8700 progress
My new Blackberry finally arrived. 2 days from Australia, 5 days in customs in Auckland. That’s good for business.
Voda NZ doesn’t push BB’s so don’t have the latest units. Hence the need to source from Oz.
But, the unit had Vodafone Australia software on and is SIM locked. Arrrrrgh!
So 30 minutes on the phone to Voda Oz. No joy. Computer Ezy looking at swapping with an Optus sourced unit (no SIM lock) or try to get the vanilla RIM 8700 build that I can flash upgrade.
So close and yet so far.
From what I can see the new UI is pretty. Phone enhancements include a richer call list and hardware phone buttons. Speaker phone and Blue-tooth will be useful. Also uses standard mini USB jack.
The ICANN conference begins in Wellington today.
What is ICANN? ICANN is an internationally organised, public benefit non-profit responsible for coordinating Internet Protocol (IP) address space allocation, protocol identifier assignment, generic (gTLD) and country code (ccTLD) Top-Level Domain name system management, and root server system management functions. For more information please visit: www.icann.org.
It’s great for Wellington that the conference is here. Due to the interest in Internet Domain Management there is a lot of influential people from all around the world here.
I caught up with Jonathan Zuck for dinner last night. I met Jonathan 9 years when I was on the Microsoft Regional Director program. He is one of the well known characters in the industry. Jonathan really impressed me when I first started travelling for business. I was completely green and he was so polished and seemed to know everyone. It’s exciting to have him and his team all the way here and have actually developed over those years into a peer. The IT world really can be quite small.
Vint Cerf, now at Google, is also here. Vint was in Wellington for the launch of CafeNet a few years ago. We’re a long way from the rest of the world but there is no doubt that Wellington has profile on the global internet radar.
Maitland and his team have just released a desktop traffic cam widget.
http://www.trafficwatch.co.nz/
Main Entry: vex·a·tious
Pronunciation: -sh&s
Function: adjective
1 a : causing vexation : DISTRESSING b : intended to harass
2 : full of disorder or stress : TROUBLED
- vex·a·tious·ly adverb
- vex·a·tious·ness noun
Used by Michael in this commentary on Windows Mobile
I’m really enjoying Russell Beattie …
http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008903.html
I’m writing this all because I came to a realization this morning: “Soft launching†is for pussies. If you want to launch a new product, and you want customers to spend their valuable time using it or part with their hard earned cash for it, then sell the damn thing. SELL it! Push it, promote it, pound it, make it special.
Internet journalism at it’s best. The medium allows an enthusiast to go deep.
Car fans, drink this up…
http://www.gizmag.com.au/go/5376/1/
Pah, just a few weeks after I got my 7730, the new 8700 has arrived.
My mate Dave who suspiciously lost his older Blackberry has one.
I must, therefore, upgrade.
Had a play with one last week and it looks like a better phone and the updated UI looks good as well.
The 7730 works great and is a nice unit. But the 8700 must be 970 units cooler (that’s 11%). You can buy my lightly used, but well travelled, 7730 on TradeMe.
Update: Phil’s taking it on. I want our interaction expert to get the BB experience
Celebrating a milestone birthday recently I got a couple of neat tech gifts.
The guys at work spoiled me with a Philips photo display. It’s actually very, very cool. You can load up pictures into like a USB drive or even add an SD card. The quality is really good.
Another present (I brought myself), is a Sony T9 digital camera. It’s small enough to carry in your case all the time, but the main reason I got it is for the ’super steady shot’ feature.
Sony’s Super SteadyShot® system uses sensors to detect camera movement while it sends correcting signals in order to stabilize the lens. This system results in the reduction of image blur and camera shake when shooting in low light.
I was finding with my last small digital camera that about 1 shot in 3 was blurred. I’m still getting used to it but the T9 seems a lot better.
Comprehensive list of Web 2.0 Companies
In the lounge at Heathrow, heading back after two very intense weeks.
Got to visit some new places I hadn’t seen before. I’d like to come back and spend more time in Northern Europe and also the North of the UK. Edinburgh was a highlight.
I love doing business in the UK and Europe. People are so switched on and the deals exposed too are world class. It’s exciting to have a product that generates so much interest and excitement.
I’m really pleased in our decision to be acquired by Quest. The people are superb and its fun to make new friends all over the world. Getting face time and having a beer really accelerates those relationships built up over email and the phone.
Travelling around to so many places does make you appreciate what you have at home. Our lifestyle is so special, but the internet and comms allows us to play on a global stage. I think we’re showing that NZ has a place in the global knowledge economy. Our perspective, general skills and passion adds value. This is exporting with minimal capex and high returns. Our electronic connection to the rest of the world is key. The Return on Investment massive.
Within a very short time we’ve been able to build out a global network of friends and partners who are looking for ways to solve business problems. Linking our technology skills to these networks is the key. No one is going to do it for you. You have to do this yourself.
Would be entrepreneurs … get on a plane.
Nice way to drive innovation…
Windows XP-on-Mac contest declares winner
I only just discovered that this was a feature. By default IE7 hides the menu.
You know the menu, where you need to find the Internet Options, then Connections, then LAN settings and then set your Proxy settings for all your internet applications to get through the network you’re temporarily on.
So the intuitive way to unhide the menu is to hit the ALT KEY.
Hmmmm the ALT KEY. Of course. That’s intuitive.
Who the &^%#* designed that! Why hide the menu’s without telling me and stressing me out for 3 weeks trying work out how I accidentally hid the menu.
Had a day in Scotland today. The City of Edinburgh. The City has a great feel, a vibe very similar to Wellington. It was my first time here and the City really is stunning with its Edinburgh Castle backdrop.
I didn’t get a chance to have a good look around but Edinburgh is definitely up there on the list of places to come back and explore.
There’s a fun team in the local office. I’ve met most of the people before during sales training in Brighton earlier in the year. A neat thing about this road trip is building relationships with the people in each office, often meeting them for the 3rd time.
Last night in London we had dinner in a ‘hip place of the week’ underground restaurant called Hakkasan. It was put together by the Waggamamma’s people. We walked down a narrow alley, to a small sign, where a stunning receptionist checks you off on the list - to see if you’re worthy -and then you go down the impressive stairs into a huge, very trendy space. It was like a tardis as the building did not look that big at all.
Outside there was a Rolls Royce Phantom, with it’s engine on, idling for 3 hours. Very rockstar.
Had meetings in London and Birmingham today. In Wellington, or even Auckland you can often manage 5+ meetings in a day. In the UK you’re lucky if you can get 3.
The travel/meet time ratio is very high. Today I spent 7 hours travelling for 2 hours of meetings. Of course you try to schedule as much together as you can but often that is as good as you can do. That time and cost forces UK sales people to be very disciplined. Within a few weeks a new salesperson sees their return on time and cost and starts qualifying hard making sure each meeting is effective.
Really good sales people do a lot of account planning to maximise their ROI and have enough leads to make their numbers even if a few deals drift into the next period.
NZ companies need to know how expensive it can be. Today we spent £5 on parking, £17 on a train into town, and if we had of trained to Birmingham it would have been another £60 each.
Doing the hard yards in the UK with experienced sales people is a valuable thing to do. Over the past couple of years I’ve learnt a huge amount. Selling is tough, but it’s very rewarding. It is much less about the stereotypes of ego and big personalities. Sales success comes from discipline, listening, effort and prioritisation.
Arrived in London and headed to Windsor. MY BAG HAD ARRIVED, having been couriered from Cologne. The biggest pain was not having a charger for my BB7730, which for some reason doesn’t use a standard USB interface.
Anyhoo, turns out I’m staying across the road from Windsor Castle, so it spent the afternoon power-touring the castle looking for Corgi’s.
The castle is crammed with paintings, murals, carvings and tapestries. Every surface is ornate making the detail in every room quite daunting. There was a fire in 1992 which they have done a stunning job of repairing.
The exhibit I liked the best was ‘Queen Mary’s Dollhouse’ which was actually a scale model of a Palace. It was fascinating to see how they use the space and the different levels in the building.
Click on the photo for pictures. Wasn’t allowed to take any inside understandably.
Russell Beattie is Rethinking Email.
He noticed email is broken too. That’s exactly what we’re working on.
When you travel from New Zealand it’s never worth going for just a week. So you often end up away from your family for a weekend or two in the middle. I find that pretty hard with a rapidly growing little boy.
To make the most of the weekend I stayed over in Copenhagen before heading to the UK tomorrow. It was cold!
As my luggage has still not arrived (hopefully meet it in the UK tomorrow - yeah right!) I ventured out in a shirt and jacket. It looked sunny enough but the temperature was around minus 10 with the wind chill. I had to quickly find a hat and scarf. Even that wasn’t enough and I finally found a full set of thermals which I just put on in the shop and never took off.
Copenhagen is a beautiful city. The architecture is stunning, it’s very clean, well laid out and it was a buzz to walk around and drink it in.
Last night, we finished our 5 cities in 5 days tour and went to Noma, probably the best eating experience I’ve every had. Some have said the best restaurant in Denmark. The food and service was unbelievable - unfortunately so were the prices. Not sure how I’m going to get that through on my expense claim.
The winter in Northern Europe is something I haven’t experienced before and it’s hard to believe this temperature is normal for so many people. While it is hard to travel so much I do feel very lucky that my career allows me to experience another stunning part of the world and see how other people live.
Click the photo above for shots of the city.
You can run BB on a Pocket PC …
BlackBerry Connect for Windows Mobile.
The first thing I noticed about Copenhagen is that it is very flat.
The next thing was that the bikes were much cooler than the ones in Amsterdam. There were a few cruisers.
Not that I’m obsessing about this, but I talked some Amsterdam locals last night and asked why didn’t they ride cool bikes, with wide handle bars that put you in a stance that men can be proud of.
They responded that because of the numbers of bikes, the handlebars can’t be too wide.
Well that’s easy fixed with my new invention, the Adjustable Width Wide Boy Handle Bars …
Arrived in Amsterdam late last night. After midnight, bikes still everywhere.
But they are all really geeky bikes. Tall black things. What’s with that?
If I lived here for a while I’d light the place up with a 3G bike. You’d be the coolest person in the Netherlands.
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