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We now return to your regularly scheduled contest

by Julie

Some of you may have noticed that we didn’t run our monthly blog contest on June 1st. Of course, we had our big anniversary party that week, with three blog contests instead of just one, so I’m sure no one minded much.

But, I’ve dusted off the ol’ contest hat and I’m ready to pick a new winner for our blog comment contest from the month of June. This month’s winning comment actually comes from one of the anniversary posts: Chantelle, who commented on “Contest Three: Finish this sentence”. Congrats! You may not have won the original contest, but your comment still earned you a prize! I’ve just sent you an email – if you don’t receive it, reply to this post and let me know.

And to everyone else – be sure to keep coming back and sharing your thoughts and opinions. Who knows, the next winner could be you!

A Snail Mail Story

by Ellen

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.

eWallet for iPhone OS 3.0 is Out!

by Marc

ewi_bignGood 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.)

Oh – and since it will surely come up – yes, we have plans underway to include some of the new 3.0 OS features in eWallet. As some of you already know, I am not a fan of predicting release dates but suffice it to say there will be updates that embrace 3.0 in the future!

If you already own eWallet you can get it through the usual Application Upgrade process on your phone or in iTunes. If you don’t own eWallet yet, you definitely want to get a copy! It’s a fantastic application! You can check it out here.

1 Million Apps = 7 Free Apps per Person

by Marc

I’m glad Palm is giving the Pre everything they’ve got but I gotta tell you, I’m a little worried. Current estimates place the sales at around 150K units sold. Not bad, but that’s around 1/2 of what the original iPhone did in two days two years ago. (Although it’s pretty close to the Android sales numbers.) meanwhile, the SDK still isn’t out, and the hints we’ve seen of it suggests that we could face some pretty powerful development limits.

The latest announcement of a million downloads is nice and all, but considering the apps are free, that means each of the 150K users have downloaded 7 free apps. The most impressive thing about this is that Palm is actually doing a pretty darn good job of convincing the tech blog sites that this is a big deal.

To put this in perspective, Apple has over 2,700,000 downloads each DAY for the past year*. And many of these are paid apps.

It might be hard to believe but really, I DO want Palm to succeed at this. I’m just disappointed because I’m just not feeling confident that they will. I’d LOVE to see another strong handheld in the market – it’s good for business! I just feel like maybe we’re seeing more of the same problems that have plagued the company for the past few years.

* To address something I am sure will come up, reports indicated that Apple sold 2.2 Million apps (free AND paid) during their release weekend so the overall average isn’t far off.

Desperate Marketing

by Marc

stacy 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.

Read on after the jump for the whole story… [Read more…] about Desperate Marketing

eWallet for BlackBerry Update

by Marc

I’m excited to announced that we just released a new version of eWallet for BlackBerry with our good friends over at WebIS. This latest release is a free upgrade for current eWallet for BlackBerry customers. It addresses a few minor bugs but also adds a number of great features.

UPDATE: This upgrade will change the version of both the eWallet sync add-in for Blackberry Desktop Manager, and the Blackberry version, to 6.1.4.3416. The desktop eWallet does not change – it will stay at 6.1.3.24746.

One of my favorite features is the updated UI with focus on the touch interface of the BlackBerry Storm. Here’s a screenshot showing a little of what this new version has to offer:

Other features include:

  • A new Quick Search that makes it easy to find the info you’re looking for.
  • Easier first time synching so that new users can get synching faster.
  • Support for landscape mode.
  • Improved scroll speeds, category behavior, and more.

If you are an existing BlackBerry user you definitely want this upgrade. We’ll be notifying all BlackBerry users soon and will provide you with download links!

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