BANKING THE UNBANKABLE -- COINSTAR EMPOWERS YOUNG GAMERS

Truth be told I've known about this initiative by Coinstar for a little while now, mainly through following one of the companies (Rixty) listed in the release, so I was thrilled to see this news hit the wires yesterday because it's a great example of a traditional brick-and-mortar based business finding creative ways to get in the new media world game.

The basic premise is that Coinstar is allowing consumers (read: pre-teen and teen gamers with no access to credit cards as a way of paying for their digital entertainment addiction - I mean, hobby) to turn in their coins in exchange for pre-paid spending cards for onling games, virtual worlds and social networks. Some of the other digital entertainment properties attached to this initiative include Aeria, Stardoll, WeeWorld, Adventure Quest Worlds and, perhaps most importantly, Facebook and MySpace. I'm sure that more companies in these spaces will soon follow suit and join the Coinstar consortium -- the question is, can mainstream media companies be far behind? Hulu pre-paid card anyone?!

Just when you thought that Sparkletts water bottle full of coins was never gonna see the light of day!!

MEMO TO THE INDUSTRY . . . DO AWAY WITH ALL MOBILE URLS!!!!

There are very few things that exist in the digital media space that I would put in the category of being a pet peeve of mine -- but this is definitely at the top of my list, and my rant on this has been a long time in coming.

In all the years that I've observed and been involved in the mobile web (aka WAP for you industry aficionados), I have never understood why any company/brand/publisher/media company would use anything other than the traditional ".com" top-level domain their mobile web destination URL. As we've all seen, there have been a whole host of mobile-specific top-level domains and URLs that have been, and continue to be, employed and marketed to consumers with web-enabled mobile phones -- for example:

* www.-------.mobi (e.g., CNNMoney.mobi)
* m.---------.com -- (e.g., m.myspace.com)
* wap.------.com -- (e.g., wap.aol.com)

For those of us in the mobile space, I ask you -- isn't the ultimate goal here to educate the consumer public that the web is the web is the web -- regardless of whether you use a PC, a mobile phone, a game console or a TV to access it? Doesn't the mere presence of different URLs just add to the confusion rather than address and remedy it? I definitely think it does. And from a business perspective, I'd prefer to funnel all my web traffic, regardless of where it comes from, through one domain so that I can get credit for the audience and also better monetize them.

Sure the visual experience for the consumer will be different across these screens, but as true convergence continues to become a reality through increased proliferation of smartphones with a more robust web experience as well as the promise of Internet to the TV screen, those differences will continue to diminish. And in the meantime, let's all agree that the K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid!) approach is probably the best one here. Just use your existing ".com" URL for your mobile web site -- and make sure to ask whoever is helping you develop it to make sure an put in that one line of code on your web server that automatically detects whether someone is trying to access your site from a mobile phone so that that the correct site is rendered. It's that simple!

So say YES to ".com" and NO to everything else -- who else is with me?!