Product Reviews/Endorsements

Deal of the Day

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I don’t know if this is a short-term offer or a closeout or what, but this camera is a great deal at this price. I have a previous version (S95) and it is about as good as it gets for a small-sensor point-and-shoot. Very small yet highly configurable with excellent controls. You can get better at this size (e.g., the Sony DSC-RX100M III or one of its predecessors) but not at anywhere near this price.

Innovation – A Bed in a Box From Casper

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Recently we contemplated buying a new mattress. There are seemingly infinite ways to approach this problem, from the Hasten’s bed store down the street in River North where they cost $16,000 and up to the re-occurring commercials on TV promising custom or cheap mattresses. This article in the NY Times “How to Find the Best Mattress in the Maze of Choices” explained how customers were confused in a world of competing brands, technologies, and choices.

Since we are not excited about spending all day shopping and fond of trying something new, we took up one of their recommendations which was a company called Casper which can be found at http://www.casper.com. Casper was well recommended on their site and sold only ONE product (reminiscent of Apple’s strategy) which was a mattress that they ship to you in a box. The only difference was the size of the mattress to fit your bed frame. We bought a queen size mattress with shipping and tax included for $850.

This model is highly innovative. Instead of investing in a vast distribution system and retail footprint, moving to an online only (they have one store in NYC) model with a much smaller shipping plan (it is much easier to ship this box than a standard mattress), they should be able to beat the hell out of competitors assuming that they have a superior product.

Here is what the box looked like when it arrived. It was a relatively small box and I could put it on a cart and manhandle it around the condo.

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