Here’s a really interesting take on the Apple vs. AT&T relationship.  As an avid Apple and iPhone user (yes, you may call me “Fanboy” if you absolutely have to) I’ve been a vocal supporter of the iPhone, but since the iPhone 4 was released (no, I haven’t bought one yet) I’ve noticed the my AT&T reception has been TERRIBLE.  No, like really terrible.  I have an iPhone 3GS, and it drops at least 6 calls every day, sometimes up to 15 calls per day, and the crazy thing, is that often times my phone will indicate FULL SIGNAL STRENGTH when dropping the call.  What’s up with THAT?

Well anyway, here’s an article I found at Wired that explains what’s likely going on there.

Enjoy.

For iPhone fans, it really was too good to be true. A pair of Apple executives had just described the latest model of the iPhone — the 3GS — onstage at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conferencein June 2009. The audience loved it. The 3GS was twice as fast as its predecessor, it included a camera that shot video, and the updated iPhone operating system enabled multimedia messaging and tethering — the ability to use the phone as a modem. Just one problem: While many customers in Europe and Asia could enjoy all those features, AT&T, the iPhone’s sole US carrier, wouldn’t allow video messaging or tethering at launch. In other words, the most advanced features wouldn’t be available to AT&T customers. What’s more, some current iPhone users who wanted to upgrade wouldn’t get the subsidies that new customers enjoyed. Incensed iPhone fanatics vented their fury on Twitter. “AT&T has been one disappointment after another.” “Is AT&T trying to squeeze more money from us poor suckers?” And they punctuated their complaints with a hashtag — the Twitter convention for grouping conversations — that became an eight-character protest slogan: #attfail.

About a week later, AT&T backed down and agreed to extend the subsidy to some existing iPhone users, but that didn’t appease its many critics. In the following months, the #attfail tag would serve as a kind of primal-scream therapy, a chance to rage against every perceived indignity that AT&T had forced upon them. Dropped call? #attfail. Data service unavailable? #attfail. Bad customer service? #attfail. The hashtag popped up on Twitter more than 5,000 times over the next six months, according to research firm Trendrr. In an attempt to assuage its critics, AT&T produced a video featuring its online spokesperson,Seth the Blogger Guy, to explain that the company was facing “an astounding amount of data demand” and to detail the “time-consuming process” involved in enabling video messaging. But Seth didn’t seem to win many converts. “AT&T LIES to consumers! Seth is not a REAL Blogger Guy!” one tweeter wrote in response. “#AT&T #FAIL miserably.”

AT&T had seen something like this coming. Almost as soon as the first iPhone was introduced in 2007, the carrier realized it might run short of bandwidth. Within just a few months, the first wave of iPhone customers was already sucking down about 15 times more data than the average smartphone customer and 50 percent more than AT&T had itself projected. In a bid to avert the looming problem, a team headed by senior vice president Kris Rinne met with Apple to ask for help. Of course AT&T was planning to upgrade its network to handle the increased demand, Rinne’s team told Apple executives, but that was going to take years. In the meantime, would Apple take measures to help throttle back the traffic? Perhaps Apple could restrict its YouTube app to run only over Wi-Fi. Maybe the iPhone could feature a smaller, lower-resolution videostream or cut off YouTube videos after one minute. Rinne, who had already met with Apple’s iPhone team at least half a dozen times, fully expected the company to play along. After all, manufacturers agreed to such restrictions all the time. It didn’t make sense to build phones and offer features that carriers couldn’t support.

But in meetings with Apple engineers and marketers over the subsequent year, Rinne and other AT&T executives discovered that Apple wasn’t playing by traditional wireless rules. It wasn’t interested in cooperating, especially if it meant hobbling what had quickly become its marquee product. For Apple, the idea of restricting the iPhone was akin to asking Steve Jobs to ditch the black turtleneck. “They tried to have that conversation with us a number of times,” says someone from Apple who was in the meetings. “We consistently said ‘No, we are not going to mess up the consumer experience on the iPhone to make your network tenable.’ They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’ I think history has demonstrated how that turned out.”

Continue Reading this article at Wired.com

Author Credit: Fred Vogelstein

What steps should my business take before we enter into a Social Media Marketing campaign? We’ve been answering this question quite frequently this past year for our own customers, and it’s a very good question.  It’s vital to have your social media marketing strategy in place, and figured out before you launch your Twitter page, or build your Facebook business page.

I’ve been meaning to put an article like this together for some time now, and then BAM!  SmallBizTrends.com beats me to it, and it’s an excellent article.  Here’s an excerpt.

Enjoy~
Chris

Author Credit: Lisa Barone.  She blogs daily over at the Outspoken Media blog.

You’re going to give this social media thing a solid chance. You’ve heard that social media delivers leads, connects you with customers and you’re confident that you can avoid falling victim to the many social media myths. All that’s left to do is create the accounts hop in.

Wait! Not so fast.

Before you enter in the world of social media, make sure you’re presenting your best possible face. Getting things in order before you take your first public steps will help customers trust your interactions and get things start on the right foot. You wouldn’t show up to your wedding without taking some time to primp, right?

Here are 9 things to do BEFORE you enter social media.

Create a rulebook: Before you step onto that field, memorize your plays. Study the channels you plan to use, listen to the conversation, understand the behavior and create your rulebook for how your company will engage. Identify how you’ll handle common support issues, the tone you’ll take, how you’ll address negativity, how fans will be rewarded, etc. Work up fake scenarios and create a plan for how you’ll deal with them. Look at issues competitors have had in social media and map out how you’ll do it better. The more you prepare, the better off you’ll be. Negative commenters are a lot less imitating when you have a plan for how you’ll convert them to your side.

Assign responsibility: Make it known who is going to be responsible for social media BEFORE everyone stands around looking at each other. Figure out things like:

• Who will be responsible for creating the content, pushing it, talking to people, responding to questions, etc?
• Who will implement any changes/issues discovered through social media?
• How much time should this be taking from everyone’s day and is the number you just came up with realistic or did you just make it up?

Unless social media is someone’s responsibility, it’s no one’s responsibility.

Increase your customer support: When you open the social media floodgates, you’re creating a new channel for people to come and get help for issues they’re experiencing. You may need to increase your staff in order to handle that. If you’re a small business, that may mean rearranging your customer support system or, if you’re a little larger, it may mean adding actual bodies. Either way, you’re now going to have a live stream of people coming to you with questions, concerns and things they need fixed. You can’t ignore them. Put systems in place to handle the increases customer service tickets.

Fix your issues: You live in your business. You know that sometimes your service is flaky. You know the number one problem with your product. You know your most common complaints. Do your best to get these under control, or at least on the mend, before you enter social media. People aren’t going to suddenly stop noticing that you could be better just because you’re talking to them. Maybe start your social media effort by TALKING about all the things you’re looking to fix.

Shift your culture: There’s more to being a social company than simply creating a Twitter account. There needs to be an internal culture shift based on creating transparency and authenticity in what you’re doing. You need to be social from inside your organization out and that that may change how you deal with customers, how you treat your employees, and how daily job functions are performed. Make sure you address this before you suddenly have a spotlight on you.

Create content around common complaints: While you’re busy fixing your issues, you also want to create content on your site dedicated to solving, resolving and addressing your most common complaints or anything that may haunt you. By putting the information out there yourself, you give yourself somewhere to link to when issues arise and you also increase the transparency of your company . If you know that sometimes you get negative mentions over a business decision you made, create a page on your site that explains it. The more you can invite people into your company, the better. Answer your customers concerns before they even have them.

Read the remainder of this article HERE at SmallBizTrends.com.

June 2010

Keep On Breathing/ The Delgados
Holiday/ Turboweekend
Only People/ Cantoma
Nobody But You/ The Apples In Stereo
I Don’t Know Why I Love You/ Ivy
Waltz Darling (Introducting Lourdes & Pretty Fatt)/ Malcolm Mclaren & The Bootzilla Orchestra
Bluebird / One Self
Make You Mine /  BreakBot
Things You Don’t Have to Do (DJ Strobe Loungin’ In Ibiza Remix) /   Norah Jones & Peter Malick
Night Dance  /  Chris Coco & Pete Gooding
Everybody Loves a Loser  /  Morcheeba
Static On the Wire /  Holy Ghost!
Crash Years /  The New Pornographers
Er det nu (Pilfingers Remix) /   Marie Key Band
Look Into My Eyes /   Ray Mang
La fée /  ZAZ
Misread  /  Kings of Convenience
With You   / Summer of Space
Untitled Love  /  Still Going
Why Does the Wind?   / Tracey Thorn
A Funny Thing (Radio Edit)   / Penguin Prison
Sweet Jezebel /   Turboweekend
Sun and Rain /   Tenfold Loadstar
Enough’s Enough  /  Jamie Lidell
Take Me to the River  /  Al Green
New Heights /   A Fine Frenzy
Bulletproof (Tiborg Remix)  /  La Roux
Sly (7″ Edit)  /  Massive Attack
Nothing Left to Do (feat. Valia)   / Cayetano
Rome  /  Yeasayer
Sigh  /  Kate the Cat
Adventure We Go  /  Muchuu
Faster  /  Janelle Monáe
Go Get It (feat. Ladi6)  /  Sepalot
L.A. Lights  /  Grum
Never Stop  /  Chilly Gonzales
North Star (feat. Dido)  /  Faithless
Paint Me Rain  /  Muchuu
Sashimi  /  Tunng
Time is Love  /  Be.Alone
When I Am Brave   / Muchuu
New York City (Lazy Sunday In Prospect Park Remix)  /  Norah Jones & Peter Malick

Apple released their iOS4 operating system for iPhone on June 21st, and many of our clients have been asking if they should upgrade their iPhones to iOS4 yet, or if they should hold off until some bugs are found, and updates are released.

I’ve been testing iOS4 out on my 32GB iPhone 3GS for the past 48 hours, and I recommend this update for any iPhone 3GS owners.  I would, however, recommend that owners of iPhone 3G skip this upgrade, as the iPhone 3G runs the new OS really really slowly.

I have had only one issue with the update.  I was in Los Angeles yesterday, where AT&T data coverage is notoriously terrible.  In fact, I didn’t even have a 3G signal where I was.  I had to settle for the EDGE network. (remember the EDGE network? 2G data speeds?  Sheesh…)

I landed at a client’s house in Santa Monica, and put my iPhone 3GS on their WiFi network, and then downloaded a full album from the iTunes store. Now, this should have been an easy process since I was on WiFi, right?  Yeah.  Not really.

My signal strength meter (AT&T’s, not my WiFi) kept going up and down, because, again, AT&T’s service is awful in LA, and my phone kept getting really confused and would hang other processes.  Eventually the album finally did download, but after the download, the iPhone’s iPod app would crash upon launch.  I restarted my iPhone several times to no avail.  The iPod app crashed every time I launched it, without fail.

This, of course, was not cool, as I was relying upon my iPod being able to play my brand new album on my 2 hour trip back up to Santa Barbara from Santa Monica.  I tried instead to listen to Pandora, but that didn’t work well, because — a point I’m laboring to get across effectively here — AT&T’s signal sucks in LA.  I digress..

The solution for this, unfortunately, was to sync my phone to my iMac upon my return home, to ensure that I didn’t lose the music I had just purchased.  Once synced, (the iPod still crashed) a complete iOS4 restore was necessary.  Luckily, this took all of about 15 minutes.  I moved all of my music back over (view THIS article for tips on how to best protect the music on your iPhone) and my iPhone and I were back in business.  I’ve since stress tested the new iOS4, and haven’t found any other issues with it.  I’m pretty happy with it so far, and I’m looking forward to testing it out on a new iPhone 4!

For more information about Apple’s iOS4, check out this great article from Michael Santo, which appeared on the 21st on examiner.com

June 21st has come and gone, and iOS 4 arrived with it. The latest version of Apple’s smartphone platform will bring with it a laundry list of long-desired features, so we have to wonder how many will update immediately?

Frequently, as we have said before, it’s not a bad idea to wait a while, and let the dust settle, along with the bugs found by early adopters. Certainly, those with jailbroken devices shouldn’t update, and they’ll lose their jailbreak: they will need to wait for a new jailbreak for iOS 4 to be created.

Meanwhile, for those who have decided to “go for it,” before you do anything, you should update your iTunes software to 9.2, the latest version. If you haven’t done it already, and are anxious to install, you’ll probably be annoyed: it generally takes quite some time for an iTunes install.

Typical of an iOS update (and yes, it is difficult to type iOS rather than iPhone OS for Apple’s newly renamed operating system), you’ll be notified via iTunes when you plug in your device and click “Check for Updates” (except for the original 2007 iPhone and iPod touch models, as well as the iPad: none of those are compatible. The iPad will get the iOS 4 features in its own release later this year).

This differs from Palm webOS and Android devices, which usually get their updates over-the-air (OTA), although some Android devices have seen standalone installers.

Assuming you’ve clicked “Check for Updates” and iTunes has told you there’s one available, and assuming your device is compatible, iTunes will lead you through the rest of the process. If your settings don’t back your device automatically when you plug it in, you should back it up manually.

To do this, right-click on the device icon in the iTunes sidebar and select Back Up. It should only take a few minute to create a backup. It’s a good idea, as being the early adopter you are, if anything goes wrong you can use the Restore from Backup option.

What is the incentive to upgrade to iOS 4? First, as developers continue to release software using iOS 4, they will require you have that on your device to run their software. There is also the incentive to be on the latest and greatest OS. Finally, there are a number of new features, some of which people have been craving for a long time.

Some of the new features are actually present in the iPad’s version of the OS, 3.2. The most notable of these changes include:

Multi-tasking: Unlike most multi-tasking OSes, iOS 4 isn’t a free-for-all. As we discussed earlier when we covered iOS 4 in detail, Apple has “distilled” multitasking to seven core services. Apps are already being posted to the App Store that support multitasking, but be aware that the vast majority will not yet do so.

That said, if you fire up a game and answer the phone and come back to the game, don’t get annoyed just yet if it doesn’t return to where you were. Time will fix this issue. Oh, and don’t forget: the iPhone 3G will not support this feature.

Folders: Finally, although this will close down the cottage industry that was Folder Support on jailbroken devices. Instead of having screen after screen of icons, you can combine them into folders, so that all your games, for example, are in one folder.

Orientation lock: The iPhone doesn’t have a hardware switch like the iPad, but iOS4 adds a software lock. This keeps the iPhone from changing orientation, and is particularly useful when reading lying down (which is why the iPad had the feature out of the gate). Double-click on the Home button and swipe to the left to find it.

Read the rest of this excellent article HERE.

By Chris Foley

The first question out of people’s mouths when they see me hanging out in a café, working with my iPad, after we get past the “Wow that’s heavier/lighter than I expected” and of course, the “Wow, that is just COOL..” has been, almost unanimously “Can I replace my computer or my netbook with one of these iPads?”

Well, I didn’t really think much of it at first, but by the 3rd or 4th time I was asked this question, I started to realize that there was really something here.

Can the iPad seriously replace a laptop computer or a Netbook?

Well can it?
Most of my consulting clients are creative professionals; Filmmakers, Designers, Photographers, Music Producers, etc, and the simple truth is no, the iPad will not replace a professional-level workstation any time soon. However, as I think more and more about our normal customers, who represent the majority of all computers sold, whose technology needs are far simpler than these creative professionals, I realize that the story is somewhat different.

What IS the iPad?
Q: Is it just a big iPhone, or a big iPod Touch?
A: Yes. And much more.

Q: Is it just an underpowered laptop computer running a mobile phone operating system?
A: Yes. And much more.

Q: Is this thing the future of computing?
A: Yes. And much more.

The iPad will easily (and elegantly) handle the basic needs of many computer users. Let’s take a look at what we can do.

Web
Email and Web browsing are handled with the Mac Mail email application, and Safari, respectively. If you currently access your email via a web browser, than you can continue to do so on the iPad. The device connects to your Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail or MSN, AOL, etc.

The Safari web browser on the iPad is NOT a crippled mobile version of a web browser, as you’ll find on many mobile devices INCLUDING the iPhone. Some sites do recognize iPad’s Safari as a mobile browser, and will deliver a mobile version of the site, but these sites very frequently have a control at the bottom of the page while allows you to switch from mobile view to normal page page view. Twitter.com is a good example of this. I’ve not run into any issues with this yet.

NOTE: I’m not a very big fan of safari on the iPhone, though I do recognize that before the iPhone came out, we were all trying to access the internet on mobile web browsers which really shouldn’t have been called “web browsers” at all.

Safari for iPad is a full-sized web browser which interacts well with every website that I’ve visited — with the obvious exception of all pages containing Flash content, which the iPad does not support.

Click HERE to view a showcase of Top-Level websites that function beautifully on iPad.

Social Networking
There are many Twitter and other social networking applications available for the iPad, similar to the assortment currently available for the iPhone/iPod. Also, the iPad will run all of your iPhone applications as well, though they don’t look very good on the iPad. There are thousands of apps already available for the iPad, with more coming every week.

Workflow
iPad does not support Microsoft Office products, such as Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. There are several Office-compatible applications available, however, such as Apple’s own Pages (a replacement for Microsoft Word), Apple’s Keynote (a PowerPoint replacement) and Numbers (an Excel replacement.) Now, I’ve already replaced my own need for Microsoft Office products by moving my workflow into Google Docs, which I can access from any computer no matter where I am in the world. There are already a handful of superb applications for the iPad which enable you to access and edit your suite of Google documents from the iPad.
Bottom line, you can work with word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, make flyers, etc.

The Calendar App fully syncs with your computer and your iPhone (either through a sync cable, or via an optional Mobile Me subscription) and is quite elegant and easy to use.

Typing
Using the iPad’s virtual keyboard does take quite a bit of getting used to, and in all honestly, I don’t use it, except to tap out a web address, or to peck out a brief response to an email. I carry a compact Apple bluetooth keyboard along with the iPad. This enables me to type as quickly as I can with my MacBook Pro, or my iMac. It’s actually the ability to use a wireless keyboard that makes me consider the iPad to be a seriously usable communications device.

I’ve always been impressed with how much work I can do on my iPhone, but I would never consider it to be a possible replacement for a laptop computer. The iPad changes my mind about that.

Media
The iPad is a full-on iPod too. Any music, audiobooks, or Movies or TV Shows that you currently have in your iTunes library are portable to the iPad. The iPad also supports most YouTube content.

The Photos application is a superb way to view, organize and share your images with friends and family, though it does not provide any tools with which to edit your images. This is a view-only photo application, though there are many 3rd-party applications available that will allow you to edit your images and then import them back into the Photo program.

eBooks
The iPad comes with Apple’s own iBooks store. iBooks are an excellent way to read your favorite books. I tested it out with the 700+ page System of the World by Neal Stephenson, and found that I didn’t experience the eye strain that I had expected. The additional features (such as built-in dictionary and Wikipedia support) make reading an iBook a very full and informative experience.

The iPad also supports Amazon’s Kindle application, so you have access to all of your Kindle titles too. My poor Kindle now lives in a draw by my bedside. (Psst. anyone want to buy a used Kindle?)

Gaming
The iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad are emerging as major players in the portable/handheld gaming industry. I’m not a gamer myself, so I don’t feel qualified to touch on this topic. Visit the iPad Apps page for a more in-depth view of what all is available for iPad.

My Favorite Apps
• Netflix – This is by far one of the coolest apps available for the iPad. Because of it’s extreme portability, I can watch a movie wherever and whenever I want to, providing I have a WiFi connection. I like to put the iPad on my kitchen counter, and watch old TV shows while I prepare dinner.
• Evernote – The iPad version of this app is excellent, and syncs up with my other ever note apps on my laptop and my iPhone. I don’t have to worry about syncing files up with my iPad. Between Google Docs and Evernote, whenever I sit down to work on my iPad, all of my files are already there waiting for me!
• GoDocs – This is my favorite Google Docs app for the iPad.
• Urban Spoon – Find great new eateries in your area by region, nationality, and price range. A fun way to experience new cuisine.
• NetNews Wire – a Fantastic (the best, in my opinion) RSS reader for the iPad. This is how I get most of my news, and stay atop trends which effect my industry.
• Wikipanion – A super Wikipedia application, offers a smoother browsing experience than the Wikipedia web site does.
• Pandora – Streaming music on your iPad.
• Thomson Reuters and AP News – great news apps with fun and intuitive interfaces for quickly locating stories of interest.

What the iPad will NOT do
The iPad doesn’t run a full Mac Operating System, so you can’t install any application that would ordinarily run on your Mac. You are limited to apps available inside the iTunes App Store. Many view this as an extremely limiting experience (the sorts of people who don’t like being told what they can and can’t do have a big problem with this limitation.) I honestly don’t care, as I’ve been able to quickly buy or download a free app which handles whatever I’ve needed.

The iPad will NOT support Flash media, which means that Flash-based web games, and many web video elements will not be visible to iPad users.

———-

Bottom line: The Apple iPad is a viable alternative to a computer, for users with simple needs. If you use your computer primarily for email communication, web-browsing, watching TV shows and movies from iTunes and/or YouTube and TED, sharing your photos with friends and family, word processing, book reading, and research, than I recommend seriously considering an iPad with 3G/WiFi connectivity as your next computer. And if you this description fits you, I definitely recommend the iPad over a Netbook.

Oh, by the way, this entire article was written on my iPad.

———-

How I Roll
I’m Rocking this Incase travel case for my iPad, which gives me room for the iPad, its power adapter, my bluetooth keyboard, and a travel charger. It even comes with a little plastic stand which allows me to prop the iPad up in Landscape orientation while I work. I highly recommend it.

May 2010

Azzurra   / Gui Boratto
Bluish    / Animal Collective
Breaststroke    / Mathemagic
Chaos    / New Young Pony Club
Clap (See the Stars)    / The Myrmidons
Clap Your Hands    / Sia
Coco (feat. Lilja Bloom)     /Parov Stelar
Dingue     /Emmanuelle Seigner
Dreamin’     /Feldberg
Dreaming     /Goldfrapp
Enjoy Your Life (feat. Liz June)    / Chris Le Blanc
Feel It All Around     /Washed Out
Fire In Your New Shoes (feat. Dragonette)     / Kaskade
Forward Motion    / Your Nature
Get Up    / Washed Out
Head First    / Goldfrapp
Hide Me    / The Golden Filter
Hold Out    / Washed Out
It’s Automatic   /  Zoot Woman
June Evenings    / Air France
Kisses    / Raz Ohara & The Odd Orchestra
La Belle Nation    / zeebee
Lately    / Washed Out
Mama Told Me Not To Come    / Wolfgang Press
Maneater    / The Bird and the Bee
Naughty Secret    / Xemplify
New Theory    / Washed Out
Odessa   /  Caribou
Også Om Dagen (SNE Remix)  /  Julie Maria
The One I Am  /  zeebee
Only Man  /  Audio Bullys
Open Your Eyes  /  Elsa
The Phoenix Alive (The Octans Edit)  /  Monarchy
Save Your Love (Lovelock Remix) /   Sally Shapiro
Say My Name   / Holy Ghost!
Sensibility  /  zeebee
She Lion  /  Rebekkamaria
Something Good Can Work (The Twelves Remix) /   Two Door Cinema Club
Sound of Love  /  Husky Rescue
Springer (Smith & Mudd Version)  /  Tosca
Superstition  /  Estelle Swaray
Under (Morgan Page Remix)  /  Under
Vampires (feat. Femi Kuti)  /  Thievery Corporation
Vox populi (Lifelike Treatment)  /  Jupiter
We Want To  /  New Young Pony Club
What’s In a Name  /  Late Night Alumni
Wonderful Life (Arthur Baker Remix Kitsuné Edit) /   Hurts
You And Me (Percussion Mix) [feat. Nadine Hoffmann]  /  Jean Mare
You’ll See It  /  Washed Out
Your Body Is a Machine (Zebra and Snake Remix) /   The Good Natured
Yours Truly   / Rebekkamaria
6 Underground (Nellee Hooper Edit)  /  Sneaker Pimps

The iPad has certainly created a lot of buzz over the past couple of months, and with that buzz comes the positive and the negative. Tech pundits and tech critics alike all weigh in, and it’s important to remember that this happens with every single new product that Apple has ever released. I enjoyed this article a lot, and I suspect you will too.
Enjoy!

Editor’s Note: This article is a repost from asktog.com. Bookmark them, if you’re not already following their site, asktog.com is a great resource.

For those of us around Apple for the launch of the 1984 Mac, things are awfully familiar.

In bringing that original Mac to market, Steve hit on a formula that worked for him. He keeps repeating it, and it seems to get better every time. It worked for the iPhone, and it worked for the iPad, too. Here are the necessary elements.

Small team

The first iteration of any new Apple product brought to market by Steve tends to look, at the onset, somewhat primitive. The iPhone, for example, was lacking such basics as cut-and-paste, the ability to search for a contact, and sported only a tiny handful of apps with none others available. The original Mac, likewise, shipped with a memo maker, a drawing program, and a painting program. Few others existed at launch.

Why so little on launch day? Because the Mac and the iPhone were both created by a tiny group of intensely-focussed young people working in extreme secrecy. The iPad was, too, but in its case, some hundred and sixty thousand apps could be ported from the iPhone, giving it a big head start. Strip away those apps, however, and you would be left with some bright, shiny technology with a handful of apps and some severe limitations, such as lack of support for multitasking or even something as fundamental as printing.

It’s easy to talk about Steve’s paranoia and how that forces him to keep the project small, but, in truth, the secrecy is more of a useful by-product of the way he manages new projects, rather than the central goal. Steve assembles and motivates a small team of young geniuses, then sets them to work for “90 hours a week and loving it.” The results are highly-integrated designs that far outpace the competition.

It is this small-team approach that, of necessity, results in important capabilities being left out of the first release. The payoff, though, is that Steve ends up with a central core of perfectly-integrated functionality instead of a rambling labyrinth of disjointed “features.” This design framework is so well conceived that it can be built upon for years, even decades, without being stripped out and restarted. Compare that with the history of Windows, with false start after false start, resulting in their repeatedly beginning design anew.

In stage 2, the second-release software, a much larger team builds upon those central capabilities without losing the tight integration originally achieved. That was true with the Mac in 1985, it was true with the iPhone 3G and iPhone software 2.0, and it will be true with next year’s iPad and especially this year’s 4.0 software.

Of course, secrecy does matter: As Steve learned with the release of the first Mac, “event marketing” is a powerful force. The carefully-planned generation of excitement surrounding each first release results in tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars of free advertising.

Fearless Leader

Probably the strongest character trait of Steve Jobs is his absolute lack of fear. While every other CEO in America, it seems, shakes in his boots at the very thought of not having a good next quarter, my experience in knowing Steve Jobs is that, frankly, he could care less about the next quarter. He’s much more focused on the next five years, rather than the next 90 days. But even more than that, it is his quest to change the world, and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish that end even if he risks failure in the process.

Every Apple employee, from the CEO on down, knew we were literally “betting the company” with the Mac. Both the Xerox Star and Apple Lisa, the first two attempts to commercialize the GUI interface, were failing in the marketplace, but Steve was so convinced that this new graphical user interface was the future, that he—and Apple—just flew ahead, in the full knowledge that he might be steering the plane right for a mountain.

The Mac has never been the runaway success it could have been due to a combination of subsequent abysmal marketing and the belief, on the part of Apple’s management once Steve left, that the Mac interface was now perfect and complete. (They watched, amused, as Microsoft crashed and burned, crashed and burned, until Microsoft, more than a decade later, finally figured out how to copy the Mac and swiftly pulled ahead in sales and even, in some areas, technology.)

The lessons of the Mac were not lost on Steve, and he pushes second and third generation products with all the fervor with which he pushes the first.

Today, Apple is a big enough company that it could absorb a failure with no danger of collapse, but Steve still bets heavily, and he doesn’t do so in order to swell the coffers in the next 90 days, but in the next decade or two.

Steve’s Razor

Steve, for such an uncommon individual, has a keenly accurate sense of what will appeal to the common person. His young geniuses pile up huge slabs of interesting ideas, and he carves away at those ideas, relentlessly, until all that is left is a perfectly-formed, extensible core.

His harsh treatment of both the ideas of, as well as the people of, the original Mac team led them to buy Steve a special red rubber stamp that said, “THIS IS S___!” so he could just stamp each page of their design submissions, instead of having to wear out his hand writing. [Underline substitutions are mine.]

Rumor has it that Steve has been throwing away entire design approaches for the iPad since before the advent of the iPhone. That’s what he does best, and it harkens back to his fearlessness: He’s never been afraid to make those around him utterly miserable if it will eventually result in the “right” product. It results in most of us not wanting to work for Steve Jobs more than once, but it also results in products that most of us want to buy, and buy, and buy. Besides, there’s always a new crop of geniuses ready to bend to Steve’s bidding.

Closed system

The blogs have been filled for three years now with the constant wailing of the technorati complaining bitterly about the iPhone’s, now the iPad’s, closed system.

It’s nothing new.

The Mac now connects to everything, but the first Mac did not. It was designed to always have a fixed amount of memory—128k—with no way of ever expanding it. The core of the OS was in ROM, not RAM. It was Steve’s vision that if you made every single computer with the same exact OS and the same amount of memory, developers would always have a fixed platform for which to develop, making their jobs easier.

Users could forget about plugging in add-ons, too, because there wasn’t anywhere to plug them. The system could not even connect to anything as basic as a hard disk, for example, again “supporting” developers by giving them a single, known quantity for which to develop.

Sound familiar?

Flash & the Arrow Keys

Jobs doesn’t like flash. It has a slow, clumsy, weird interface, and he’s elected to “cripple” his mobile devices to rid the industry of its dependence on it. In the next 90 days, as in the last 90 days, that decision will cost Apple money. Steve doesn’t care, and, if the stockholders do, they can get rid of Steve and go back to the way things were before his reappearance.

He did the same thing with the original Mac, although then, Flash was not the issue. Few will remember, but, when the Mac debuted in 1984, there were no arrow keys on the keyboard. That was a big deal. Almost every application then in existence depended on the arrow keys (then called cursor keys) for navigation. With that one stroke, Steve reduced the number of apps that could be easily ported to the Mac from tens of thousands to zero, ensuring that this new computer would have a long and painful childhood.

Steve’s button mania, which grew from his earlier parts-count mania, was already in full flower, and many have ascribed this crippling omission to some sort of self-destructive obsession. It was not. It was one of several strategies specifically designed to ensure that existing software would not run on this new machine because existing software, in Steve’s eyes, sucked (an opinion I share). The absence of those four keys ensured that any developer who wanted to have software appear on the Mac was going to have to start over and write software that conformed to the Mac interface, not the keyboard-oriented precursors to MS-DOS.

Steve’s fearless crippling of that original Mac saved that computer and saved the graphical user interface.

Childhood’s End

I was responsible for putting the arrow keys on the Mac some 18 months after first release. I didn’t do it because I thought Steve’s original decision was wrong. On the contrary, I believed then and I believe now that decision was critically important. Without it, the new machine with its rodentiometer* and unproven interface would have been overrun with great hordes of horrific software, likely preventing the new interface from taking hold.

Rather, I added the cursor keys a year and a half later because the interface had taken hold and was growing vigorously. The Mac’s childhood was over. Not only had the value of the Mac interface been proven, but those few developers that had tried a straight port had been publicly humiliated by the press and had faced immediate financial failure. It was time to open the system up more, particularly to people who are visually impaired, by overlaying a complete keyboard-driven interface onto the primary, mouse-driven interface.

The tide has turned a lot more slowly with Flash. It is only now that HTML5, “the Flash killer,” has finally made an appearance. I predict things will look a lot different a year from now. If HTML5 builds out as well as it appears, if more and more systems can alternately serve Flash or HTML5 based on the calling system, HTML5 may, in fairly short order, be universally available to iPhone/iPod/iPad users, and there may be no reason to ever support Flash.

On the other hand, Apple needs to consider opening up their mobile devices more and more as time goes on, just as we opened up the Mac. Either Apple doesn’t have the resources or Steve is unwilling to commit the resources to keeping up with the needs of the users and the competition. Multitasking, for example, is already a year late. So’s a competitive camera. (So, also, is Verizon compatibility, but that’s another subject.)

It goes deeper than that, however. There’s an overall problem at Apple, the same one that dogged the Mac twenty years ago, with keeping up with the users, as well as the competition. Try loading 20,000 photographs in the iPhone’s or iPad’s Photos app and try to find the one you’re looking for. All the keywording you spent dozens of hours entering in iPhoto is stripped off on the photo’s journey to the mobile device. It’s been three years now that serious photographers have been suffering. Where is it?

Steve and Apple keep a laser-like focus on that next sale, ensuring that the first two-weeks’ experience is absolutely perfect, but today’s new, naive user will be tomorrow’s expert. And you know what expert’s do? They tell their friends to buy. They are Apple’s best sales force, and they are not being properly supported.

Yes, continue giving new products the childhood they need to take root and grow, but, as with children, there’s a time to open the products up, still controlling what is important, while allowing the products to reach full bloom. Consider what Apple would be like today had the Mac, indeed, stayed at 128K of memory with no hard disk. The apricot orchards would have long since returned to Cupertino.

Word on the street is that Google has already powered up its copiers, and will be chunking out an iPad clone. Unlike Microsoft in the early days, these guys move fast, and they add real additional value along the way.

Steve already took the first necessary step to opening the mobile environment up when he opened the iPhone to external developers–or at least sort of opened it. More will be required if Apple is not again to end up a niche player in a market they created.

*Early technical term for a mouse

Here’s a great tutorial that appeared this week on Macworld.com about how-to use your camera’s white balance controls.

Below is an example of a poorly white balanced image.

There’s a lot of color correction that can be done inside of your image editing software, such as iPhoto or Photoshop, but the best way to fix color issues is to have your camera setup properly before you shoot.

Enjoy!

Author Credit: Ben Long

The human eye has a lot of amazing capabilities. It can see in 3D, it has continuous auto-focus, and it is so light-sensitive that it can detect a single photon of light. Amongst these and other astounding feats is the ability to perceive color correctly under any lighting conditions. If this seems like a ho-hum achievement, consider that we have yet to develop an imaging technology that can do this. Film can’t, and neither can digital sensors.

What is white balance?

The problem is that different types of light shine with different colors. Sunlight, for example, shines a very blue light (no, our sun does not cast yellow light; take a look at your shadow next time you’re outside and you’ll find that it’s slightly blue), and incandescent light bulbs shine very red. While your eye can adjust automatically to these different light sources, so that color appears correct under each of them, your digital camera must be calibrated to a light source to properly represent color. This calibration process is called white balancing.

If you think back to elementary school, there was probably a day that you learned about rainbows and prisms, and how both of these split light into its component colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. In other words: white light contains every other color. The idea with white balancing is that if you can get your camera to properly represent white, then all other colors will be correct.

Choose a white balance preset

By default, your camera is configured to use its auto white balance mode. When in this mode, the camera analyzes the scene and tries to determine the best white balance—the one that will yield the most accurate colors. These days, the auto white balance mechanisms on most cameras are very good, and will almost always yield accurate results when shooting in bright daylight, and several other types of light. However, even the best auto white balance system can begin to fail when shooting in shade.

Read the rest of the article HERE.

Some friends and colleagues who know that I work with Denzyl Feigelson and Club Monaco to provide their monthly in-store music programming have been asking me where they can find a list of music, and also where the songs can be purchased. I’ve decided to post the playlist at the end of each month.
In fact, here’s what Club Monaco has to say about it on their Tunes Page:

FAVORITE TUNES
Club Monaco!

Each month, we get scores of questions about our Club Monaco store soundtracks. Who sings that song with the addictive rhythm? What band performs the cover of that amazing song? When are the new tracks coming out? Where can I buy these songs? Why don’t you spread the news?
Who, what, when, where, why!

~ Cheers
Chris

April 2010

All Those City Lights  /  Sono
Comme Ci Comme Ça (The Twelves Remix) /   Terry Poison
Go Go  /  Alphabeat
Desperately Trying  /  Anna Luca
Sans l’ombre de toi   / Mélanie Pain
Phébus  /  M
Fire  /  Tesla Boy
Blow Away  /  A Fine Frenzy
Strange Transmissions (Chillout Remix)  /  Norah Jones & Peter Malick
London Girl   / The Invisible
The Metro  /  Sleepthief & Jerri Eckert
I Can’t Wait   / The  Kenneth Bager Experience
That’s the Way Love Goes  /  Yuliet Topaz
Engiadina /   Sky D’Or
The Shining Path (feat. Phonte Coleman)  /  RJD2
So Light Is Her Footfall (Breakbot Remix) /   Air
She Takes My Breath Away  /  Casio Social Club & The Diogenes Club
Avenue l’Amour (Lemongrass Remix) /   Naomi
Addicted  /  Waldeck
Amour (Lounge Mix) [feat. Stella]  /  Superlounger
J’me fais mal  /  Etyl
Erlend /   Ted & Francis
Higher Heights  /  8000Below
Always Something Missing  /  Sono
A Night Like This  /  Caro Emerald
Sitting On Top of the World  /  Joey Negro & The Sunburst Band
Star  /  Lazy Hammock
Another Sunday Morning  /  The Casino Royal
A Bright New Life (Morgan Geist Re-Edit)  /  Escort
Stuck /   Caro Emerald
The First Picture  /  The  Kenneth Bager Experience
Conmigo (Featuring Sol Galarreta)  /  Fous de la Mer & Sol Galarreta
Apples and Pears  /  The Canyons
Let It Flow  /  Naoki Kenji
Be As One (feat. Emma Saville)  /  MinusBlue
Locomotion  /  Sophialorenians
Still Here (feat. Kim Sanders)   / Aural Float
Airtight [Aeroplane Remix]  /  Cobra Dukes
End of the Day (Silence)  /  Blue Foundation