picklemania

disclaimer – my opinion, not that of anyone i do work for.
/me hugs his free speech blanket.

There’s plenty of rants going on about AT&T’s inability to accomodate services in the new iPhone 3GS. That’s not what this is about. This is about me being selfish, greedy, and materialistic. I want a new phone.

“For non-qualified customers, including existing AT&T customers who want to upgrade from another phone or replace an iPhone 3G, the price with a new two-year agreement is $499 (8GB), $599 (16GB), or $699 (32GB).”

Wait. What? You’re kidding, right? Oh. You’re not. And yes, I get the subsidy thing. You need the incentive to attract new customers. I don’t get the “but we don’t need an incentive to keep our existing customers” thing. What’s that all about?

Hi AT&T, I’m an early adopter. Nice to meet you. I buy new tech gadgets. A lot. Almost obsessively. I’ve had a real hard time not wanting a Palm Pre, or *gasp* a Nokia E71 or *dreamy* N97. The main driver behind that hesitation is my happiness with my iPhone, even at the cost of being locked into a pretty horrible AT&T network. Sorry, it is. Voicemail delivery a week later? Awesome. SMS delayed delivery? Sweet! Yeah, these aren’t the incentives I was looking for. Maybe something like a reasonable upgrade path.

Oh, and before you go into the whole “cell phone customers have the highest attrition rate” thing, ever stop and ask why? Yeah, uhm, let’s try and learn from the GM’s of the world. Let’s listen to our customers before the ship starts to sink. Please? (Spoiler alert: All we want is a reasonable upgrade path. Second time I’ve said that. Resonable upgrade path. Reasonable upgrade path. Reasonable upgrade path.)

Sorry.

Well, thanks AT&T for finally giving me the incentive to break the shackles. Look, AT&T biz bozos, I’m still a customer, and believe it or not, you still need to work for my retention and loyalty. I’d gladly renew a contract for a price break on a new generation. Hell, I’d even gladly pay a slightly inflated price. But $400 more than the MSRP for new customers? Fuck. You. This is the sound of me taking my business elsewhere. Can you hear me now? I give you until June 18th.

Oh, and for the AT&T bean counters that messed up their math?

• Cancel AT&T contract = $200
• New customer contract + 32gb iPhone = $299
• Total out of pocket cost = $499

For those reading from the AT&T office, that’s a price break of $200 for breaking your contract (to the $699 unqualified non-qualified customer upgrade). Don’t tempt me.

BRB, heading to the Verizon store and Sprint store to see who wants my business. AT&T doesn’t.

Edit: I have two AT&T accounts, one through work (primary) and one personal (hardly used). My personal account is eligible for an upgrade to the new phone…for $18 (plus phone costs). AT&T, pull your head out of your ass. If you’re going to let some existing subscribers upgrade, why not all? And, uh, $18? Wow. I guess I’m only surprised it’s not $18.29, to be precise(ly screwed up). Check your eligibility at http://www.att.com/iphone

I really wanted to plug the fact that @COStartups has just launched a new seed fund. Unfortunately, if I mention that account in my tweet, nobody in my stream will see it. I want to plug @COStartups, want others to know about him, but now, I can’t.

“Twitter: Putting the anti-social into social media since 2007.”

But wait – there’s more!

So here’s what we’re planning to do. First, we’re making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account. This will bring back some serendipity and discovery and we can do this very soon.

http://blog.twitter.com/2009/05/we-learned-lot.html

Uhm, by following which account? The account that get’s mentioned, or the account that originates the message (I refuse to say tweeted. Damnit!).

Call me nuts, but based on Biz Stone’s recent blog entries, his attention is more on being acquired by Google Facebook Apple Google. Afterall, the blog is powered by blogger.

Some fancy pants from Rackspace is here to give a talk. He’s Chief Strategy Officer or something. Neat.

• cloud is a movement AND a technology
• cloud is ready for everyone, but not to be used for everything
• cloud is part of a computing strategy.

Not a believer of cloud (movement)?

• $1,200/sq ft for tier 1 datacenter (+ servers)
• Increasing computing demands, decreasing forecasting ability. In other words, IT underperformance is either going to bottleneck innovation and business objectives, or it’s going to make it die.

It’s a technology. Here are the requirements:

• Pooled computing, provisioning powered by software.
• IaaS (Amazon EC2, cloud servers, cloud files) is closer to dedicated hosting. Very raw.
• PaaS (App Engine, Windows Azure, Cloud Sites) is closer to SaaS.

Onto Q/A. My attention span is shot.

API is a strategic decision to achieve business objectives. Companies are building ecosystems to further their business model. API is a distribution tool, which commands it to be somewhere on the business side.

Aside from that, a boring presentation. Sorry guys.

API is a strategic decision to achieve business objectives. Companies are building ecosystems to further their business model. API is a distribution tool, which commands it to be somewhere on the business side.

Aside from that, a boring presentation. Sorry guys.

Trends Driving Context Automation

• Cloud Computing
• Extensible Browsers
• Internet Identities

The glue is the intersection of all of them.

• Browser as a Platform – Browsers tie web sessions together. Both IE and Firefox have found that they can build ecosystems around offering extendibility. Firefox has 1B downloads since 2005, or about 12/sec. Mobile doesn’t have this extensibility – Safari is the dominant web browser.
• The Identity Shift – the old model was ad hoc, now we’re looking at relationships and trust stemming from identity. Identity also provided the keyhole to provide individualized content, because identity is unique.
• The cloud – it gives you machine independence and increased security (ed: bah’waah?). I call BS – his example was “if there’s malicious code running on  a client, it’s hard to turn it off.” Well, we just haven’t seen malicious code hit the cloud, but we will.

Kyntex – the marketing part. A client has a computer, the computer has a browser. Browser extension talks to a rule engine and end site.

That’s all I got. Work just called, had to bolt out.

INCRWD – Experiences are most powerful when shared. “The behavior of checking in still fundamentally sucks.” INCRWD uses clues from around the web to automagically track you down.

CONNKTR – Best path to saying hello. Anyone in sales knows that cold calling sucks. LinkedIn is one graph, Facebook is another. CONNKTR crosses networks, but not all contacts are equal.

BUZZY – monitors the web for relevant (to you) emerging memes, the provides a streamlined response interface.

Turns out none of these services exist, but they could be.

What is glue? Brad Feld, Seth Levine, and Eric Nolin asked “What if all applications moved to the web?” Started finding intersections around data portability, context.

Josh Elman, Facebook Platform
Open protocols, open standards. Connect and transmit interoperable data. Not going to talk about servers, but person to person. Afterall, we’re really trying to connect people to people. People who have used FBConnect have seen 20-30% user registration growth.

How does Facebook think about glue?
Instead of asking “what did you do this weekend” you can ask “how was that family BBQ you went to?”

Connecting people
Friends, family, coworkers, public profiles, all spoke and hubbed around you. It begins with one person and shared experiences. The best example is probably Obama’s inaguration. Like numbers? 2M status updates through CNN Live feed. 4k updates per minute. 8.5k spike of updates when obama began speech. Wow.

The Social Stack
identity (authentic representation of you) -> friends (the people and connections you care about) -> share (opening up to the people around you).

The real you changes day to day. You’re the same person, but you might be wearing different hats each day.

Friends – discovering them on other sites is so much easier when it’s Facebook Connect’d.

Sharing (everywhere)- it’s just too plain hard. Email a friend means you have to know which email address to send it, plus hope that the email isn’t going to be captured and resold.

the ante has been upped on the fail whale. nice work, twitpic (on the fail whale page, not on running a reliable service).