Global Nerdy

In Consumerist’s 8 Confessions Of A Former Verizon Sales Rep, you get 8 useful tips for getting the best deal from Verizon:

1. Never get a 2-year contract. “The only benefit to a 2 yr contract is a $50 savings on your phone. Its not worth it. Take the $50 and get a 1 year then you can upgrade to a new phone every 10 months.”
2. Verizon reps get tons of money from new lines and certain accessories and text packages, take advantage of this. “VZW makes $ off the service, not the phones. Tell them you don’t want to mail in the rebate… Also tell them you will buy the accessories, and text package. Trust me here, these are 2 of the biggest metrics for the reps. Return the accessories the next day and call customer care to cancel your text package.”
3. Mention the lost or stolen program to get 25% off a new phone, even if you’re under contract. “Who’s to say you didn’t lose it?”
4. If you’re on a rate plan of $59.99 or higher, you can get “a new phone (and new contract) for the discounted price after 12 months.”
5. Insurance is a rip-off. “It costs too much and has a $50 deductible.”
6. Tell them you’ll sign up for the Unlimited Data Plan with your Treo. “Speaking of Treos, often they offer an extra $100 off if you get the Unlimited data plan. Get it. Save $100 and cancel it the next day if you don’t want it. The leverage here is amazing also because that high end data package counts as a new activation in a roundabout way for the rep. None of the data packages are contractual.”
7. Reps don’t get as much money if you’re still in a contract. “If you upgrade on the phone with Verizon, the store reps won’t be as motivated to help you.”
8. Ask for a loyalty credit on the phone before going to the store.

I’m in Canada, where Verizon ain’t, so these tips won’t apply to me. Any former Bell Mobility reps out there who’d like to spill the beans?

In an article in The Guardian titled My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots, Charlie Brooker complains about his Samsung mobile phone:

It seems to have been designed specifically to irritate anyone with a mind. It starts gently – a pinch of annoyance here, an inconvenience there – but before long the steady drip, drip, drip of minor frustrations begins to affect your quality of life, like a mouth ulcer, or a stone in your boot, or the lingering memory of love gone sour.

I understand his frustration.

The features offered by the more expensive mobile phones offered by my provider — Bell Mobility (whose motto could be “great signal, not-so-great phone selection, semi-amusing TV commercials”) — or any provider, for that matter, don’t seem worth the added expense. Hence I went with a relatively simple phone: a near-bottom-of-the-line Samsung that doesn’t even feature polyphonic ringtones. The only “special features” of the phone that I’ve ever used are SMS text messaging and the alarm clock function (it’s handy when travelling). The only feature I wish I had was Bluetooth syncing with the Address Book application on my Mac laptop.

Like many people, I’ve been using my mobile phone as a pocket watch. This phone even has an extra display you can read when it’s snapped shut, which is perfect when you just want to know what time it is.

With all the other mobile phones I’ve had, being cut off from the network didn’t mean that I was also cut off from knowing what time it is. Those phones would simply rely on their own clock. Not my current phone: when I’m in the subway and the network is inaccessible, the phone doesn’t show the time. Instead, it displays an animated dish antenna and tells me that it’s attempting to find some phone service, as pictured below:

This annoys me to no end. I want to know the time, and all the phone wants to do is go “Ooh! Look at me, boss! See how hard I’m working for you, boss! Pleasepleaseplease buy more Samsung products!”

Thanks to this, I’ve grown to become annoyed with the animations that the phone insists on playing whenever I turn the phone on or off. Must it display the Bell Mobility logo whenever I turn it on? Trust me, I know that my phone service is Bell Mobility: I get a bill from them every month. (Bell Mobility, if you really want my attention, how ’bout you pay me every month instead?) Almost as annoying is the animation that plays when I turn off the phone — an array of cubes that shrinks and rotates to display the message “Powering off”. Although I know that it’s good to have some kind of feedback, my reaction to this over-the-top animation is “I knew that — I pressed the ‘off’ button, didn’t I?”

It’s been a while since I’ve gone phone shopping — is it this way with all mobile phones, or just the Samsung ones?

Family-social-network-cum-genealogy-site Geni has gone from $0-$100MM (in valuation) in eight months (I’m sure the “seven weeks” in Mike’s TechCrunch post quoted below is a typo).

Seven week old Geni raised a $10 million second round of financing last week, led by Charles River Ventures (see our coverage of CRV here), with a post-money valuation of $100 million.

This is a 10x increase in valuation for Geni. The company’s first round of financing, led by Founders Fund, was $1.5 million, at a $10 million post-money valuation.

Sacks describes Geni as a “social network for the family.” It provides an easy to use (and easy on the eyes) Flash based family tree. As you add family members, they are optionally emailed to register as well and help fill out the tree.

I’ve used it (only to build a family tree so far, I haven’t spammed my family and in-laws with invitations yet), and it’s very straightforward as family tree builders go. My hat’s off to the Geni team.

Still, it strikes me as weird that we’ve got a $100MM social networking site whose primary population will be dead people.

Source: $100 Million Valuation For Geni

The good news: a major band has released their latest album, in its entirety, as DRM-free MP3 files.

The bad news? It’s the Barenaked Ladies.

I kid because I love. And also because, as a Canadian of a certain age, I was practically force-fed BNL from their earliest days, whoring their self-produced tape release on MuchMusic (the nation’s music station, if you must know).

Mike “TechCrunch” Arrington says the album will be released through Amie Street, the digital download service where tracks start out free, becoming more expensive as they gain in popularity (capping out at around a buck, I think).

The songs will only be free through the first few downloads, and will start to rise after that. But even at full price, listeners are getting quality music, DRM-free. Let’s hope other labels follow Nettwerk shortly. Market driven prices and no DRM = Music Nirvana.

I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for the major labels to follow suit, Mike.

As for Amie’s “market driven prices,” I beg to differ. Since there’s no scarcity (there’s an infinite number of copies of any digital track) there’s no market condition making these tracks more expensive as the demand increases. That happens when there’s more demand than there is supply. While I wish all success to any company trying to do something different in digital media retail, it bugs me when people refer to Amie Street’s pricing model as market based.

Source: Barenaked Ladies: New Album. Free. No DRM. Now.

Watch for all sorts of follow-up, discussion (and possibly a shouting match or two) over at O’Reilly Radar, where Tim O’Reilly starts a series of articles titled Programming Language Wars. In Part One, he presents a graph comparing book sales on computer languages between January 2006 and January 2007, based on data from the Bookscan Top 3000 Report (click to see it at full size):

Tim writes:

As you can see, books on every language but Actionscript (Javascript for Flash), JavaScript, Ruby, and SQL were down, some more than others. Ruby books did outsell Python books. But Javascript — driven by everything Ajax — was the biggest winner.

Link

Perhaps most of the tips listed in the article 12 Quick Tips To Search Google Like An Expert might be old news to you, but there may be one or two tricks in the list that you might have missed. In my case, I was unaware of the “numeric range” search, such as this one: president 1940..1950.

One tip they don’t list in the article is the unit conversion feature. For instance, give these a spin:

• 180 pounds in kilograms
• 500 miles in light-years
• 1 parsec in cubits
• 1 femtosecond in fortnights

Feel free to try less ridiculous conversions. Or more ridiculous ones, if that’s your thing.

Link

Designer/developer Joshua Porter lists his five design principles in the latest post on his blog, Bokardo:

1. Technology serves humans.
2. Design is not art.
3. The experience belongs to the user.
4. Great design in invisible.
5. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Pretty sound advice. Even if we could only get techies to follow principle 1 and artists/designers/ponytails to follow principle 2, that would solve a lot of problems.

Link