I don’t really care too much about the iPhone, but the buzz around it is truely stuff of ledgend. All the secrecy, all the hype… the rate plan announcement made headlines. THE RATE PLAN!!! Companies would kill for this kind of buzz (so might Cheney but that’s a different story).
At the Apple store on Fifth Avenue in New York, the first in line are already camped out. Sightings of the device already in the possession of a privileged few were being reported, even photographed and posted on the Internet. Rumors have it that shipments are arriving in the dark of night, accompanied by armed guards.
“It’s masterful when you really think about it,” said Jeremy Horwitz, the editor in chief of iLounge, a popular online publication read by iPod and iTunes users. “Ask yourself how many companies can announce a product six months in advance and not just sustain public interest but even build the frenzy. It’s staggering to me.”
Pre-introduction product hype and hysteria is not new, of course. Just ask any 12-year-old Harry Potter fan or middle-age Star Wars cultist. Last year, video game addicts slept on sidewalks outside Sony stores to be the first to buy the PlayStation 3. But ever since Apple first let the world know about the Macintosh computer in 1984, with its Super Bowl commercial, the company has become the standard-bearer in drum roll marketing for consumer electronics.
Gates calling himself low tech is most likely an attempt to deflect further questions. It was well known in his time at Texas A&M that he would personally respond to many emails from students, and as he was leaving the university he made it known that he frequented a popular aggie message board.
Study: Inkjet printers are filthy, lying thieves This was an interesting test I thought. It would have been interesting to see how long they could keep printing after the printer says “out of ink” before the printer stops or else they notice a problem. In some respects, this is like penalizing a car’s fuel efficiency because the low fuel warning light comes on. I don’t swap the cartridge until I notice a problem. I think I get about 50% extra use out of it. (I have a canon)
The study by TÜV Rheinland looked at inkjet efficiency across multiple brands, including Epson (who commissioned the study), Lexmark, Canon, HP, Kodak, and Brother. They studied the efficiency of both single and multi-ink cartridges. Espon’s printers were among the highest rated, at more than 80 percent efficiency using single-ink cartridges. Kodak’s Easyhare 5300 was panned as the worst printer tested, wasting 64 percent of its ink in tests. TÜV Rheinland measured cartridge weights before and after use, stopping use when printers reported that they were out of ink.
Microsoft’s coffee table: the future of computing? Microsoft is at it again in the hardware arena with Surface, a table-style PC with a touch-sensitive screen, unveiled today California today in California. It is expected to retail for about $10K, but that will drop as more units are sold.
The machine replaces a traditional mouse and keyboard with its advanced screen. Using a so-called “multi-touch” interface, people can move items around in front of them with their fingers or write on the table using a pen. It reminds me of the computer Scientology Tom uses in Minority Report.
”It’s a good start. It’s not an overwhelming start. I’m not going to pretend it’s some gigantic move,” said Bach. It took the iPod 14 months to reach 600,000 shipments, but it was much earlier in the game than the Zune, when the market for digital music players wasn’t so hot. Apple has likely sold around 25 million iPods over the same time it has taken the Zune to reach its goal, according to financial analysts. Those numbers include the much less expensive low end iPod shuffles and the somewhat less expensive flash memroy models. Still M$ is no Apple and Apple is winning this battle and this war. We see where things go though.
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson today announced he is ending the exploratory phase of his campaign and is officially seeking the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination. Democrats have been on pins and needles for the past year as he’s campaigned… Now we know.
Per Daily Tech, Sony has decided to ship only the 80GB model of the PS3 to Korea. This kind of stinks, but unlike the Xbox 360, the 2.5-inch hard disk drive inside the PlayStation 3 may be upgraded by the user freely. Sony’s Korean division appears to be well aware of this, and according to official information posted on the PlayStation Korea website. I don’t think it’s much of a big deal for folks, but if it is, message boards will flare up and Sony will do what it needs to to secure this vital market.
Well… Al finally met the the Mormon church in Utah, 2 weeks after Sharpton told a debate crowd that people who worship the real God will never vote for Romney. He was in Utah making nice with Mormon elders after his remarks and then Mitt Romney (rightly) calling him a bigot.
After dining with M. Russell Ballard, one of the Mormon Church’s “Quorum of the Twelve Apostles,” Sharpton was full of praise for the Latter-day Saints. He did not mention the Mormon record on race – the subject of his most pointed comments last week when he noted the church did not start accepting black people as equals until 1978.
“I wanted to discuss some of my historic concerns privately,” he said later.
I think that’s fair. Bigotry and polygamy are stains that will likely forever haunt the latter day saints and it’s perfectly fair to talk about those concerns. It seems more helpful and less inflammatory to talk privately when you have audience with decision-makers.
The NY Times has a neat advice column for states considering moving up their primaries. States haev been looking to do this for $ millions of reasons.For Iowa and New Hampshire, the primaries and caucuses have been economic windfalls, with candidates and news organizations spending money on hotels, restaurants, bars, and rental cars, and the campaigns devoting huge sums for advertising on local television stations. But faced with such an expansive playing field and the fact that much of the campaigning in the Feb. 5 states will take place in the week before the voting, reporters and candidates will be spending so much time on planes that they probably won’t have time to spend much money on the ground. As for television, some of the campaigns — trying to figure out how to run an advertising campaign in 20 states — are already talking about simply buying national television time rather than time on local stations.
So why not wait? If Feb. 5 is inconclusive, there are going to a lot fewer states competing for the candidates’ time and attention. There are going to be many fairly empty Tuesdays on the primary calendar next spring; pick the right one and one of those states might end up putting a candidates over the top.
Mayor Bloomberg, who has made news of late for the rumor that he is setting aside $1 Billion for an independent presidential run, may be having difficulty winning support in Albany for his congestion pricing plan. The plan did win praise from former President Clinton today during the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit in Manhattan.
“The longer I wait in traffic, the better I like it,” Clinton said. “I remember when people said (Bloomberg) was committing political suicide when he came out for smoke-free restaurants when restaurant revenues were already down about 15% after 9/11. He clearly was right and events proved him right. So I wouldn’t bet against the mayor’s judgment on this.”
The mayor responded with his own, quintessentially Bloombergesque praise for Clinton, saying the ex-president had taught him “a great deal about leadership, about being strong, about being charismatic, about being tall and handsome and Southern.”
The two pols joined forces for an announcement that 15 cities will receive $5 million loans from private banks to outfit buildings with green technology
Perhaps all the climate-friendly talk at the summit went to the head of one reporter, who referred to Bloomberg as “Mayor Greenberg.” Bloomberg quipped: “I don’t know if that was a Freudian slip.”
Getting mayors to save energy in their cities, acting where larger entities will not, seems like a noble plan, though not inviting NGOs to the meeting leads me to believe that the plans will be executed in a manner to ensure that the energy companies and consultancies are the biggest winners here.
