Thursday, December 31, 2009

Tweetin’ with The Dragon Lady


Global warming protest canceled because of blizzard

This just in from Salt Lake City. Al says it’s all happening just like he predicted in his book. Scary.


Ironic

I saw this headline and thought it must be a story about Gawker. But then, no — it was on Gawker.


The 50 worst gadgets of the decade

I remember this one!  The Cue-Cat.  For some reason, you would plug this little scanner thing into your computer, it would scan some bar code in a magazine ad, and automatically send you to their site.  As opposed to, say, just typing in the URL.  Get 49 other terrific gadgets here.


AT&T hangs up on Tiger

Another ripple from Operation Chokehold? AT&T has decided to pull the plug on Eldrick. For those keeping score, that’s Accenture, Gillette, Tag Heuer, and now AT&T. They’ve either dropped TW or “scaled back.” (Read: dropped but we haven’t had the lawyers figure out the buyout.)  Just waiting for The Big One to cut him loose now.)


Ten minutes with Nexus One en Français

(Can’t get the audio to play, rrrrrrrrrr.)  Update: Peter Kafka says there’s not supposed to be audio. Go figure. Crazy French.


A reader cc’s me on his letter to AT&T

This comes from a guy in New Jersey:

AT&T –

I would like to file a service complaint on behalf of 18 residents in my building (address erased ). We all have service issues in our apartments, and consistently have dropped/failed/missed calls. We also receive text messages late, and voice mails late. Many of us have had to resort to buying a landline for telephone service because our cellular coverage doesn’t work regularly. We’ve all received the run-around from customer service about how it’s not a network issue, but rather a device issue and are tired of hearing this. We would like a technician to investigate matters further, and to provide us with answers as to when our service will be up to par. Until we are provided with quality service, we would like to be reimbursed for all service outages and dropped calls. Until AT&T can provide a solution to our service issues, we will not accept this level of service. We pay for a service, yet only receive it about 60-70% of the time. The Terms and Conditions of AT&T state:

“Subscriber must live and have a mailing address within AT&T’s owned network coverage area.” According to this statement, AT&T recognizes and accepts that our apartments are within AT&T’s coverage area as we all receive a bill each month. We expect quality service in return, or refunds.

I have filed a Better Business Bureau complaint against AT&T regarding this matter as well. You can find below a list of residents in the building who have these same issues, and there comments about service and/or customer service provided by AT&T.

Please let me know if you require anymore information if you decide to pursue and investigate our service issues. Please feel free to contact me.


Chokehold, Phase 2

The guys who run Operation Chokehold, who call themselves The Three Musketeers, are still on the case and cooking up ideas. “The interest in holding a real-life protest outside an Apple and/or AT&T store is incredibly strong,” they tell me. But they’re not sure that’s going to be effective. They’re also working on a letter-writing campaign to Randall Stephenson, and a YouTube contest.

Another idea: a blackout map. The idea is, people send in locations where their iPhone doesn’t work, and the Musketeers pin the locations to a map. Would be even cooler if people could take a photo of the deadspot location, and the photo could pop up when you clicked on the dead spot.

Naturally this one needs (a) someone to code it up so that it works; and (b) loads of people to participate by sending in deadspot info. If you’re a coder and want to help, write to the Three Musketeers via their Operation Chokehold Web site, or just send email to operationchokehold@gmail.com.

Once we get the map up we can just watch the black spots spread, minute by minute, day by day.

The advice I’ve given to the Musketeers goes like this. AT&T has two constituencies — customers and investors. These two groups have opposing needs. Customers want the best possible network for the least amount of money. Investors want AT&T to take in as much money as possible from subscribers and spend as little as possible on the network.

So far AT&T management has aligned its interests with investors. They get compensated based on financial results and stock performance. As long as the stock stays up, they have zero incentive to fix the network.

In other words, when we went after the network, we went after the wrong target. We need to go after the stock price instead.

The good news is that stock prices are relatively fickle, and are based in part on things like psychology and sentiment.

A few thousand people can’t crash a data network, but they can definitely create enough noise and bad publicity to move a stock. Especially if they feed their noise into the amplification system known as Facebook and Twitter, and then take that amplified signal and pump it into that giant Marshall amp in the sky, aka the mainstream media.

That was the lesson of Chokehold Phase One. A tiny random joke on a blog — a prank that never had any chance of working — was picked up by a few hundred people on Facebook, spread by a few hundred more on Twitter, and ended up on Wolf Blitzer.

And suddenly AT&T started putting up cell towers.

The lesson in this: Keep up the pressure on the stock, and they will keep improving the network.

This isn’t vandalism. The point of having a system in which companies sell stock to the public is to ensure that the public can hold these companies accountable.

You want a better network for your iPhone? We have the power to make this happen. Ain’t capitalism cool?


Kai-Fu Lee throws fuel on the tablet fire

Operation Tablet Hype continues right on pace thanks to my good friend Kai-Fu Lee. He worked here at Apple in the 90s, but we sent him off as a double-agent to infiltrate some of our competitors — first the Borg, and then Google. He now has some mysterious “investment company,” but it’s really a front that lets him stay behind enemy lines and funnel information back to us. He’s also now engaged in disseminating disinformation on our behalf. See, his investment company has ties to Foxconn, our child-labor manufacturing partner. So he goes on TV and tells Fox News that I’m going to announce the tablet in January and that “Apple expects to produce near 10 million units in the first year!” We have complete deniability, but we still manage to feed the media beast with yet another ridiculous teaser. Well done, Agent Lee.


Here they come to save the day!

Hey, Ivan is stepping to the plate to stop the next asteroid strike from hitting the earth and obliterating the population. Way to go, Putin. When’s it due? Really? I’ll be on depends, a drip feed and hillbilly heroin by then. i may want the damn thing to ram into the planet!