Apparently Apple sold 3.75 million iPhones in 2007 however AT&T has only activated 2 million iPhone accounts. So what happened to that missing 1.75 million? According to Forbes it’s estimated a majority of those unaccounted for iPhones were probably hacked, unlocked and probably in use on some other network. That’s nearly half of all iPhones! Obviously there’s a problem with the one carrier option that Apple and AT&T rolled out with. Apple hopes to reach it’s goal of selling 10 million iPhones in 2008 - a very aggressive goal which they might be able to reach, but losing the extra revenue on the service plans has to be killing them. While AT&T was critical in helping Apple launch the iPhone It’s clear the long term business model is not sustainable and I doubt making users signup for an AT&T plan at point of purchase will go over well with consumers.
This cracks me up. Following Stephen Colbert’s attempt at running for president a few months back, I just read today in an article on CNN titled “Colbert earns ‘appropriate place’ at Smithsonian” that his portrait is now actually hanging in the Hall of Presidents. Or maybe I should say it’s hanging close to the Hall of Presidents. Erin M has a nice snapshot of the portrait up on Flickr.
Yesterday was MacWorld Expo 2008 San Francisco and as was speculated by mac rumor specialists Apple released a new notebook called the Macbook Air. It’s a super sleek machine weighing in at 3 pounds. It has a 13.3 inch screen, and it’s 3/4 of an inch thick. It’s so thin folks it even fits into an envelope!
In the ongoing battle of copyright infringement the New York Times informs that AT&T and a few other I.S.P.’s have started to discuss the possibility of filtering for pirated material. The news comes from a panel at the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) where a few third party filtering companies along with NBC, Microsoft, AT&T and others discussed the minimal success of preventing users from sharing and downloading copyrighted material. Currently, I.S.P.’s act as an open “data highway” allowing users to download and distrubute anything without looking at it’s contents.
From a consumer standpoint this sounds terrible. Just what average joe customer needs, his over priced I.S.P. starting to act like big brother. The real issue that keeps getting swept under the rug is that our concepts of copyrighted material are outdated and need to adjust to reflect the change in technology and world we live in today. Of course the record industry, media conglomerates and general owners of copyrighted material would beg to differ and this will continue to be a bloody fight for years to come.
For those of you who are familiar with the old Obama site that went up early last year you should check back in because some time around the Iowa caucus it seems they launched a website redesign. For those of you who were not familiar with the first site, check this post out to see screen shots of the nicely designed original and read about it’s deterioration over the year.
Anyone who lives in Chicago in our around Wicker Park has probably seen Mean Gene the Dancing Machine. Gene Lee was that crazy dancing character often found at the three way intersection of North, Damen and Milwaukee cranking out out some footwork while jamming to his headphones. According to his MySpace page and other rumors on net, he’s passed away. I have to admit every time i’ve seen the guy he’s brought a smile to my face so hopefully his passing is a prank and not reality.
Anyone who’s ever created an HTML email knows what a pain it can be to get the document to render properly across the numerous email clients out there. Because of the lack of standards for email clients to follow HTML emails are a nightmare to develop and I personally try to avoid designing them at all costs. In the past I’ve used Campaign Monitor which I found to be one of the best resource in easing the burden.
It turns out the guys behind Campaign Monitor in addition to running a great business are trying to do something about HTML email standards too. Taking a page from the Web Standards Project (WaSP) book they’ve created the Email Standards Project which attempts to do some of the same great things for HTML email that WaSP did for the Web. You can help by spreading the word.
A couple weeks back U.S. News published an article titled “Best Careers of 2008” that highlights a list of 31 jobs the magazine considers to have strong outlooks for the future and overall high employee job satisfaction. Although the definition of Usability Specialist by U.S. News is somewhat generic (most likely to include multiple industries ) It’s still great to see a web related career on the list. I’ve always wondered if people outside of the web development community were even aware of usability as a profession and it’s importance to a good consumer experience. It seems so often that even seasoned professionals will often times discount the importance of the user experience so it’s great to see usability getting some recognition from the outside world.
On a somewhat related note, i ran across a new tool called GigZig, from the Payscale people. It’s a “career path explorer” that allows users to type in a career title and see what positions people have held 5 years prior to that title and what positions they might hold 5 years in the future. The tool attempts to give a rough estimation of how many people have followed a certain path by illustrating with little people icons. Using “User Experience Specialist” as an example on GigZig we can see that in the past those people have been Web Designers or Developers and in the future they are Product Managers, Directors. Nothing earth shattering about that profession’s results but the tool could be really useful for those looking to get into certain professions if they’re unclear of what path to follow. The data is a little skimpy at the moment but product is still in beta so hopefully more people take the surveys so the experience is more robust.
This cracks me up. Following Stephen Colbert’s attempt at 
Anyone who’s ever created an HTML email knows what a pain it can be to get the document to render properly across the numerous email clients out there. Because of the lack of standards for email clients to follow HTML emails are a nightmare to develop and I personally try to avoid designing them at all costs. In the past I’ve used Campaign Monitor which I found to be one of the best resource in easing the burden.
On a somewhat related note, i ran across a new tool called 
