Services

CFI Group has released its most recent figures for smart-phone providers.  The list includes AT&T, Sprint/Nextel, and Verizon, among others.  According to the survey, Verizon smart-phone users ranked the carrier positively 79% of the time; Sprint/Nextel smart-phone users liked their service 74% of the time.  ATT iPhone users, on the other hand, scored only 69%.  The biggest complaints are dropped calls, slow 3G service, and other network problems.  This is the first time AT&T has been at the bottom of the list.

But I have to wonder, are these figures misleading?  After all, AT&T has the lion’s share of the market with the millions of iPhone users out there, while Verizon and Sprint/Nextel have a much smaller customer base.  One of the reasons Verizon and Sprint/Nextel’s network has such good uptime for smart phones could very well be that the load on their network is much reduced from the monster load that is trying to make its way through the AT&T network.  It is likely, and probably inevitable, that should the same high traffic hit the Verizon and Sprint/Nextel networks, there would be as many, if not more, complaints. The fact is, none of the wireless networks are truly able to handle the load that iPhone users require.

Is it possible the world wasn’t ready for the iPhone?  Or at least, the providers’ networks weren’t ready for the iPhone?  Even with massive, billion-dollar spending to upgrade existing networks, it may be some time before wireless networks are truly ready for smart phones in everyone’s hands.  I don’t suppose that’s much of a consolation for those with iPhones in their hands but no decent network to run them on.

With the release of the Kindle 2 from Amazon this week, we techies are faced with another financial pitfall. Do we buy or do we not? How many of our gadgets end up being pricey, not just for the initial purchase, but for the continued upkeep or subscriptions for the device in the long run? What is the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) on the product?

One of the biggest complaints about the Kindle is the cost, around $360. And while you are presumably getting unlimited wireless download service for years to come, the books themselves aren’t free. Okay, some books are free, but those are public domain. Books range in price from $4.36 (Feng Shui A to Z) to $6,431.20 (Selected Nuclear Engineering Systems, Part 4). The Kindle holds 1500 books, so even if you look at the low end of about $5 per book, your Kindle could cost you $7860.00. Or more, if you are into Nuclear Engineering Systems. So total TCO for device could really get up there at some point.

The iPhone presents the same sort of issues, in a different way, than the Kindle. The higher-end iPhone will cost you about $400 plus an ATT wireless contract locking you in to two years of service with a base price of $70 per month. Then there are the applications you are expected to buy to make your iPhone be all that and the kitchen sink, and you’re talking a pretty good chunk of change in the TCO department.

And I’m not going to let the iPod slide either…Mine was $350 for a 60 gb video model, plus another chunk for the extended warranty, and I purchase all of the music I am storing on my iPod, whether electronically (eMusic, iTunes, Rhapsody), or by CD. I’ve had my iPod for 3 years and have about 6000 songs on it; I estimate I’ve spent another $400 buying music that I didn’t already own. That’s a chunk of change too, although it’s a bit more spread out and may not be so obvious.

There are times when I want a device to do just one thing and do it well (like the iPod). But then there are times when devices that serve multiple purposes can have lower TCO. For example, if I want to read eText, my laptop can already do that, and I can even have it read it to me with text-to-speech. My laptop is reasonably portable, as well, and would hold a lot of eBooks, too. And it holds my entire iTunes/iPod library as well. It’s just a little hard to carry around in my pocket, and it isn’t very good at making phone calls on the run.

But when it comes to TCO, it is something we have to consider, especially in these scary economic times. It’s not just the initial cost of the gadget. It is the long-term costs of service and support for that gadget as well. How many of us have made this decision when it came to home printers, and went from ink jet to laser jet, because of the TCO when it came to ink and toner?

For me, the Kindle and the iPhone have not hit my “must have” list because of TCO. How about your must-haves? Is TCO not a consideration, or are they a good return on your investment?

Over the past two months we have had a Indian development firm under contract to develop for us a shopping cart that we were going to roll out over a month ago.

The experience with this firm has been less than positive. We charted out how long the job would take and expected it to be a 2 to 3 week job tops and what we have after two months is a shopping cart that needs a lot of clean up work.

Issues we faced with this Indian firm included promising we would have senior developer from the start but our guess is that the developer they assigned to us had a year of experience if we were lucky. At week 4 I put the hammer on them and they assigned some more knowledgeable but he spent the next 2 weeks cleaning up the code the first developer had mangled.

It was a truly terrible experience and while we got the product we largely wanted it was not at the speed we would have expected. We probably saved a couple of thousand dollars at the expense of the shopping cart taking 2 months when it should have taken 3 weeks.

My recommendation to anyone looking to hire Hidden Brains is to have very low expectations. They talk a big talk but fail to be able to operate at a competency level that I would expect.

Deficiencies

• Code is not up to par with Current Standards
• Several Security issues were discovered in the code
• The programmer did not understand functionality of many libraries
• English comprehension was really sub-par
• Basic things like working with Subversion was unknown

While the company may be able to do basic web designs they in my opinion can not be relied up to work with companies that are looking to integrate features into existing code design.

That being said I am again on the hunt for another PHP Developer that can web integration and design. If you have a strong working knowledge of PHP and can speak English we want to hire you. Examples of previous work will be required and interview with my lead developer will be required. Send email to ceo@rawvoice.com

When a business and all the companies associates are all located under one roof it is very easy to install and maintain a sophisticated CRM system. With todays mobile workforce along with startups who’s workforce is often spread across multiple states and countries it can be a challenge to keep track of who everyone is talking to and what the status of a follow up may be.

Fear no more because Highrise is a new web based CRM platform that allows all of the information that is often shared in a stand alone system to be shared across an entire company via the Internet.

On a quick look at the service I was pretty impressed and will be migrating some of my team onto it. The service is worthy a look, I still have to analyse features to see if the per person cost is at the right price break. www.highrisehq.com from 37Signals.

At the bottom of this post I am going to link you over to a post that has a list of tools that teams like RawVoice that are spread out all over the country can use to to work interactively online.

While the list is pretty good one thing that they missed is Virtual Phone Systems like GotVMail which allows a company to have a sophisticated PBX/Voicemail system.

I would love to hear from others on what kind of virtual collaboration tools they are using as well. www.readwriteweb.com

The word out is that it is possible that Apple will offer movies that can be downloaded and burned onto a DVD. This could be part of a reason for the delay in the iTunes movie store debut. The DVD Copy Control Association is the one hurdle that Apple has faced in their pursuit of the copying of movies to disc. The DVD Copy Control Association has the Content Scrambling System(CSS) which is placed on DVDs to prevent illegal copying. There is also a rumor that blank DVDs might be made with the CSS system in place.

It sounds like you’ll need this special kind of blank disc for this to happen. But it also is pretty clear that this is not near the end and there will be some more discussion on the legal side of such a task as this. Appleinsider.com has the story on their homepage.

-mn
My Website

Well I have been fielding e-mails from people voting at the 2006 People’s Choice Podcast Awards, seems Hotmail thinks the verification e-mail we are sending is spam and has blocked all e-mail coming from the podcastawards.com domain.

This happened last year as well, I understand companies trying to protect their customers from spamming but we are 100% in compliance in all e-mail we have sent, yet they are blocking every last single piece of mail. Now imagine if Hotmail decided to start blocking e-mail from your customers how mad would you be.

This is one service I will never ever use again. Good luck getting removed from their block list it is nearly impossible unless you want to pay some company a $100,000 a year to make sure all of your e-mail is delivered, this is beyond criminal.

I knew it was only a matter of time before a social networking site would receive a patent. It was to be expected I guess. The surprising part of the whole situation is that Friendster is in on it! MySpace could be expecting some backlash in the future. There has been no talk about what this patent news will mean in the means of law suits or fines for social networking sites. Friendster has not revealed any plans as to what they plan on doing with these shiny new patents.

What is going on here!?! Internet sites are getting patents? This is exactly what was mentioned yesterday in the General Public License article. Patents are being giving under the wrong circumstances. Now what will happen to somebody who wants to do social networking but can’t because of patents. Will this happen? Is the scare to possibly get Friendster back in the limelight? It is very hard to see exactly what will happen with such an issue, but it has me on the edge of my seat.

I would like to take some time to mention that my company’s website has officially launched as of 1pm PST. The link is XiTechnology (www.xitechnology.com). We specialize in software development at no charge! Check it out!

Thanks,
-michael novak

Friendster Article Link (www.news.com.com)

I am sitting here shaking my head, sorry you knew I was gonna say it. For those that have been reading this site long enough you know what I am thinking about the announcement of being able to have your Typepad RSS feed re-directed to FeedBurner automatically. At least the folks at SixApart were smart enough to make it optional. What I don’t understand is why companies like SixApart have given up on RSS stats.

In my humble opinion they should have there own reporting system. There is nothing magical about a RSS feed it is a file that sits on your website, and when an application needs to be updated it reaches across the web pulls a copy from your webserver and your webserver logs the encounter in a log file.

Then it is just a simple mater of processing that log file and providing very detailed infomation about your RSS feed.
You can bake that data any way you want and your good to go plus you don’t have to pay someone for advanced stats that in my opinon are pretty piss poor. The folks at SixApart had a chance to make their service better, but instead went the easy route and gave a large percentage of their unsuspecting customers a easy way to offload the single most important link on their blog.

First some will say well they can’t read my rss feed on my site, guess what I don’t want people reading my RSS feed I want them on my website. Second many will say using FeedBurner is easy, my response do you realize every blog application in existence today has RSS baked in already.

For those using FeedBurner pray they have a endless supply of money, and that they become very profitable on the backs of your feed because heaven forbid their site goes dark, thousands of you could be singing a different tune. I just hope people make educated decisions on using there service just before opting in. Many really like the service and I am cool with that but having used the service before I am not drinking the koolaid.

Here is my final thought on this, of the two URL’s below which makes the most sense to you.

www.yourdomain.com/index.xml or feeds.feedburner.com/yourwebsitename

[FeedBurner & Typepad]