First of all, it’s quite common, especially in enterprise
technology, for something to propose a new way to solve an
existing problem. It can’t be used to solve the problem in the old
way, so ‘it doesn’t work’, and proposes a new way, and so ‘no-one
will want that’. This is how generational shifts work - first you
try to force the new tool to fit the old workflow, and then the
new tool creates a new workflow. Both parts are painful and full
of denial, but the new model is ultimately much better than the
old. The example I often give here is of a VP of Something or
Other in a big company who every month downloads data from an
internal system into a CSV, imports that into Excel and makes
charts, pastes the charts into PowerPoint and makes slides and
bullets, and then emails the PPT to 20 people. Tell this person
that they could switch to Google Docs and they’ll laugh at you;
tell them that they could do it on an iPad and they’ll fall off
their chair laughing. But really, that monthly PowerPoint status
report should be a live SaaS dashboard that’s always up-to-date,
machine learning should trigger alerts for any unexpected and
important changes, and the 10 meg email should be a Slack channel.
Now ask them again if they want an iPad.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard:
Last year, an anonymous hacker broke into the systems of VTech, a
company that makes internet-connected toys, tablets and baby
monitors. The hacker was able to access the personal data of more
than 6 million kids, as well as more than 4 million parents,
including tens of thousand of pictures taken with the company’s
Kid Connect app, which encourages children and parents to take
selfies and chat online.
Less than two months later, VTech is now launching a whole suite
of new internet-connected devices designed to monitor your house
— and the company is promising that this time, it won’t leave the
personal data of its customers exposed to hackers.
Report from Canaccord Genuity analyst Mike Walkley pegs Apple’s share of mobile profits last quarter at 93 percent. Samsung took 9 percent, and the rest of the industry (combined) was in the red.
Brian Fung and Craig Timberg, reporting for The Washington Post:
Federal officials on Tuesday sued AT&T, the nation’s
second-largest cellular carrier, for allegedly deceiving millions
of customers by selling them “unlimited” data plans that the
company later aggressively controlled by slowing Internet speeds
when customers surfed the Web too much.
The Federal Trade Commission said the practice, called
“throttling” and used by AT&T since 2011, resulted in slower
speeds for customers on at least 25 million occasions — in some
cases cutting user Internet speeds by 90 percent, to the point
where they resembled dial-up services of old. The 3.5 million
affected customers experienced these slowdowns an average of 12
days each month, said the FTC, which received thousands of
complaints about the practice.
Insert non-sarcastic finally here.
“It’s absolutely outrageous,” said John Bergmayer, a senior staff
attorney at Public Knowledge, an advocacy group based in
Washington. “They’re not allowed to promise one thing and deliver
another… Unlimited is not unlimited when you put limits on it.”
Worth a revisit — Charles Duhigg’s 2012 report on Target’s customer data collection:
Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target
in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped
by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if
a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can
you do that?” […]
The desire to collect information on customers is not new for
Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target
has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly
walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns
each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID
number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a
credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a
refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve
sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to
your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”
Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your
age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you
live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your
estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards
you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can
buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you
read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year
you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what
kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain
brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your
political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the
number of cars you own.
This is what retailers like Target want to preserve, or even improve upon, with CurrentC. And this is exactly the sort of thing that Apple Pay, with its per-purchase unique tokens — is designed to prevent.
Perhaps the reason the WaPo is so confused is that FBI Director
James Comey has told the media that Apple’s anti-backdoor stance
only protects criminals. Unfortunately he’s not seeing beyond his
own job, and WaPo didn’t look much further.
Apple’s anti-backdoor policy aims to protect everyone. The
following is a list of real threats their policy would thwart. Not
threats to terrorists or kidnappers, but to 300 million Americans
and 7 billion humans who are moving their intimate documents into
the cloud. Make no mistake, what Apple and Google are proposing
protects you.
Whether you’re a regular, honest person, or a US legislator trying
to understand this issue, understand this list.
You've probably been to one. The organization is about to embark on something new--a new course, a new building, a new fundraising campaign. The organizer calls together the team, and excitement is in the air.
Choose which sort of meeting you'd like to have:
The amateur's launch meeting is fun, brimming with possibility and excitement. Everything is possible. Goals are meant to be exceeded. Not only will the difficult parts go well, but this team, this extraordinary team, will be able to create something magical.
Possibility is in the air, and it would be foolish to do anything but fuel it. After all, you don't get many days as pure as this one.
The professional's launch meeting is useful. It takes advantage of the clean sheet of paper to address the difficult issues before egos get in the way. Hard questions get asked, questions like:
What are the six things most likely to go wrong?
What will lead us to go over budget? Over schedule?
How will we communicate with one another when things are going well, and how will we change that pattern when someone in the room (anyone in the room) realizes that something is stuck?
Right here, in this room, one where there's nothing but possibility and good vibes—here's your moment to have the difficult conversations in advance, to outline the key dates and people and tasks.
By all means, we need your dreams and your stretch goals and most of all your enthusiasm. But they must be grounded in the reality of how you'll make it happen.
Unbelievably inept management. Contempt for customers can only get you so far - even in a quasi monopoly.
Adrianne Jeffries, writing for The Verge:
“We locked down the ability for most customer service reps to disconnect accounts,” a billing systems manager who worked for Comcast from 2008 to 2013 told The Verge. “We queue the calls for customers looking to disconnect to a retention team who are authorized to give more deeply discounted products to keep subscribers. Even if the subscriber disconnects cable, maybe we can keep them on internet or voice.”
A current employee at Comcast who participated in the Comcast Confessions series provided The Verge with a copy of the 20-page guidelines the company uses for retention specialists.
This will be the cable industry’s downfall. No company with such disregard for their own customers will succeed for long.
Fantastic resource from former Genius Bar staffer Scotty Loveless. Bookmark this and send it to anyone you know complaining of problematic iPhone battery life.
An identity theft service that sold Social Security and drivers
license numbers — as well as bank account and credit card data on
millions of Americans — purchased much of its data from Experian,
one of the three major credit bureaus, according to a lengthy
investigation by KrebsOnSecurity.
The results confirm what users believe about the devices, and they
highlight a feature that is usually left out of technical
comparisons.
In its first TouchMarks benchmark test, the iPhone 5 responded to
touches at an average time of 55 milliseconds, compared to 85
milliseconds for the iPhone 4. The closest Android device was the
Samsung Galaxy S4 at 114 milliseconds.
“Apple trounced the competition,” said Peter Relan, chairman
of Agawi. “There is this whole other dimension of responsiveness
that Agawi cares about.”
Interesting to see it measured, but this is something we’ve all known all along.
But the really interesting – and in the long-term important –
sensor in the iPhone 5S is the M7, a “motion co-processor”
which allows it to measure data from the accelerometer, gyroscope
and compass without draining the battery as heavily as would be
required if the A7 processor were used. Effectively, using the
CoreMotion API, apps can access data about movement all day,
without destroying the battery life.
Think about that for a second. Your phone can now measure
everything that the likes of a Jawbone Up or Nike Fuelband
can. Plus, it can do it all day, with the processing power of
a 64bit computer to crunch that data when it needs it. And
that power is available to developers, to create applications
which single-purpose devices like the Fuelband will never be
able to match.
Seems like the sort of chip that could fit into a lot of other products, too.
For the third weekend in a row, I’ll be settling down on the sofa on Saturday morning to watch some rugby. It’s the second British & Irish Lions test this weekend – I can’t wait. A lot of sponsorship has gone into making this tour happen, and I’ve definitely got a favourite: I am completely enamoured of the Specsavers sponsorship of the referees.
It’s one of those where you say, ‘How did no one think of this before?!’ Brilliant. (And equally brilliant that Specsavers has not taken the mickey out of referees explicitly in its sponsorship spots – that necessary respect is preserved).
This is sponsorship at its best: relevant with a completely natural link… and a little bit funny, even a little cheeky. As a consumer, I don’t need to think about why it’s a good fit – I don’t really even need the brand to explain it to me (although that’s a nice bonus with a fun TV spot).
There are a few pitfalls with sponsorship but the most toxic is a lack of relevance. If it’s shoe-horned in, even if you have an ident before and after every ad break, you are going to struggle to get the necessary cut-through. Not every link will be as natural as this one, but if the link is clear, it is more likely that people will get it. They won’t work hard to understand the link, they’ve got cups of tea to make.
There’s another kind of relevance, too: relevance to your historical campaign Big Idea. If your sponsorship is doing something completely different than you’ve ever done before, you’ll have an extra challenge layered on top of the existing cut through challenges. Of course, it can be done – but how much harder will your hard-earned pennies and pounds have to work if you’re going against the grain?
From a media mix perspective there are a couple of other pitfalls to avoid too. The first is stand-out. If there are fifty other sponsors, you’ll need a little extra oomph – from your content and campaign strategy – to stand out from the pack. In the case of Specsavers, they stand out from the other sponsors because the strategy to sponsor the referees fits in so well with their historical communication, as I noted already.
Also from a media perspective, there is the dreaded curse of the sponsorship ident. These little beauts can be amazing – tell an eloquent, funny, touching, [insert your chosen adjective here] story over time. Or they can annoy the heck out of people because there’s too much frequency for a small pool. If the idents – or indeed your TV spots – are running frequently – and likely amongst a repeat audience of, say, rugby viewers – better to vary them a little, lest irritation run too high.
When it’s relevant and well-deployed, sponsorship can be a fantastic tool to really pay into your brand. I can certainly see the point of using it.
Brian X. Chen, reporting for the NYT from the e-book price-fixing trial:
Both parties showed their evidence on a projector screen. Apple’s
legal team used a MacBook to shuffle between evidence documents,
stacking them side by side in split screens and zooming in on
specific paragraphs.
In contrast, the Justice Department’s lawyers could show only one
piece of evidence at a time. One video that Mr. Buterman played
as evidence failed to produce the audio commentary needed to make
his point.
Tight security restrictions at Thursday’s Google shareholder
meeting led even the company’s much-hyped Google Glass technology
to be banned, infuriating a consumer watchdog group who accused
the tech giant of hypocrisy.
Many PC OEMs are dissatisfied with what Microsoft has done with
Windows 8 and the way the company has handled the negative
response to the operating system. Privately, one OEM source
told me that Microsoft is “destroying” the PC industry, while
another claimed that Windows 8 has “handed over millions of
customers to Apple.”
Other than that, though, how do the OEMs like Windows 8?
Kordl makes detangling balled-up headphones a cinch.
My pre gym ritual, aside from beating my chest with my bare fists and grunting, always seems to include 2-3 minutes of loathsome headphone detangling. How those confounded white wires always weave themselves into a tangled ball, I do not know, but now there might be hope.
Kordl by J2 Product Development Category: Accessories Works With: Earphones of all kinds Price: $7.50 for three!
Kordl is a little clip that secures the pod and plug ends of your headphones together, thus, theoretically speaking, making annoying detangling sessions a thing of the past. Kordl’s founders, now trying to fund their product, go so far as to promise Kordl will make your headphones tangle proof.
Bold claim! So I decided to clip a preproduction Kordl to my Earpods and find out how well it really works.
What It Does
So the idea behind Kordl is kind of clever. By clipping both ends of your earphones together, the founders say they discovered the wires wouldn’t become tangled. That means you can just jam your earphones in your pocket, and then when you’re ready to use them, pull them apart from both ends to straighten them out quick.
Kordl keeps your bits from twisting
But wait, aren’t there already products out there that do this? Well, kind of, but the problem with the ones I’ve tested is they require stringing your earphones around some kind of object, then unwinding them when you want to use them. That’s fine if you don’t use your phones very often, but for people who use them them several times throughout day, winding-type gadgets just take too long.
Kordl’s founders promise their method is quicker.
In Use
Try shoving this loose wiry ball in your front pocket
Yes—they work! Kordl definitely made quick work of my assorted earphone tangles. Pulling my Earpods apart from each end reduced detangling to around a second or two, with a small snag occurring here and there.
But I found stuffing my headphones in my pocket without winding them around something made them a little harder to deal with. I mean, how do shove a handful of loose wires into your pocket? However, if a backpack or purse is what normally stores your pods, this would probably be a non-issue for you.
Product Name: : Kordl The Good: Makes quick work of detangling your earphones. The Bad: Makes storing your headphones in your pocket a little unruly. The Verdict If you’re tired of earphone tangles the Kordl is for you. Buy from: Christie Street
