Which consumer happenings cheered you recently and which ones made you want to scream or weep?
Here are my best and worst consumer experiences this week:
My best: Seattle’s Green Festival offers inspiration
David Korten and Alisa Gravitz, executive director, Green America
My third Green Festival was a great consumer experience. Inspiring speakers, including David Korten author of “Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth,” exhibits with healthy foods and green building materials, and the sharing of ideas for a more sustainable, just world were highlights.
I also enjoyed a show of eco friendly fashions. See my photos here.
The Green Festival was a positive, inspiring, and uplifting event. I’ll be blogging about the speakers next week.
The festival is sponsored by Green America, formerly Co-op America, and Global Exchange.
My worst: Using Kizoa to make a DVD photo album
The kindergarten teacher for my twin grandchildren asked if my daughter and I could put photos of the class on a CD with music. We said we’d help her do that. Since I’ve made photo albums for my blogs, I didn’t think the project would be too hard.
The teacher gave us a disk with 92 photos on the last day of my vacation. The difficult part, I told my daughter, would be finding a free program to create the photo album.
First, we tried Smile Box. It didn’t upload the photos well. It put them in a side panel, and I had to drag them to the album. The photos weren’t in order, and I had duplicates. We abandoned Smile Box.
Next, we tried Kizoa. It took 45 minutes to upload the photos. They were in order, so we were hopeful.
However, everything went downhill from there. We put in the transitions, made a title, and typed in the names of the children.
We saw that if you wanted any of the premium services you could pay $2.09. However, we found out that if you wanted to make a DVD of the photo album, one of the premium options, you had to pay $50 for a year. The $2.09 turned out to be a “come on” of a monthly charge.
It was getting late and the graduation ceremony was the next day. So we paid the $50.
My daughter tried for more than an hour to download Kizoa to her computer so she could burn a DVD. It didn’t work. For another hour, I worked on putting Kizoa on my laptop. I finally got it downloaded.
My daughter tried to burn a DVD, using one of the blank ones she’s had for a while. It didn’t work. I went to CVS to buy some new ones. They didn’t work either.
My daughter figured out that she could send the photo album by e-mail. She proposed writing a letter to parents saying they could receive a copy by e-mail.
When we got to school, one of the parents said he could burn the DVDs. He was successful, but what he could grab didn’t have the music or the student’s names.
For us, Kizoa turned out to be a “bait and switch” program. It wasn’t clear that you’d have to pay $50 to burn your creation to a DVD. Then it was difficult to download, and when we finally got it downloaded, it wouldn’t burn a DVD. Finally, when the third attempt was made to burn the DVDs, Kizoa gave just the photos, not the music and the names we’d typed in, even though we paid $50. Kizoa was truly a frustrating consumer experience.
