Someone here – and I won’t name names – forgot to pick up our physical mail for a few weeks. Like 12. And none of us noticed.
If we’d done this years ago, we’d be in trouble. Our phones would have been turned off, as well as our internet, and we’d have racked up some serious late charges on the credit cards, if not had them cancelled as well.
But since we’ve been moving more and more of our bills to electronic only, it turns out that ignoring our paper mail for over two months wasn’t a big deal. Macworld sent a few testy “reminders” about our bill, and at least a few of us now have bigger than usual piles of stuff to read, but the only real problem was that Marc had ordered some live tadpoles to be sent here, and by the time we found them, they weren’t live anymore.
Sorry guys.
But it pointed out very clearly how unimportant physical mail has become. I wonder how long daily delivery will hang on.
Good news! It only took three weeks (ack!) but the eWallet update is approved! The point of the update was to tweak a few things that cropped up after 3.0 was released. As you probably know, Apple is retesting every app under 3.0 so we wanted to make sure that there were no problems. Even the things we did fix are so minor I bet most folks never would have seen them (like a funky keyboard appearance where is popped up instead of slid up with animation.)
There are certain marketing techniques that just scream desperation. They move the retailer from “dignified and disappointed” to “creepy stalker.” It’s something that could happen to any retailer, us included, in tough economic times. When times get tough people start tossing around all sorts of ideas, searching for something – anything – to change their fortunes. Fortunately, I like to think we’ve avoided this so far, but I ran across one painful example of this yesterday.
I’m excited to announced that we just released a new version of eWallet for BlackBerry with our good friends over at 
I’ve seen some complaints online recently about people no longer being able to buy iTunes Gift Cards to be sent by email, or that iTunes Gift Card amounts are now being limited. In fact, our account is one of the ones affected by this: our company iTunes account suddenly became unable to buy Gift Cards on iTunes. We get the message: