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The recent NYT article on sales trends at Home Depot and Wal Mart has some great clues into how consumers are changing habits in the light of economic downturn.

1. Food stays on the list, clothes and furniture don't
2. People are trading down to private label
3. People trading down the protein ladder from steak to ground beef, others moving from beef to chicken and others moving from protein to carbs
4. The home is the focal point- cheap take out pizza and movies is the new form of entertainment- people aren't going out and they are not cutting back on their entertainment tech. Sales of the more affordable flat screen are holding up
5. Vegetable gardens are booming
6. People are trying to stay healthy on their own with out resorting to experts- this means increased sales of vitamins and OTC medicines.
7. They need relief for these troubled times so they are buying more sleep aids, pain relievers and antacids
8. Home repair is on the increase
9. People are not buying new cars, they are repairing and maintaining the ones they have
10. Parents are not transitioning their kids between diapers and underwear with pull ups, instead they are going straight to underwear


Posted by Ed Cotton Spore is the latest game created by Wil Wright, the brain behind Sim City and The Sims. It let's people create their own creatures and evolve them over time. Using simple creature creator tool sets, users get to decide how they want their creatures to look, feel, behave and evolve.



Could Wil Wright and EA's Spore be the latest research tool to help understand human behavior?

The latest issue of Seed, suggests it could.

"It's the potential Spore has to evolve over current and future interactions into a massive dataset of billions of human interactions and decisions that may make the game a target for scientific research rather than a reflection of it."

They already men prefer conquest through blood and aggression and women prefer non-aggressive methods which often involve singing and dancing, this is not especially surprising and seems perfectly obvious, but it's just the tip of the iceberg of data.

The game even in the test phase has an incredible level of participation. It took only 18 days for the Spore community to match the 1.6 million species on Earth. It took just 22 hours to generate 100,000 creatures.

As of the end of September, the game had sold around 1 million units, but more impressive are the 39 million creatures that have been created to date.

Seed Magazine confirms that EA has a massively powerful research tool in its hands, but it remains unclear if they are just going to keep it for themselves or make it public.


Posted by Ed Cotton