Nicolas Cage has named his newborn son Kal-El, which is also the birth name of the Man of Steel, Superman. Kal-el Coppola Cage was born on Monday, and both baby and mother, Cage’s wife, Alice Kim Cage, are said to be doing well.
Cage, a huge comic-book fan once sold his entire collection for $1.6 million, hence the chosen name for his child. Cage even adopted his name from the Marvel comic-book character Luke Cage (his realy name is Coppola, his Uncle being the famous helmer Francis Ford).
Cage will next be seen in the big-budget comic book adaptation of GHOST RIDER.

That $1.6 should just about cover the therapy bills for that poor kid.

You can read all details in this story but basically

palmOne, Inc. has announced an agreement with PalmSource, Inc. for palmOne to acquire full rights to the brand name Palm. The brand had been co-owned by the two companies since the October 2003 spin-off of PalmSource from Palm, Inc. palmOne will pay PalmSource US$30 million for PalmSource’s 55 percent share of the Palm Trademark Holding Company. Payment will be made in installments over 3.5 years. palmOne will change its company name to Palm, Inc. later this year.

Yeah, that’s clear. Because they’ve had such great success in the past with their names. I think people still refer to the entire category as the Palm Pilot (which could be a success, except that they dropped the Pilot name about 6 years ago), but then it became Palm, but then the company split into PalmOne and PalmSource (although I guess Palm was still an umbrella organization) – but really I was never able to tell which one was which, and mostly that just meant that the email addresses of contacts who were employees of Palm were suddenly no longer usable. Now, they are switching again.

And me, I’ve still got my Handspring Visor Edge, a spin-off from the Palm empire that they got brought back in and then dropped. I don’t think they make any Handspring products any more, let alone a Visor model, let alone the rare Edge sub-model category.

One would need a PDA to organize all of this information!

Today I got spam from “Enrique Nudnud”

========================================================
FreshMeat #13 from Steve Portigal

               (__)                     
               (oo) Fresh                  
                \\/  Meat

Gimme gimme gimme! Gimme FreshMeat, Gimme FreshMeat!
=========================================================

Over the last couple of years, the Safeway grocery chain
has attempted to improve their quality of service by
addressing customers by name. You see, if you use their
loyalty card, or if you pay by debit or credit card,
they retrieve the text of your name and print it on
your cash register receipt. Checkers are required to
thank you by name, which they read off the receipt,
before they hand it to you. This doesn’t work so well,
because it takes more than a few seconds for some
checkers to read some names, and that delay at the
conclusion of your service is intolerable. Add to that,
an increased likelihood of having one’s name mispronounced,
and you’ve got a customer service failure. I mean, if I
had a dime for every time they’ve called me “Mr. Portugal,”
well, I wouldn’t have to shop at Safeway!

(This customer service problem was parodied by Saturday
Night Live back in 1992. You can read a transcript of that
sketch here.)

Recognizing the long-frustrating problem of
mispronunciation of names during commencement ceremonies,
schools like Baylor and Worcester Polytechnic Institute use
the web to collect phonetic spelling info from their grads.

The need is clear, and the technology is ready. Products
like Espeech and Orator II can begin to solve this problem.
The technology that translates text to speech actually
builds a sequence of phonemes (the basic speech sounds
used in a language) that could be spoken (by a speech
synthesizer) or output as phonetics. Just add another
field to all those databases of customer names. Let the
software take the first stab at guessing how to pronounce
the name. Checkout clerks and telemarketers would be
shown a pronunciation key at the appropriate time. If
the customer offers a correction, update the field.

If the companies that consumers do business with (airlines,
grocery stores, phone companies, banks, etc.) are going to
be addressing them by name, is it really so crazy to spend
some money getting those names right? Safeway obviously has
an inkling that they could deliver better service and forge
the right relationship through judicious use of their
customers’ names, maybe they need to step up their efforts
just a notch or two, and get it right.

—

If you are interested in ideas for products and services,
check out http://www.idea-a-day.com/ (updated daily, as the name implies, or available as a daily email), or
http://www.halfbakery.com/ (looks cool, but kind of
impenetrable UI.)

Update:
Received February, 2002 from Steven A. Burd, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Office of Safeway, in response to a faxed copy of this issue of FreshMeat.

Dear Mr. Portigal:
Thank you for suggesting that we use some of the new software that translates text into speech, in conjunction with our ongoing customer service initiatives. We appreciate your interest as a good customer whose name has been mispronounced occasionally by our clerks.
It’s an interesting idea, one we have considered before – but using voice recognition technology, the opposite of what you propose. To be honest, we haven’t pursued this since our initial research, because the applications available at the time were expensive, slow and ineffectual. While we have similar concerns about the technology you mentioned, our industrial engineers may wish to visit the two web sites cited in your newsletter.
Meanwhile, we’ll review our stores in your area to be sure any employees who are having difficulty thanking customers by name receive remedial training. If our clerks are unsure of how a name is pronounced, they are to ask the customers. Admittedly, this is a low-tech solution, but it seems to work well.
Thanks again, Mr. Portigal. We value your constructive criticism, and the friendly spirit in which it is offered.

Update:
As we automate our lives, swallowed in a bottomless maw of voice-mail, it’s hard not to heed that little voice telling us to listen

Susan Sward
Sunday, October 18, 1998

Mother used to say that by the time people die, the world around them has often changed so much that death does not seem so terrible. I thought about her comment off and on when I was growing up — partly because I wished that the world where I had played in the 1950s would remain unchanged forever.

Soon enough, I realized that wouldn’t happen. There were the darkened, tree-lined streets of Santa Monica, for example, where my sisters and I ran barefoot chasing after the neighborhood boys. The magic of that mysterious realm was lost forever when the city installed street lights and switched them on one evening. Lately, though, my mother’s observation has been haunting me — because I fear the inexorable march of the machine.

News item: Bank says it will introduce cash-dispensing machines with new software to recognize customers’ faces.

News item: Three industry giants are pioneers in using speech-recognition technology for services such as quoting stock prices over the phone, switching a caller to the right department and reporting the whereabouts of a lost package.

News item: Later this year, many callers wanting flight information from an airline will not speak to a person but to a computer that acts like one.

News item: The Mill Valley Public Library installs an electronic checkout system removing the need to deal with a library assistant when borrowing many of the facility’s books.