I saw a story this morning on Mobile Commerce Daily: "Fontainbleau targets upscale, on-the-go consumers via mobile presence." I've been a guest at the hotel for the past day so I can't resist joining this conversation. I also happened to download this application while waiting in line for a smoothie at a restaurant yesterday -- between meetings, of course. Here's a quote from the article:

“Fontainebleau chose to launch this app to enhance the overall customer experience while giving them insight on the resort as well as the surrounding Miami Beach area,” said Philip Goldfarb, president and chief operating officer of Fontainebleau Miami Beach, Miami. “It is an extension of the brand’s commitment to providing its guests with the latest advances in the mobile marketplace.”

First, I'll offer -- I'm just a guest or customer here -- I haven't studied the business, but there are a few disconnects.  

Here's what is working well:

• Fontainbleau does seem to have a tech-savvy customer base. As I walked through the pool area yesterday, I noticed quite a few iPads, Kindles, and smartphones -- guests definitely have their technology at the pool. And Wi-Fi works at the pool -- well done.
• The application is promoted well. I noticed advertisements several places throughout the property. It uses a sweepstakes to promote the application with the prizes clearly listed.
• Beautiful photographs -- this resort is amazing and is well represented by the media in the application.
• There is a solid balance of content -- eat, shop, play, etc.
• There was a lot of content re "what to do" nearby.

US personalized online radio provider Slacker has thrown its hat into the on-demand music ring by launching a $9.99 a month on-demand streaming music service with offline playlists. Yes, that is indeed akin to launching Spotify in the US before Spotify does. You can just imagine the grin on some of the faces on both sides of the negotiating table when Slacker tied up this deal with rights owners . . .

So, would-be US music subscription customers are now spoilt for choice, with the top-tier options including stalwarts Rhapsody and Napster, newcomers MOG and rdio, and now Slacker. The only problem is that US consumers are lukewarm about subscriptions. No US service has broken the 1 million paying subscribers mark, despite years of trying, and others have simply given up completely, including the heavily funded Yahoo Music service.

Slacker will rightly argue that it is entering the market with a differentiated mix of complementary tiers: its free, ad-supported Pandora-esque personalized radio tier is a genuine complement to a premium on-demand tier in the way that a free, ad-supported, on-demand tier a-la-Spotify is not. The former helps drive discovery and meets different usage needs, while the latter is just a watered-down version of the premium tier.

But that still won’t be enough. The premium subscription market hasn’t failed to break through to the mainstream for all these years through a lack of availability or the quality of services (Rhapsody still makes a pretty good claim for being the best programmed music service out there). The reason consumers have held back is simple:

$9.99 subscription rentals are not a mass-market value proposition. 

A reporter just asked me what I thought HP's earnings meant in the context of the post-PC era and I thought I'd share my response:

HP’s drop in PC shipments is not unique in the industry—Acer and other companies have also reported a drop in their recent quarters. And let me say this loud and clear: Tablet cannibalization is only a minor contributor to soft PC sales. The bigger factor is the Windows release cycle—so many consumers bought new PCs when Windows 7 came out, and without a new version of Windows this year, there isn’t the same catalyst to buy. Forrester’s data shows that 34% of US online consumers report having bought a PC in the past 12 months, and an additional 25% bought one 12-24 months ago. Tablet owners are actually more likely than US online consumers in general to have recently bought a PC: 44% in the past 12 months and 28% in the 12 months before that.

While most design researchers and practioners would agree that surveys aren't the best tool for designing experiences, I'm still suprised that we get pushback on the value of other (primarily qualitative) research methods from customer experience professionals and of course their business colleagues. While many of these people will argue to the grave that surveys are "better" than qualitative research methods because they mitigate risk by being both quantifiable and statistically significant, they don't realize that when designing experiences, surveys introduce "risk" well before a survey is analyzed. How? Well, surveys:

• Limit responses. Most surveys (whether they're open-ended or offer restricted responses) ask users for their reaction or input to a specific question or situation. If you're asking for something that's relatively black and white, that's a perfect technique. But if you're asking people to explain why they did (or didn't do) something or about the nuances of how they did something, or if you want to see how their context influences their behavior, then surveys are difficult to craft because you essentially have to know the answers before you ask the question. And if you don't know all of the right answers, then you're introducing risk by guessing what they may be.