RedBox and the Golden Arches

After seeing RedBox on Engadget and in my local McDonalds as well as the McDonalds near my work I just had to give it a try.

One dollar ($1) per night with no late fees. You just pay $1 for each night you have it past 7:00pm. If you visit RedBox.com you can get your first night free. Some McDonalds have these inside and some are in the drive-thru. And, you can return the movie to any RedBox location. You can rent online to reserve your movie for pickup at the vending location of your choice.

Why is this better than NetFlix? Simple -- little to no waste. Steph and I were on the $17.99 plan at NetFlix which was unlimited rentals with 3-at-a-time. Most months we watched 3-4 movies. That was $20 (with tax) for 4 rentals, or $5 each. So, we changed to $9.99 which was 1-at-a-time unlimited and we watched 3 movies in 2 months. That was $20 for 3 movies or just shy of $7 per rental. We were giving our earned cash away for nothing.

We have a Series 3 Tivo and can download through the Amazon Unbox service. This has the pros of never being out of stock and you can have the movie of your choice in 15-30 minutes download time. You also get 30 days to start watching it and once you start you get 24 hours to finish it. There's no driving and no return necessary. What it is not is DVD quality video and is only stereo sound (not Dolby 5.1 or DTS). And at $2.99 a pop it's only marginally better than NetFlix.

What I find with RedBox is that the 3-4 movies we watch cost us $3-4 in total, not each. If we don't have time to watch we don't pay anything. We have to pick up the discs and take them back but it's not like we aren't out and about daily (and often several times a day).

So, here's to you, Golden Arches, for partnering with one of my new favorites -- RedBox.

Google Labs, GrandCentral, OhDontForget, and Mozy

Friends, as a part of my job I research and explore new technologies and seek ways to put them to good use. Some fall into my "why in the world" category, some into my "that's cool" genre, and a select few I choose as "must have". Today, I share a few of the best finds with you and you may have heard of these before, but never reviewed with my intense wit and charm (see what I mean?).

Google Labs' GOOG411 and Reader
Call me biased but there's one company that doesn't often make a mistake with their product. If it needs "fixing" they do it and quickly. I wasn't impressed by the first version of Google Reader but in it's latest iteration I have found it incredible. I can subscribe to as many RSS feeds as I want and Google Reader will feed them to me however I want -- chronologically, random, alphabetical -- and know what I've read and what I haven't. I can see, at a glance, all the feed topics and after viewing those that catch my eye I can click "Mark All Read" and move on. Why use this over Outlook or IE's built in reader -- simple. I can use Google Reader on my laptop at home, desktop at work, my Motorola Q and the content is the same and always up-to-date.

Labs recently debuted GOOG-411, a voice-response system that is free to use to find business listings. You simply dial 1-800-GOOG-411 from any phone, tell it the city and state, and what you are looking for. GOOG411 presents you with the top listings and you can simply pick by number or ask for "more". Want GOOG411 to connet you, just stay on the line of say "Connect". You can also ask for "directions" or have it sent to you phone with "text message". An incredible alternative to cell providers charging you $1.49 per call to their own 411 service.

GrandCentral.com
Originally a start-up GrandCentral is now owned by Google. GrandCentral provides you with a single phone number that you provide to everyone instead of giving them your home, cell, and office numbers. They call one number and all of your phones ring, or only certain phones -- it's all up to you. Every call is logged and can be screened, sent to voicemail, recorded (which notifies the caller of the recording) and you can see it all online, mobile, anytime. You classify your frequent callers into Family, Friends, Work or Other and can choose which of those groups call which phones. And possibly my favorite part is that you only have one voicemail to check. GrandCentral is currently by invitation only and if you ask nicely I may help you out (cash bribes accepted).

OhDontForget.com
Simple service but very handy. You "add" your number to the service and then you can schedule text messages to your or your spouses phone at any time using a very simple interface. Very handy for quick reminders.

Mozy.com
Love this one. Most people have data they want to backup, but to where and how? You could have an external hard drive with one of those free softwares that copies data to that drive on a schedule. Great. Now you have it in two places hooked to the same computer that can be struck by the same lightning. We need to one-up this. Network Attached Storage (NAS) technology is essentially a hard drive on a stick. You hook the drive to your home network and your computer can backup data to this drive and you may not lose them both at the same time -- or will you? What if you were one of those affected by the April 7th tornado or Katrina and lost your house and along with it all of your precious digital data? Tax records, family photos, important documents all good in an instant.

For a while there have been services available such as Carbonite and XDrive that will backup your data over the Internet to a private storage facility. Enter Mozy. Carbonite has issues -- you need a client program to access/restore your data, you must transfer the entire file when changes are made, and multiple versions are not kept. XDrive, from AOL, also has the lack of delta transfer technology, but also cannot backup open/locked files. Mozy is incredibly easy to setup and 2GB of space is yours free. Have a lot of photos and other data? Need 50GB? No problem. XDrive will give you that for $120 a year. Mozy will do it for half that. Need 100, 200, or 500GB? XDrive will laugh at you. Mozy will answer the call and for not a penny more.

Bruce is back

Having seen the first three Die Hard movies (numerous times) it is essentially impossible to ignore the latest movie -- "Live Free or Die Hard". I won't spoil anything for anyone, you can read the plot online if you want, but the movie is undoubtedly 'Die Hard' in nature. Things explode, a couple of bullets are distributed, cars are wrecked, and the body of a man endures impacts, blows, and injury beyond imagination. Sure, there are a couple that-would-never-happen scenes but overall it is one great action movie. Yes, fellas, take your wife. Steph liked it, too!