Apple recently dropped their price on the new iPhone only a couple of months after it was launched. This caused a massive backlash from all the early adopters who queued up outside Apple Stores all over the US the first day it went on sale.

Now they Apple is offering $100 US store credit to anyone who feels disaffected. I think this is extremely admirable of Apple, but what do these people expect? Of course you pay more for being an early adopter. This is the same with virtually any product, especially mobile phones and other consumer electronics. I’ll never forget buying my first PlayStation within months of it being released, I don’t even want to remember exactly how much I paid for it. Maybe I can get Sony to give me some store credit?

I’ve tried very hard to resist my early adopter urges in recent years as you also end up dealing with potential problems with new hardware. The iPhone is not immune from such issues.

You have to have a valid AT&T account number to get this, so too bad if you bought an iPhone and hacked it to use it on a different network.

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone

I’ve had a play with the iPhone and I can’t see how I could replace my Blackberry with this. The killer app for me is still email and typing on the iPhone screen was not as quick as with the Blackberry qwerty keyboard. What I did love was the Safari web browser on the iPhone, however, you don’t get 3G only 2G, however, the browser is loading up an entire web page which is incredibly slow if you’re not on WiFi.

Now you can get the best of both worlds with the Opera Mini 4 browser. You get the Safari for iPhone style browsing but you can keep your 3G Blackberry.

Only available to Blackberry and Palm handsets, to install point your browser to:

mini.opera.com/beta

Technorati Tags: apple, blackberry, iphone, opera mini 4, crackberry

Microsoft have announced they will release their answer to the iPhone:

Of course, I found this on FakeSteveJobs.com. Read his “Dead Man vlogging” post, very funny.

If you still feel like some more Microsoft bashing, checkout the Windows Vista Upgrade Decision Flowchart. You can get more useful flowcharts on BoingBoing.

Technorati Tags: apple, microsoft

The new release of Salesforce.com is out now. This includes an improved Outlook Edition for even better integration.

Here are some of things I like about it:

• Ability to add a contact/lead/account if they don’t yet exist
• Ability to upload attachments from the email
• It feels faster to me
• Works with Outlook 2007.

So the bad news is that there is now even less excuse for not recording your customer activity in Salesforce.

Technorati Tags: outlook2007, salesforce

This is something that has driving me crazy for a while but have finally found the solution.

When you create an Email Signature in Outlook 2007 it creates three different versions:

• HTML (.htm)
• RTF (.rtf)
• Plain Text (.txt)

However, you can only the edit the HTML version via Outlook > Options. The files are actually stored in a format that you can edit directly.

Step 1

Make sure that you can view Hidden Files in Explorer. Go to Tools > Folder Options and make sure that Show Hidden Files and Folders is selected.

Step 2

Go to C:\Documents and Settings\[Insert your user name here]\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures:

You should see three files (.html, .rtf, .txt) for each Signature you have created. Once you have created a signature file you can then edit or copy over existing signature files. This is useful if you have a template you want to use throughout the organisation as individual users often end up with variations.

Technorati Tags: outlook2007

The hard drive on my 13 month old Apple MacBook Pro died on Tuesday, conveniently as I was plugging into a projector to give a presentation to a room full of people. This isn’t the first time my most essential business tool has let me down:

• Faulty memory replaced….twice
• Replacement Logic Board
• Replacement AirPort WiFi card
• DVD Super Drive has failed
• Battery lasts about 30 minutes

By the time it is finally repaired, it will essentially be a new machine.

After 3 days of disruption, I’m now almost back to full productivity and only lost a day’s data in the end, which wasn’t that major. Using Gmail as my email mailbox was a lifesaver. I was at least able to keep on top of that and still access all my archived messages.

I do need to review my contingency plan though as it caused me far more problems than I had anticipated. I think it is just getting a computer set up again to how you want it.

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt this time Apple, but please don’t let me down again.

Just returned from 2 days at Morgo up in the beautiful Bay of Islands of New Zealand. It is invitation only, and the deal is that everything that is said there is considered confidential. This means that you get some unbelievable frank and honest presentations and insights into other people’s businesses. It is very refreshing when so many events are just full presentations that are really thinly veiled sales pitches.

The other reason I love Morgo is that you get a chance to spend some time with some really great people. I first met Sam Morgan in 2001, and hasn’t really changed at all since becoming a gazzillionaire. I met Rowan Simpson who was at TradeMe and is now at Xero with Rod Drury. I think these guys and others in the industry in Wellington have done a great job of developing a community of people who can work together on launching different online businesses, and I anticipate many, many more will follow. Mike Cannon-Brookes has co-founded and built, Atlassian, Australia’s largest software exporter in just 5 years…oh and he’s only 27. The Ryan brothers who have eurekster and SLI Systems. Then there are the enterprise software and technology guys selling into the US market like Ian McCrae from Orion Health, and Selwyn Pellett from Endace, the first New Zealand company to list on the AIM share market in the UK.

So it was quite daunting to have to run a workshop on Internet Marketing with an audience of extremely experienced entrepreneurs. Luckily I had some help from Andy Lark. Thanks to Andy and everyone who came along, and I hope you got some value from it. If you would like a copy of either of the presentations, please let me know.

Thanks to Jenny and all the other organisers for inviting me again and for putting on such a great event. It was a great honour to have a chance to present at such an amazing event.

More posts about Morgo:

Morgo 2007 - Thoughts on the way home
Mike from Atlassian
Morgo - going global from NZ

Technorati Tags: morgo

Just returned from 2 days at Morgo up in the beautiful Bay of Islands of New Zealand. It is invitation only, and the deal is that everything that is said there is considered confidential. This means that you get some unbelievable frank and honest presentations and insights into other people’s businesses. It is very refreshing when so many events are just full presentations that are really thinly veiled sales pitches.

The other reason I love Morgo is that you get a chance to spend some time with some really great people. I first met Sam Morgan in 2001, and hasn’t really changed at all since becoming a gazzillionaire. I met Rowan Simpson who was at TradeMe and is now at Xero with Rod Drury. I think these guys and others in the industry in Wellington have done a great job of developing a community of people who can work together on launching different online businesses, and I anticipate many, many more will follow. Mike Cannon-Brookes has co-founded and built, Atlassian, Australia’s largest software exporter in just 5 years…oh and he’s only 27. The Ryan brothers who have eurekster and SLI Systems. Then there are the enterprise software and technology guys selling into the US market like Ian McCrae from Orion Health, and Selwyn Pellett from Endace, the first New Zealand company to list on the AIM share market in the UK.

So it was quite daunting to have to run a workshop on Internet Marketing with an audience of extremely experienced entrepreneurs. Luckily I had some help from Andy Lark. Thanks to Andy and everyone who came along, and I hope you got some value from it. If you would like a copy of either of the presentations, please let me know.

Thanks to Jenny and all the other organisers for inviting me again and for putting on such a great event. It was a great honour to have a chance to present at such an amazing event.

More posts about Morgo:

Morgo 2007 - Thoughts on the way home
Mike from Atlassian
Morgo - going global from NZ

Technorati Tags: morgo

Yellow Pages in New Zealand is now just Yellow. They have recently relaunched their entire online offering.

To help you use their new search engine they have put together a handy online tutorial to give you step by step instructions.

It is very similar to the one Google had to explain to you how to use their search engine…..hold on a minute, I don’t think Google ever needed an interactive tutorial on how to use Google. This could be an issue Yellow, you have fundamentally missed what makes a good search engine from both a consumer and a business perspective:

1. You know how to use it instinctively.
2. Most of the time you find what you are looking for straight away.
3. You can buy advertising simply and easily online.

As my colleague Joel found out recently spending money as an advertiser is remarkably difficult for some reason?

Whilst there is no denying that Yellow is a substantial and long overdue enhancement of the previous offering, I can’t see why they didn’t prioritise using AJAX and actually getting the data right. I tried searching for “Sports Shoes” in “Auckland” and got Berton Automotive Ltd, an automotive repair shop, in my top 10 search results. They don’t sell shoes, sports or otherwise. Let’s try “Running Shoes” instead. One company in the biggest city in New Zealand that sell sports shoes apparently. Okay.

I did see that they had bought banner space on YouTube, which is quite a clever media buy. I have to say though, the idea of advertising a search engine is also fundamentally an issue. Ask.com is everywhere in the US at the moment and it will be very interesting to see if they can make any in roads at despite a seemingly huge advertising budget.

There is an interesting discussion going on at ProBlogger.com on the subject “Should Links Open in a New Window?“. Five years ago, I would said yes. Now, I agree with Darren, if you use a tabbed browser (and who wouldn’t?) then having them open in a new window is very annoying. This is one feature of Gmail that really annoys me, all external links open in a new window.

I have been thinking for some time that actually what we need is a new target attribute for the hyperlink target. Obviously this would only be supported by tabbed browsers but it would be great if you could specify a link to open in a new tab.

<a href=”http://www.problogger.com” target=”_tab”>ProBlogger</a>

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: problogger, tabbed browsers