I upgrade mobile devices twice a year on average, and have a steady stream of other gadgets being put into and taken out of rotation. I take pretty good care of my devices as well - screen protectors, cases, all that. The smart thing to do when rotating out a device would be to sell it on ebay.
But honestly, I hate the hassle. Taking pics, writing great descriptions, finding decent boxes and packing materials. To me, it s not worth the time.
I recently discovered an ebay store near me. It s not really ebay-owned of course, it s called SellIt4U or SellUrCrap or something. But regardless, they list your stuff on ebay and take a cut of the profit.
So I brought my old Nokia N90 over there to see what they could do.
First they check if it s going for over $50 - otherwise it s not worth their time. Then they ask about the condition, functionality, etc.
Then you sign something and leave. That s it.
They email you the listing when they put it up.
(might be taken down at some point since it closed.) I was totally surprised at how many pics they took and how straightforward the listing was. They honestly did a solid job listing it.
It brought in $217. I ll get around 60% of that - and all I had to do was leave it there.
For me, this is absolutely perfect.
Some may complain about their 40% cut. But compared to the $0 I d get leaving it in my closet, I d say it s a great deal. I m heading back there this week with my XV6700, my wife s RAZR (we moved her to a Cingy Family Plan - will probably post something on that soon), and an old iQue 3600 PDA/GPS.
Ive been developing an SMS component recently, and I have a consistent disturbing reaction that I ll admit here.
I wrote a commandline test program and have been using it repeatedly to send test messages to my phone. Here s a typical testing loop:
My Brain: Oooh!
Someone just sent me an SMS!
My Brain: DAMNIT! I m an idiot.
I do this time after time and somehow my brain decouples my deliberate test with getting a legitimate SMS. Sometimes I make it to Ooh! Someone just .
DAMNIT! and even sometimes to Oooh! DAMNIT!
. But there s always this little surprise.
One time my wife got in an SMS between hitting enter and getting the test SMS.
That didn t help the situation at all.
Since I m a heavy DVR user, I don t see commercials all that often. So can someone fill me in on how long this on-demand choose your own adventure ad tech has been around?
Let me explain what happened:
1. The commercial for Sony s Bravia TVs was on Comedy Central. In the top right corner was superimposed text choose your ending at channel 651 (or some channel - I don t remember the exact one).
2. I go to the specified channel and get a selection screen to let me choose my ending, and some other links to info about the product.
3.
I pick my ending, and get this:
4. I click on the URL on that page and get my commercial choice:
First of all - I m not in the set top game, so it surprised me to see channels being reserved as on-demand for ads. Second of all - whoops.
I guess it s not all there yet.
Anyone in the know about they re implementing this? I assume it s a closed IP network with some html markup tuned to the box.
In my case, it s a Scientific Atlanta. Is this all proprietary? Do the providers using Motorola boxes have something completely different?
What are the standards here? I m really curious.
I know it s late, but I ve just been able to post some pics from CTIA.
MoCoMixer Photos - we were on top of the Staples Center! Pics. They suck.
No, I wasn t drunk - just busy talking and reconnecting with people:
Our development team is spread out. That s the price of a telecommuting company.
We have some amazing developers that use creative ways to stay in contact - IM (of course), a Jabber chat room, Skype, a wiki all of these tools have helped immensely.
Some of our developers have been trying out an editor for OSX called . They seem to like it. It lets you collaboratively edit a document together in a developer-centric interface.
I think it might be decent for code reviews, so I m willing to give it a shot. Personally, I m addicted to method completion popups, so I don t think I want to code with it full time. But reviews are for looking, commenting, and sometimes quick changes.
So it could be useful for that.
The reason I m posting is because MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software by discounting SubEthaEdit based on qualifying blog posts.
Basically it comes down to if enough bloggers blog about it, all of us get SubEthaEdit for free.
I m running a startup, so free is good.
Go over to and read the rules about blogging. Then blog it if you want a copy.
This is a real shocker.
after years of blogging.
Come on, you know you read his blog.
It s probably the first one you check while making your rounds.
Though Russ could trigger a debate over technology like no other, love him or hate him, he got people talking. The reason - he honestly loves tech and was able to communicate that passion by not putting a filter between his brain and what he wrote.
A lot of times that rubbed people the wrong way. But he didn t care - and that raw presentation was what made his blog most people s first stop.
Russ, you know it ll be hard - all the developments that will come along in the next months and years.
How are you going to resist not commenting on it?
Anyway, thanks for speaking out about the potential of the mobile industry all these years. I m sure you re still going to run the Bay Area Mobile Mondays?
There s been a good bit of about Google Inc. s project to provide San Francisco with free wireless. The whole deal of free muni Wi-Fi is obviously in Google s best interest as they look to stretch their Ad empire, but I thought of another side to this story: the ultimate back-channel, and who s going to control it?
And how?
I imagine that some corporate folks at the investment banks in SF are starting to freak out a little bit more about the prospect of another network available to employees while they re at work. Today the scenario is: an employer has blocked access to AIM, so an employee relies on his mobile phone to SMS and uses the AIM client on his phone to stay privately connected.
Up until now, you d have to pay to be connected on IM through your phone might not be expensive, but you still have to pay a bit even with flat data plans. Not only that, but up until now you wouldn t expect to have a huge amount of bandwidth available on your phone.
Now, all of a sudden, add the new high-end, smart card reading, WiFi enabled phones (finding homes in the pockets of well paid executives and employees) and free muni Wi-Fi and you have the possibility of free access to the net with reasonable throughput.
All of a sudden you have a CEO coming into the office jet-lagged, thinking he s connecting his laptop to the secure corporate network but accidently connecting to the totally open GoogleNET AP and sending off the earnings report to his colleague. All of a sudden you have some malicious guy bridging into the corporate network.
What new corporate-theft episode is waiting to happen?
What kind of insider trading is this going to facilitate? How are private companies going to respond to the increasing ability of information to literally flow out of the organization, and all in a timely manner. I m obviously not the only one thinking of this issue: see , but its entertaining and scary to think of a world with a persistent high bandwidth back-channel.
I m wondering what companies are building technology to help control these risks. I think this is a medium to long-term investment opportunity. Any suggestions?
Based on Google/Earthlink s plans there may be a huge market growing here.
Update: I chatted to Rich over the weekend and he pointed out that there are some materials already in use that make buildings better . Engadet has a good post about Wi-Fi security in a corporate context.
Including mention of by a British Defence contractor.
Friday night, I moved Mobilitee to a new server and upgraded to Wordpress 2.0.
1. This went surprisingly well - to the point of paranoia that I missed something. So please let me know if you see something amiss.
As a note for you blogging geeks out there- this was the first time I moved a Wordpress database. Both the source and target hosts used phpmyadmin, so it should have been as easy as an export from one and an import to the other. However, the new host claimed the SQL in the dump file was invalid when I tried to read it in from a file.
So I had to cut and paste the SQL from the dump file into the dialog window bit by bit. Very annoying. The most annoying part is that when I was done, I realized about 80% of what I copied was spam blacklists and filtered spam comments.
Sad sad sad
Update: Yeah I new it couldn t be that easy. The cut and paste move I pulled caused all UTF and anything requiring an HTML escape code to turn into invalid characters. I had to go through all the posts and edit them manually.
Remind me not to do that again.
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