This weekend, I dragged Michelle out to the Men’s Luxury Toy Expo at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale. We went AFTER I mudded the kitchen ceiling, of course. I had expected at least some techie geek stuff and maybe a few more supercars, but it was OK. It was also smaller than I expected. We made it through everything in about an hour or so. Here’s some of what we saw.
The “affordable” supercar
That’s the Mulsanne GTM, unless I’m mistaken, and it looks like one hell of a car. The “booth” was really just a table with a guest registry on it, so I’m left with Google searching to find out more about it. It seems Factory Five developed this kit that’ll run you around $20,000 or so and gives you most of what you need to build the car. You’ll still need to buy the engine and some other key ingredients and you’ve gotta put it together yourself. Still, not bad for the price. Here’s a bit of what they have to say about it:
The GTM is an all-new American V-8 powered, mid-engined, original design with a stunningly beautiful hand-crafted composite body shell and a computer designed steel tube frame chassis. It is a fantasy Supercar engineered to be affordable and bring the dream of owning such a car to people whose talents and craftsmanship outrun their bank accounts.
Rent a super car
One of the first things we saw upon entering the expo was this beautiful Lotus Elise that Status Toy Rentals wants you to rent. The price isn’t really all that bad, at about $400 for a 24 hour rental. I thought it was going to be a lot more. More importantly, they have a Ferrari F355 Spider with my name on it for $795 for 24 hours. The rental policies on the site state that “The vehicles may not be used: To carry persons or property for hire”. Does this mean prostitutes? Kind of an odd policy. They also disclose that they reserve the right to remotely disable and retrieve their vehicle if you take it outside the allowed areas or near, say, a race track. Now that’s a smart policy.
Spas, pool tables, trucks, choppers, coaches, and everything else
The event didn’t have JUST cars. There were also a lot of spas, pool tables, big trucks, huge coaches and buses, million dollar boats, and various other items. There were also several booths offering prizes like vacations and tickets, but you have to fill out a form which will undoubtedly land your name on several call and email lists, so I stayed away from those. All said, it was almost worth my $9, but I don’t think I’ll be going next year unless they do something drastic to enhance their vendor list. Throw some tech toys in there for starters.
The blogs below all chipped in to make February’s contest for $100 possible, and after a large delay (which is mostly my fault), we’ve chosen a winner!
We we randomly chose Rina, the author of AzrinaAznan.com as our winner. She wrote this blog post about the contest, landing her 25 easy contest entries (entries 852-876) and the winning entry was 875.
Congrats, Rina. I will contact you in a moment to arrange immediate payment.
Don’t miss out on YOUR hundred bucks. Enter the March $100 contest right now.
Because I run a Gothic and Industrial internet radio station, I get regular mailings and promos from a variety of labels and other sources, including the artists, themselves. A few days ago, my inbox contained an email from beatwire.com with the subject, “Austin label announces “pay what you want” for Mp3s”. I figured I’d save it to read later and I tagged it “important” and moved on.
We all heard about when Radiohead decided to let fans pick their own price for their new album, In Rainbows. When that happened in October of last year, it created a huge buzz and shook the music industry. Many even speculated that this could be the shape of things to come. Those speculators may have been on to something.
Texas Music Forge makes their own rainbows
Today, I was reminded to look back at that email from BeatWire, a music industry press release distributor. The email was about Texas record label, Texas Music Forge‘s decision to allow the consumer to choose what to pay for an MP3 purchase from the relatively new label, and said, in part:
AUSTIN, TEXAS–March 12, 2008–Austin, Texas-based publisher and record label Texas Music Forge announced today that it has begun a pay what you want policy for its mp3 downloads. The concept of allowing customers to download music and set their own price for it has been a topic of intense controversy in the music industry.
TMF really just opened up their mp3s for download and threw a PayPal “donate” button on the page, but how they are doing it isn’t what’s important. The important part is that they decided to grab on with both hands to the concept of giving the consumer the power to decide how much to pay for music. They’re not the only ones putting music in our ipods while keeping cash in our wallets, either.
Trent toes the free music waters
Fellow blogger, Malin recently wrote about Industrial staple Nine Inch Nails‘ move to make their new album, Ghosts, available for only five bucks. With a huge following, NIN has no real need to lower album prices, but why not when you can afford to. Trent Reznor has always had his game face on when it comes to leading the industry and marketing himself and NIN, so this is really no surprise to me. I’m actually a little shocked that more artists haven’t leaned toward the consumer in an effort to attract more people back to actually BUYING music.
The future of music online
The before YouTube choked all the bandwidth out of the internet, there was mp3.com, which CNET bought and all but ruined (but that’s for another article). Mp3.com opened the flood gates for new and unknown artists to get a lot of exposure very easily by just producing good music. It also gave them a platform through which to sell digital copies of their music. Then we saw the birth of iTunes and the 400 companies that have tried to unseat it. I have a feeling that the next progression for music online is individual artists and labels all stepping up to the plate to offer very cheap or donation-based digital album downloads until such a practice becomes nearly mandatory to compete in the industry.
A lot has been going on, so I thought I’d give a little update.
Twitter – My new time consumer
I’ve been sucked in to Twitter. I got sucked into MySpace, FaceBook, and everything else, and now Twitter has sucked me in, too. Shoe was my first follow on Twitter, but I think it was Tris who convinced me to give it a shot.
Talkin’ about Joe Tech, eh?
It’s been a busy couple weeks. XY7.com shot some video of me talking about what I hope to get out of their affiliate program for some marketing video they’re producing, Pam Hoffman of Internet Marketing Seminar Listinginterviewed me online about attending Affiliate Summit West for her blog, and Bloggin-Ads.com wrote this nice review about JoeTech.com. I’m working on those changes you suggested. I promise. I’m happy to have all the attention, so feel free to drop me a line if you’ve written a review or would like an interview.
Another broken camera project
Michelle took a fall while hiking and landed on her camera, so I’m going to have another project coming up in the next week. The plan is to replace the broken screen with one from an otherwise broken camera on ebay. Should be fun.
Sites and other projects
As many of you know, I build web sites in my spare time and get traffic to them so I can sell them. I currently have a few sites for sale, so contact me if you’re interested. One earns about $100/month and has a lot more potential for someone with more time, and another has a good deal of traffic, but I haven’t had the opportunity to monetize it properly. I’m looking for about $2,000 and $500, respectively. I need to free up some time, as I am about to enter into a partnership with an existing site and it should eat up some time, building the site up to what it really should be. More on that later.
