Time Warner cable may not be available in your neighborhood so you may not have a dog in this hunt. To catch you up, TWC offers a free iPad app that allows you to stream live video TV feed to your device. You would think that the networks would have no problem with this. Let’s list the reasons:
You must be a Time Warner customer to use the service.
You must be a RoadRunner customer to use the service (RoadRunner is the brand name for TWC’s cable modem service).
You can only use this service at the specific IP address of your RoadRunner account. You cannot be at the Starbuck’s down the street. You cannot be at your neighbors house that also has TWC and RoadRunner but a different IP address. You cannot be traveling to a hotel in a far off city.
I just read a great article over at The Marketing Tech Blog that I think anyone in sales or marketing should read. In fact, I think everyone in business should pay attention to number 3! I am not going to quote the entire article on this site but I will give the 5 bullet points. You can jump over to the original site and enjoy the full article.
The generic private message
Preemptive Disclaimers
Abuse of carbon copy
The Soft Opt-In
The Random Cause Invitation
Number 3 is most interesting as so many people violate the simple rule:
Only use carbon-copy if you are 100% sure that 100% of the people on the list know each other well AND would appreciate the chance to immediately Reply-All AND would immediately appreciate any Reply-Alls.
President Barack Hussein Obama has been talking about his new plan to invigorate the economy and move us out of a double-dip or very long recession. I have to admit that I am confused by his logic.
First, a bit about myself. I hate taxes. I know that I need to pay them. I know that I make a good living (not from this blog mind you) and I need to pay into the system more than some others that don’t work as hard as I work. I get all of that.
A decade ago, I was traveling with one of the founders of the company that I worked for at the time, Timm Martin, and we arrived at the discussion of electronic books (ebooks). I said that I thought ebooks were the wave of the future and I wished that I could figure out how to start a company that was a part of that change. Timm, who was the technology visionary of our company, seemed to cautiously agree with me at the time and I think we both worried that the portable platform had yet to be created that made that prediction a certainty, at least in the near term.
I can attest to occasionally experiencing this problem. It is rather intermittent for me and I can mostly control the problem by not moving the phone from my ear during the conversation.
This is a little frustrating. I get the antenna being affected by my hand but this proximity sensor problem is just bad engineering (either software or hardware).
My thoughts on my new iPhone 4. I just received it yesterday from FedEx (it was fun watching the FedEx package being tracked from China through Hong Kong through Anchorage through Indianapolis and then to Loveland, OH where it was routed to me). I received it one day ahead of Apple’s expected revised delivery date.
I say “revised” because AT&T and Apple screwed up and missed my first delivery date. The unit was supposed to ship on July 2 but they updated their date on July 3 to say that it was going to ship a week or so later. I was upset and I called Apple – the very polite and professional rep apologized but couldn’t change the ship date. He did give me a bumper as a consolation gift – good thing too as it turns out.
Apple has recently put out an open letter explaining that they have made a mistake in calculating the signal strength bars on their hit product, the iPhone (all versions up to the latest iPhone 4). I am glad that they Apple code developers have stumbled on this bug and are producing a fix. We all know that there are a few more software bugs in every product, so it is no surprise that Apple has a bug in this portion of their code.
But, is that really the fix? No.
All wireless devices need antennas. If you are as old as I am, there is a chance that your first mobile phone was a “bag phone” or a “car installed phone”. These phones were massive and required a car or, at least, a briefcase to carry them around. The towers were so far dispersed that you needed a BIG antenna that was putting out mega-wattage to reach them. Putting that antenna up to your head would almost certainly turn your brain to scrambled eggs in a couple of weeks or so. These monsters were also analog and all you could do was talk on them (no texting – how in the world did we survive?).
Even though the economy is slowly starting to recover from the excesses of spending of the George W. Bush administration (and the equally complicitous Congress), we are still far from out of the woods. The economy is in pain, in addition to the overspending, due to poor financial market regulation which destroyed several top-notch financial firms such as Lehman Brothers (who also appeared to break some standard accounting laws and best practices). The government responded to help these big institutions because they were “too big to fail.”
Let’s face it – there should be no such thing as “too big to fail.” Most of us work for companies that are not in that category. If our employers screw up and the company goes down the tubes then we will individually hurt and perhaps the micro-economy around that company will hurt a bit but for the most part the US GDP won’t even see the speed bump. This is the way that it should be – screw up and fail then just pick yourself up and get on with life.
I am sure that you have heard of the current oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. If you haven’t, here is a link – please come back after you have caught up with current events.
I am just aghast at how stupid these companies are. Current reports are that they didn’t install an “acoustic switch” on the well. From NewsInferno:
The Deepwater Horizon oil rig that exploded last week was not outfitted with a safety device that might have prevented the massive oil spill now nearing the U.S. Gulf Coast. The device, known as an acoustic switch, is a last-resort protection against underwater spills, and is required by regulators in Norway and Brazil. Unfortunately, the U.S. has no such regulation for oil wells operating off of its shores.
You know it is bad when one of the greatest founders of a technology company says the following (from a Fortune interview):
It must be private, never go public. There will be no upside investors other than me and the employees. . . . I hope we can pull it off under those conditions because I would be thrilled to lead another group of smart engineers, without all the crap that goes into running a company today. I just don’t want Congress telling me how much I should be paid or firing me. I want to pretend I am back in the 1980s again.
