The Weekly Round-Up: 02.09.05

'Oops we did it again...'

If Argos was after a corporate song it could do worse than to borrow that slightly amended musing from Britney Spears, because the company has repeated a blunder with its e-tail operation which it first committed some years ago.

In 1999 the retailer advertised a television for sale on its website for £3 but after a rush of customers taking it up on the deal the company refused to honour the sale, claiming it was clearly a mistake.

Fast forward to 2005 and the company has committed exactly the same blunder. The only difference this time is its site claimed it was selling the TV for just 49p, and threw in a combination DVD player as well for good measure.

In total around 10,000 shoppers rushed onto the site to snap up the cut-price TVs and, true to form, Argos has once again said 'no sale'.

The retail giant says it won't honour the purchases or deliver the televisions to customers, claiming they didn't make the purchase in good faith, knowing they were onto an offer that was too good to be true.

And there is of course an element of that - most of these people were doubtless shameless chancers such as the student whose capitalist ambition forced him to risk the staggering sum of £39.20 ordering 80 sets - but there comes a point where pressure should surely be brought to bear on Argos to sort out its act.

Once was unfortunate but twice with almost identical blunders is simply rubbish, in the Round-Up's humble opinion.

And while expecting the company to take a £3m hit on the revenue those televisions would have generated is possibly a touch unreasonable, the Office of Fair Trading should be readying whatever weapon of choice it thinks is best suited for a serious knuckle-rapping for the folks at Argos.

And while they're at it they should force them to ditch those awful adverts with Richard E 'could do better' Grant and Julia 'she probably couldn't' Sawalha.

Lest we forget this is the same company, apparently struggling with the finer points of ecommerce, which also exposed customer data with a serious security vulnerability on its website back in 2003, as revealed by silicon.com.

Assuming we let Argos off the first blunder of this kind - after all, mistakes do happen - you might think it reasonable, after that learning experience, for customers to expect the price on the page to be the price they pay.

But apparently not.

Of course, Argos isn't alone in such pricing blunders. Thai Airways committed a similar howler a couple of years ago, as did Amazon.co.uk with a £7 PDA.

But unless Amazon repeats the mistake - fair's fair - we're not holding that against the pioneering retailer (which is named after the longest river in south America but based in the largest warehouse in Milton Keynes), which threw open its doors this week to let silicon.com have a good nose around its operation and take some photos.

Have a look and, in the words of one reader, be thankful that we went to Milton Keynes, so you don't have to.

We also ran a photo story following 'A day in the life of an Amazon.co.uk order' - tracking a book from it being ordered to being delivered.

And on the subject of ecommerce sites, a newcomer to the weird wide web this week is the intriguing 'Walesinabottle.com'. Not to be mistaken with 'Wales 'n' a bottle' which is just a Saturday night out for Charlotte Church.

According to a report on the BBC, an enterprising Welshman by the name of John Gronow is bottling Welsh air and selling what might, in a more cynical market, be considered 'empty bottles' to customers around the world keen to sample a lungful of 'Welsh atmosphere'.

'Welsh atmosphere'?

The Round-Up is aware this is a gross generalisation likely to result in angry emails and the burning of Silicon Cottage on the Gower but anybody who's ever been to Cardiff on a match day could be forgiven for thinking that is a euphemism for an air of deep-seated hatred towards the English (which the Round-Up is clearly doing little to assuage right now) and an undercurrent of violence.

But Gronow hasn't bottled the city air - of course he hasn't, that would be foolish - he has bottled the air of the beautiful rural environs of the Brecon Beacons and Snowdonia, which makes the whole venture entirely reasonable.

And if that doesn't make you rush online to buy up as many bottles as you can cram into your cupboard marked 'stupid purchases', let the Round-Up give you a further nudge by telling you the price.

These bottles of air would only set you back the bargain price of £24 each.

The Round-Up says 'bargain'... it of course means '£24 for a bottle of air, are you mental?'

But the Round-Up knows what you're thinking: how do I know this is real Welsh air? Because they come with a certificate, of course.

He's thought of everything has Mr Gronow.

The only thing he clearly didn't think of, which the Round-Up spotted immediately, is that anybody with the name 'Gronow' and a ready supply of empty bottles was clearly put on this earth to challenge the Baby Bio plant food empire.

'Gronow plant formula', or perhaps just the slightly bastardised 'Gro-Now'.

Gro-Now's motives, however, appear to owe more to the famous sense of Welsh patriotism than any attempt to make money by selling bottles of nothing but fresh air.

Gro-Now told the BBC: "I am offering a genuine service for people who want something of Wales that reminds them of their childhood or their homeland."

Well, what about measles? That would remind people of their childhood - though the Round-Up accepts that shipping contagions overseas in bottles is something of a no-no these days.

"It is the genuine article from the green, green grass of home," added Mr Gro-Now, perhaps himself starting to realise the relationship which could be crafted between his horticulture-friendly name and some well honed clichés about rural idyll.

And still in Wales, if you haven't heard about the 'robot lifeguard' who saved a girl from drowning in the deep end of a swimming pool in Bangor this week, then where have you been?

Fortunately for you, silicon.com has the whole thing caught as it unfolded in a photo story, which also proves it was nothing at all to do with an actual 'robot lifeguard'.

Instead, such headlines referred to a digital monitoring system called Poseidon which is designed to spot swimmers getting into trouble under water. In this case it identified a lifeless 10-year-old girl who sank to the bottom of the pool. The system notified the very much human lifeguard who dived in and performed the necessary heroics.

François Marmion (whose name sounds a little like Merman... which is spooky in a sub-aquatic kind of way), general manager of Vision IQ, the company which developed Poseidon, said: "It is virtually impossible for lifeguards to see everything that is happening in the pool all of the time, given the warm, noisy and crowded environment in which they typically work."

Now the Round-Up doesn't know why warmth makes the lifeguards' job any more difficult but either way thinks it's all very impressive that when it was needed in a genuine emergency the system worked so well.

And finally, speaking of averting nasty incidents, a Dutch artist believes he has invented an 'MP3 player' in the style of an iPod, which is far less likely to be stolen than Apple's own device which has become something of a must-nick item for the world's muggers, bag-dippers and pick-pockets.

Clearly keen to get his hands on some Apple-headed notepaper, the artist, known as Pii, is calling his invention the 'PiiPod'. (Can you see what he's done there? We're sure Apple's lawyers have.)

But you don't really care about that, do you? You want to know how he can be so sure his design will be less prone to theft? What's so special about the PiiPod that means it will evade the light fingers of the criminal underclass?

Well, it's carved from wood and is no more likely to actually play songs than any other block of wood, rendering it entirely valueless as a gadget. (Which some harsh and cynical critics may suggest still barely differentiates it from the battery-problem-plagued iPod.)

According to Pii his eponymous gadget could also help to break iPod addicts of the need to keep their gadget with them at all times.

"The wooden PiiPod is designed to be a tool to aid in maintaining health of those addicted to mp3 players," according to Pii who calls his lump of a wood "a surrogate to their little musical data storage device, offering users the chance to rest their ears, yet still draw comfort and succour from having the familiar-sized unsightly bulge in their clothes... without any of the alleged social and physical side-effects of the long-term usage".

We're not exactly sure what he meant with his last line - and we're not sure it would stand up in court - but the "alleged" was probably still a wise move.

You can see a picture of the PiiPod - and even enter a competition to win it - here.

Apple meanwhile has been busying itself with its own plans for a forthcoming addition to its product line, which presumably won't be made of wood.

Let's hope these new releases have distracted the Apple lawyers from the wooden rip-off, else the life of Pii may be about to get a lot worse.

Now some news from the past five days: