Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

I’ve had this sitting on my Mac for over a week. So, when I say I’ve had the iPhone since last Friday, I mean I’ve had it since the day it was officially launched. Let me know what you think of the new iPhone and/or the latest firmware. I’ve heard a lot of bad reports on the new software - I’ve experienced a lot of problems - ranging from slowness to email not working from time to time.

James Whatley wrote a post where he describes why he feels Carephone Warehouse should employ an evangelist. I tried to leave a comment but the blog has a horrendous registration process which I got bored with. So instead, I’ve decided to publish my comment here.

I’d rather encourage all staff into becoming evangelists, but that will only happen when they care enough about the brand to become brand guardians. Having nominated evangelists only works when they’re evangelising specific technologies - like you get with companies such as Microsoft and Apple. By demonstrating that you care to educate and listen to people about your technology, you end up doing the marketing bit indirectly and in a much more discrete manner.

My advice to Carphone Warehouse is for the senior management team to take stock of public perception and put in place a plan to change the culture across the company. They have a serious culture issue which I believe is management’s failure to evolve as the company changed direction over the past few years. Only then will staff care enough to treat customers as customers and not second class citizens.

Carephone should consider hiring new management, not tech evangelists. Change must come from the top, even if instigated and encouraged by those on the ground.

Read previous posts about my Carphone Warehouse rants.

Sign up to Wubud.

We setup an account for Wubud on Twitter a few months ago to raise some awareness for the company and promised to give away a Mac Air in a prize draw as soon as the account reached 5,000 followers. Numbers increased each time we talked about Wubud but they stagnated as soon as we stopped. So, in light of this and to ensure we give away the lovely kit on this side of the next millennium, we’ve decided to solicit your opinion.

Should we change the rules so that the Air is given away when my personal Twitter account reaches 5,000 followers, or, don’t change anything and continue the competition on the basis of Wubud followers?

By changing to my personal account you no longer subscribe to a product, which I personally don’t particularly like anyway. It will also mean the Air is likely to be given away more quickly as I have just over 1,300 followers. On the down side to changing, it might annoy those who signed up to Wubud and who couldn’t care less about my personal ramblings outside of that particular product.

[Update: if the majority go with the 'change', we'll add everyone who's following Wubud into the prize draw to guarantee that their name is in at least once for their effort]

What do you think? We promise to go with the majority and the final outcome will be announced on the 21st of July 2008.

Feel free to leave your general opinion about product vs person twitter accounts.

This post was inspired by an email I received this morning about an event entitled “Managing the Consumer Clamour“.

The digital industry appears to be split into two in my opinion. The first half is made up of those who don’t talk about ‘managing the consumer’ because they understand the art of conversation - instead, they talk about how to enable a better conversation between brand and consumer. In fact, the best of them aren’t talking about it at all, they’re just doing it as it comes natural.

The other half is made up of old media - they’re still talking about ‘managing the consumer’ and trying to figure out how to control what they say.

You can’t manage the consumer clamour. What you can do, is influence it by making sure you get involved in the conversation. It’s cheaper and easier than ever, with tools readily available to help everyone become a publisher/creator - enabling them to influence the perception of a particular brand. This is normally done through personal blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and other forms of public arenas where it’s easy to publish an opinion for everyone to see.

What should you do?

Stop talking about trying to manage what people say. It’s impossible. In fact, trying to control what people say is worse than doing nothing. Instead, talk about how to get involved by listening to what the crowd has to say and then react accordingly. Soon, you will become proactive by asking the crowd what they think upfront.

If only I was Hugh McLeod. I could capture all of this and more, in one cartoon. Here’s a post by Hugh that’s relevant though.

GeoHot, the creator of first iPhone hack has recently launched a Web site. It’s unknown whether he’ll release a hack for the new 2.0 firmware though. The iPhone-dev team responded to the launch of the site with venom. Not sure why as it’s a compliment that others want to copy their work - especially because they’re all hackers. It doesn’t make sense for a hacker to complain about another hacker hacking their work. Does it?

Here’s the dev teams response

Rush, rush, rush….
Over the last year we’ve discovered some interesting things about the software used in the iPhone. These “hacks” , “exploits” and “techniques”, or whatever you want to call them, are valuable - not only from a financial perspective (so scummy people can sell unlocking software) but also from a strategic point of view. Think of it like a game of poker, showing your hand too early would certainly make you lose “the game”.

The majority of iPhone users are not technical - they want an easy, one-stop, simple application that will allow them to quickly and painlessly unlock their phone. If we were to release a crummy command-line based tool that does the immediate job that everyone is screaming for, we’d only end up in the following situation:

1) The technique is released to the world and people use this technique to quickly create GUI apps that they charge cash-money for, or re-release something hacky and horrible that bricks lots of devices, or for example disables the Wi-Fi that then causes more stress that ultimately comes back to us

2) The technique is exposed to the vendor, allowing them to locate and repair the security hole. Sometimes these security holes span product versions, for example: between the first generation and second generation iPhone. In such a case releasing the knowledge in the middle of the product development cycle is pointless and risks the “usefulness” of the technique - especially if there are existing hacks/techniques that work just fine.

The iPhone DevTeam is comprised of a group of people who work together over IRC from various parts of the world. This distributed method of working happens 24 hours a day with people performing tasks in the time that best suits their time-zones. It is a completely self-managing, self-regulating and member-funded organization. Most of us have never met face-to-face and we rarely know real names - in fact, we would more than likely not recognize each other if we walk past one another on the street. Despite this we follow a strict “hacker code”: ground rules by which we all abide.

Perhaps the foremost of these rules is management of knowledge. We keep certain information private, restricted to members of the team only (to help with points 1 and 2 above), and members are entrusted to make sure this secrecy is consistently enforced. This makes the team. Only when there is a majority vote from the team do we make any announcement or release.

So now we come onto Geohot, the self appointed media frontman for last year’s iPhone hacks. Geohot actually worked with us a month or so before the media-circus that he led. Geohot is certainly a bright guy, but he couldn’t abide by rules that I described in the last paragraph and because of this he was asked to leave the team. Of course like any hacker Geohot continued on for his goal.

Using some of our techniques and tools (and some of his) and using his own brain power (and that of an unnamed Russian) he was able to release his hardware hack and demonstrate the first unlocked iPhone to the world, he has also demonstrated other things during the last year and some of those releases have helped us with our work.

We thought that Geohot would have matured somewhat in the last year, but this clearly isn’t the case, as sadly one of the team members has leaked a copy of our exploit to Geohot and he is now using this to try and provoke us into making an early release

So finally, just in case some of you were wondering, we’re not sitting on this tool because we’re full of ourselves or stuck up our own asses. We’re not sitting on it cause we like to see you writhe. We are testing it to make sure it’s as glitch-free as we can make it. We want to avoid releasing something that turns expensive phones into pretty looking paperweights. Don’t you agree it’s worth the wait?

If others want to feel like they’re in control by posting all-knowing entries on their blogs, we can’t stop that, but the new PwnageTool will be released when it’s ready, and not a moment later.

Zibri, the maker of ZiPhone decided to add to these curious happenings:

Talks, lies, haters, fans.
I’m sick of this!
This is not a war and not even a game.
I originally developed ZiPhone for my own use.
Then people asked me to release it and I did.
I bought my first iPhone in September 2007.
I released ZiPhone in February 2008.
I know you people are crazy about the iPhone
but believe me, I am not.
I think the 3g iPhone is not worth even buying
for people who already have the
first generation iPhone.
GPS ? I have a TomTom Go device.
3G data ? I have a 7.2 Mb/s card
in my laptop.
Apps ?
I have my iPhone.
Everything else ?
I have my life !

IF and WHEN there will be a new
ZiPhone you will be informed.
Stop asking, hating, begging.
By the way,
Maybe you don’t know the difference,
But ZiPhone was a real hack.
Software upgrades or custom firmwares
are a totally different thing.
A nice proof of concept, a nice work, but
that’s not hacking..
But if that will ever be released
and that suits your needs,
use it. You’ll be (hopefully) happy.

Another note:
I’m being reported of many people
faking me on many blogs and sites.
Check the profile (if there’s one).
And don’t take as gold any word from me that
you don’t read here !

To any hacker out there:
FACTS speaks louder than words.

Peace out,
Zibri

Read the original post here.

Original source: Florian Seroussi via Twitter.

So, no expected time of arrival for the hack. Are you having problems with the 2.0 firmware? I’m going to do a vblog review of the new 3G iPhone including the 2.0 software so I’ll save my thoughts for that.

A reader tonight, highlighted a feature on this blog that upsets them enough to post the comment below. I’m not sure if they wanted to have a dig, or provide useful feedback because they care. It’s unfortunate that they decided to hide behind anonymity by not linking to their Web site/blog. If it wasn’t for trolls we’d naturally assume it was friendly feedback. I won’t assume either way. Anyway, here’s what ‘Edison’ had to say;

Why do you insist on linking keywords in your articles to your blog’s archive of that tag? To be frank, it’s retarded and makes you look extremely self-centered and obnoxious.

If I see the word Apple hyperlinked in an articlea bout technology, I assume it will go to Apple’s online presence.

If you are tagging your article on your blog, why aren’t you listing the tags at the bottom of each article? Your tagging serves no purpose in this case.

On a side note, your “Twitter updates” box in the sidebar has not been working for weeks, if not months.

I thought it was worth publishing a new post to explain the method behind the madness. I’ve pasted the response I left ‘Ed’ (may I call you Ed?) in the comments:

@Edison - thanks for the feedback. You’re not the first person to have asked that question. Mind you, the first person wasn’t so passionate. I thought it was obvious that the hyperlinks I create are in bold.

The tags to which you refer, are automatically created by the blog software. They lead back to previous posts which have been tagged with those terms. Given that the tag cloud was installed afterwards, I don’t suppose I need them anymore. I personally don’t like tags at the top or bottom of posts as they tend to look messy.

Also, thanks for the feedback regarding the Twitter plugin. The Twitter API instructions have a serious security breach which meant my login details had to be disabled when we found every blog reader ended up automatically signed into my twitter account. I didn’t realise it had stopped working altogether. Shame you didn’t report it when you first saw it. I’ll get my developer to fix it next week – or remove it altogether.

So, on Monday, I’m going to disable the feature that automatically tags words which have been tagged in previous posts. If you look closely you can tell which tags are automatically added. The text I hyperlink is in bold, whilst the tagged words aren’t.

Is there any value in having the Twitter updates on the sidebar? Do you ever take the time to read them? Should I remove or keep the updates from the people I follow on Twitter.

I just used an application called Grab, to cut and save an image from the Apple Web site for my previous post, and thought you might benefit from learning about this wicked little piece of software.

Grab lets you take a picture of all or part of your computer screen. It’s one of the best little applications I’ve got on the Mac - I use it all the time. It saves images in TIFF format so you’ll probably want to save again as a PNG or something similar, using Seashore.

Download Grab now.

[Update: 12th July. ZIPhone will not work on ver 2.0 of the iPhone software. It's not possible to unlock or jailbreak the new software at the time of writing this update - at least none that I could find anyway]

Download ZIPhone now (opens in a different window)

Do you want to use the iPhone on any network? Do you want to install applications for free? Are you dishonest?

If the answer to the above questions is yes, then download ZIPhone now. You can continue to sync with iTunes and if you want to revert your phone back to its original state (to take in for a repair) simply ‘restore’ it via iTunes. It really is that simple.

When you Jailbreak the phone, an ‘installer’ icon will appear on your desktop, through which you search for, and install applications. The 2.0 software enables your iPhone to access an applications directory via iTunes but they’re likely to charge and be restricted to a small number of partners.

I’m naturally very honest and only answered yes to two of the above questions

Thanks to Aido for the tip - naturally he’s too honest to do any of this. I think he overhead someone talking about this stuff in the pub.

If you decide to jailbreak your iPhone, I hear Twinkle is a brilliant Twitter client and sketches is pretty cool for scribbling on photos - which you can also send direct to Twitter. MxTube is useful if you want to download videos from YouTube - in other words, you’re not restricted to streaming.

You should check out the Qik application too - it allows you to stream live to the Web right from your iPhone - even though the iPhone doesn’t come with a native video recorder. Now, that’s innovation.

Have fun and leave a comment if you know of any cool applications. Unfortunately I won’t be able to install them as I’m too honest.

Visit the original ZIPhone download site.

[Update 19:21 - I've just tried to reinstall the software. It managed to delete what I had but failed to restore it. "Unable to complete your iTunes store request'. So, looks like I'm back to the old one for now]

I appear to be experiencing authentication issues and starting to wonder if it’s a widespread problem, or just me. My POP email is behaving weird. It took at least 20 attempts before it authenticated my details. When I finally managed to get it working it only downloaded one email from today and two from yesterday. How weird is that?! There’s no logic to the issues I’m experiencing.

I’m still unable to sync mobile me with my Mac Pro. The account is setup but it fails to authenticate when I try to sync.

I’m wondering if there’s a general authentication issue due to server load. Are you aware of known authentication issues with the new 3G iPhone or the old phone with version 2.0 of the software?