Thoughts From The Cake Scraps

Well folks, it looks like we have yet another ‘entertainment shopping’  site on our hands.  SevenSnap has thrown its somewhat different hat into the 3rd ring at this 3 ring circus we have.  We’ve previously covered Pennycave and Swoopo on this blog (found here and here) so what better place to cover SevenSnap.

SevenSnap, at its core, is more like a XXX phone line or live show than anything else.  Rather than paying for bids and the risking getting nothing on the bids, SevenSnap charges you just to look at the item.  Yes, that’s right.  You have to pay just to get the chance to buy it.

Here’s how it works.  A new item gets put up every 60 min.  You have to create an account and buy minutes to get into the ‘Snap Room’.  Yes, they actually call it that in their guide.  Once in the room, the price of the item drops by as much as $100 a min, based on the number of people in the room.

Hold on; that sounds good for a second, but think about that.  They are capping the rate that it can drop to $100 a min, no matter how many people in the room.  If there is only 5 people it drops $5 a min, but if there are 1,000 people (or 5,000 for that matter) it only drops $100 a min.

After you have paid to gain entry to the oh so wonderful Snap Room, you can ‘Snap’ the product at any time.  As you can tell, they spent a lot of time on the names of things.

Once anybody in the room Snaps a product the price goes back up to the original amount and begins the price dropping anew.  So while you may try and get a good deal, the likely thing that will happen is that someone will ‘snap’ it before you, leaving you with nothing.  And remember, the price only drops every min – unsure how they deal with people joining at different times – so it is not constantly dropping, just in big chunks.  As with most of these sites, most people will lose out.

The worst part here is that there isn’t even risk to SevenSnap.  If you buy it right away they get their asking price and then sell another one.  If you don’t buy right away, the price is only dropping if people are paying.  So they are still fine.  They determine their minimum margin from the start and then anybody that is in the room over 100 (since the price decline caps a $100 a min) is gravy.

I would stay away from this, just as I would every other ‘entertainment shopping’ site.  Go buy a lotto ticket, your odds of coming out ahead are probably better.  At least SevenSnap is limited to the iPhone and iPod Touch.  This way a few extra people will save their money.

So do you think this and other ‘entertainment shopping’ sites are a scam?  Let me know your thoughts below.

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.  (Hat tip to TechCrunch for their post)

Every now and then a person stumbles across a small tip that makes life easy. Well, maybe just easier. Today I share one of those tips with you, the shift key.

We all use the shift key, but few people know about the additional power that it can provide. Gone are the days where it is used just for making a letter upper case or YELLING on the internet.

On a Windows OS,  holding the shift key while right clicking an item in a folder allows you to open the document read-only.  Very helpful if you don’t want to lock people of of the document, but still want it open.

The second and more helpful trick that I learned is in Excel.  Have you ever wanted to have a single page summary, but just couldn’t get it to work because the column widths for the stuff above doesn’t match with the stuff you want below?  Shift can help.

Copy the area that you want and then hold shift and go up to Edit > Paste Picture Link.  You now have a picture that is easily moved around, no matter the above column structure.  Better yet, if you change anything in the original range, it changes along with it!

Update: As commenter Ryan, of RyanMalesevich.com fame, points out, this is for Excel 2003.  For 2007, no shift is needed.  Just click the down arrow below “Paste” > “As Picture” > “Paste Picture Link”

Do you have any tips to share?

This has been a Thought From The Cake Scraps.