I was sad but I can’t say surprised to hear the news of Gil Scott-Heron’s death on Friday, at the age of 62. Ever since I had researched his life for a KEXP documentary a few months back, and come across a New Yorker profile where he openly smoked crack in front of the interviewer, I wondered how long he could last. He had battled addiction for decades, and it showed. So striking  in the 1970s, he had become withered and gaunt, with a bunch of missing teeth.

Scott-Heron was one of these people who seemed gifted with outsized talents. When Brian Jackson, his longtime musical collaborator, met him while they were at Lincoln University, Scott-Heron was already writing poetry and working on his two novels. Jackson thought, “OK, I’ve met my Langston Hughes.”

Scott-Heron wrote without apology, speaking out against the status quo. In “Whitey on the Moon,” he criticized the use of tax money to send “Whitey” into space when many blacks were struggling just to get by.

Was all that money I made last year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain’t no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon)
You know I just about had my fill
(of  Whitey on the moon)
I think I’ll send these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)

As in that song, Scott-Heron was never just polemical. His work was subtler than that. He could be cutting and funny at the same time. He once said that people thought that the “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” was militant. “But how militant can really be when you’re saying, “The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner?” he once said in an interview.

His “comeback” album, I’m New Here, which came out last year, came about because of Richard Russell of XL Recordings. Russell visited Scott-Heron when he was in prison on drug charges and got him to agree to make a new record. Scott-Heron hadn’t recorded anything for 15 years. Given the demons he struggled with, his version of Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil” gives me the chills. But I keep going back to the opener, a tribute to his grandma, called “I Came From a Broken Home.”

I want to make this a special tribute
To a family that contradicts the concepts
Heard the rules but wouldn’t accept
And womenfolk raised me
And I was full grown before i knew
I came from a broken home

Sent to live with my grandma down south
When my uncle was leaving
And my grandfather had just left for heaven
They said and as every-ologist would certainly note
I had no strong male figure, right?
But Lily Scott was absolutely not your mail order room service typecast black grandmother
I was moved in with her; temporarily, just until things were patched,
Til this was patched and til that was patched
Until I became at 3, 4, 5,6 ,7, 8, 9 and 10
The patch that held Lily Scott who held me and like them four
I become one more and I loved her from the absolute marrow of my bones

In the obituaries, people are calling Scott-Heron  ”the godfather of rap” because of the influence he had on hip-hop artists. But he didn’t like the label. “I ain’t sayin’ I didn’t invent rapping, I just can’t recall the circumstances,” he once joked. He preferred to call himself a bluesologist. And when I think of his life, and what might have been if not for drugs and everything else, the blues seems about right.

RIP, GSH.

There are more than 160 documentaries in the series. I think they are are all worth a listen, but if forced to choose, I’d say my favorite series would be Portraits of Post Punk and Masters of Turntablism. I have a soft spot for post-punk bands, that being “my era.” As for the other series — how can you forget the story of Grandwizzard Theodore accidentally inventing the “scratch”? The latest series is on Grunge, a genre “invented” by that band from Aberdeen — Nirvana.

One of the cool parts of the job is stumbling across old video on YouTube of  artists or bands while they were still early in their careers — before they became iconic. Like this 1976 footage of Patti Smith singing “Gloria” on Saturday Night Live. She’s so tough —  and un-self-conscious.

And then there’s Soundgarden at a 1986 show at the Rainbow Tavern, a tiny bar in the University District in Seattle. This is around the time the band got signed to Sub Pop, and way before they started packing in arenas.

Target seems to have covered its bases in its mobile strategy. On its website it advertises shopping apps (Android, iPhone, and iPad), as well as a mobile web site and text alerts. I chose the latter. You sign up on the website. There were three options—mobile coupons  and weekly ads for the store and daily deals for Target.com . I settled on mobile coupons.

Target mobile coupons arrive on Sunday. There are 5-10 coupons each time, though nothing has sent me in a mad dash to the store. For instance, there was 30 cents off Suave shampoo or $1 off Pizza Hut Express in the food area. For Black Friday and Saturday, some of the deals were better but the items were pricier. One coupon offered $10 off a Guitar Hero Warrior of Rock video game bundle, another $20 off a ceramic bakeware set. If any of these items were on Santa’s list in our house, maybe I would break my vow to steer clear of big-box stores the weekend after Thanksgiving. But, alas, they weren’t.

Tully’s is a Seattle-based coffee retailer. Although it is dwarfed by another locally based coffee chain, it has 100 stores in the Puget Sound region, as well as in other states. Recently, when I was at a Tully’s, I noticed, on a TV screen above the barista area, an ad for a Tully’s Text Club. I texted to the short code and got an immediate response asking me to stay tuned for my first offer.

A few days later,  on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I got my first text from Tully’s at 12:30 p.m., offering me 25 percent off a Peppermint Mocha from 3-6 p.m. First, I’m not a flavored mocha fan. But if I was, that window of using the coupon seems small. There is not a Tully’s in every neighborhood as there is a Starbuck’s.  Maybe Tully’s was trying to drive traffic to the store during a slow time, or maybe it was to trying to promote holiday drinks?  It’s hard to know since I’ve only gotten one text so far.

Presumably, Target and Tully’s are trying to build biz through their text campaigns. What would make me more likely to take advantage of their deals?

1.Make the coupons relevant to my interests or preferences. Perhaps at signup you could be asked if you wanted to fill out a survey where you could specify the types of deals that would interest you.  At Target, for instance, I mainly shop for kids’ stuff and housewares. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to see the other deals, but I’m more likely to go to the store if I have one good coupon. And getting people in the store is the point, right? I always make a few impulsive purchases at Target, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

2.Make the deal good. If I’m going to drive somewhere, it has to be worth the gas price. (Maybe Groupon has ruined us, as Kelly suggested in class.)

3.Get the timing right. There must be a sweet spot between sending too many text messages (annoying, costly) and sending too few (forgot you signed up). Target’s once-a-week schedule is fine since I usually don’t go there more than a couple times a month. But Tully’s could perhaps step up the frequency, or offer a bigger window for getting the deal. Drinking coffee is a daily thing. Give me a good discount at the right time and I’m there.

In the December issue of Lucky is a large  Microsoft Tag with this line underneath, “Yep—that’s a giant bar code you’re looking at.” The copy goes on to explain that if you install the code reader and scan the code with your phone , “you’ll be able to watch every page of Lucky come to life in video.”

The code reader opens a web page with dozens of videos to go along with the issue. The videos generally seem to correlate with articles in the magazine, though there seemed to be a few extras, too. A video interview with cover girl Diane Kruger interspersed footage of her modeling  gorgeous outfits for the cover shoot with her talking about how her style has evolved. It made me realize how limited print is for fashion. It’s an art best experienced in person  but few people  get to see a runway show or watch celebrities walking the red carpet. So video is the next best thing.

The December issue happens to be Lucky’s 10^th anniversary issue, so I got the sense that there were more videos than usual. Most of the videos were of staff editors offering how-to’s or style advice. In one video an editor talked about how how to shop for the right handbag. Another editor showed how to put on eyeliner, and still another suggested different ways to pair a tuxedo jacket.  Some editors were more natural on camera than others, but that was OK. It made the videos feel intimate and not overproduced, like these were just friends giving advice.

You can watch these videos on Lucky’s website, but the phone seems the more natural place. How often do you read a magazine in front of a computer? For me, never. But how frequently do you read one on the couch or at a café, with your phone nearby?  All the time.

I’m impressed with how Lucky has used a Microsoft Tag to extend its content onto the mobile phone. The tag isn’t just a gimmick — the videos make editorial sense. By making the videos feel like a personal interaction between the editor and the viewer, Lucky helps give its viewers more confidence in trying out new looks and styles.

What would I do differently?

1) Make it easier to find the relevant video for an article, perhaps by adding the page number to the video or having a tag per page so you could look up the videos individually. Right now, the videos seem to be loosely in order on the web page, but they were hard to find because of the extras thrown in.

2) It’s a shopping mag, so make it easy to shop for the things shown by adding links directly next to the video.

DIRECTV, the service we subscribe to at our house, takes mobile scheduling seriously. Not only does it have a mobile app for iPhone and Android but also Palm, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone 7. The mobile apps are advertised at the very top of the DIRECTV homepage, where it says “DVR Scheduler: Record any show anytime from your PC or mobile phone.”  The apps are also promoted under a section called What is DIRECTV?

 We subscribe to DIRECTV, and I’ve long complained about the user interface for the Tivo-based DVR. Granted, it’s an old model, but it doesn’t make recording anything fast or easy, so I was curious to find out whether the mobile app would be better.

As it turns out, the iPhone app is very straightforward. You can browse by channel (name or number), browse by date & time, or search for shows. You can either remove the channels you don’t get or have them grayed out. When you click on a program, you get details like program description, length, date it first aired, and, for movies, a rating. You can then choose to record the program or the series, whether you want to definitely record or record if possible (since this is subject to DVR space). You can also order a paid movie from the phone if you are in front of your TV.  

The app works well, though some of the pages are slow to load, perhaps because of the amount of data. Everything I selected got recorded. The app is not a replacement for using the DVR, however. You can’t prioritize or delete shows on the app, for instance. And you still need to use the website to pay your bill or change your DIRECTV package. So the mobile app adds to existing tools rather than consolidates them.  

 My main quibble with the app is that there are no recommendations beyond the movie ratings. We get 150 channels, and scoping out good programs is like a full-time job. Ideally, the app would use your programming history to recommend shows. Or solicit and show user ratings. Or even just promote popular programs. I remember last year, during the Olympics, it took some work to figure out where and when the hockey games were on. Why weren’t they promoted to make it easy for subscribers to record them?

Recommendations would chanage the DIRECTV app from a good app to a great one.  And what would make it a killer app? Being able to watch programs from your phone, as DISH subscribers can.

I don’t really go in for pizza chains, but when Mobile Marketer recently reported that Pizza Hut racked up more than $1 million of sales from its iPhone app, I was intrigued. That sounds like a success. Would the app impress?

Steps to Engaging

The app is advertised prominently on the Pizza Hut homepage, and I downloaded it from the iTunes store. The first step, before starting to order, was to register. This turned out to be a long and painful process. I inadvertently hit “OK” before I had filled in all the fields and the application got hung. When I closed out and tried to register again, I was told the email address was already taken. I tried three more email addresses; all were supposedly taken. BROKEN. After about 20 minutes, with the troops getting restless, I abandoned trying to register and decided to order online. On the website I could order as a guest without registering. I just had to enter my name, address, and phone for delivery.

The Experience

Later, after dinner (the pizza was fine, if a little salty), I decided to register on the website and then try the app again. No problem this time. From the homepage I selected the Pizza category, which launched a pizza builder. First I was prompted to choose a crust. There were four to choose from but no descriptions to help me decide. Next, size and toppings. When you click on a topping, it visually sprinkles on the pizza. Then you can tilt the phone left or right if you only want a certain topping on half.

Some of the touches on the pizza builder were nice, but I was left wondering why I couldn’t also get the specialty pizzas offered on the website. Other items were missing, too, like breadsticks, my kids’ favorite. And drinks. Hmm, what’s the point of limiting the menu on the app?

After the registration snafu, the rest of the app worked well. It seems like the app would be handy if you’re in the car and want to swing by and pick up a pizza or have one delivered. Otherwise there is no particular advantage or payoff to using the app over the website. And would either be faster than making a phone call? Probably not, if you know what you want.

What  Would I Change?

Fix the registration process. Pizza Hut must lose a lot of app customers right there. Add the full menu. And continue adding  touches that take advantage of the platform to make ordering fun, like a game.

This week for class, I thought I’d check out what the Gap is doing on mobile. The Gap is one of the largest clothes retailers in North America and is geared to a young, presumably phone-carrying clientele.

In what seems like a pattern for the campaigns I’ve looked at, there was no mention of a mobile app on the Gap website, but I found an app called the Gap StyleMixer in the iTunes store.

The Gap StyleMixer lets you build outfits using items from the Gap and add them to a virtual closet. You can also upload pictures of your own wardrobe, so you can mix-and-match old pieces with new ones. And of course buy what you like, or find your closest Gap store.

The app had fewer items than the website. In women’s shoes, for instance, there were only flats and sandals, and there was nothing in the GapBody line.

The outfit builder was fun and easy to use, almost like dress-up dolls. But because all the pieces of an outfit remain separate, you don’t get a real sense of what the outfit would look like. Or how it would look on you. Now that would be truly great—being able to try on clothes virtually. I’m sure some company is already doing that, like Ray Ban is doing for sunglasses.

So what might the Gap be hoping to achieve with the StyleMixer app? Create a more engaging way to shop? It’s advertised as a social shopping app, and what makes it social is that you you can share outfits on Facebook if so inclined (though it kept crashing when I tried). But would people want to, really? It’s like social networking for its own sake. I can see someone wanting to share a find with other like-minded friends on a fashion site, though. What would make more sense here would be to include customer ratings and reviews. For that, you still need the regular Gap website.

This week for class I decided to give Amazon Mobile a spin. Amazon Mobile is an app for the iPhone, iPad, Android, and Blackberry. It’s been available for the iPhone since April 2009. And apparently it’s doing well: Amazon recently reported that their customers order $1 billion a year via mobile devices.

With so many people using the app, I expected it to work well. But what I was really interested in checking out was Amazon Remembers, an experimental feature available for the iPhone and iPad only. Amazon Remembers tries to match a photo you take with a product in the Amazon Marketplace. How many times have you seen an item in a store and wanted to know if it was cheaper on Amazon? In some ways, this feature could be a brick-and-mortar killer. Not only could you find a cheaper price, you could order it on the spot.

Surprisingly, the Amazon Mobile app was not promoted anywhere on the Amazon homepage. I found it by searching in the iTunes store. First, I decided to do some searches on the app to see how it compares to searches on a computer. My first search was on “Merrell boots women.” The results were identical to a computer search. Then I searched on “floating eyeballs.” Also identical. The only negative I encountered was the apparent lack of a spell-check. The mobile app has pictures, prices, customer reviews, and even the “Customers Who Bought This Also Bought” feature. You can buy something or just add it to your Wish List. Overall, the design is clean and efficient. You can get in and get out. By comparison, the website design suddenly seems cluttered and bloated.

Now to Amazon Remembers. I took pictures of various items in our house to see how well it works and whether I could trick it. It found matches on an Etch-a-Sketch, a juicer, a pack of gum, a book by Patti Smith, and a board game. These all had product names on them. For a generic checkerboard, it found a comparable checkerboard. For a stuffed beagle, it found a teddy bear. It came up with a similar-looking toy train for a Lego train. Match score: 7/10.

I also took photos of bar codes to see if the camera could read those. It found matches in all three cases, but sometimes slowly. The slowest took about four minutes. If you have an iPhone 4 (I have an iPhone 3), apparently there is a bar code scanner as part of the search. I’m guessing it’s faster than the camera software.

If I could recommend anything, it would be to better promote the app because it can only drive greater sales. It’s just too handy to be able to shop, compare, and 1-Click. And perhaps rename Amazon Remembers. It sounds like a birthday reminder feature.

The first is called the My Starbucks App and offers features such as a store locator, a drink builder, and food menus. It’s available for the iPhone. The second is the Starbucks Card Mobile App, and it’s available for the iPhone and Blackberry. It allows you use a prepaid Starbucks Card from your phone. This app is in a trial phase at 16 locations in the Seattle area and Silicon Valley; in Seattle, most of the Starbucks that accept mobile payments are downtown, or, intriguingly, at Starbucks kiosks at Target.

FEATURES

The store locator in the MyStarbucks App lets you filter on things like whether the store is open now, takes mobile payments, or has a drive-through or wi-fi. From this list you can get directions, share your location on Facebook or Twitter, or invite a friend to join you by phone, email, or text message. You can save your favorite stores to a myStores list.

With the drink builder you can virtually assemble your favorite drinks, save them, and email them or post them to Facebook. (I can’t imagine why you’d want to do this, though.  “Hey, Facebook friends,  check out my double-tall soy latte extra hot with no foam!”). For the coffee aficionado, there is info on coffee bean varieties. Again, you can save your favorite coffees to a myCoffees list. There is a similar page for food that includes calorie and allergen information.

My Balance

The Starbucks Card Mobile App lets you swipe your phone to pay for your Starbucks order.  You must buy a physical card first and manually load it onto your device. When you swipe your phone, it instantly calculates your new balance. You can also reload your card from your phone. The app includes a store locator and keeps tracks of stars earned in My Starbucks Rewards, a loyalty program. When you earn 15 stars, for instance, you get a free drink.

HOW WELL DO THE APPS WORK?

The apps worked fairly well on my iPhone, with a few glitches. On the mobile card app, I got error messages a couple times when searching for participating locations and also when trying to sign up for the Rewards program.

More importantly,  though, did the apps do what I would want them to? What kind of Starbucks info do people want on the go? Store locations for sure. Who hasn’t been in Nowheresville and been desperate for a reliable cup of coffee? Drive-through windows, too. When my kids were small and routinely fell asleep in the car, I used to rack by brain to remember where the closest drive-through coffee shop was. The ability to search for drive-throughs –and then save them in a list on a phone–would have been a godsend.

I have mixed feelings about the rest of the myStarbucks App. I like the idea of spontaneously inviting a friend to join me at Starbucks but realistically I wouldn’t do it that often. Maybe younger students would.  And while the drink builder is fun to play with, do I need to keep a list of my favorite drinks in case I might forget? Or my favorite variety of coffee bean or scone? Perhaps the intention of all the content is to build greater product awareness and engagement. If I stumble across a new drink on the app, maybe I’ll try it next time I’m at the store—or the drive-through (where, come to think of it, the mobile menu could be handy).

The Starbucks Card Mobile App is cool for the novelty, as many iPhone apps are. But it does have  a few advantages over the physical card.  You don’t have to dig into your wallet for  it. You can instantly see your card balance and Rewards tally. And you can reload your card with just a couple of taps on your iPhone.

RECOMMENDATIONS

It surprised me that Starbucks had two mobile apps to begin with. Why not collapse them? The key features for the mobile user are the store locator and the mobile payments. The drink builder and food menus did not seem essential, though perhaps they are part of some future plan to allow customers to both order and pay with a swipe. This could be a huge time-saver in busy stores and obviously efficient for Starbucks as well.

With the mobile card app, Starbucks could take steps to make it all virtual. Why should you need to buy a physical card in the store first to load the mobile app? And when you earn a reward, like a free drink, you should be able to redeem it from your phone, not by bringing in a postcard, as apparently it is now done.

But Hulu obviously has a lot going for it. The ready access to a huge catalog of shows, the ability to watch TV almost anywhere, the user rating systems, the ease of spreading content virally. And the free-ness. If I were better at reining in the family budget, I would spend less on a subscription service and take advantage of the bounty right in front of me.

Hulu was founded with the idea that it could be supported by advertising. It has a large and growing audience. It is making money–an estimated $164 million this year–but it is losing money, too.  As the former chief of CBS Digital Quincy Smith said, the advertising dollars are still, by and large, on the air, not online.

If Hulu’s audience continues to grow, would advertising eventually cover its costs? Maybe. I still think Hulu should charge for some of its content. Good programs cost money. The cable/satellite TV models show that people are willing to pay for quality TV and to have more TV choices. Even in this economy, cable networks like Showtime and HBO are adding subscribers. Why not take advantage of a model that is working?

Perhaps Hulu could charge to stream the programs most in demand, such as new or original programs. Older programs could be streamed for less or for free, with ad support. There could be an option to pay per stream, as well as a range of monthly subscription packages. The success of Apple’s App Store shows that if the price is reasonable, people will pay with a quick click.

To counter Hulu, Comcast and Time Warner are teaming up on an initiative called TV Everywhere, which  would allow people with cable or satellite subscriptions to watch their programs online. If this initiative moves forward, it only makes sense that Hulu would follow suit with a paid model. In fact, there are rumors that Hulu has already has a subscription model in beta. The web has tried giving everything away for free, but at a cost to content creators. My hunch is that it’s about to try the paid model again.