Wednesday, July 18, 2007

 

Smart advertising

Samsung deserves credit for smart advertising. Countless times I have spent hours at an airport, desperately crowding around the few power sockets in the wall with a bunch of other folks charging their cell phones, laptops and media players. I even got to the point of bringing warning signs to place around the cable since for some reason the chairs were never closer to the power sockets, and sitting on the floor typing for a while made my wrists hurt.

But now relief is here: I am sitting at JFK airport now, as usual traffic on the SPB was light and I am here way too early, but no more sitting on the floor, looking for power. Throughout the terminal, there are Samsung mobile recharge stations, well-designed poles with power sockets and even a small round table to put the power supplies and other equipment on. No more tripping over wires, no more fierce looks when using power for more than a few minutes ... there is plenty of power now, for everyone. The poles are effective for promoting Samsung products too: The latest Samsung mobile products are featured on the poles, at eye height, not just printed ads but real devices behind a glass cover.

When was the last time you saw advertising that was useful and looked that good?

Labels: , , ,

Sunday, July 15, 2007

 

iPhone update

So after nastiblogging about the iPhone yesterday I managed to get my hands on an iPhone when I was at the Westchester mall yesterday afternoon. What can I say, I still think that the poor battery design, the lack of high-speed Internet connectivity and the limitation to one carrier per country make me think that this isn't a cell phone I would want. But it does feel very, very good. The user interface is amazingly simple and straightforward, no long-winded multilevel menus, no key sequences to remember, the browser works well and rendered www.ibm.com nicely, including the recently added dynamic components. The touchscreen keyboard works pretty well for text thanks to error correction (but otherwise requires some practice and probably even then it won't match the speed of a tactile keyboard).

Labels:

Saturday, July 14, 2007

 

Customer support at its best

Shareware and open source software have been said to lack official support. This may be true for some products but certainly not for my favorite editor, EditPlus, for which personal support by the developer is second to none.

Hats off to Sangil Kim, not only does he write fantastic software and respond to feature requests and (rare) bug reports almost immediately, he is also the most organized person I can think of. When I tried to reinstall EditPlus on my new computer, I managed to locate the original registration email which had the version 1 registration key, but couldn't find the upgrade key; so after searching all places where I typically keep this type of information I sent off an e-mail to the EditPlus support address, and within a few hours received a copy of the original e-mail from 2000(!) that contained my registration key. Thank you!

Labels: ,

 

Do I want an iPhone?

The New York Times has two entertaining videos by David Pogue about the new iPhone, the pre-release The iPhone Challenge: Keep It Quiet and I want an iPhone.

What is all this hype about? I guess it holds true that good design is still good business, and Apple certainly knows good design, at least when it comes to user interfaces. Not allowing the user to extend the device or even just change the battery may follow the Apple philosophy that users don't need to care what's inside, but requiring customers to send in the phone, wait three business days, pay $85.95 to get the phone "repaired" as Apple calls it and have all your data deleted during that process is not good design.

Dear Apple folks, please try harder!

Labels:

Thursday, July 12, 2007

 

Luncheon at Le Château

After two days of hot and humid weather, the thunderstorm and heavy rain last night had worked miracles and today was a beautiful day, just perfect for a luncheon at Le Château in South Salem, New York, to celebrate the successful launch of our latest Website design and the Virtual Business Center in Second Life.

It was good to meet so many colleagues and friends, including some people who I had worked with for a while but never met in person. We started with drinks and hors d'oeuvres in the garden, followed by short talks by our executives and an awards ceremony before we went on with lunch. Well, actually, since we were running behind, lunch didn't quite start after but during the business session. It was kind of weird to see restaurant staff squeeze through between our executives with soup bowls while they were still handing out awards and congratulating award winners. The lunch was excellent though, and we all had a good time at Le Château.

At night Christian and I met with Margaret at a restaurant in Armonk, Opus 465, for a light dinner and interesting discussions about processes (so yes, we did get some work done and not just eat all day long!)

Labels:

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

 

Wabisabilabi

While sitting at Vienna airport and waiting for my flight to New York, a newspaper article about a security startup caught my attention: The Swiss company Wabisabilabi has established a market place for security exposures with the intent to give security experts "fair compensation for their discoveries".

Googling for the easy to remember company name (Vienna airport now has wireless connectivity and unlike other airports this is offered for free, nice!) I stumble across a good number of articles which sound very similar to the press release, I mean, article I just read ... becoming the EBay of zero-day exploits, finally a market place for security issues.

The first two search results are obviously the new site that's going to make the world more secure. Not that they have figured out how to give pages meaningful titles yet:

On to the press release at https://www.wslabi.com/wabisabilabi/news.do -- mistakes happen but finding a typo in the first press release of a company looks odd. Equally odd is their math: "Recently it was reported that although researchers had analyzed a little more than 7,000 publicly disclosed vulnerabilities last year, the number of new vulnerabilities found in code could be as high as 139,362." Exactly 139,362, huh?

Not much information about the company either, looks like a British Limited company although there is no company registration information on the site (or at least I haven't found it). I guess I will sign up anyway and see what they have to offer.

Labels: ,

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

 

Google dropped my site

Google's Matt Cutts asked for feedback on the webmaster guidelines and I gladly shared my experience there:

Recently, Google sent me an email entitled "Entfernung Ihrer Webseite sitename aus dem Google Index", notifying me that one of my sites had been dropped from the Google index for violating the content quality guidelines. Now that site certainly deserved to be dropped for various reasons, not the least being that the content was old and not highly relevant and I am quite happy to see that site dropped.

I couldn’t find anything related to the specific issue highlighted. In addition the issue highlighted doesn’t exist (or I don’t understand what it is trying to say, maybe something got lost in the translation since the mail was in German):
Wir haben auf Ihren Seiten insbesondere die Verwendung folgender Techniken festgestellt:
*Seiten wie z. B. example.com, die zu Seiten wie z. B. http://www.example.com/index.htm mit Hilfe eines Redirects weiterleiten, der nicht mit unseren Richtlinien konform ist.
Translation: In particular we have noticed the following techniques on your pages: * Pages such as example.com, which redirect to pages such as http://www.example.com/index.htm using redirects, which is not compliant with our guidelines.

Now since when does Google consider redirects within a site evil? Plus, the referenced domain example.com does not even exist, nor does the homepage redirect either.

I couldn't care less about this particular site. What worries me though is that I haven't been able to identify how the site violates the guidelines, even after reading the guidelines more than once, and chances are that I have used the same techniques on other sites where I do care.

Labels:








Page tools



Archives