Hey Apple….think different and put a store here?

I am not certain how each retailer chooses where locate a store, but I am sure there are many similarities and a few company-specific differences. What I cannot figure out, is how a metropolitan region with more than 500,000 residents, that is the state capital, and has somewhere in the ballpark of 80,000 are college students, does not have an Apple store. Michigan State University, Lansing Community College, Olivet College, Davenport University, Baker College, Great Lakes Christian, and several branch campuses are all situated here. What more could you ask for as a hip company?

Many people throughout Greater Lansing love Apple and its products.I see MacBooks, iPods, IPhones, and other Apple products everywhere in Greater Lansing, but yet there is no Apple store located here. Sorry Apple, but that makes no sense to me and I am the owner of a MacBook Pro and an iPod Nano, not to mention the plethora of Apple products owned by my sons and daughter-in-law.

To me, any company as cool and smart as Apple should be thinking differently in regards to store locations too and would want to locate retail stores in every major university metro area in the country before plopping them down in run-of-the-mill suburban sites.  College students are the early adopters of new products and technology, so why don’t you have a store in Greater Lansing? Here’s a nice map from MDOT to help you find a location. Hope to see you soon. : )

Source: MDOT

Read Full Post »

The passing of an American legend – Steve Jobs (1956-2011)

I was deeply saddened last night upon learning of Steve Jobs passing. At the time, I was writing a new post for this blog, but had to stop working at the news.

Source: http://www.apple.com

Steve Jobs was the Galileo, the Da Vinci, and the Thomas Edison all rolled into one for my generation and was certainly the single most important individual of both the computer and digital ages. Steve Jobs changed the way the world operates, as well as how it is entertained. Don’t forget, he was not just the co-founder and creative inspiration for Apple with its iPod, iPhone, and iPad, but also Pixar Studios.

As we all know, Pixar reinvented and revived motion picture animation and brought back damn good story telling. Anyone would be hard pressed to find an American home that does not have at least one Apple electronic product in it and/or at least one Pixar movie on a shelf. None of us will ever forget Buzz Lightyear, Woody, Nemo, Wall-E, Mr. Incredible, or any of the other wonderful characters Pixar Studios has brought to life on the silver screen.

Your inspired and far-reaching innovation will be missed, Steve. Thank you for all the great inventions and creations. As the best quote I have seen about your passing puts so eloquently, “iSad.” Rest in peace, Steve.

Read Full Post »

iPads for one, iPads for all – in Zeeland, Michigan

Kudos and major high-fives to the Zeeland Public Schools. Starting with the 2011-2012 school year, students in the Zeeland school system between 3rd grade and 12th grade (approximately 1,800 of them in all) are being provided with a free iPad to use in the classroom and for all of their school work. Sayonara to carrying 50 pounds of text books in a backpack – thank goodness.

This is an amazing program and innovative idea that clearly takes Zeeland’s education system to the cutting edge nationally.

Read Full Post »

Where geeks call home in America

Below is the list of the geekiest places in America, as compiled by the National Science Foundation (NSF) using 2007 data and published on Forbes.com. Some of these may surprise you. I know several did me, especially numbers 17 and 20. The full chart from the NSF with more data is available through this weblink. Who knows, Sheldon Cooper might living right next door.

1. San Jose, CA
2. Boulder, CO
3. Framingham, MA
4. Huntsville, AL
5. Durham, NC
6. Lowell, MA
7. Washington, DC
8. Ithaca, NY
9. Bethesda, MD
10. Seattle-Bellevue, WA
11. Kennewick-Richland-Pasco, WA
12. Austin-Round Rock, TX
13. Ames, IA
14. Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, FL
15. Boston, MA
16. Ann Arbor, MI
17. Bloomington-Normal, IL
18. Olympia, WA
19. San Francisco, CA
20. Fort Walton Beach-Destin, FL

Read Full Post »

How about designing digital products and services with the customer in mind?

Do not know about all of you, but I find it rather annoying that some of new digital gadgets, especially televisions, do not come with all the necessary parts included. Gone are the days of buy it, plug it in, and its ready to go. Not everyone needs or wants to be tethered to a cable company or satellite dish provider. Believe it or not, some are just fine with local channels.

I found out recently, that if you only want to receive digital broadcasts from your local area, “the system” is set up for you to spend more money and buy more crap than should be necessary. I own a four-five year old flat screen television with audio/video inputs, and a coaxial connection. When I first went to a well-known electronics retailer, they thought it might be a recent enough television to only need a digital antenna. Wrong… Back to the retailer to find out I also need a digital converter box or a whole new digital television.

But, here’s the catch and the part I do not understand — even the digital television needs a digital antenna unless you are connected to cable or satellite provider. What????? So, if I buy an expensive digital television, the damn thing can’t even pick up a local station a mile away. That is crazy, lousy product design, and places the customer at the bottom rung of importance.

Since when did the conversion to digital television become the cable and satellite provider welfare act? That is exactly what it seems to be. When I was growing up (oh so many years ago), my dinky 12” Panasonic black and white television could pick up stations 50 miles away. You did not have to pay some one to reach the “public” airwaves.

Continuing on my quest, I bought the converter box and along with the antenna connected them to my relatively young (except in dog years) television. Eighty bucks later, I now receive 11 channels. For some reason CMT (country music videos) and Cool (rock music videos) are among them, but NBC is not. Guess the local NBC affiliate decided to be stupid and put its antenna out in the sticks. Good move gang.

Here’s a interesting piece of data from J.D. Power and Associates that was released just in the past couple of weeks – younger people are more likely to cut the pay television connection! So it is not just us old farts that want better choices or less confusion options.

One cannot help but wonder if network television ratings (and advertising revenue) would improve if they made receiving their programming as easy to receive as it used to be. Similarly, the pay television providers really ought to re-consider allowing the a la carte option. If you really are trying to serve “the customer” then a switch to a la carte is necessary.  Then, let the cable and standard networks compete in the “free market” we hear so much about, instead of having stupid channels bundled with popular channels.

Read Full Post »

Ranking states by broadband internet access

Some real surprises in the 2010 data from the National Broadband Map website. I can certainly understand smaller states having some geographical advantage over larger states in achieving 100 percent broadband (high-speed internet) coverage at an earlier stage. But that does not explain why Indiana, which is relatively small in geography, is ranked 50th with just over 70 percent of the population having broadband coverage – behind both Dakotas, Mississippi and Alaska. Holy spinning beach ball of doom, Batman! That is downright pitiful.

Also somewhat surprised how some states with significant technology centers do not reach 100 percent of the population like California, Minnesota, and Virginia. Vermont’s poor ranking is also a surprise to me considering how small the state is in area.  Kudos go to those larger states that ranked well, like Florida, New York, and Nevada.

It will be interesting to see how these numbers change when the 2011 report comes out in a few months’ time. Hopefully, Indiana, Alaska, West Virginia, and Wyoming have decided they might want to enter the 21st century.

By the way the interactive maps on the site are amazing.

Read Full Post »

Where to “gopher” the latest trends

The Oxford-American Dictionary on my MacBook Pro defines hipster as:

“A person who follows the latest trends and fashions.”

Based on hipster search volume study, Minnesota has replaced New York as the most hipster state in the country according to a post by Chris Menning on BuzzFeed. Here’s the top 10 hipster-est states, as determined by the study by Chris Menning:

1. Minnesota
2. New York
3. Oregon
4. Massachusetts
5. Illinois
6. District of Columbia
7. Rhode Island
8. Washington (state)
9. California
10. Pennsylvania

Congratulations to “the Gopher State” for achieving this status. Nice to know the Midwest can be considered “cool” and not be referring to the weather.

Read Full Post »

Sayonara to using Slashdot

When Reddit went down recently because of problems with the Amazon cloud, I thought I would spend the time searching out other similar sharing websites. I came across Slashdot. Though more techie oriented it seemed like a good site to add links from the blog. It advertises it self as “news for nerds, stuff that matters.” Unlike Reddit, Slashdot has more moderation hoops to jump through before a post will be distributed.

All went well for the first week or two and one of our posts uploaded to Slashdot got more than 100 page views. The account also was rated positive by the moderators and received some achievements (their term for good karma). Several days ago I went on the site to upload a post from our blog and discovered someone had marked every single post that had been uploaded to Slashdot as spam.

Uploading our original posts to sharing sites is not blog-spamming. Essentially, whoever did this was calling any original material we wrote and any news topics we provided commentary on and uploaded, blogspam. But, worse than that, I could not figure out anyway to correct it or how to contact someone at Slashdot to resolve the issue. In addition, many of the site functions no longer worked, including the ability to logout from the website. My only option was to reset the computer to get off Slashdot’s website. NOT HAPPY!

As a result of all this crap, it is time to say sayonara to using Slashdot. It is no wonder they were long ago surpassed by Reddit and StumbleUpon. Too bad, because I think there is room for healthy competition in this area of the web. Certainly, the groundbreakers do not always rule their domain – MySpace being usurped by Facebook  and Reddit outdistancing Digg and Slashdot are two good examples.

Read Full Post »

Freedom on the net – ranking 37 nations

A recently released study by Freedom House ranks 37 nations on their internet freedom. Below is a description of the criteria used to rank the countries.

Ratings are determined through an examination of three broad categories: obstacles to access, limits on content, and violation of user rights.

Obstacles to Access: assesses infrastructural and economic barriers to access; governmental efforts to block specific applications or technologies; and legal, regulatory and ownership control over internet and mobile phone access providers.

Limits on Content: examines filtering and blocking of websites; other forms of censorship and self-censorship; manipulation of content; the diversity of online news media; and usage of digital media for social and political activism.

Violations of User Rights: measures legal protections and restrictions on online activity; surveillance; privacy; and repercussions for online activity, such as legal prosecution, imprisonment, physical attacks, or other forms of harassment.

Below are two lists identifying the ten most free and ten least free nations for internet use of the 37 studied by Freedom House.

Ten most free of the 37 nations studied

1. Estonia
2. United States
3. Germany
4. Australia
5. United Kingdom
6. Italy
7. South Africa
8. Brazil
9. Mexico
10. Kenya

Ten least free of the 37 nations studied

1. Iran
2. Burma
3. Cuba
4. China
5. Tunisia
6. Vietnam
7. Saudi Arabia
8. Ethiopia
9. Belarus
10. Bahrain

Read Full Post »

Etiquette for the digital era

I like reading a funny e-mail as much as the next person, but I think 80 percent of e-mails that get passed around are junk. Many are chain letters that promise something exciting will happen if you forward the message to 10 people; these are, of course, lies. Others take aim at specific groups of people. I tend to delete junk forwards without looking at them, but in the past couple of years I have replied to three e-mails, all sent from relatives, that attacked Muslims and immigrants. The most recent one was about a supposed Muslim stamp that President Obama introduced. I exchanged a couple of messages with the sender, then checked out Snopes.com and found out the whole thing was false. No response when I pointed this out to the sender.

Even if your message is funny, I’m less likely to look at it if you send me five or six messages a day. Same with Facebook posts. Even if I’m interested in the topic, I’m going to scroll on by because reading everything takes too much time. I’m much more likely to pay attention if you post or e-mail once a day.

Petitions are another thing I think there should be limits on forwarding. I sign one or two per day, probably, but then I post them on Twitter or mention them on the blog. I don’t necessarily think my whole contact list will be interested in the same causes I am.

One of the reasons I started this blog with Rick is because I don’t feel comfortable sharing all of my political opinions on Facebook. I’m not ashamed of them, and I do make occasional posts that are political, but in general I don’t think a personal Facebook page is the proper outlet for passionate interests, whatever they are. I’m more interested in what and how you’re doing personally than a story I could find myself on CNN.com.

So here are a few general guidelines for today’s digital age:

1. Think twice before passing along an e-mail that targets a specific group of people (Muslims, Christians, men, women, the mentally ill, etc). You’re likely to make yourself look racist or sexist to at least one person. When in doubt, err on the side of caution and don’t send it.

2. Check Snopes for urban legends before passing along a message. Just because you get it in an e-mail doesn’t mean it’s true.

3. Keep in mind not everyone has a chance to constantly monitor her e-mail. Try to be considerate by passing along or posting one or two things a day instead of five or six, which can quickly clutter inboxes.

Are there any digital habits you wish people would rethink?

Read Full Post »