This one made me laugh, if only because I’ve actually heard parents of college-bound children say similar snarky things while in the field.

Barry Judge, the Chief Marketing Officer for Best Buy, mentions the commercials in a blog post about Twelpforce and how it is blurring the line between customer service and marketing.

Also, John Bernier talks about the Twelpforce learning experiment in a blog entry called Getting Dressed in a Glass House.

This week marked the official launch of Best Buy’s @Twelpforce, which allows customers to connect with regular employees for questions and support with products and services they are looking at, or have already bought.

TechCrunch has been very positive on the idea of connecting customers with employees, calling it, “a phenomenal way to engage with Twitter users and social media in general.”

I’ve had an opportunity to join in on the experience as a Geek Squad Agent, and it’s been eye-opening in just how powerful the idea is. I’ve seen hundreds of customer-employee interactions since the launch, and it’s wonderful to see how welcomed the responses are by the public.

I think the thing that makes this idea so unique is that it’s not just another contact point for a company public relations team. Instead, it’s made up of regular employees from around the world, 700+ at last count. The expectation for participation, according to the publicly-available website is that @Twelpforce members, “just have to be curious, proactive, and helpful- much of the same stuff you do everyday.”

I look forward to more @Twelpforce twittering in my future!

It used to be that once a PC game disappeared from store shelves due to age, it was often difficult to find again for a reasonable price. A perfect example of this is Evil Genius, which I had thought about buying again after having long ago lost my original copy. Out of print copies could be had for $24.95 at Amazon.com, which was about $15 too much for the interest I had.

The recent surge of older games available on download services like Valve’s Steam service piqued my interest in older titles again, and a Google search for Evil Genius brought my attention to Good Old Games, available at gog.com.

GOG has built up a great little service around offering legal, DRM-free downloads of older games at the prices I found myself unable to resist. A few minutes later, I had already bought Evil Genius and Painkiller Black Edition for $9.99 each.

Even better, GOG has gone through and patched their products to ensure that they’ll run on most modern systems. In my case, the 64-bit Windows 7 Release Candidate ran both games beautifully.

Much like Steam, I can re-download my purchased games should I delete them down the line. However, GOG takes things a step further and offers nice downloads, like manuals, artwork, desktop backgrounds and soundtracks for the games when possible.

Thanks, GOG, for bringing back the option of all those games I missed the first time around!

I found a great little app called AutoStitch for the iPhone that came in very handy this week when I wanted to create panoramic views of the displays at the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio.

Click for full size:

The program works by allowing you to take a series of overlapping photos using the iPhone camera and “stitching” them together in one long, panoramic image. While you can find software to accomplish the same effect with more features for your desktop or laptop, I love the fact that you can create and save the panorama directly on the phone.

The only thing holding this $1.99 program back is the limited image quality available to my iPhone 3G camera. However, as you can see from the above examples, impressive results are still available despite the hardware issue.

Two themes I see in a number of recent Twitter stories talk about how the company needs to find a way to generate revenue, as well as how businesses can use Twitter to reach out to their customers. There’s already talk of Twitter creating “professional” accounts, but critics wonder what features they could offer for business clients.

After thinking about it, one of the first suggestion I have would be the creation of a Twitter account infrastructure to allow multiple sub-accounts. Often, the marketing teams of companies will have multiple employees all using the same account, which can create security and tracking issues. Twitter should allow the creation of sub-accounts, all with their own login requirements for each employee, that could post on behalf of the main account.

Another feature Twitter could offer would be extra security for professional accounts that tracks posting behaviors in order to detect and prevent hacks and hijacks. High-profile Twitter accounts are a prime target for bad guys to try and take over for their own use, so having a system that could detect logins and password changes from suspect sources would be a great benefit for the credibility of that account.

I’m sure there will be plenty of other features available, such as increased data tracking features (like number of views from non-follower sources), but the above are two that I could see to be key for the growing professional Twitter market.