Welcome to Geek Squad City

Business
ENTERTAINMENT 3
COMICS 4-5
Housing woes
Despite lackluster sales, poor
credit is still keeping many
from buying a house 2
WEATHER 6
D1
MONDAY,
MAY 21
2007
Page edited by Justin D. Beckett
‘‘The challenge of the wall and the tower is different than the other things we do. Climbing the wall is personal, and the kind
of goal it offers depends on the person. One person might want to see how fast he can get to the top. Another might want to
just try climbing. And another who is afraid of heights might just want to get off the ground.’’
Fort Carson Challenge Course coordinator Trevor McConnell
Your Corner
By Mike “Bogey”
Boguslawski
How to
improve your
credit score
Photo by Hunter McRae / Freedom News Service
Cynthia Decker makes her way up a 60 ft climbing wall Friday, September 15, 2006 at the Fort Carson Challenge Course.
Team play
Challenge course
goes to great heights
for group bonding
D
Photo by Hunter McRae / Freedom News Service
The 60 ft tall Alpine Tower is part of the Fort Carson Challenge
Course on Friday, September 15, 2006.
By DEB ACORD
Freedom News Service
on’t let the shorts and T-shirts
fool you. Or the amusing games
these grown-ups are playing on
the giant jungle gym of lumber,
swings and netting.
This group of professionals is hard at work
on this bright, windy afternoon, trying to balance shoulder-to-shoulder on a horizontal telephone pole and arrange themselves alphabetically according to their first names, without
stepping off the pole — and without talking.
Figuring out how to communicate without
words is a cornerstone of the team-building
program at the Challenge Course and Alpine
Tower at Fort Carson, Colo., and this group
from Evans Army Community Hospital is
taking the mission to heart. They concentrate and undulate as balance is gained and
Welcome
to Geek
Squad City
HILLVIEW, Ky. — The nation’s top electronics retailer
didn’t pick Silicon Valley, India or another high-tech hub
to build its hospital for personal computers. It chose the
Kentucky countryside, known
more for race horses and bourbon distilleries than geeks and
microprocessors.
Geek Squad, the quirky PC
service division of Best Buy
Co. Inc., opened its 165,000
square-foot Geek Squad City
warehouse just south of Louisville late last year with a goal
of cutting the time it takes to
repair and return a PC — especially laptops.
“This is all about giving the
customer a better experience,”
said Michael Rodgers, Geek
Squad City’s “ambassador,” or
spokesman.
Comput e r s w i t h b ro ke n
motherboards, hard drives
Teamwork/D2
Fugitives, parades and
sports: Cable television
expands local coverage
By DEBORAH YAO
AP Business Writer
Speedy laptop repair a
priority at giant center
in rural Kentucky
By DYLAN T. LOVAN
Associated Press Writer
lost. Finally, they complete their task with
a primitive, nonverbal language of taps and
nods.
They stand, triumphant now, a unified
presence on the log.
‘‘Good job,’’ shouts Fort Carson Challenge
Course coordinator Trevor McConnell, who
is watching the group with experienced eyes.
‘‘You’ve succeeded.’’
Similar scenes play out every day on hundreds of outdoor courses throughout the
country, where the aim is to foster trust and
self-confidence and improve communication
among people who might work together, play
together or study together.
The challenge-course concept originated
in Europe in the 1930s and hit the United
States in the 1960s. Since then, the courses
have gotten bigger, better, fancier.
The course at Fort Carson — open to civilian groups as well as the military — is
the epitome of the challenge course gone
wild. Built in 1997, it has an Alpine Tower,
a 60-foot structure of telephone poles, rope
ladders and swinging bridges that resembles
something from the mythical Neverland. It
also has a 60-foot climbing wall.
AP Photo / Brian Bohannon
Agents walk along the edge of ‘downtown’ on February 23 in Hillview,
Ky., in Geek Squad City’s sprawling repair room.
with death rattles and virus infections begin streaming into
the warehouse at 5 a.m. from
a nearby UPS air hub in Louisville, one of the key reasons
that the business was built
here, said Wes Snyder, Geek
Squad City’s top manager, or
“mayor.”
Snyder said the nearby city
offered a tech-savvy work force.
The state also offered tax benefits worth up to $9.3 million.
Inside the facility’s sprawling repair room, PC parts and
precision tools are spread over
the rows and rows of desks
where hundreds of computer
techs — Geek Squad’s “agents”
— fix more than 2,000 laptops a
day. More than 700,000 PCs will
be repaired here this year, Rodgers said.
Laptops are the majority of
personal computers sold nowadays, and the smaller and more
advanced they get, the more
complicated the repairs. The
portable PCs also endure more
abuse than their larger desktop
cousins, getting dinged, dropped
and splashed with coffee.
“They’re getting down to
where you need watchmaker
tools and very special expertise. It’s not just swapping out
a disk drive anymore,” said
Richard Doherty, president of
The Envisioneering Group, a
research company.
About half the laptops are
repaired on the same day they
arrive at Geek Squad City, but
the average time is about three
days, Rodgers said.
Rob Enderle, an analyst with
the Enderle Group research
company, said the turnaround
time is faster than any other
computer retailer.
Geek squad/D2
PHILADELPHIA — Gloomy
weather didn’t dim the smiles
of the two perfectly coifed TV
anchors as they bantered into
their microphone headsets.
“The skies may be gray, but
spirits are sunny and bright.
Good mor ning. I’m Janelle
Wolfe and thanks for tuning
in,” one said with practiced,
professional poise. “It’s going
to be a long parade. I hope you
have a bowl of popcorn or some
beverages handy, because folks,
we’re going to be here a while.”
Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade? Not even close. It’s the
2006 bicentennial parade of
Pottsville, Pa. The town’s population: About 15,000. Here’s
another surprise: The show
wasn’t produced by the local
TV station but taped and edited by Comcast Corp. It aired
on the cable company’s statewide video on demand service,
which is a bank of stored movies, television shows and other
content that its digital TV customers can access at any time.
Comcast, based in Philadelphia, and other cable operators
such as Time Warner Cable,
Cablevision Systems Corp. and
Cox Communications Inc., are
quietly expanding their local
news coverage of the communities they serve, offering an
alternative satellite rivals can’t
match and tapping into demand
for everything local.
While the quality of the
shows varies from ESPN sophistication to simple footage
of cheerleading, they’re generally slicker and more diverse
than those seen on public access channels produced by the
community. Many local ondemand shows are produced
by the cable companies, using
their own video crews and onair anchors.
By offering local on demand,
cable operators hope to give
subscribers one more reason to
stay with them.
Parents who miss their kids’
Tuesday afternoon baseball
game can watch, pause, replay
it on video on demand as early as that night. The video is
stored on servers in the cable
company’s network. Customers
make selections with their TV
remotes and get nearly instant
gratification.
Cable TV/D2
Daily Press, Victorville, Calif. PAGE D2
business
Monday, May 21, 2007
Weak
credit
shuts out
buyers
Geek Squad: Idea sold
to Best Buy in 2002
FROM D1
By JANET FRANKSTON LORIN
Associated Press Writer
With a second child on the
way, Chris Shields and his wife,
Michelle, wanted to move from
their two-bedroom apartment
in Southern California to a
house with more space.
But because their timing coincided with a shakeout in the
mortgage market earlier this
year, their credit now isn’t good
enough to get a loan to purchase the house they wanted
with no money down.
Rising interest rates and
dropping home prices have
squeezed a market that had
been propped up by risky loans
and easy credit during the
housing boom. As mortgage
bills came due, foreclosures
rose, and the easy credit dried
up for families like the Shields.
“Now we’re stuck in the apartment,” said Shields, 31, a firefighter who lives in Manifee, Calif. His
wife gave birth to baby Gabriella
at the end of March, and they are
running out of space without options for a house.
These mortgages, also called
“subprime,” opened up homeownership to people who otherwise couldn’t buy houses because
they had weak credit or little
money for a down payment.
Unlike traditional 30-year
fixed mortgages, these loans are
often adjustable and payments
grow with rising interest rates.
The nontraditional loans allowed
homeowners to borrow large
amounts thanks to low initial
“teaser” rates, piggyback loans
split into two mortgages, or interest-only payments.
In the past, lenders didn’t
want to give mortgages to people with below-average credit
because it was risky, said Kathe
Newman, a professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey
who has studied the subprime
market and foreclosures.
But the explosion of a secondary market for repurchasing
mortgages provided more cash
to lenders, and investors were
willing to take bigger risks. Technology, such as automated credit
scoring, also allowed lenders to
quickly assess risk, she said.
This year, the volume of subprime mortgages is expected to
drop by about 30 percent, said
Jay Brinkmann, vice president
of research and an economist
for the Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington, D.C.
Over the last few months,
Louis Allee, a mortgage broker based in Whittier, said he
has seen fewer clients qualify
for 100 percent home financing.
More potential home buyers
also are having to prove their incomes and they must show they
have the equivalent of several
months’ mortgage payments in
their savings account.
LaVerne Jackson, who sells
homes for Century 21 south of
Newark, N.J. said the mortgage
situation is slowing her business down.
In early March, one of her
clients was set to close one afternoon on a $320,000, four-bedroom
home in Linden, near Newark
Liberty International Airport.
But it was canceled abruptly just
hours before closing when the
buyer’s mortgage company shut
its doors, she said.
Jackson said the housing market will suffer as buyers work to
establish better credit.
Page edited by Justin D. Beckett
AP Photo / Matt Rourke
CN8’s Carla Showell-Lee, left, interviews Teddy Pendergrass an advocate for people with spinal cord injuries in
Philadelphia, on May 9. Comcast and other cable operators such as Time Warner Cable, Cablevision Systems Corp.
and Cox Communications Inc., are quietly expanding their local news coverage of the communities they serve,
offering another alternative satellite rivals can’t match and tapping into demand for everything local.
Cable TV: Cox using local on demand
FROM D1
“It’s something satellite can’t
do,” said Bruce Leichtman, president of Leichtman Research
Group, a technology research
and consulting company. “It’s all
about differentiation.”
Meanwhile, phone companies
are spending billions of dollars
to blanket the country with their
own TV service but aren’t yet in
a position to offer much, if any,
local video on demand.
Besides staying a step ahead
of telephone companies and
standing out from satellite, video on demand also is being used
to entice customers into upgrading to more expensive digital
TV packages.
“They want to convert folks
from analog to digital,” said Todd
Chanko, an analyst from Jupiter
Research. The key is to offer the
“deepest, widest amount of content as possible.”
In a meeting last week with
analysts, Comcast executives
said customers who buy digital
cable tend to stay with the company. Digital subscribers who
use video on demand are even
more loyal.
Most local shows — from high
school sports and small-town
parades to middle-school dance
contests and community politics
— are free while newer movies carry a charge or require
a movie channel subscription.
On-demand movies are different from pay-per-view, where
programming is broadcast on a
schedule and usually only one
viewing is allowed.
Last year, 54 percent of digital
subscribers watched an on-demand program, according to the
Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing. That’s
up from 35 percent in 2004. About
35 million U.S. households subscribe to digital cable, according
to Jupiter Research.
There aren’t any industrywide
figures yet for local video on demand, but cable companies said
the shows have turned out to be
quite popular.
“It’s become a hot category for
us,” said Michael Doyle, president of Comcast’s eastern division, covering Pennsylvania,
New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland,
Virginia and Washington, D.C.
Just in the first quarter,
Doyle’s division recorded 2 million views for local video on demand. That compares with 3.7
million views for all of 2006 and
2.6 million in 2005. (A customer who clicks on an on-demand
show and doesn’t finish it but
watches it again later would
count as two views.)
While growing fast, local on demand is still a small percentage
of the half a billion total views
the Eastern division recorded in
2006. Nationally, Comcast posted
1.86 billion on demand views last
year, up 33 percent from 2005.
Time Warner said viewership
of its Wisconsin On Demand has
at times exceeded those for the
on-demand shows of Comedy
Central, Nickelodeon and two
premium channels, The Movie
Channel and Playboy.
Excluding paid channels, the
region-focused Wisconsin On
Demand was the second most
popular video on demand channel for Time War ner in the
state, beaten only by children’s
channel PBS Kids Sprout, in the
fourth quarter of 2006.
Wisconsin On Demand started with 50 shows in 2003 and
now has about 400 shows. New
York-based Time Warner said
about two-thirds of its 27 geographic divisions carry local
video on-demand shows, including lessons on fly fishing,
outdoor grilling, dance contests
and high school sports.
In March, Cablevision of
Bethpage, N.Y. created a video
on-demand category for its local shows, covering such events
as high school sports, parades,
festivals and political events. Its
“Meet The Leaders” program
has featured politicians from
New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer to
Gary LaPelusa, city councilman
for Bayonne, N.J.
It also airs “Long Island’s Most
Wanted,” to enlist the public’s
help in catching criminals.
Atlanta-based Cox, which is
still rolling out video on demand
to all its markets, said a bayou
classic called “Phat, Phat ’N All
That Bayou” is its most popular on-demand show in New Orleans. In April, Cox started offering local on-demand shows in
Baton Rouge, Lafayette and surrounding Louisiana parishes.
The video on-demand service
became available in these areas
in January.
B y c ove r i n g c o m m u n i t y
events, cable operators are becoming a source of hyper-local
news as television stations cut
their news budgets. Newspapers
cover much more local territory
but are hampered by deteriorating finances.
“This was largely, at one time,
the domain of local television,”
said Al Tompkins, who teaches
broadcasting and online journalism at The Poynter Institute
in St. Petersburg, Fla. “As local
television has continually moved
away from that connectivity, others have found ways to do it.”
Cable’s advantage over local
TV stations is that it doesn’t care
about ratings, Tompkins said. Its
strategy is to make the cable TV
service more enticing to folks by
adding local content.
“What you’re trying to do is
you’re trying to provide a unique
service that they can’t get if
they don’t get cable,” he said. “I
can’t get the Pottsville parade
on CNN.”
“From a store perspective,
I’m not aware of anyone else
doing this,” he said. Original or direct manuf acturers, like Dell, can typically
re pair and retur n a PC in
a b o u t t h a t t i m e, E n d e rl e
added.
Circuit City Stores Inc.,
Best Buy’s main competitor
in the electronics retail market, launched its own PC repair service, called Firedog,
in October. It offers in-home
and in-store service, similar to Geek Squad. Circuit
City declined to comment on
Geek Squad City.
“Oftentimes what an inThe Associated Press
dustry leader like a Best Buy
Michael
Rodgers,
‘ambassador’ or
does is force others people to
kind of follow,” said Samir spokesman at Geek Squad City’s
Bhavnani, a research direc- 165,000 square-foot warehouse
just south of Louisville poses for a
tor with Current Analysis.
M o s t o f t h e t h o u s a n d s photo on February 23.
of computers sent to Geek
Squad City could not be
Geek Squad’s pseudo-serifixed by employees at Best ous image — high-tech culBuy locations, typically be- ture with a dab of intrigue
cause the store didn’t have straight out of a 1950s spy
the proper parts. Best Buy n o ve l — i s e m b r a c e d by
is considering shipping ad- Geek Squad City’s 600 emd i t i o n a l p a r t s o u t t o t h e ployees, who carry titles like
stores, but for now the com- “counter intelligence agent”
puters go to the Kentucky and “commissioner.”
warehouse, Rodgers said.
Founded in 1994 in MinSwift repair time is cru- nesota by Robert Stephens,
cial in an industry
the comwith customers
pany bewho don’t want to
g an with
be away from their
h o u s e
private files.
calls to
“Laptops are
customvery personal and
ers with
people don’t like a
computer
personal element
w o e s .
of their life to be
Ste phens
out of their reach
sold it
for two or three or
to Best
ten days,” Doherty Richard Doherty B u y i n
said.
2002. Best
President of The
S o m e s m a l l e r,
Buy ofEnvisioneering Group
inde pendent tech
fers Geek
support companies
S q u a d
forego shipping computers service packages that range
and have instead built their from $29 to $299. They also
b u s i n e s s a r o u n d o n l i n e fix computers not bought at
t ro u bl e s h o o t i n g s e r v i c e s. it stores.
HiWired.com, a small MasThere are no customer
sachusetts company, repairs walk-ins here, but employc o m p u t e r s w i t h a re m o t e ees still don the standard
screen-sharing technolog y, i s s u e bl a ck - t i e a n d p a n t s
said Singu Srinivas, its co- w i t h wh i t e, s h o r t - s l e eve d
founder. A typical service dress shir ts. About 350 of
call costs from $75 to $100, the f acility’s workers are
he said.
“agents” or computer tech“What we’ve found is 93 nicians, most from nearby
percent of problems can be Louisville. Rodgers said the
actually solved remotely,” facility is already planning
Srinivas said, “because most to hire another 350 workers
of the problems people have at wages ranging from $9.50
these days are less, ’My key to $31.50 an hour.
is stuck on my keyboard,’
Though it’s been open
but more about, ’I saw a new since October, management
piece of software on the In- is constantly streamlining
ternet, and my PC was work- methods.
ing fine before that, but now
“I’ve never found a probit’s running sluggish.”’
lem that somebody here
S r i nivas s ai d co n s u m er couldn’t fix,” said Justin
computer service and repair M e a d e, a 2 1 - ye a r- o l d wh o
is a $15 billion a year indus- works at Geek Squad City.
“We kind of relish in that.”
try and growing.
“Laptops are very
personal and people
don’t like a personal
element of their life
to be out of their
reach for two or
three or ten days.”
Teamwork: Coarse used by many corporations to build coorperation skills
FROM D1
But the purpose of challenge
courses, big or small, hasn’t
changed: ‘‘To strengthen the spirit of the individual and create an
aspect of connectedness within
a team,’’ says Tom Leahy, owner
of Leahy & Associates, a Lafayette, Colo., company that designs
and builds challenge courses and
trains course facilitators.
Leahy has been working with
challenge courses for more than
30 years. He says a course helps
bring a group together in several
ways with physical, cognitive and
emotional demands.
‘‘There’s always a physical
aspect to it. Cognitive learning
comes in with the problem solving — making decisions with a
creative use of limited resources.
The emotional aspect of a course
is about creating healthy relationships and creating a sense
of understanding of what trust
really is.’’
The group from Evans got a
chance to tackle the course
thanks to Sgt. Amelia Graves, a
physical therapy assistant. She’s
in charge of regularly scheduled
meetings that bring together
staff members of the hospital’s
physical therapy, orthopedics
and occupational therapy departments. Usually, the meetings
are indoors, but for this day, she
chose something completely different: a day outdoors in the sun
and wind at the Challenge Course
and Alpine Tower.
The three departments interact
daily, but interactions are usually centered around a patient’s
therapy or rehabilitation. Graves
thought a day away from the hospital would allow the participants
to get to know each other better,
in a different setting.
‘‘We all work at Evans, but we
are members of three different
departments,’’ Graves says.
Graves’ meetings are mandatory. The Challenge Course activities weren’t, but employees were
asked to show up at the course
whether or not they planned to
participate.
‘‘Some people were a little worried,’’ Graves says. ‘‘They said,
‘Are we going to climb? I don’t
want to climb.’ We told everyone
they could participate at their
own pace.’’
McConnell introduces himself
to the group by setting up the
course rules.
‘‘Be respectful, be safe and be
here,’’ he says. ‘‘If you don’t want
to be physically engaged, then
still be a part of the group.’’
The group starts off with challenges that require them to work
as a cohesive team. At first, they
are awkward and uncoordinated.
McConnell watches closely, reprimanding when they don’t follow
his rules and cheering them on
when they come up with innovative solutions.