The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘convenience’

Megalomania or genius marketing move? Canon seriously takes aim at becoming the world’s first company with its own generic top-level domain ( gTLD ), namely “.canon”. The new domain would join the likes of .com, .edu, .gov, .org, etc

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.canon: Canon wants to establish its own top-level domain

It’s no secret that we consider the PR industry, for the most part, the bane of our existence. They’re just under too much pressure to get results, and when we don’t do what they want (write about their clients), things turn ugly. And before things turn ugly, we get spammed. By phone, by Twitter, by Facebook, by email, by mail and by fedex. Some PR firms will lie, cheat, manipulate and then just smear your reputation to get what they want.

Today something new happened though. It wasn’t a PR firm we went to battle with, it was a press release distributor – prMac. I know these guys well, because for the last year and a half they’ve sent me an average of 15 emails a day, sometimes far more. Each email contains a useless press release that someone paid them to spam out to the media. As far as I know, not one of these emails has ever turned into a story.

Most PR emails come from a human, and it’s easy to just reply and tell them to stop if it becomes annoying. The more streamlined operations that spam stuff out at least give us an opt out to get off their dreaded mailing list. But not prMac – none of their emails have an opt out.

Today was the day I decided to take a stand against the onslaught of prMac emails. Some small step in my hope to regain human dignity, I guess. Since there was no opt out, I simply sent out a Tweet, saying “prMac really needs to chill out on the unsolicited press spam, and give an unsubscribe link.” I followed up with a link to a single day’s emails from the company.

If I were prMac, I would have seen this and either kept on spamming, or quietly taken techcrunch emails off their list. But that didn’t happen. Instead, they got angry. Really pissed off, actually.

First came a comment to that image of the spam, saying “Claims it’s spam, but OPTED IN to the service. The reason for the duplicates is TechCrunch provided two email addresses.”

Then a barrage of emails (sort of ironic). One said in part, and I’m not kidding, “prMac is an OPT IN service for the media. We’re not spammers. We set up your account for you, only for your convenience and under your behalf…”

Yep, they followed a statement that they are opt in only and that they aren’t spammers with an admission that they set up our account for us “only for your convenience” (and certainly not at our request).

Unpleasant words were exchanged over the course of ten or so more emails. prMac forwarded an email from 2008 where they cajoled a CrunchBase staffer into giving up our emails to start the whole process. I noted that I had no way of stopping the barrage, and kept pointing out that a simple opt out in each email would have been so…legal of them.

But by far the most perfectly absurd comment came from prMac in one of their last emails, where they said to me “…you seriously need to take some diplomacy lessons my friend. The smart ass remarks aren’t assuaging me one iota, and only making a situation worse than it didn’t even have to be.”

Indeed. And since I want to become a better person, I’ve enrolled myself in a course on how to be diplomatic with spammers who don’t want to let go. Hopefully, I’ll handle the situation with more finesse next time.

In the meantime, though, the whole PR profession really needs to get a grip. We aren’t here to do their bidding. We serve our readers. At least, the readers we like. And our community. If they want to be part of that community, they need to lose the sense of entitlement and chill out on the aggressive marketing a little bit.

I would have been quite happy just venting on Twitter earlier today and eventually setting up an email filter to remove anything that came from them. But we’re only human. And this tirade of angry emails (just now yet another one from them popped into my inbox – “If your receiving distributions from us were such a problem, when didn’t you bring this up long before?? It’s not like we started doing this yesterday.”) was a little too aggressive and a little too much. So now I’ve vented more fully.

We first wrote about Shit My Dad Says, the Twitter account a 20-something-year-old guy set up to tweet out bits of wisdom from his 73-year-old father, back in August. By November, the account had already landed creator Justin Halpern a TV deal. And today, it has now landed him William Shatner to star in it.

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Shatner has agreed to star in the show as the father, and because of it, the show has been greenlit to shoot a pilot episode. It’s not yet clear when it will air, but when it does, it will be on CBS. The creators of Will & Grace are executive producing the show for Warner Bros. TV alongside Halpern and Patrick Schumacker, both of whom wrote the script for the pilot. Both Halpern and Schumacker used to write for the TV and movie blog Screen Junkies.

On Twitter, Shit My Dad Says continues to rise in popularity. By the time we wrote about it in August, the account already had over 100,000, but by November (the time of the TV deal), it was well past 700,000. Now, it has over 1.1 million followers and you can expect that to keep rising when the show airs.

Of course, how well the show can translate a Twitter account remains to be seen. After all, it will be on network television which means no swearing — a large part of what makes Shit My Dad Says tweets funny. In fact, of just the last 10 tweets the account has sent out, 8 of them would have to be altered to make it onto TV (7 feature “fuck” or “shit” and 1 features “dicks,” which CBS probably won’t like either). But I’m sure Shatner will find a way to make even a show called Stuff My Dad Says humorous.

Also, we love William Shatner because William Shatner loves us (see video below).

Last night, we reported on a new restriction that was being applied to Apple’s App Store: no more applications with “overtly sexual content”. At this point, the exact nature of that ban is unclear. But it’s a policy shift that may alarm many developers — even those whose applications have nothing to do with sexy content.

First, a little background: we’ve seen numerous reports about applications that have been pulled from the App Store for featuring sexual content, but there are still plenty of apps that have names like “Magic Boobs”. I reached out to Apple PR to ask if they’d enacted a sweeping policy change that could affect many applications, or if they were only removing a handful of applications with especially explicit content. This morning an Apple spokesperson sent back a response. It doesn’t have any answers:

“Whenever we receive customer complaints about objectionable content we review them. If we find apps that contain inappropriate material we remove them from the App Store and request the developer to make any necessary changes to their apps in order to be distributed by Apple.”

I’ve asked Apple to further clarify their stance — does this only apply to applications that have received complaints? Do they have any plans to specify what exactly makes an application too sexy for the App Store?  I’ll be surprised if they get much more specific.

Now, it’s true that many of these “sexy” applications were little more than spam, featuring titillating titles, perhaps a handful of sexy photos, and little else. There were some applications that included more functionality, but it’s safe to say that the average quality of the applications on the App Store has almost certainly improved because of the new ban. But it’s still a disturbing move on Apple’s part.

Most worrying is that these were applications that were already blocked at one point until Apple specifically changed its policies to begin letting them in. It was only a little over a year ago that the words “Boobs” and “Booty” in an application’s description weren’t allowed. But Apple made the conscious decision to lift that ban. In effect, Apple sent a message to developers that on a platform where the rules are nebulous and anything innovative is risky, these applications were safe. Now it’s changing its mind.

Since the App Store first launched in July 2008, Apple has gradually loosened restrictions on what kinds of applications it would approve. In December 2008, it started approving “humor” apps like iFart and Pull My Finger, as well as an NC-17 rating for adult applications. And over the last year, it began allowing more and more sexy applications — it even began offering parental controls with the iPhone 3.0 software update to help parents keep what their kids accessed in check.

Now Apple is moving in the other direction, and it’s setting a scary precedent. It’s showing that it’s comfortable throwing out applications that developers have spent their time and money building, without even bothering to give them advance notice. It’s one thing to have an application get denied when it’s first submitted — it’s another thing entirely to have the rug pulled out from under you once your app has thousands of downloads and customers. Is Apple going to start blocking apps like Qik if it builds its own live streaming service? Are iFart’s days numbered? Could Apple simply ban all NC-17 rated applications because too many parents complain?

And then there’s an entirely different issue: censorship. Apple is now one of the world’s largest gatekeepers to content, with a store that encompasses music, video, applications, and soon, books and magazines. And it’s shown before that it’s a totally inconsistent hypocrite when it comes to which content it’s willing to sell. Have exposed breasts in an R rated move? Sell it! Jiggling boobs in a silly iPhone applications? Banned. Apple previously blocked an iPhone application that allowed users to access the Kama Sutra. What happens if it gets too many complaints about iTunes making it too easy to purchase books and magazines with sexual content?

We now know when UFC Undisputed 2010 will be on store shelves: May 28 . Well, for the UK, that is. I do believe the North American release date is May 25

Excerpt from:
May 28: UFC Undisputed 2 puts you in a triangle joke

When I first saw this, I thought to myself, “Wow, that is wonderfully stupid.” But then after remembering my days working in an actual office, it doesn’t seem quite as insane. I mean, you’ve got a computer right there in your cube. And, what, you’re going to lug a big espresso machine into the office?

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Finally! USB-powered latte foamer

It’s always good to hear that some robot makers are focusing on the development of machines that actually have the potential of helping people in their everyday life. And the so-called Indoor Personal Mobility Robot, which is particularly geared towards the elderly, is certainly one good example. The main idea behind the robot is to make life easier for people who have trouble moving indoors

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Indoor Personal Mobility Robot (video)

If you prefer warm, indoor shopping to cold, outdoor, middle-of-the-night Black Friday shopping, then you may be happy to hear that Best Buy “is bringing the excitement of Black Friday a week early this holiday season.” How is this possible? How can one retail store bend the fabric of the time-space continuum in such a way?

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Best Buy drops everyday price of 40-inch 1080p TV to $500, 32-inch 720p to $300

I think we can all agree that protecting our own personal privacy is a generally good idea. There are an enormous number of ways that our privacy can be encroached in a given day.

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Privacy versus power: smart grids are the new battlefield