I am writing to express my disappointment in the Apple 3G White 16GB iPhone. I have found areas of the iPhone to be inferior to my previous smart phone, the Treo 650p. As most would agree, Apple is a visionary organization known for pushing the limits of user experience and customer satisfaction. Therefore, I did not expect that things like battery life and phone reliability would give me fits when I made my “investment” in your technology.

iPhone 3G Battery Life Sucks

So let me just come right out and say, without mincing words, that the battery life of my iPhone 3G is horrible. I get all of these great phone features like: email, youtube, applications and web surfing and Apple’s marketing encourages me (in every marketing campaign) to use them, and then find that my battery needs a boost around 2PM every day.

I even believed some of the Apple zealot propoganda out there. See the third comment on that thread. It basically “reminds us” that lithium batteries need to drain totally, then have several 12 hour charging cycles before we judge them. I did this. I made sure that my battery was totally drained, not just mostly dead.

I have 2 problems.

• Apple obviously knew that the battery life was going to be a problem or they would not have put out this comprehensive guide to becoming an iPhone battery ninja. It’s practically a course syllabus.
• The phone is sealed so that I cannot swap the battery for a replacement mid-day even if I want to

Let’s take an in depth look at the suggestions for improving battery life.

• Minimize use of location services: OK done!
• Fetch New Data Less Frequently: Oh, ok. I guess I can get my mail less frequently.
• Turn off push mail: How infrequent are we talking now? Every hour is a long time to wait
• Auto-check fewer email accounts. Is 3 too many? Gmail, Yahoo and Corporate email are all pretty important. I guess I could scale back.
• Minimize use of 3rd party applications. But, I thought you wanted me to get cool stuff that differentiates my phone from every other phone. So I can have it, but I just shouldn’t use it that often? What if I meet a Sith Lord and need to battle with my Phone Saber? What if I don’t recognize a whole block of songs and need a whole lotta Shazam? Seems unfair that I should be encourages with 16GB of space and not be able to use the apps when I want to.
• Turn off Wi-Fi. I thought that WiFi was supposed to help battery life. Oh, I see it does! “If you rarely use Wi-Fi, you can turn it off to save power. Go to Settings > Wi-Fi and set Wi-Fi to Off. Note that if you frequently use your iPhone to browse the web, battery life may be improved by using Wi-Fi instead of cellular data networks.” Man, that sure is confusing. I hope there is a one-click method for picking which configuration I am using. I move around a lot during the day.
• Turn off Bluetooth: I don’t use it. It’s off.
• Use Airplane mode in low coverage areas. AT&T has low coverage areas? GASP! It’s the “largest wireless operator in the country”.
• Adjust Brightness. All the time?
• Turn off EQ. Reduction in sound quality! AWESOME
• Turn off 3G. Great idea. Turtle phone.

Would it have been that hard to expose the battery and let us buy another battery/charger so that we could run all day?

Sincerely,

the Michael Schneider

Readers: what thoughts would you add?

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re: @chrisbrogan’s tweet:
chrisbrogan Is Twitter an intern-level responsibility for a business? http://tinyurl.com/5u75pe . Look@comments

Like anything with Twitter, the more transparent you are, the better. It depends on the social media related goals of the company. I see pros and cons to this dip-your-toe-in-before-jumping-in strategy.

If the intern is twizzlin’ to get a sense for web related buzz, to make announcements about upcoming objects-of-interest, or take feedback with an “I’ll check and get back to you” sort of flare versus being expected to be the online voice of the organization, then I think it is excellent. The intern could be twitter triage! It would be difficult to expect an intern to be able to represent the company. That’s a lot of pressure for someone who may not know the company very well.  That said, if Claris Networks has not made a “we’re on twitter” announcement to their customers, they might find that they have a limited, manageable following/stream at first that they can use as a microcosm for what they actually want.

Businesses should expect that they are going to achieve limited benefits vs. putting an executive or even a full-time community manager online. And I’m sure they do. Businesspeople are smart. They understand the value of their resources and tend to (at least it is their best intention to) allocate their sparse resources carefully. We don’t all have AT ATs, Tie Fighters, Battle Cruisers and Death Stars at our disposal!

Looking hypothetically, I can picture the decision makers of Claris Networks in a room talking about social media and its impact.  I can picture both evangelism and nay-saying. I could picture them coming to the conclusion that they should be doing something and that either they will use an intern to get learnings about the benefits or  use them until they can hire a community manager (anyone checked their site for this exciting potential career opportunity?)

If you look at Claris Networks’ twitter stream, it is pretty sparse on the “social” and heavier on the announcements. This article will certainly help them shape their strategy and perhaps help them engage in a more warm and transparent way. I’m a new follower and I’m excited to see how their twitter and social media presence evolves. 加油 Go Claris Networks! 加油 Good to see an increasing number of people like Brooks Brown out there who get it!

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I know that Google understands the importance of video, after all they bought youtube. They also have at least one text-to-speech experiment in Goog-411 (that we know of) and they have the resources of Emperor Palpatine. If Amazon can scan the lion’s share of their books, couldn’t Google “watch” and digitally imprint all of youtube’s videos? They have the processing power.

The trick is the isolation of the vocal tracks. Most would argue that this is impossible because when you combine all the tracks like in a .wav file, the track information is left behind, but there are people who claim that they can get (most of) the music track to go away.; If anyone can do it Google can, right? And if they can do that, they can implement speech recognition technology and output the results to good ol’ XML.
What do you think? Could they be close? Are they working on it?

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Big International Personalities

Soccer has huge personalities, all of them more famous Internationally than Brett Favre and Tom Brady combined.

• Kaka is a Brazilian midfielder who last year won an award called the Golden Ball, which means he was last year’s MVP of the WORLD. He plays for AC Milan in the Italian Serie A league. He walks on the straight and narrow, is a philanthropist and a devout Christian.
• Ronaldinho is a Brazilian midfielder who is one of the most creative players ever. He can do things with the ball that most people could not even conceive of let alone do. He play for Spanish giant Barcelona.
• Christiano Ronaldo is probably the best player in the game today. He plays for the New York Yankees of Soccer, Manchester United.

Not to mention Messi, Beckham, Fabregas, Robinho, Ronaldo, Sneijder, Ibrahimovic, Drogba, Lampard, Van Nistulrooy, Rooney, Van Der Saar etc etc etc

There is more at stake than just the League

Your favorite team’s league is only part of a season. There are other tournaments throughout the year that your team may be able to participate in. Imagine two to four March Madnesses at the professional level every season. Here are a couple:

The Champions League

Imagine that the NFL was the top football league in the United States. Let’s say that the UK had an NFL quality league with 6 teams in London and 10 more in various other UK localities. Let’s also say that Germany, Spain, Italy, France, Brazil, Scotland, Greece, Portugal have similar leagues. Now the question is, how do you decide who the top team in the world is? The answer is to have the top 2 to 4 teams in each league each year play in a separate league called the Champions League. The Champions League takes place during the regular season and ends in a knockout round tournament. Most players feel that the Champions League is the top of club play. Typically the world’s top club teams like Arsenal, Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, AC Milan, Inter Milan, AS Roma, Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich are involved. Wait, you mean there’s something more important? Yes…

The World Cup

This tournament is so big and so special, it only takes place every 4 years. It pits national teams from throughout the entire world against one another. Players represent their nation rather than playing on their club team. This is one of the few soccer events that Americans have a passing interest in aside from the Olympics. There is high drama because players often take on their teammates from their club teams and because the rivalries are international.

The FA Cup

The FA cup is a tournament that involves all 770 or so teams in the United Kingdom. Imagine if every single A, AA, AAA and Major League Baseball team played in a huge tournament during the regular season. Managers need to make decisions about who to play and where to focus. The lesser leagues tend to get pretty far in these because they pour their heart and soul into the tournament where the premier league giants may play second stringers because they are focused on the Champions League or the League title. The 2007-2008 FA Cup came down to a mid level EPL team from Portsmouth against Cardiff City, which is in the League Championship Division, the equivalent of AAA. Imagine the 2007 Cleveland Indians playing the Pawtucket Red Sox for all the marbles.

Soundbites Are Better

Managers like Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger talk a little bit more. They are not afraid to call a player out. They like to give the press more of an idea about what is going on in their club house.

Will Not Conflict with American Football

Most matches are shown on Fox Soccer Channel or Gol TV on Saturdays and Sundays. They are played live between 10AM and ~2PM (Eastern time) and they last only 90 minutes. The entire telecast is not more than 2 hours, so unlike baseball and football, you can plan around the matches. If you get both channels, you can easily follow most of the world’s leagues.

Relegation

There are tons of other reasons to love soccer, but I think my personal favorite is relegation. Let’s put things in baseball terms again. Imagine that every single baseball team was a separate entity instead of ultimately being affiliated (usually) with a big league club. So in our analogy, MLB is separate from AAA is separate from AA is separate from Class A. Teams could still send players down, they just loan them to other teams. So what does this set up? If relegation were a reality in US baseball, the 2 worst teams in Major League Baseball would MOVE DOWN TO AAA and they would be replaced by the best two from AAA. The same goes for AA and A ball. Can you imagine if the Kansas City Royals or the old Tampa Bay Devil Rays dropped down to AAA if they were in the cellar? What about teams like Pawtucket or Scranton Wilkes/Barre in the Majors? Sure would make teams think harder about how hard they play or how hard they pursue the free agents! This is a reality for every international soccer league.

The English Premier League starts up again in August. Check with your local cable company or satellite provider to see if you can get both Fox Soccer Channel and Gol TV. Enjoy and let me know what you think about your new sport!

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The scheduling, the anticipation, the holding your bathroom breaks until the ads. The “bust out the popcorn” as Jeff Chausse put it, that is all gone. Thanks VCR, Thanks DVD. Thanks Tivo. Thanks YouTube. Thanks Hulu. Those are not sarcastic thank yous. Those are sincere, that-sucked-compared-to-today thank yous! Now we get to watch what we want to watch whenever we want to watch it! But why should it stop there?

Even as a kid, I was into deciding my own destiny. While other kids were picking up Nancy Drew mysteries and Judy Bloom books, I was looking for the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. I would make a serious attempt to read the whole book, often working backwards from a particular outcome to see how I could get there. Now, 20 some odd years later, that has been introduced for TV. Video delivery platforms like PermissionTV give entertainers and marketers the opportunity to take “television”, a very much linear activity and add it to the non linear paradigm.

My friend, Martin Sarafian, is one of the great unknowns in the world of research. Not only does he have very broad knowledge about topics like foreign policy, entertainment and the entertainment industry, economics, advertising and technology, but he dives in to the depths of the Internet underground (you didn’t even know that existed did you?) and pulls the nuggets that make the Drudge Report cringe. Research is a passion for him, and he uses it as something that allows him to create.

About 8 years ago, we started talking about a project that we would work on together. The overarching concept was something that we called Non Linear Entertainment. This allowed the user to control how they experienced the story line and how they got to our desired outcomes (if they ever go to them at all). At the time we were talking to major entertainment houses as well as venture cap. They got the concept, but did not think that we could charge for the content. They were probably right and at the time I was concerned both with building the CMS as well as the revenue model. to figure out how I was going to build the platform. This was long before blogging. Long before online communities were inter connected and things like PHPbb allowed people to easily setup forums, let alone integrating all of it together. I started working on CMS-like technology so that Martin would be able to make updates to the site via either XML documents or forms. In parallel we (mostly he with me to bounce ideas off of) kept flushing out the idea for the content and designing and building the universe.

The idea of Non Linear Entertainment is that the user can choose what they want to consume, when and how they want to consume it and that everything they do adds value to their personalized customized experience. Instead of a linear storyline, the story is a tangled web of story lines. You still have the sort of buildup to outcomes, but the user can choose if they want to go off and experience something else for as long as they like instead of going right for the payoff.

So Non Linear Entertainment is:

• Personalized
• Customizable
• Reusable
• Replayable
• Not the same thing twice

A perfect example of Non Linear Entertainment is World of Warcraft. While not all Non Linear Entertainment allows the user to be an avatar in the universe the point is that it is highly interactive. A content consumer has the option of going through the content in their own way and ultimately will experience many of the same pockets of content that others do but not necessarily in the same order or time. At the end of the day the discussion between two people who have a NLE experience is about their payoff and how they got there. They might even suggest a way that they thought was fun or interesting and encourage their friend to try that way, thereby giving NLE the potential to be repeated, or at least to have pieces repeated. In this way the experience is highly customized and the rules of engagement have changed forever.

Platforms like permissionTV can enable NLE by

• Allowing the placement of a hotspot on the content that yields other content.
• Allowing the user to make a decision for the characters in the story
• Provide areas to upload user generated content
• Allow the user to create their own content by slicing up the content.
• Embed and Share
• Much more

Enter the marketers. Some obvious marketing uses are that people can click on product hotspots within video content and get more information or even be able to purchase. Decisions made during the video might yield different ads that are based on the decision that was made. For instance if someone decides to make a character go on a roller coaster versus staying home and soaking in the tub, they might get to see an add for Cedar Point where the second scenario might show an ad for L’Occitane bath products. Decisions could also be saved in a user’s profile and choices, including ad choices, can be aggregated to form powerful segmentation that could power the ads themselves.

Click here for For more information on permissionTV

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Things have been going well until recently. You see, it has been hot outside. Our line, the Worcester line, uses CSX tracks. When it gets hot enough to bend iron outside, CSX puts speed restrictions on the tracks. This causes issues. MBTA’s normal strategy is to make an annoucement in the station that says that trains are delayed. There is usually no further communication until recently. The conductor on the 6:30 Framingham train has taken it upon himself to be more… social. Instead of just saying “The train is late. It’s CSX’s fault.” He uses a very warm and apologetic (for a dude with a wicked awesome Boston accent) tone.

“Well, we got you out of the station on time today. Looks like we need to stop here. We have a red signal. We are going to have to wait a couple of minutes for the Inbound train to get in. Not a huge deal. We should still have you home in time for dinner. Sorry for the delay.”

And that is essentially how you want to talk to people in the Social Media world. Use Facebook, Myspace and Twitter to be very transparent with your customers. If you use them to introduce a new product, remember that your customers are not going to Twitter to get spammed with product information. They are there to get the little tidbits of a person’s day that happen in between company announcements and advertisements. Give them something they don’t know. If you are beverage company, tell them that you are excited that you worked with Robert Graham on your new can design. If you are a clothing company, let them know that you expect polka dots to be prominent in your fall line and maybe give them some sneak previews via a Flickr gallery. Delicious little nuggets like that will get people talking and give them a warm fuzzy about your online presence. They may even forget that your are trying to sell them something.

I encourage you to check out the Twitter how Zappos (@zappos) behaves. They are a great example of building a rapport with their customers.

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For as long as you can remember you have been into computers and programming. You spend most of your day connected via your desktop, laptop or device. You sometimes solve coding problems in your sleep and then implement your solutions when you wake up. Even though you are passionate for a particular development platform, you see the need for others.

Every third book on your bookshelf is an O’Reilly and you know who Dr. Dobbs is. You often code for fun. Your RSS reader is full of sites like Slashdot, Tech Crunch and Gizmodo and your offline reading staple is Wired. When you see two cool technologies, you try to figure out how to make them work together. Your ideas of fun are gaming, jail breaking your iPhone or hacking together a Google maps mashup. You’ve probably had more than your fair share of Mountain Dew, Red Bull or Monster Energy. Your de.licio.us bookmarks are mostly coding how-tos. Bonus if you like to blog, use Twitter, Plurk or Froggums (I made that last one up). If your apartment or house has a mat that says “Welcome” in binary, that may be taking things too far. I am only kidding. You are our guy/gal. Seriously though, that Bluetooth earpiece is not meant to be worn all the time.

Apply for Developer positions here.

You strive to write simple, elegant and accurate code. Reuse is vital to you and you wouldn’t generally think of writing something that is not version controlled. You can think in Java (or C++/C#) as if it were your primary language. You neither fear Databases nor XML. You favor Agile methods for new development. Bonus if you know what a scrum is and brownie points if you have been a pig. You see the big picture. People call you smart behind your back. You have the ability to work on more than one project at once. You are either a technical lead or on the cusp of being one. You have between 4 and 8 years of professional development and you are ready for more responsibility. You want to work in a nimble, flexible and fast paced shop on projects that matter.

If this sounds like you and you want to get involved in high profile, digital and social media solutions, then we want to meet you. Please come armed with examples of tasty projects that you have played a major role in developing.

Apply for Developer positions here.

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Alignment with Vision

A good agency will spend some time up front learning about the client’s vision for their work before they even pitch. A good client will afford them some of their time. Agencies that go in and try to roll out their entire tool belt without a sense for what the client wants are destined to either fail because they came in too expensive, or scare the client because they thought they were only looking for a customer segmentation exercise and not a full re-branding of the organization with a new TV campaign, a CRM database and a media optimization tool that tells you how to exactly spend your ad bucks. Giving the client a sense for what you are going to propose before you propose anything will allow them to give you feedfront before you spend valuable time putting your pitch together. In other words, be careful not to be that eager puppy with the sock in your mouth who is just happy to be playing tug-of-war with anyone.

They Seek Partnership

Trust is not something that happens overnight, but you want to increase responsibility and data sensitivity as your time passes and the relationship evolves. If your agency is a strategic think-tank, then you want to find a client that shares information like

• Key Performance Indicators
• Past performance
• Campaign results
• Customer data
• Product information
• Profitability data

That data thing is really important! If you are a tactical execution or delivery shop, then make sure that your client is sharing their brand, mission and vision with your team so they can make decisions as if they were spending their own money. Having a client who does not share the big picture indicates a lack of trust and an unwillingness to partner. Tread carefully.

Involvement

The client sponsor should be a part of the agency team and vice versa. Be very leery of situations where the person who ran the pitch process and brought your team on board is going to be “too busy” to participate in the actual projects. Make sure that they assign people with appropriate decision making responsibility.

They need your help

Projects are great, but in order to form an ongoing relationship where an agency can make a difference, you want to seek a client with a recurring budget for consulting. It takes time to iron out the kinks in working together. A client should be willing to give you at least 6 months to figure out how you best work together and to provide them results that make a real difference in their bottom line. That said, your agency’s goal should be to start adding value on day one and continue until the end of the relationship. Your client is paying top dollar for your services. Earn them.

Trust

The client trusts that the agency will deliver and allows the agency leeway to execute their best ideas. What good are your ideas if they end up being diluted of tossed out?

Notice I didn’t say: Knows exactly what they want. Agency folk often converse about the varying degrees of client vision. Most clients are paying for fresh, new ideas, not someone who only does exactly what they tell them to do. If that was the case, what would they need agencies for?

What else makes a good client?

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Everything we have been told about search engines is about to be flipped on its ear. WOW! Now Google can read and crawl your Flash .swf files, but do not expect Digital shops to start recommending that everything changes to Flash just yet.

While Google may be able to crawl flash the following questions are still shrouded in Googley secrecy

• How much of the site can Google crawl?
• Which pieces is Google indexing?
• What are the most important parts code wise?
• How will results be displayed in a Google search?
• Can Google take you to specific “pages” within a flash app?

Since paging within a Flash application is not as cut and dry as an HTML site, it is not clear that whether Google will be able to find specific pages within the application. In order to judge the impact, we will need Google to provide a text cache for a Flash site. This is unlikely to happen for until the other (hahaha what other?) engines catch up. Until then, it’s a whole lotta test and learn.

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Expensive : Complicated : Useless

These are words they have used to describe segmentation! Further investigation usually reveals that their segmentation study was conducted so long ago that no one really remembers why. In one case, some muckety-muck told a group of analysts to do it and so they did exactly what he told them to do. No one really knew why it was being done.

Of course then nosy consultants like me come along and ask the question. Why did you do this segmentation? What does it all mean? It used to shock me when they would say that “it’s just the way we have always done it”.

Segmentation is not about grouping data for the sake of grouping data. Segmentation should have purpose. It should be used to solve a particular problem. It is useful for determining sales regions/territories, marketing message and campaign optimization, risk management, web visitor behavior classification etc etc etc.

At the end of the day, your segmentation should tell your group or organization exactly how to focus on a particular audience. Keep in mind that an organizational segmentation is typically a pretty intense exercise, but that you might segment campaign audiences or web traffic on the fly and change it to suit your needs as campaign messaging changes or web traffic ebbs and flows.

Just remember that if your segmentation model does not include factors that drive the problem that you are trying to solve, you should not expect it to be highly actionable. I often am asked “Hey, can you do something with this data? How about a segmentation?” and am given Dun and Bradstreet profiles and customer/prospect information and little else. There is a lot of directional information I can derive about the way that you do business from this data, but I’m sort of left licking my finger and holding it in the air when you ask me how to use the segmentation to drive your media. If the segmentation is actionable, I would say that you should focus on your core, growth and niche segments.

To succeed:

• Start with a problem to solve. It can be as simple as not knowing where the company is the most profitable.
• Insist on historical transaction data that includes both demographic and actionable information. For example, profit margins for sales, conversions for campaigns and goal related metrics for web sites.
• Make sure that you understand the segments that were created and that they make sense to your business. There are n ways to look at data sets. They should be easy to understand as well as to act on. Too many segments can be unwieldy and difficult to act on. Too few can leave you without focus.

The awesomeness of your segmentation depends on following the aforementioned. There are other subtleties to this kind of exercise that are learned over time, but these are basics akin to boil water, put tea bag in cup, pour water.

Happy segmenting!

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