July, 2008

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31
Jul 08

About Phone Support

Sarah from 37signals says phone support is a bad experience:

Phone calls require you to stop what you’re doing, go to a quiet place, and concentrate. It requires waiting on the line, listening to hold music, being transferred and possibly having the call lost, all so you have to start over again. You can’t share a phone call with your colleagues, you can’t get someone else’s input or feedback.

…

We get requests every day from people who don’t think email support will cut it and demand a phone number to call us. Their worries are assuaged when they get a reply from me in less than 15 minutes that is informative, helpful and obviously written by a human being. It’s absolutely 100% possible to provide excellent customer care without a phone or phone number, and our company proves that daily.

Their support ticketing system? Gmail.

 

 

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29
Jul 08

On the Price of Gas

Thomas L Friedman on the price of gas:

When a person is addicted to crack cocaine, his problem is not that the price of crack is going up. His problem is what that crack addiction is doing to his whole body. The cure is not cheaper crack, which would only perpetuate the addiction and all the problems it is creating. The cure is to break the addiction.

Ditto for us. Our cure is not cheaper gasoline, but a clean energy system. And the key to building that is to keep the price of gasoline and coal — our crack — higher, not lower, so consumers are moved to break their addiction to these dirty fuels and inventors are moved to create clean alternatives.

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27
Jul 08

Reticence to Change

Hugh Greenway contemplates resistance to change and learning in his post “You can lead a horse to water…”

“I can’t learn a foreign language” or “I don’t do technology” generally means, “I’ve had a bad experience trying to learn”. Of course this is often masked by the standard excuses, “I don’thave time”, “How are we going to make money out of it?” etc.

He links change with an openness to learning, and learning with an acceptance of occasional failure. 

Or to put it another way, if education and learning are not central to your environment then you are likely very risk-adverse, and there will be little or no change – change for better, or change for worse.

 

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25
Jul 08

CDC Software Withdraws IPO

This is just a little news blip on our favorite software company, CDC Software (makers of Pivotal):

Chinese software developer CDC Corp said it filed with U.S. regulators to withdraw the planned initial public offering of its software arm, CDC Software, in view of the downturn in the U.S. stock market.

Doesn’t look like the last year has been that great for them. More finance info over at Google Finance.

 

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17
Jul 08

The iPhone Upgrade

Previously, I remarked:

This one is a little on the edge of “tried and true”, but I think it’ll prove itself out in time: Get an iPhone. I’ve had mine for a year and depend on it every day in a dozen different ways. They sell now for only $199. I’d buy it again in heartbeat.

This past week Apple had some opening-day glitches with their 20-country launch of the second-generation iPhone, the iPhone 3G. But despite the glitches, this is the way it should be. Not because of the glitches, but because beyond the 3G hardware, Apple released the 2.0 software as a free upgrade to all original iPhone users.

This means that for free (and only a year after I bought it in the first place), I now have a phone that has many more features. My favorite is probably the App Store (3rd party application support): 

Applications designed for iPhone are nothing short of amazing. That’s because they leverage the groundbreaking technology in iPhone — like the Multi-Touch interface, the accelerometer, GPS, real-time 3D graphics, and 3D positional audio. Just tap into the App Store and choose from over 500 applications ready to download now.

So tell me – what new features did you get in your cell-phone, only a year after you first bought it?

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