Dev::Blog

So there are 31 million homes in the USA without internet access. Actually, there are more homes than that, but these homes in particular have no plans to get online in the next 12 months, according to a recent survey.

I’m gonna put on my Richard Dawson hat for a moment and ask what you think the top reasons for this is.

Who here thinks it’s a question of availability? Well, since this is access of any kind, and dial up still exists, somewhere, you’re wrong. Only 3% of the respondents gave this as a reason.

OK, then it’s got to be affordability of ‘net access, right? Well, while 8% said they couldn’t afford ISP fees, a larger 14% couldn’t afford a computer.

It turns out the number one reason people aren’t going online if they haven’t already, with a score of 44%, is that the internet isn’t very interesting.

Wuzzah?

I remember my dad buying his first computer in the late ’90s simply because there were URLs showing up at the end of car commercials and he thought he might have been missing out on something - that’s right, more advertising was a killer app once upon a time. It seems that the hold outs have higher standards.

Hmmm, maybe DRM-free music downloads from EMI will be the lure that finally brings ‘em in. (What, it’s not like I was going to spend a whole post echoing what everyone else was saying about EMI, but I had to participate somehow…)

I just read that SourceGear was starting a new magazine ad campaign consisting of full page comic book stories. I was kinda hoping that the ads would be copies of the Hostess snack foods ads from the 70’s, but it so far it doesn’t look like the hero’s going to throw copies of version control software at the bad guys and cart them off to prison while they’re engrossed in effective software development. Sigh…

Technorati Tags: SourceGear, Advertising

Nat Torkington: “Mike Loukides pointed out that movement in salaried labour means the industry is booming. Similarly, when people like Simon Willison, Matt Biddulph, and Alex Russell all return to contracting from salaried employment then you know that there’s a ton of demand.”

Figures that this would be when we’re looking to hire, huh?

The local computer retailer chain has started a couple of new initiatives in their advertising - watch for these trends in your home town!

For starters, dual core CPUs are now being advertised in “equivalent speeds” derived by multiplying the processor speed by 2 to reflect the two cores inside. Of course, that assumes that both processors are loaded evenly (and fully) for that to work, but the whole megahertz business has gotten pretty abstract over the years…

I’ve only heard this second hand, but apparently they also managed to lower their price on laptops by… wait for it… excluding the battery.

Of course, none of these practices would necessarily deter me from buying anything from them, but I’d sure check the packing slip carefully before signing anything.

Then again, when I see that they’re advertising “Genuine Microsoftl [sic] ® Windows Vista” as an upgrade, I’m not altogether sure if it’s a typo…

Technorati Tags: Marketing

Rogue Amoeba’s got a great piece up about the costs of exhibiting at MacWorld, which looks like it ran to around $12K for them. They’ve got a handy rule of thumb for making the “go/no go” decision: “Your annual revenue should be at least 10 times your exhibiting cost“.

This reminded me about a similar essay by Eric Sink regarding his experience at Tech Ed 2004.

I had a booth at a (non technical) show last fall, and it looks like something else is coming up in April. My biggest bit of advice to add to the pool for people who don’t do this kind of thing regularly: get help with staffing the booth, and drink lots of water. Even if you go straight to bed after the first day, if you work the whole shift you’ll feel incredibly hung over the next morning, and it’s all downhill in the days to come. That doesn’t help sales and PR much. Really.

Technorati Tags: Trade shows

What the heck, let’s make it an Apple day for posts - Mike Zornek has posted a summary of the first 100 days of his first software product’s sales. Billable is an invoice tracking application for OS X. According to Mike, his support time went through the roof in the first week, but in a good way:

When it came to the actual launch I vividly remember spending the first week answering tons of email (practically full time). Almost all of it was feature requests; very little of it was actual support. Since the launch I get a similar, but smaller, stream of feedback with very little support issues.

Congratulations, Mike! While I don’t use Macs as much as I used to (and use FreshBooks for my invoicing), Ange does freelance photography and this might be right up her alley.

Technorati Tags: Billable, invoicing, Mac Development

Via Global Nerdy, I found out about Aime Street. This might be old news to everyone else, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it. Basically it’s a music store for independent musicians with a unique pricing model - the songs start out as free, but then once they gain some traction (via user recommendations), they start to cost money (capped at 98 cents). The idea’s explained by one of the founders in this comment.

This is a neat answer to the chicken/egg problem facing indie musicians, and I suppose it provides some incentive for users to try more music out while it’s still cheap/free. What else could the model apply to?

Technorati Tags: Amie Street

I swear, I’m getting to work! Hey, can’t I spend 2 minutes and 59 seconds to watch Ze Frank?

The ad at the end of this one caught my eye, and not just because it had a big picture of Go Daddy girl Candice Michelle - the promo code for 10% off was “revver,” which happens to be the name of one of them there social video sites.

Now, who got the kickback for the bonus “product placement,” Go Daddy or Ze?

Technorati Tags: Ze Frank, Go Daddy, Ads

Two quick thoughts today:

1) If you’re a company offering consulting services in the field of business development, you probably shouldn’t do your website in Microsoft Office.  I’m not being a design snob here (note the default WordPress template in use here); I just figure you’d want your site to work on the other 15% of the browsers besides Internet Explorer.

2) If you’re a company doing just about anyting online, the Mix 06 sessions are available online for free and are well worth a look.

When mobile companies say that there isn’t much of a market for the whole mobile browsing experience, it really isn’t that hard to figure out why that might be - I just saw a Bell Mobility ad in the paper with a $20 plan that included something called “Mobile Browser Lite” - a whopping 100Kb per month of data, with a 5 cent per 100Kb charge for overage. Wow. That means that you could read this blog 3 times a month on your phone for no additional charge! Yeah, that’ll get them screaming for the service, all right…

This reminds me of Bell’s lame WiFi experiment. They picked two pilot locations for a free hotspot. The first was at Union Station in Toronto, which wasn’t a bad idea, except that they put it somewhere where there weren’t many seats (and most people were commuters where were really near their internet-powered workplaces), and the other was at some park in Kingston, Ontario. There was some usage (there weren’t many hotspots available at the time, and certainly not many free ones), but amazingly, once they started charging for it, demand dropped off.

Bell Marketing is awesome. I bet they could find a way to prove that there’s no demand for free money.