jvanderwal

The same exact thing is happening with businesses on Amazon.

A few years back Wendy's had an offer where if you got a medium or large drink there was a coupon on it. 32 coupons got you a one-way flight in the continental US, 64 got you a round-trip flight. Being a poor college student at the time, a few friends and I went dumpster diving at all the local Wendy's and over a couple nights ended up getting about 4 round-trip tickets. The only drawback was having to throw out those clothes..

My friends and I got a few round trip plane tickets once. Wendy's had a deal where their largest drinks had coupons to cut off their sides. I think 60 coupons got you a one-way domestic ticket on AirTran and 120 got you round trip. We were kids so we went dumpster diving at a couple local restaurants, found hundreds and hundreds of cups, and walked away with 3 or 4 round trip tickets. Not nearly as amazing as 1.25 million air miles, but we were pretty proud of ourselves.

I've just used vanilla extract before.. it doesn't take much, treat it like cologne. It smells much better than bug sprays and you don't have any weird residue.

It'll be interesting to see which company Google's autocomplete ends up suggesting when someone types "Moz".. right now it's Mozilla, but with SEOmoz's abilities I wonder if that'll change.

I wonder if there's any sort of somewhat even distribution to the winning tickets. If it's entirely random, there's shouldn't be. However, I knew a guy who worked at a gas station and he'd watch whenever people bought a bunch of tickets. If they scratched them off right there and didn't win anything, he'd buy the next few tickets. I believe he spent about $50-$100/week, but regularly won about $150/week.

We use TVEyes.com in our news monitoring product and it's very close to real-time. It does make mistakes sometimes, but I'm not aware of any perfect transcription software.

I was just looking for this kind of information the other day. Is there a way to give it a budget?

I'm actually looking into this a little right now since I happen to work for a media monitoring company. I can tell you there is a definite correlation between them, but haven't been able to determine if it's a leading or lagging indicator.