PardonMyFrench

Living with an Apple Watch for 1 Year

I was working on a different post when I got distracted by a Facebook update.  When I checked on my memories from last year, I saw that 1 year ago today I ordered my Apple Watch at 3AM EST (thanks for that Apple - couldn't you just make it midnight East Coast time).   Then I remembered that I started working on a post about living with it for 6 weeks and then decided to resurrect it for a 1 year anniversary.  So, here's my own experience with it for 1 year.

What I Like About My Apple Watch

I love the notifications I get because I don't need to constantly check my phone and with a simple glance I can see what's going on.  I think that makes my phone battery last longer.  Also, I like using it to track my pulse rate over the day.  I do sometimes wear it in bed to see what my resting hear rate is while sleeping; however, when I do wear it in bed, it sometimes wakes me up because I move my arm and the watch turns on.

I love the home screen notifications.  I get the time, any calendar items, and a quick glance at the weather.  Plus, the music you are playing as well as heart rate are quick swipes away.

I do enjoy using it while working out - pretty much for tracking my time and my heart rate.  It's also super helpful while driving because without taking my hand off the wheel, I can skip songs, respond to phone calls, and even easily follow directions (when it's time to make a turn you get a little vibration).  If I was commuting a ton, the Apple Watch would be indispensable. However, it's not indispensable for me because I don't commute like I used to.

Here's What I Don't Like About My Apple Watch

I don't really use a lot of the applications that are available.  I probably could delete most of the apps that are loaded on my phone.  The apps themselves seem like cheap stripped down version of their iPhone app counterparts.  Shazam?  Never seems to work. The other news apps - just really push a lot of alerts.  Starbucks?  Not even sure I need to use it.  Also, if I'm not exercising or driving for a distance, I don't wear my watch and to be blunt, I don't miss it.

A year later, I do enjoy my Apple Watch.  I highly recommend it to people that commute any distance or go to a lot of offsite meetings.  I'm glad I bought it but it really isn't this awesome earth shattering device wearing product.   It's more like a great notification device that extends the life of your iPhone's battery.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

 

 

 

Related articles

GetResponse iPhone App 2.0 Now Available on the AppStore

New GetResponse iPhone App on the Way!

Check Out Our New Mobile Site!

I'm Nearing The End with Microsoft Windows

When I browse the internet, my browser of choice is Google Chrome.  It used to be Firefox, but I couldn't stand the updates.  My backup browser is Safari and in third place, a distant third, is Internet Explorer.  In fact, the only time I ever used IE was to login into Microsoft's AdCenter and Atlas.  AdCenter is for managing search campaigns on Bing and Atlas is a third party ad server I use to place ads on specific sites for media buys.  You see Microsoft in their infinite wisdom really only allows IE as the acceptable browser.  AdCenter I can get in with Safari and look around but eventually, I have to use IE.

That was until a week ago.  Internet Explorer just stopped working.   I have no clue why. So after uninstalling it, I tried installing IE 9 and after many times I gave up.  I have no clue why it won't install and Microsoft's knowledgebase is only good for serious gear heads.  I installed update after update and upgraded my DirectX and still nothing.  I must have spent 4 hours and all I kept seeing was IE crapping out and the Blue Screen of install. 

So I gave up.  I used my old computer to login into AdCenter and Atlas and moved on.  

I don't understand the logic of forcing advertisers to use a specific browser to manage ad campaigns.

I dont understand why it is so hard to install Internet Explorer.

I dont understand why the KB solutions are so hard to understand.

I dont understand all of the constant updates.

If I wanted something turnkey that I don't really understand how it works, maybe I should just get a MAC and call it a day.  That's saying a lot for someone that used DOS and remembers Windows 1.0.  Plus, back at AT&T I was voluteered to be a Microsoft sales connection for Office products.

Microsoft, you make it really hard to stay a customer. I think I'm done.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

 

The iPad Nay Sayers Don't Get It

Yes I'm excited to get an iPad and I'm going to wait for the 3G version.  Why?  The functionality at the start and then the potential to have Minority Report newspapers.   

Right now I'm typing this post on my laptop while sitting in my leather chair and balancing that laptop on my leg.  It isn't comfortable.  What's annoying is that other than playing computer games, I don't need all of that laptop power.  The features in iPad will actually work a lot better for me for what I' currently using the laptop for (entertainment).  I think Apple knows that and knows that a giant size iPhone will actually sell because that functionality doesn't work so well on a small screen while in the house.

Look, I love my iPhone.  I love everything about it.  The one small negative I have is trying to read books or surf the internet while on that small screen.  Yes it works great when I'm traveling but not when I'm home. That's where the iPad comes in.  Bigger screen, similar features, and the ability to leave my laptop in my office.  Even when I'm traveling I can leave the laptop home and load important files up to Google's cloud and access them whenever and wherever I want.

And all of that has me sold and that's before the Minority Report Newspaper and Magazine transformation. You remember that movie right?  Tom Cruise's character is on the run from the law and while on a train a USAToday newspaper headline transforms with the most recent news which is his character is a fugitive. Here's the video in case you forgot.

That's what I think that new Apple chip is for.  That's what makes this product a huge deal.  Get over the big iPhone descriptions and the funny name.  If the bigger iPhone and Kindle killer doesn't do it for you, think about how the iPad will make your newspapers relevant again and how you'll be able to subscribe to Sports Illustrated.  So, instead of reading dated articles as soon as they are on ESPN, you can let SI stay up to date for you.  That's why you should ignore the nay sayers and see what Apple really has planned for this newspaper evolutionary product.  BTW - here's an article from the NY Times' media and advertising section that shows that I'm really onto something.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Can Apple Save Newspapers?

I don't consider myself an Apple Fanboy, I'm definitely closer to a Google Fanboy, but I have to admit I'm kind of excited at the prospect of Apple's Tablet.  Why?  I think a slimmer version of my laptop will make it much easier for me to read books, newspapers, and magazines; plus I'm willing to bet that the idiots that run the newspaper industry will view Apple's tablet as the last ditch effort to save their industry and put some effort behind it.

Personally, I ditched almost all of my newspaper subscriptions primarily because of the waste of paper and the lack of timely news, relying on the internet for information.  However, I do miss the ability to thumb through a paper and with the outside chance that Apple can make newspapers interactive I think it may breathe life into their currently bad business model.  Up until recently newspapers were hoping for federal government bailout, but with everything else going on in Washington there is no way anyone would stomach such a terrible idea.  

Even subscription marketing scams like the one the Star Ledger tried to slip by me, isn't helping them. And, as their paper subscription and sales volume falls so do their advertising dollars which was already decimated by eBay and Craig's List, plus the smart marketers who already abandoned them for their lack of tracking and their lack of creativity.

Up until a possible Apple Tablet launch, newspapers were trying to replace their declining offline revenues with online advertising.  However, the online dollars weren't large enough to cover their bloated payrolls and paper production, so of course they turned to Google.  First they relied on Google to help them with their sales model, but even Google once in a while flops as is the case with Google Print Ads; Google was trying to keep their content farms alive.  Next, Google continued to make improvements with Google News and then Google offered some tough love as to how these newspapers should change their business model to stop whining about all of that great traffic that Google sends them.  However, the significant traffic Google sends them coupled with using Google to backfill unsold inventory still wasn't enough to save them.

Now instead of turning to Yahoo or MSN to fight Google (neither which can), they now potentially have a savior in Apple who can breathe life into their ancient and outdated product; plus they are a formidable competitor to Google.  An Apple Tablet with interactiveness and flashy graphics might bring back subscriptions.  Also, old school agencies actually might be able to start convincing marketers to start to buy ads in newspapers again.  Plus, a Tablet might actually be retro cool as all of us 40+ year olds who actually grew up with paper can be cool reading the news again. 

As much as I love my iPhone it is hard to read news stories and books on it.  The screen is just a tad bit small, but a Tablet might just be able to bridge the gap and give the newspapers an answer to declining revenues that doesn't rely heavily on Google.  I think it actually might work.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

P.S. Here's an interesting article in PC World that actually goes into more detail my lines of thinking regarding Tablet rescuing newspapers.

I'm Into MoFuse for Mobile Blogs

An old friend of mine sent me a link yesterday for MoFuse and I really like it.  While on vacation to Disney it was very hard for me to browse my own website on my Treo and when I wanted to make a comment, I had to email another friend to make a post on my behalf.  Via MoFuse I set up my mobile blog in literally about 5 minutes.  It was fast and painless and believe it or not the user interface was a piece of cake.  Sure, I could spend more time on it to clean it up a bit, but I'm heading to California today and I want to take my blog with me.  Here's my mobile link and a screen shot.

I had a few issues with it, but my biggest one is that it doesn't appear that I can update my TypePad code to automatically redirect to my MoFuse mobile URL, but that's ok for now.  It might be available but I just didn't have the time to play with it.  I also didn't see the need to upgrade to the Pro version for $3 per month, but perhaps I will later.  My final issue is that besides splitting the ad revenue (probably non existent right now), I wonder how they will make money in the long term.  It definitely appears to be modeled after TypePad (proprietary URL, ad revenue, a little subscription), but unlike TypePad they will have to survive long enough for real mobile interactivity.

MoFuse looks like a great play right now for me and I'm glad my friend sent me the link.  If you have a blog, take 5 minutes to set something up.  You'll be glad you did.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

HP's Pretexting Worries Me More Than Whitehouse Wiretapping

Have you been following the story of HP hiring investigators to uncover leaks from the highest levels in their company?  It has been in the Wall Street Journal the past few days and I have to tell you I'm very worried about this.  As you can see from my title of the post, I'm wondering why there isn't bigger outrage over this? 

No matter which side of the political fence you are on, this seems a lot more to worry about than the Government getting phone records or wiretapping people that it suspects has ties to terrorism.  One has to do with national security and the other has to do with keeping a company's private conversations under wraps until it is ready to release it.  On the one side you don't have any victims that have been identified while on the HP pretexting side you have reporters, a reporter's father, and board members that have had their privacy compromised.  Here's a quick summary of the relevant articles I've been reading.

• HP's SEC filing of the resignation of board member Thomas Perkins over HP's investigation into leaks.   It also mentions some form of pretexting was used.
• Perkins letter where he writes how his phone records were hacked and also the letter from AT&T explaining how this occurred.
• CNET reports how the HP Probe snared a third reporter, a father and 6 other reporters in the pretexting scheme.  Let me repeat that again, Steven Shankland's father, Thomas, a semi-retired physicist has his phone records targeted.
• Wall Street Journal has many articles, but the best are Nine Journalists Phone Records Targeted in HP Probe of Leaks and key HP documents.

So how does the pretexting work?  Well according to the AT&T letter that they sent to Thomas Perkins it doesn't seem that difficult.  First, you need a 3rd party who wants to pose as you in order to obtain your records.  In this case it was [email protected] with IP address 69.99.17.80.  Second, [email protected] got a copy of the last 4 digits of Mr. Perkins' social security number and phone number and then established an online bill with AT&T for local.  Mike then tried to establish an online LD billing account but was denied so he called into customer care and had it manually established.  Not bad huh?

I don't know about you, but this worries me a lot.  How many documents do you receive in the mail every month that someone could get a hold of to gain information on your records.  Here are some steps that I'm taking ASAP.

1. No more using Mother's maiden name as a security question.   I'm going with other less obvious ones that people can't find by looking up marriage licenses.
2. Shred all bills and financial statements
3. Open and then shred all offers for credit cards
4. I don't do this, but make sure you use a good version of passwords.  Your first name with last initial is terrible.  Come up with something that can't be figured out in 2 seconds.  I always try and make mine letters, number, and special characters.
5. Be careful who you give your data to online.  I'm still pissed off that Second Life's customer database was recently hacked.
6. I won't be leaking anything to the press from the various boards I'm serving on ;-)

The HP pretexting case should worry you a lot more than the Government using phone records to track potential terrorist activities.  A reporter's dad was targeted....think about that....it could easily happen to you.  And you thought you just needed to make sure you don't call Iran on a regular basis.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Springsteen Gets Hitwised

So, if you haven't figured out by now I'm a huge Bruce Springsteen fan and have been for a long time (1983).  However, with Bruce's change in music direction to a folksy one with the release of the We Shall Overcome:The Seeger Sessions, I found myself on the outside looking in on this Springsteen period.  Gone are the rushes to the store to buy the CD before its official release, the endless games of trying to score good tickets, and the hours spent on my favorite Springsteen fan site Greasylake.  Almost all of my friends feel the same way and then I started wondering, what impact this change in direction has had on the rest of Springsteen's fan base. So, I went about this the way I could using whatever online data I could find at my fingertips.

My first visit was to Google Trends to see what the search activity looks like. However, because the data only goes back to 2004, I can't see what the long term trend looks like.  However, judging from what is there, it looks like Bruce's trend has been level except for the Vote for Change Tour and the recent spike around the Seeger Sessions.  One thing you can see is that the recent spike is not as large as the VFC one and now looks like he is returning to normal levels. 

Next visit was to Alexa to look at reach of the three best sites  - Greasylake, Backstreets.com, and brucespringsteen.net.  The Alexa data was a little more interesting because I can track back to 2002.  What does it show?  Well for Greasylake, Backstreets, and  brucespringsteen.net it shows a drop off in traffic with the most pronounced dip on backstreets.com which looks like a Roger Clemens split-finger fastball falling off the table.

Ok, so the traffic is definitely lower on all of the main sites and one could assume so is the search activity.  However, I was still missing the final piece of the puzzle which was whether there was a change in the fan base.

Enter my final stop which was Bill Tancer over at Hitwise.  I asked Bill to take a look at the data hoping he was a Springsteen fan (or at least a casual fan) and you know what, Bill published a great report over at his blog called Springsteen: The Boss Goes Folksy. I won't steal Bill's thunder too much, but he looked at Backstreets.com's website visitor profile from last year and compared it to this year.  He found that Springsteen's fan base has indeed shifted from an Urban Core profile to an Elite Suburban/Midtown Mix.  Very interesting.

So, traffic is down across the board as is search activity for the change in music direction.  Also, it appears that the current fan base is not made up of the working class people and is more elitist.  My guess is that the activity drop-off was probably planned, but what shocked me the most was the shift to the elite suburban mix due to folk music.  I guess the people that enjoy folk music are not the down to earth people you would have guess and instead seem to have a lot of money.  Hmmm, I wonder what their political profile would be???

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

AT&T - Your World Delivered Sometime in 2008

Tonight I'm writing to you from my hotel room in beautiful Alexandria Virginia where I'll be until tomorrow night after I have a few meetings on political online advertising.  There are so many articles out there on my Bloglines RSS reader, that I hardly know where to start.  I may have to do a marketing rapid fire list, so if I'm still awake after I finish this post, I'll give you one more quick one.

The one article that deserves some attention is one written over at the Wall Street Journal called AT&T Readies Service Uniting Internet and TV and if this is the New, New, New Your World Delivered by AT&T definition of a united offering then perhaps their product management team should visit dictionary.com.  According to the article, AT&T through a new digital product called Homezone will allow users to download for a fee on demand movies (whoopee) as long as they have AT&T DSL and satellite TV from Dish Network.

Yes folks, this is just what you've been waiting for.  This the TV bundled offering that I'm sure you just can't wait to have and now you'll trade in your high-speed digital cable service so you can stick a dish on your house and get slower downloads on DSL all for the privilege of downloading movies for around $3.95 a pop (my guess at the price).  Oh wait, you get some more services with Homezone including the ability to listen to music from Launchcast or view photos on your big screen TV.

The only good news about this bundle is that the movies will be of higher quality than the versions currently found on the internet - you see when you need to make a movie for a small 300x250 pixel box unit you can skimp on the quality , but on the big screen you need quality.  The only problem with this is that you won't technically be on an on-demand platform because it will take some time to download files.  It is too bad because I wrote about this as the challenge for streaming TV shows on the internet in the post called the last few feet to the TV box.  Sure you can get on-demand internet TV shows and movies but there won't be huge demand until you can watch them in high quality on your big HDTV screen.

This offering reminded me of a bad bundle that the old AT&T launched back I think in 1998.  It was crafted by a product manager without any consumer input as I recall.  I don't remember then name of this bundle and I asked a few people but they couldn't remember it either.  What this bundle had was a kitchen sink mentality of putting all of these unrelated AT&T services together and then offering a bottom line discount.  Heck, if AT&T raised chickens back then, they would have thrown that in too. Sadly, AT&T learned after wasting much time, energy, and political capital (I actually berated a product manager who was mishandling the project so badly that after he got into a car accident at lunch time, he still showed up to his meeting with a concussion) that the only good bundle is one where the services are joined together on a single technology device, not wrapped up in a discount package that the customers can see through. 

According to the Journal article there will be a Homezone set top-box that connects to the internet, but this still doesn't qualify as a good bundle.  You still need to have DSL and a Satellite dish to participate in this offering.  It isn't until sometime in 2008 when AT&T finally delivers a TV offering courtesy of a project called Lightspeed that they deliver a TV bundled offer.  Until then, just sit this one out and wait for your neighbor to  get this new world delivered on demand with a 20 minute delay.  Meanwhile, you can watch whatever you want with your DVR.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Phishing in Safety Town

The marketing team at Symantec put together a great site to highlight the dangers of phishing through a fun interactive movie found at www.safetytown.com.  They created a movie that plays in a mythical movie theater in Safety Town complete with a popcorn counter where you can download screen-savers and music, plus of course purchase Norton's 2006 Internet Security.  On a side note, the movie is not that bad, but what I like the most is the overall design and the message they are promoting.

Phishing is a pretty bad problem on the internet these days especially for financial services companies.  In fact about 2 years ago my COO at Harrisdirect Mike Hogan told me "in a few years we won't be able to use email, so figure something out!"  Phishing is when your credentials are stolen by either sending out a fake email with links to a site where you try and log in with your actual password and ID or even worse, the URL is hidden on the clicks and you end up on one of these sites.  In fact, I saw presentations where they had screen shots of sites where these stolen credentials were bought and sold.  BTW - the site in question was busted up by the FBI.  Don't believe me - check out this link from Chase.com

The more you know about phishing the better off you'll be and if you can learn about it in a fun interactive way, so much the better.  Personally, I want to see what happens in the movie.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric