Three different personal encounter with social media this week reaffirms how powerful social media can be in marketing and brand building:
Twitter for Customer Support
I use Rackspace to host all our web servers for ourselves and our customers. I was playing with their iPad app one afternoon and found a problem. It is not a mission critical error, so I wrote a tweet to them, something like “Hey @rackspace your iPad app is crashing”. Within minutes they tweeted me back, asking me to email them with specifics. Soon they both emailed and tweeted me back with a solution. I was happy. Then to top it off they offer to send me a t-shirt! Honestly I would have been very happy just with the speedy response via twitter.
Twitter for Pre Sale Support
I was looking to buy a small messenger bag from Rickshaw Bags as a gift. I wanted to know if a Kindle Touch would fit in their mini zero bag. The dimensions given on their websites are too close. So I tweeted a question to @rickshawbags. Within minutes they answered, via twitter. I placed the order. During the check out process they asked me for my twitter handle.
Twitter for Post Sales Support
This evening, Rickshaw Bags tweeted out to me, with a little custom poem, a pictures of the bags that I ordered, before they are handed off to FedEx. I know they do the picture thing with their customers, but the emotional impact was far greater, positively, than I expected. Remember the Rickshaw Bags are custom made with hand pick color combinations. So seeing the pictures before they ship is a wonderful way to build the customer relationship. These are the first bags I bought from them. If the bags themselves are as good as they are suppose to be, they have hooked me for good.
Conclusion
This level of customer interaction does require someone monitoring the company twitter stream. But I believe it is sure worth it. What a differentiator and relationship builder.
I like modern art. But after reading the new multi-gallery show of Damien-no-more-spot-painting-hirst’s news, I have to make this small contribution. Click on the image below to see:
We often use wordpress as the CMS for our application’s public site. That means we have to install mysql on our rackspace servers. Today the installation process failed several times, with this error message in syslog.
Error:
ERROR: 1064 You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual
that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to
use near 'ALTER TABLE user ADD column Show_view_priv enum\('N','Y')
CHARACTER SET utf8 NOT ' at line 1
I first try to uninstall and reinstall sqlserver but it will not uninstall cleanly. Finally I have to both use apt-get and manually remove some directories to get back to a clean install:
apt-get purge mysql-server apt-get purge mysql-common rm -rf /var/log/mysql rm -rf /var/log/mysql.* rm -rf /var/lib/mysql rm -rf /etc/mysql # and then: apt-get install mysql-server --fix-missing --fix-broken
Then I get a clean (re)install of mysql and it started up.
Executive Summary
- If you are a serious reader, even if you own an iPad2, buy the Touch.
- If you have a child who loves to read, buy the Touch.
Background
I own an Amazon Kindle 1, aka the White Wedge. I used it quite a bit until the battery stop holding it’s charge, and I got an iPad2. I do almost all of my book reading on the iPad2 using the Kindle App (how ironic). However the weight and the glare makes the reading experience sub par. One cool thing that I can do however is to flip between the Kindle App and iThought HD (a mindmapping app) to make notes while I read.
I pre-ordered the Kindle Touch when it was announced and it arrived yesterday. Charged it up in about an hour, and it is ready for use.
Likes
- It is small and light, something that you can “throw” in your bag and have your books with you anywhere, bonus: much lighter than the iPad2
- Page turn delay, which is always an issue with e-ink display, is not bad. Check out the video review I made, basically it is quick enough not to be bothersome.
- The on screen virtual keyboard is also very responsive, meaning you can make notes easily right on the device
Dislikes
These are all minor issues:
- The charging port, which is a micro-USB port, feels loose. I hope it does not break in the future
- The feel of the plastic body is not great. I cannot tell why, but it just does not feel nice, especially compare to Apple products
- Similarly, I which it comes in a sharper color, but then that’s what cases and covers are for
- no landscape viewing mode (at least for now) — I do not find this to be a big problem, but people using the Kindle for reading personal PDF may find that an issue
- When you click a “button”, it does not “flash” — so there is no visual feedback of a button being pressed. This is something that, say Apple, will never let go. They should either turn the button dark for a moment or have audible feedback, considering there will likely be a delay until the action is taken. (Note: The keyboard has this “flash/dark” feature. Only buttons in dialog boxes do not.
For Video Review click here to see my video on Amazon.
More Tips and Issue
Amazon Account Management
We use the Kindles within the entire family. One question is whether to use one single Amazon account for all content? Or split them up into adults vs kids accounts. This is a problem that would be solved if Amazon allows a easy transfer of content between accounts, but they do not. This is how the “book” metaphor breaks down. We are not allowed to give our books away. Since we may want to read each other’s books, we choose to use a single amazon account. As a result, we need to:
- disable auto-syncing so that two people can read the same book at different speeds without all devices automatically jumping to the furthermost point
- use collections to organize a larger than necessary set of books
Listening to Music from iTunes
I am a Mac user and all my music are stored within the iTunes / Apple ecosystem, as DRM free Apple Lossless format files. the Kindle only support MP3s. So I need to convert any music that I want on the Kindle into MP3 files. iTunes has this feature but it may not be obvious.
Kindle Touch for Kids
The Kindle Touch is a great device for kids who read.
Final Thoughts
Summarizing the bigger points regarding the e-book and digital living marketplace:
- Amazon should allow ownership transfer of e-books. This is solved in the music world by the removal of DRM in music files.
My main music library is on my 2011 Mac Mini, 2.3GHz 8G ram Core i5 CPU. Right now it is half way matching my 9000+ songs. Looking at the activity monitor, it is using up one entire CPU, with 35 threads and about 500 Meg of real memory. I assume the matching process is some sort of checksum computation and then a network query, which is why it is CPU intensive but not network intensive.
At 10:59 this morning my kids decided they want to do something special at 11:11:11 11/11/11. 12 minutes later a non cropped version of this picture showed up on our facebook wall. How do I do it?
- Find a free clock app for the iPad and install it
- switch on our Apple TV feeding into our main TV
- run the Clock app and turn on AirPlay Mirroring
- get the kids positioned
- take a few pictures using the iPhone4S
- Once we have the right picture,
- go to the iPad photo stream which has already pulled down the picture from the iPhone
- do a quick crop and enhancement (our loft is too sunny and it messes up the contrast)
- run the Facebook app on the iPad to post the picture
All in 12 minutes. Thank you Steve!
If you have your phone’s date and time settings set to “automatic”, meaning it will automatically determine your time zone, you would be one hour early to your appointments today! For some reason, if you set your timezone yourself then the phone gets the day light savings change correctly. See the two screenshots I took flipping the automatic switch back and forth.
I have been eagerly awaiting the Jabra Supreme bluetooth headset. I always find boom based headset sounds better. While the Jabra is a bit larger then, say the Jawbone, I find that it is still small and comfortable to wear.
I like the flip boom design, where it switches on and off as you flip the boom open and close. Very natural. When the boom is folded in, the headset is smaller but still pretty thick. I wish for $99, Jabra ship the headset with a case.
Out of the Box Experience
The out of the box experience is pretty good, with the standard exception of needing to charge the unit up before first use. It is very nice that it comes with both a charger with a fixed cable, and an additoinal USB to micro USB cable so that you can use your computer to charge it up. It took just over an hour to get the headset fully charge.
Initial Pairing
Because the Supreme has “Voice Guidance”, it will literally talk you thru the initial pairing. You can see this video of the voice guidance in action. I suppose you are expected to wear the headset to listen to the instruction, but I thought (wrongly) that I have to press some buttons, so I had the headset off. The voice guidance is loud enough that I can hear it anyway.
Comfort
The headset is really light. To be fair most of the new generation headsets are light. 18 grams. You really would not notice it. I wear eyeglasses, and it still fit over my very thin eyeglasses frame without problem. If anything I find that it is a little lose. I don’t think I can jog in it.
Sound Quality
I say the sound quality is fair, which is good for a bluetooth headset. The noise cancelling works very well. I place a test call with the radio blasting in the office and much of that is muted out.
Voice Control and Guidance
Of course the Jabra is no Siri! But the voice system works surprisingly well. In fact if I do not have an iPhone with Siri, I would be really impressed. You can say “what can I say” and the headset will read you a list of available commands. One that is particularly useful is “phone commands”. When you say “phone commands” it passes you thru to the phone. Since I have Siri activated on the iPhone, it starts Siri up for me. However, currently the Jabra Supreme firmware does not work with Siri. I can hear Siri, but Siri cannot hear me. Jabra promised a fix really soon.
Pros
- boom design for initiative on/off
- long battery life (5+ hours)
- comes with a charger and an extra cable for computer charging
- voice guidance and commands
Cons
- Does not work with IOS5, no SIRI, no Skype. Jabra promise a fix real soon, check their support page to see when it is available.
- Does not come with a case
Links
- Main product page at Jabra
- More Pictures of the package
We all love Siri, and scheduling reminders verbally, right? But you are not getting the most out of it unless you do the following, if you are a iCloud user with other devices and macs:
- Delete your local Reminder list in Reminder, leaving the iCloud reminder list
- On your Mac(s) calendar program, go to View / Show Reminders
- (optionally) on your iPhone change Settings/Sound for reminders so that you know a reminder has gone off as oppose to other events.
Now when you schedule a reminder with siri, it will automatically synced to your macs and ipads, and it will show up on all devices!
There, I said it. Siri really is amazing. People who think it is just voice recognition software need to try it before passing judgement.
This is BETA according to Apple, learning a trick from Google. That just means they are going to tweak it with user data. Some of these things are not working (yet):
- It does not work with third party app. “Play Norah Jones” only work if you have her music on your music library. We need it to work with Rdio or Spotify, like Dragon Go does.
- It does not take multiple calendars into account. I have 25 appointments next week according to “check my schedule”, what I really want is “check my work schedule”
- You would think you can send tweets from siri, with all the twitter integration, but you cannot. You can say “text twitter” if you have twitter setup as an account with code 40404, the standard twitter SMS interface. You will be using your SMS credits though.
- It will be nice if it interface with either the calculator app or something more streamlined for basic calculation, and then read back the result instead of showing me a wolfram alpha page.
