broadcast source,” he explains. “And sure enough, there it was…”
He points out that it seems the collection URL this info is being sent to doesn’t actually exist at the moment, what’s to stop LG from enabling it tomorrow?
He contacted the UK branch of LG about his concerns and basically received a “Shrug, read the fine print next time” response.
The advice we have been given is that unfortunately as you accepted the Terms and Conditions on your TV, your concerns would be best directed to the retailer. We understand you feel you should have been made aware of these T’s and C’s at the point of sale, and for obvious reasons LG are unable to pass comment on their actions.
While the model he owns, the LG 42LN575V appears to be only in the UK, it’s still a somewhat troubling thing that consumers everywhere should be aware of before they purchase a smart TV.
Engadget brought up DoctorBeet’s work to LG and received this statement:
We’re looking into this now. We take these claims very seriously and are currently investigating the situation at numerous local levels since our Smart TVs differ in features and functions from one market to another. We work hard to get privacy right and have made this our top priority.
It’s worth checking your own LG Smart TV to see if it has the “collection of watching info” option in its settings. But if turning it off doesn’t do anything, it’s up to LG to decide whether or not it wants to change its TVs so off really means off, or just keep collecting info whether you want it to or not.
LG Smart TVs logging USB filenames and viewing info to LG servers [DoctorBeet]
LG Smart TVs could be collecting personal data, even if you tell them not to [Engadget]
Police say two groups of women got involved in a melee at a local grocery story during an argument over money. But soon punches were pulled when one woman pulled out pepper spray and sprayed two of her enemies, reports Channel3000.com.
That’s when the feathers started flying — or they would’ve if the frozen turkey one woman wielded as a weapon was still in his natural state. Officers made sure to include the fact that the frozen turkey was not only swung, but tossed, while two other women started throwing fists.
Things got messy when a pallet of eight boxes of bacon fell to the ground, mixing in with the pepper spray and turkey tossing. A witness who called the cops told them he was smacked in the head with a full container of yogurt.
The flying fists continued on the floor in the midst of the spilled yogurt and bacon, making what sounds to be some kind of furious salad dressing. It was a recipe for disaster, that’s for sure.
Cops were able to stop the women who’d been pepper sprayed and cited one for disorderly conduct, while the other combatants slipped away, ostensibly sliding on a yogurty path to freedom.
Woman wields frozen turkey in grocery store melee, police say [Channel3000.com]
Instead of arriving in the Big Apple, the train somehow took a wrong turn, which is apparently possible on train tracks, and ended up at the local train station in Bala Cynwyd, which is outside of Philly and not Wales as one might think from its name.
It seems the train missed a signal at some point along the way after leaving Philadelphia until finally reaching its wrong destination.
SEPTA officials helped the crew get the train back to Philly, where passengers got off that train and finally boarded another one to take them to the Big Apple at last.
An Amtrak spokesman tells the Philadelphia Inquirer that the train’s crew won’t work until they’ve gone through additional training.
