Arthur Freydin’s Blog

Online marketing, gadgets, business, and thoughts.

A buddy of mine called me up the other day and asked me to help him purchase a PC. He stated that he didn’t need anything extravagant and all he used his now defunct PC for is trading in the stock market and surfing the net. His sole requirement was that the computer needed to have a decent amount of RAM to support 2 monitors and a few resource hungry applications running at the same time. No problem.

I accompanied him to our local Best Buy to look at his options, and man did he have options! We were confronted with a sea of black & grey boxes from HP, Acer, Gateway, and Compaq. Here’s the revelation. Neither of us cared what the brand was; as long as the PC had a minimum of 2GB of RAM, he was fine. There are no differentiating factors between any of the PCs aside from price, configuration, and whether or not Best Buy had it in stock.

This brings me to why I never really loved my PC.

The Looks

It’s so hard to love something that is so indistinguishable from everything else. If you had stacked hundreds of PC towers next to each other in a line and through mine into the mix, it would take close inspection to actually pick mine out of the pack. There is only so much a PC manufacturer can do to stand out – manufacturing a cleverly hidden media card reader or replacing a side panel with see-through glass is not innovation. It’s a lame attempt at punching a customer hard enough for them to give their box a passing look.

The Operating System

I can probably reuse the above example in describing the operating system. Windows XP is not exciting, it suffices a need that doesn’t over-deliver. It looks identical on every machine, no matter who manufacturers it (Sony’s desktops may look a bit different on a first boot thanks to all the bloatware). After you boot into XP, you forget what brand your PC is until you reach for the power button to turn it back off. And let’s not forget Windows Vista here. Sure, Windows Vista looks a bit different than Windows XP but is it really worth it? In fact, Microsoft has been consistently extending Windows XP expiration dates because of how much users hate Vista!

The Community

When was the last time that someone referred to an HP community? How many times have you heard people exclaiming that they loved their Acer? People don’t love their PCs. How could you love something if you don’t know its name? There is not a single PC manufacturer that differentiates themselves enough from the pack that would enable a user to justify their admiration. Their HP does exactly the same thing as their neighbor’s Dell.

The Buying Experience

I’ll go back to my opening story for this one. My buddy and I decided to approach a salesman to discuss some options. Keep in mind here that Best Buy salespeople make no commission whatsoever so his recommendations were less biased. In suggesting a PC, he paid no mention to the manufacturer and solely focused on finding one that had at least 2GB of RAM and was in stock. He had found a few contenders and then begun to narrow them down by which one had the best offer and came with a decent monitor. When asked what differentiated the computers from each other, he proceeded to read from the specs sheet in front of the PC.

The Conclusion

PC’s are just not that exciting. You get one when you need it and it fullfills a need. You never learn its name, find out where it came from, or how it gets along with your family. It’s very difficult on the first date(s), doesn’t pay for itself, and never kisses you back. How is it that we can have so many manufacturers using the same exact skin (operating system) that have not figured out a way to differentiate themselves from everyone else?

Let’s take Windows Mobile as a quick example. Manufacturers do all they can to differentiate themselves by releasing handsome hardware and some have truly succeeded! However, one manufacturer took that one step farther. Not only did they create some of the sexiest handsets we have ever seen, but they also reskinned the operating system in a much sleeker presentation. It’s no secret why HTC sells so many damn Windows Mobile phones – it’s different from the rest!

Why is the iMac so damn successful? Well, let’s see: it’s beautiful, easy, and it’s not Windows XP! Here we have an alternative to an otherwise drab set of look-alikes. It’s no wonder why people that want a Mac will settle for nothing but. In cellphones, HTC has carved a name for itself by differentiating its hardware and skinning Microsoft’s software. What PC manufacturer has the balls to do it on a PC?

Stay with me folks, I don’t think I’m too crazy with that title.

SanDisk launched a new line of 1GB microSD cards that will contain high quality (320kbps) DRM-free MP3s of full albums pre-loaded. While this sounds like yet another scam for the music industry to save itself from the decline in cd sales, there may actually be a strategy back there – even if SanDisk doesn’t realize it.

SanDisk will likely entice users to purchase these memory cards by solely highlighting the music on the card itself. This may be the wrong way to approach this. My way would be a bit less invasive and obvious.

• Start distributing these things with the premise that you are getting something that you were already looking for (a memory card for your cellphone or MP3 player for instance) but with a bit of an added bonus. 
• Work with wireless cariers to bundle the cards with new phone purchases. Those users that just purchased their multimedia-ready phone may start unpacking the phone before they leave the damn store and will almost definitely shove that MP3 packed memory card into the phone.
• Use the slotMusic name for embeddable MicroSD cards into the cellphones & MP3 players. This has been talked about quite a bit and seems like a logical progression. This would be similar to Nokia’s “Comes With Music” functionality.
• Instead of pre-loading albums on to the memory cards, create categories such as rock, rap, pop, top20, etc. Less and less people are actually downloading albums these days.

No, not RSS feeds. I’m talking about social feeds like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

Fred Wilson’s post on feeds got me thinking. He talks about letting marketing into social feeds through accessible APIs by the networks. I’m not opposed the idea providing that there is interactive, relevant content associated with the marketing – something that grabs my interest and I might actually want to interact with.

While services like Friendfeed and Plaxo have been aggregating feeds from these social networking services, what about the other side of the coin? Let’s say that I have multiple social networking accounts: Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook. How do I update my status on all three of these? I’d have to login into each and every one of those and paste my update individually. Time consuming and impractical. What about online mavens that use 6 or 7 services, and all support status updates?

I have accounts on quite a few social networks and I don’t remember more than half of them. I’m sure that I’d be able to leverage them more if I can go to a single service that can send out my status to all of these networks without me actually having to log in to all of them which can take 20-30 minutes.

I think the time has come to think of a solution. Maybe then I’d actually use Twitter.

Go get it. My download just finished

Ruh, roh. Looks like the one application that I had running all day on Firefox doesn’t like Google Chrome. I use CentralDesktop for collaboration at work so clearly this is an application that I need 100% of the time. I guess my goal of not opening up Firefox all day is no longer a reality.

On a side note, did you see how I referred to CentralDesktop as an application? Before Chrome, I would have just called it a website. Interesting.

I’m writing this post right in Google’s new browser – Chrome. It was officially announced here, via the Google blog. Here are my initial thoughts:

• It’s crazy fast on web applications like Wordpress, Omniture, Gmail, etc.
• More screen real estate devoted to the actual webpage rather than status bar, toolbar, etc.
• Remembers usernames/passwords like a dream – all you have to do is begin to type the username and it automatically fills in the remainder of the username and associated passwords
• Loads Flash animations much quicker
• Gathered all Firefox history, cookies, logins, etc so it’s easy to hit the ground running in a new browser
• Very pleasing design
• Status bar on the bottom only appears when it needs to
• The “omnibar” address bar is awesome!
• No title bar

Was activating my new iPhone (more on this later) in iTunes and saw this gem before syncing my music:

Clearly Apple doesn’t want its users blaming them for not being able to make ringtones out of their purchased songs from the iTunes Store.

I usually bypass liveblogging posts from online marketing conferences since most of that info gets covered by day-to-day reads in my RSS reader. I typically go to the conferences for the networking opportunities (or free drinks) unless I come across a really interesting session.

But what about all those other readers that can’t make it to the conferences but know they can benefit from the sessions? Since they can’t make it to the conference, there is really no better alternative but to follow the sessions through livebloggers like Lisa Barone and Lee Oden. The readers count on these livebloggers to provide them with the most updates to almost every session in the conference.

My question is this: How many livebloggers pass the readership metrics back to the conference organizers? Or, let’s rephrase that question: How many conference organizers [politely] ask the livebloggers for this info? Considering that most companies that don’t consider online marketing as a 1st priority, they may not want to shell out almost $1,000 a /day plus air travel to have their employees attend the conference. That means that most attendees may actually be “virtually” attendending these conferences.

I’m sure that conference organizers like Kevin Ryan (although a bit off-the-wall at times) find attendance metrics very useful and determine future sessions based on this data. So why not get the full picture instead of just understanding the paid attendees physically attending?

I’ve been using a BlackBerry 8820 for almost a year now and have found that it is perfect for my needs: email, calendar, texting, phone. Even with that aside, I can’t avoid the lure of new, prettier cellphones to potentially off-seat my trusty BlackBerry. I don’t know why I do this since I am fully aware that the BlackBerry does absolutely everything that I need it to do and then some. What can I say, I love gadgets.

Some of you may be aware of that strange iPhone 3G device that reared its head on July 11th. Naturally, I lined up and shared my story. Aside from the battery draining issues, I loved my new toy and wrote off the battery performance as a victim of its own creation. I played with the iPhone all damn weekend and found it an absolute joy to use. Come Monday however, it was an entirely different story. The iPhone 3G was clearly not ready for true business use since it lacked many business-centric features such as cut-and-paste (duh), calendar invites, no sub-folder sync, no extension dialing, and so on (I know that only BlackBerries really offer some of these features but keep reading, i’ll address it). So, no more iPhone for me and it’s back to the BlackBerry I went.

I’ve also tried a handful of Windows-based devices to no avail. While most of them offer a decent feature set, I find that all lacked in one or more major areas. Lets take HTC for example. Their devices can be downright gorgeous at times but are always hampered by the Windows Mobile OS. Windows Mobile introduces serious hang-ups, downright crashes, random restarts, and security issues. Because the operating system is the root of the problem, these issues carry over to Palm, Motorola, Samsung, and any other device that go with the WinMo route. Also, many of the Windows Mobile devices tend to go for a longer horizontal keyboard which makes single-hand typing impossible. I’ve tried alot of WinMo devices over the past few years and have never really had much luck with them.

The closest replacement candidate that I have seen is the Nokia E71. The device has gotten awesome reviews by almost every respectable online publication so I was naturally curious enough to try it. I purchased my Nokia E71 at Nokia’s flagship store in NYC and immediately tore it open once I got home. Having had uninspiring experiences in the past with the business features of QWERTY phones in the past, the first thing that I did was connect to my company’s Exchange server. The process was relatively smooth but, once complete, I already had reasons to miss my BlackBerry. A few of my contacts did not sync over, no extension dialing, no sub-folder syncing (or viewing for that matter), no way to invite attendees to meetings, etc. Also, the Symbian operating system used by Nokia phones just lacks polish entirely. There are strange abbreviations (mangment?), convoluted menus, grammar mistakes, and way too many features such as video calling that are just not available in the USA. Overall, the device looks and feels amazing but lacks quite a few key features that I have grown to depend on in my BlackBerry.

With all that said, would I still try other QWERTY (love typing that) devices in the future? Probably, but it is becoming more apparent that no one can replicate what RIM has done to make their devices the true king in business. I don’t care how many manufacturers decide to release a device that targets the BlackBerry marketshare; there is just no equivalent to a BlackBerry other than a new phone directly from them.

I was cruising on my way to work this morning, listening to 92.3 KROCK in New Jersey and heard a radio commercial that kinda cought my eye (ear?). AT&T was advertising a website that was said to stream Lollapalooza live on August 1-3rd. Interesting.

Judging by the AT&T Blue Room site, it looks like that is exactly what they are going to do, and then some! They will stream Lollapalooza via a webcast on said days. Not only are they using such new-world (to them) technologies like webcasts, but they are also posting updates on Twitter!

It looks like the live webcast will be their major marketing stunt to get people to notice them. Everything else they offer is standard fare for a video/music portal. I’m not really sure how this ties to their core offerings but AT&T service advertisements are splayed all over the site. Seriously, they’re advertising 3 seperate services on one damn page.

From their official release (the service has actually been around for quite a while):

The blue room is part of a larger initiative in which AT&T is leveraging innovative tactics to connect consumers to its products and services. Through blue room, AT&T is able to reach demographics, particularly the highly coveted youth market, which are generally more difficult to reach through traditional programs.

Last year in August, it looks like AT&T’s Blue Room has drummed up some scorn from Pearl Jam when it last streamed the Lollapalooza event. Apparently, AT&T inadvertently censored Pearl Jam’s anti-George Bush comments.

Better luck this year I guess.