iPhone app helps passengers overcome fear of flying

Has ever been a time where you’ve gotten nervous from being on a flight? Well there’s an app for that. Virgin Atlantic partnered with Mental Workout has created a “Flying without fear course” on the iPhone and iPod touch. This fear iButton was designed so that people would be able to overcome their fear of flying. The app lets people become familiar with the types of unsettling noises that stem from the plane, also the sounds you hear when the plane loses control.

Richard Branson, president of Virgin Atlantic, stated in an article, “Our first iPhone app will bring the benefits of our successful flying without fear course to millions of people around the world who are now using mobile technology to make life better”. Stan Schroeder from Masable.com said that the panic button has a 98% success rate and then he goes on further to say that that the app would be really useful to people with a legitimate fear of flying.

I agree with Schroeder because a lot of people become unsettled after a flight. And I believe that if I was in that situation, I would want something that could relieve my fear of flying. This could be a new marketing scheme by Apple because the company uses customer fears as a way of forcing people to buy the iPhone and iPod touch. But it should be good anyway, the app is available for $4.99 in the Apple App store.

Walmart finding a new adversary in Amazon.com

Wal-Mart and Amazon.com have been fighting over online pricing for their products. This fight started a couple months ago, with Wal-Mart and Amazon competitively fighting over who had the lowest prices on anticipated books and DVDs. The National Retail Federation predicted that sales would decline by one percent to $437.6 Billion during the Black Friday holiday sales. They also stated that sales would not drop as much as they did last season.

Wal-Mart continues to dominate the affordable pricing industry making $405 billion dollars in sales last year. Amazon.com doesn’t provide the retailing aspect for consumers like Wal-Mart, but it does provide an online option, Amazon.com has made 20 billion from its online sales asccording to the new york times. It seems like more customers are leaning towards online shopping more than anything else because purchasing items online makes life a lot easier. Could this be a possible trend in the media?

Consumers tend to follow things that are more convenient to them, and Amazon.com does this by providing all of its products online. The online market is a good thing to get into because more people would rather click on the item that they want, rather than actually going out to the store to purchase, it’s less time consuming. Online businesses produce a revenue of 4 billion dollars monthly according to wordpress.com

Online purchasing is the way of the future because people are becoming more technologically inept and these are trends that Wal-Mart should follow. If Wal-Mart isn’t careful they could also suffer the same as Block Buster, where the company lost most of their customers due online movie rentals with Netflix. So ultimately I feel that Wal-Mart should try to improve their online purchasing methods by following Amazon.com and try to figure out what they’re doing to attract their customers.

If you want to take a look at the sources that I based my post off of just click on the links below:

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/HolidayShopping/wireStory?id=8842129

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33347048/ns/business-consumer_news/