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If you've been around this industry for a while you'll remember those crazy Internet radio programs that Doc used to run. It seemed that just about every one of those programs ended with him giving away a prize if you could guess how much lose change he had in his pocked or strewn around his desk.

They were good times and I was reminded of those shows when I started reading a report that arrived in my email last Saturday. The report set out the findings of a study conducted by the Conference Board Consumer Research Center that found that 73 million households in the United States now have discretionary income.

Discretionary income was defined as having 'spendable' income and the number of families with money to spend is up from 57 million in 2002. On an individual basis that's 64% of the population who have money to spend now compared with only 52% of the population back in 2002.

But as most of us know from personal experience, just because we happen to have money in our pocket doesn't mean that we can afford to buy a lot of things. The cost of living is going up and so is the cost of discretionary items so while more people have money to spend the items that they can spend it on could be declining.

Other findings that came out of the study that are worth noting include figures that show the wealthiest concentration of households in the United States is in New England. California is the most populous state and also has the largest number of households that actually have discretionary income while Texas comes in at the number two spot.

So if there's more spendable money around why are we seeing a decline in sales here in adult? Sure the cost of many discretionary items has gone up but not here in adult; in this industry the cost of memberships have been dropping so theoretically we shouldn't be seeing a decline in sales.

I'm sure that if you could find the answer to that one there would be a lot of sponsors who would be interested in hearing from you.

Online Gambling
Were you one of those webmasters who used to make a nice chunk of your income from advertising online gambling sites? If you were then you were obviously hit hard by the United States government move to make online gambling illegal and you've probably moved on to marketing other products by now.

However don't turn your back on gambling entirely. While the changes to the laws governing online gambling might have caused you some pain there's no real guarantee that they're set in concrete. In the last few weeks there have been some interesting moves both within and without the United States and those draconian laws that banned online gambling could be overturned.

There are no guarantees but there's certainly a lot of noise being made by those who think that there's nothing wrong with online gambling.

Has Mobile Stumbled Again?
When the Apple iPhone was released a few months ago there were some industry pundits who were claiming that this was the start of the Mobile revolution. To their way of thinking the iPhone would take the Web onto the streets of cities and towns across the world.

The fact that mobile access to the Web was already out there seemed to elude them or they were so blinded by the Apple brand that they missed all those other mobile phones that gave users access to the Web. I do have to admit that the frenzy of interest that surrounded the introduction of the iPhone in the US certainly did seem to indicate that it might live up to its hype but, sadly, it doesn't seem to have done that at all.

Europeans haven't been as keen to take up the iPhone when it was released over there as Americans were and Telcos in other parts of the world don't seem to be in a rush to snap up the iPhone for resale either. But does that really mean that the driving force behind mobile Web access has faltered?

I really don't think so. There are just too many options other than the iPhone out there for people to use and the convenience of downloading information from the Web on a mobile phone is too great for people to ignore. Most people realize that they can do it all without an iPhone so if you're basing your mobile marketing on take up of the iPhone you could be missing an important opportunity to get involved in mobile marketing.

The Blue Screen of Death
Remember the blue screen of death that Windows users often encountered right at the worst possible time? It was quite common with Windows 95 and Windows 98 too but became less common with Windows XP.

It was also something that Mac users never encountered and they were quick to point out that while we struggled with blue screens and lost work Apple products never threw up a blue screen.

Hmmm ... maybe now things have changed just a little. On Saturday morning two dedicated Apple users came into the computer shop. One complained of what he called 'the gray screen of termination' and the other struggled for words to describe a blue screen incident.

A blue screen of death on an Apple computer? Tell me it's not so! The world must be about to end!