The Devil You Know

Posts Tagged ‘iphone’

The (currently) lost opportunity with iAds

In Bidness, Free idea, Gadgets, Media on June 14, 2010 at 9:51 pm
150 Million

150 Million (Source: Engadget)

So I imagine, like me, many of you are buying your new iPhones today or at least waiting with bated breath for the New World of the iOS 4.0.

Last week, I followed the WWDC keynote, and despite all the gadget and gizmo talk, there was one thing that stuck in my head. In fact, it haunted me as nothing has since I first wrote the business plan for Pegasus News in 2004:

150 million credit cards on file from people using iTunes and/or the App Store (and now the iBooks Store). 150 Million.

As Steve Jobs said, “We have 150 million accounts — we think it’s the biggest on the web. We’re number one.”

Interestingly, he then segued into a discussion of iAds, but there was no connection.

As someone who has been obsessed with transactional ad models for the better part of this decade, this presented both a tragedy and an opportunity. That night, after mulling the problem while floating in the pool with the pups, I toddled inside and fired off an email to sjobs@apple.com: Read the rest of this entry »

How I manage information overload

In Bidness, Gadgets, Media, PopCult on December 6, 2009 at 8:15 pm

If I’ve had a little extra bliss in recent weeks, it’s because I finally feel like I’ve mastered control of the ridiculous amounts of information I choose to and not to ingest on a daily basis. I Tweeted about it a while back and instantly got numerous responses from folks wanting to know the secret. I said:

16 yr working, 15 yr InterWebs/email, 7 yr smartphone, 5 yr RSS, 3 yr social networks – finally have info mgmt system that works for me.

First, some context. On average, I:

  • Read and react to more than a thousand emails a week
  • Send more than 300 emails a week
  • Subscribe to a couple hundred RSS feeds, for around 400 posts per day
  • Follow 700 Twitter users
  • Manage four Twitter accounts
  • Keep up with 350 Facebook friends
  • Manage a Facebook page
  • Have 15 meetings a week that have to be coordinated with other people
  • Take 20 phone calls per week
  • Have about a dozen topics that I feel like I have to be expert on at all times
  • And run a large local website

And somehow, I finally feel like I have control of it all. I trust my system and nothing seems to slip through the cracks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Customer service at scale, part II: Why my experiences with AT&T make me fear for GM

In Bidness, Gadgets on June 29, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Yeah, you may have a great big battle station, but if you waste the opportunity to shore it up, a rebeliions gonna come. (Image from The Daily Yeah.)

Yeah, you may have a great big battle station, but if you waste the opportunity to shore it up, a rebeliion's gonna come. (Image from The Daily Yeah.)

I’m going to resist the temptation to turn this post into a therapy session over the myriad problems I’ve had with AT&T over the past month. Specific situations will crop up organically in the descriptions below, but instead of a chronological chapter-and-verse story, I’m going to focus on the lessons I’ve learned about AT&T and its processes. Read the rest of this entry »

Customer service at scale, part I: Why I’m an Apple customer for life

In Gadgets on June 20, 2009 at 10:17 am
Image lifted from The Iphone Blog

Image lifted from The Iphone Blog

Yes, I can probably be classified as an Apple fanboy. But if you know me, you know my allegiance doesn’t come easy. For my purposes, Apple produces the best computer and phone technology available. But there are lots of companies that produce good technology — It is my human interactions with Apple that make me a loyalist. My experience in buying the new 3G S Iphone is one of, if not the most memorable I’ve had: Read the rest of this entry »