After 2 years, Apple finally shares the list of reasons that they reject apps (approximately 100 or so – it’s not complete, but it’s close)
This is big news – finally, professionals can act professionally and do their own QA before submitting apps, rather than just wishing and praying.
When I log into LinkedIn, I now receive 3 pages of spam. That spam is “every tweet by every person I’ve ever met”.
Somewhere, buried inside the avalanche of spam, are a few genuine LinkedIn messages. e.g. today I saw that a friend had moved to a new company – important, useful information.
I asked the LinkedIn customer support folks how to disable the spam. Their response:
You can “only hide the member’s Twitter updates [if you] also [hide all] their LinkedIn updates”.
i.e. your choices are:
Hmm. Think about the people with tens of thousands of connections on linkedin. Their linkedin home pages must be absurdly high spam-to-signal ratio.
LinkedIn’s CTO / lead architect / whoever authorized this stupid setup apparently “forgot” that the main feature of Twitter is it *allows* you to choose the people you receive tweets from.
(or, more likely, they’ve never used Twitter – it’s just a buzzword they’d heard of from a VC)
LinkedIn removes that choice. It simply forces everything on you. No filtering. No choices. Nothing. As a user, you exist to be spammed.
As a user, you exist to consume LinkedIn’s adverts, and nothing else. The site is – it would seem – not intended to be useful.
For a business to sink to such a low level of utility, and for the management to achieve such a high level of ignorance about the market, suggests to me that LI is moving rapidly towards implosion. I don’t believe it will still be with us two years from now. And that’s rather tragic, given how valuable it used to be.
If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ll have read my thoughts on the Science part of Marketing, and how much money this makes you.
As I explained recently to an Accountant, we don’t have a “business plan” for my current company, we only have a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet – done correctly – *is* a business plan, and a better plan than any you’ll ever see written down.
(NB: I’m not an accountant. I’m not a Finance Director – and never have been. I don’t even like spreadsheets; normally they bore me to death. But this is an exception. It is the only way to effectively plan and run a startup)
So I was delighted to see that Dave Stone has posted a spreadsheet to track and measure the effectiveness of your “attention” campaign – how much exposure did you get from TechCrunch et al? Was it worth it?
There is a curse afflicting the startup world right now. It’s insidious, it’s harmful, and – as a potential customer – I’m fed up of running into these brick walls of customer-hatred. Each time it happens, yet another startup generates massive harm for itself, and I’d like to see this madness STOP.
(by “startup world” I mean: West-coast USA-style startups – i.e. Silicon Valley VC’s and Angels, the startups they back, the people seeking money from there, and any startup that follows their way of thinking. I do *not* mean – for instance – old-style Europe startups, who haven’t even grasped the idea of a pre-funded “beta” release yet. This post probably will sound new and scary to some of them. For everyone else, this is already standard practice)
EDIT: I forgot (!) to add: when it works, for the startups that use it sparingly, and for the *minority* that are well-suited to it, it works fine. But the current trend is for *everyone* to try it – and that’s where the failure lies. “When all you have is a hammer…”
Startups today are advised to build a micro-website with just 1-3 pages that gathers people’s email addresses and does nothing else. This is supposed to show “traction” (in the number of emails captured) and “early lead generation” (by creating a pre-made mailing list of potential customers you can later approach), as well as “idea/product feedback from potential customers” (soliciting opinions from these people by emailing them and trying-out your ideas on a fresh audience – BEFORE spending the money to make the product).
I can’t remember where I first saw this, but its been promoted by a number of major VC’s on their blogs and tweets, and it’s generally seen as a sign that a startup is hip and modern and knows its shit. From memory, it’s been popularized too by things like Y Combinator, Seedcamp, etc – the places that up-and-coming startups go to learn “how to be better at being a startup”.
First para of wikipedia’s summary on what is an Early Adopter?
Typically this will be a customer who, in addition to using the vendor’s product or technology, will also provide considerable and candid feedback to help the vendor refine its future product releases, as well as the associated means of distribution, service, and support.
Why do we care about these people? Because we certainly do care; we care very much. Startups pore vast amounts of energy into wooing this crowd.
In this context, there’s several valuable uses of these people (
Three things on that list shine brightly, and are where old-style startups haven’t caught up yet: these people massively reduce the startup’s SALES and MARKETING costs. A small, lean startup doesn’t yet have the cash to hire a sales team. Nor a marketing team. Also, the founders usually don’t *quite* know what it is they’re selling, or how best to describe it.
These early adopters make SALES EASY, they do FREE MARKETING, and they ADVISE ON WRITING A BETTER SALES MESSAGE. Wow. Awesome!
Let’s look at the *second* para of Wikipedia’s description:
The relationship is synergistic, with the customer having early (and sometimes unique, or at least uniquely early) access to an advantageous new product or technology.
i.e. for all that FREE juicy goodness your Early Adopters are giving you, you’re expected (usually: required) to give back, in spades. Usually what you give back is worth more in cash than what you receive – but it’s all about timing. The cash “cost” to you is due in the future, in the long-term product discounts, etc. Whereas the cash “benefit” to you is accrued in the present, in the form of increased sales *today*. And cashflow is the thin that tends to kill startups, so this is hugely valuable for you.
And – unfortunately – these “beta” websites tend to completely ignore the “give back” part of the relationship.
Here’s the problem: if you piss-off the visitors to that micro-site, you generate *disproportionately* large hatred of your company, your team, and your product. Just as an Early Adopter is inclined to tell everyone how wonderful your product is (even though it doesn’t work yet, and they’ve only got a partial version) … they’ll equally tell everyone how terrible your product is (even though it’s not finished, and they’ve only got partial info).
These people don’t conveniently sit around waiting to SERVE YOUR STARTUP … no, they’re people with reputations of their own, with thoughts and feelings. That’s what makes them so valuable – other people trust and listen to them. And that means they’re expected/required to report the bad along with the good. Upset them at your peril.
When they come to your website, an Early Adopter has a rough pyramid of needs. The more convinced they are of your product – OR the more it seems to fit a problem they already know they have – the further down this list they’ll go:
…and they’re impatient, by nature. If you convince them with your first sentence that your product is even ATTEMPTING to fix a problem that’s causing them major pain right now, they may well *immediately* run to your “pricing” link, straight from the home page.
Incidentally … in that case, here is a person TRYING TO GIVE YOU MONEY. You don’t always want their money – it might come with too many strings attached – but, generally, you probably do. You certainly want to consider it, not cut-them off mid-stride and tell them to piss off and leave you alone (which is what a lot of sites do).
But lets go back to the most basic need: information.
Someone comes to your site. Why?
You can bet that – no matter what else – they want Information. Who you are, what you’re selling, why is it useful … might they want to use/buy it for themselves?
And here is where most of these beta sites today do a full-frontal face-plant straight onto the tarmac.
Here’s what most sites do:
This reminds me of The Pirate Code, courtesy Disney:
“Synergistic”, says Wikipedia: i.e. a trade, an equivalence: you rub my back, I rub yours.
Only … with these startups, it’s all about TAKING the customer’s info, and then sending them away empty-handed. No wonder a lot of visitors come away with a vague sense of having just been scammed – this is exactly how most con-artists work!
Not every startup is created equal; if the founder of Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, or … etc … choose to start a new startup now, with a new product, then you can be sure thousands of people will beat a path to their door just on spec of who the founder is. They don’t know what it will be, but they know they want in – if only for the bragging rights to say “First!”.
To a lesser extent, there are startups whose product approaches a need so great, and so tightly defined, and so cutting-edge … that customers will again come beating down the door IRRESPECTIVE of any sense of rationality or sense.
But, for most startups, that’s not the case.
For most startups, if you throw up a “gathering email addresses TRUST ME I’M NOT A PORN-IN-YOUR-INBOX SITE REALLY”, it’s not so simple.
For most starutps, who then use that landing page as *the main funnel for all outside contact*, this is a disaster.
For instance, last week I met a startup co-founder who gave me his business card. Only it wasn’t his card – when I followed the web-address, it proved to direct straight to the funnel for gathering email addresses. Ironically, the site didn’t even have contact info. The founders had linked to their twitter profiles.
(and the main founder had then back-linked his Twitter profile to this funnel site! Way to go, idiot: now there’s literally no way of contacting you directly. I have to @reply you on Twitter and “hope” that you will be gracious enough to a) bother to check your @-replies (since Twitter doesn’t inform you automatically) and b) avoid irritating my own followers with meaningless private messages I had to send to you in public)
What happens if you want to watch the Animatrix films on the WB website?
Here’s the direct link, in the intothematrix.com website, as of August 2010:
http://progressive.warnerbros.com/thematrix/us/med/Episode1l_dl.zip
The handful of Google links I tried all just redirected to the WB hosting.
Right. So. The only way to see the free content, from their OWN website, is now to go and pirate the full version, and “promise not to look at the non-free parts”.
Sigh. Remind me again, what was the film companies’ stance on digital piracy?
Anyone saying “redundancies are inevitable for games industry companies” should never be allowed to run a studio. Ditto for the raving loons who think everyone should be hired as contractors instead.
I was pointed at this by Nicholas Lovell’s wholehearted supporting tweet, reminding me that Nicholas is a finance guy, not a game developer:
“If you’re a work-for-hire/self-funded studio working for little profit who employs 100% of your staff on a permanent basis then expect redundancies at the end of every project and or the business completely failing.”
No. If you’re in that situation *you don’t deserve to be in business*. Contractors are no solution here at all: your “solution” is to *raise income*. Making games is not a box-shifting industry, it’s a creative industry. The ONLY way this works is to charge high prices, because you can never directly control creative-cost.
This has absolutely NOTHING to do with “Cyclical business” and “Core teams” and “Contractor flexibility” – those are the terms of idiots who think it’s reasonable to run a business as if it were a hobby, always on the brink of bankruptcy. You’ll go the way of Woolworths et al – and you damn well deserve it.
A healthy, profitable, creative business not only ALWAYS runs at less than 100% staff efficiency, it positively THRIVES on it. The open secret of successful creative industries is that you pay someone’s salary just to get them in the door and to keep them content … so you can reap the rewards by being the one to exploit the new IP that – randomly, spontaneously – flows out of them.
I’ve long felt this intuitively to be true, but the weight of opinion and accepted “evidence” has made the idea laughable: Copyright has no social benefit.
So this article in Spiegel Online is fascinating:
No Copyright Law – The Real Reason for Germany’s Industrial Expansion?
(I’ve been in hospital recently, just catching up now on old posts, but I see other outlets such as Wired have finally caught-on to this too – I haven’t read their take on this yet)
It appears to be mostly centered on a contrast between two similarly advanced nations, England and Germany, which had radically different copyright laws at the time.
“In Great Britain, people were dependent on the medieval method of hearsay for the dissemination of this useful, modern knowledge”, whereas “The prospect of a wide readership motivated scientists in particular to publish the results of their research”.
…and so we see a key part of modern research and academia, the concept of publishing your work: born from the *abscence* of Copyright.
18 months ago, Scott and I described our perspectives on the fall of Tabula Rasa. I said that if you’re going to spend $100m on an MMO, you’d better be aware of MMO history and not repeat those mistakes.
It would seem that Real Time Worlds wasn’t listening – coincidentally, $100m is how much *publically announced* money just went down the pan, now they’ve gone into administration.
No-one in this industry likes to talk openly about their enormous fuck-ups – and the few that do tend to become pariahs, sued by their employers or shunned by future investors. No major company openly documents – or “allows to be documented” – anything of import. It’s a system that punishes progress in the professional field.
There’s a single public analysis on RTW/APB right now. It’s an anonymous source (oh, for god’s sake! When will we stop shooting the messengers?), but some non-anonymous sources have backed it up. So, let’s take a look…
“lead you to think it’s going to come right by release … You end up in this situation where you’re heads down working your ass off”
Me, 18 months ago:
“The implication being that they didn’t do anything wrong, perhaps, but that they stood by and watched the train rolling slowly towards the brick wall and didn’t try (hard enough) to stop the collision.”
“APB … came together… relatively late in its development cycle … leaving too little time for content production and polish … lacking any real quality in some of its core mechanics”
Me, 18 months ago:
It wasn’t ready for beta. I said so. Many others said so.
“it was pretty clear to me that the game was going to get a kicking at review – the gap between expectation and the reality was huge.”
Me, 18 months ago:
A survey was taken, internally, asking what people thought. The results were never published – so no-one (apart from the survey takers) knows exactly what the results were, but we were told that the *company* knew.
Incidentally … I was afraid to come clean at the time (and upset individuals), but that survey of all staff was EXTREMELY negative about the project, and I have been told (but you’ll have to take this as unsubstantiated rumour) that the reaction of the top-level execs on seeing the results was simple:
“Bury it”
“I wasn’t on the APB team, so I played it infrequently, during internal test days etc. I was genuinely shocked when I played the release candidate – I couldn’t believe Dave J would be willing to release this.”
Me, 18 months ago:
[I wasn't on the TR dev team, but] given my position I had the luxury of a lot of insights that other people wouldn’t have had.
…
I played TR in the alpha, and I actually enjoyed it
…
it was a good pre-production prototype [but - at best - YEARS away from being a finished project - and they went to beta only 6 months later]
“The real purpose of beta is publicity, not bug fixing. We never took that lesson on board.”
[I didn't cover this, but Scott's post did, IIRC]
“MyWorld is an innocent bystander caught up in the demise of APB. Which is a real shame, because it is genuinely ground breaking, though not aimed at the traditional gamer audience. ”
…which sounds an awful lot like Scott’s team and Steve Nichols team (the former very basic playable but unreleased, the latter Dungeon Runners)
EDIT: it’s 100k sales, not 10k.
APB:
“the real killer, IMO, is the business model. This was out of the team’s hands. The game has issues, but I think if you separate the business model from the game itself, it holds up at least a little better.”
I originally (mis-)understood
the figures that Nicholas Lovell has dug out, but apparently sales were over 100k (presumably that means practically zero sales in USA?).
By comparison, the previous big-failure MMO which went down because of the “bad business model” was Hellgate: London.
So, not as strongly as I originally put it, but I’m still dubious about the business model being the cause. This stinks to me of a marketing/sales failure (unless those 100k sales are spread equally across territories)
APB:
“we should have kept our powder dry. Our PR felt tired and dragged on and on, rather than building a short, sharp crescendo of excitement pre-release.”
IMHO this is a really bad idea – unless you remove the entire “MMO” part of the game. Big Bang Marketing doesn’t work for MMOs; this is the old-school of game-marketing.
Although, given how ineffective RTW’s marketing seems to have been, I doubt a big-bank-marketing-campaign could have done any worse.
Two parts of this industry need to talk, one part doesn’t. As I said in 2009: “We need to talk [about failure]; when will we talk [about failure]?”
The professionals: you’re getting burned out, chewed up, and spat out. Your lives are being wasted.
The investors: you’re getting screwed. You write it off as random failure, and you can afford it, but you’re shying away from “games” as a result, leaving good profits behind on the table.
The inexperienced, the mediocre, and all those people who don’t actually MAKE the game, but do get to ruin the process (rockstar-designers, producers, marketers, directors, managers, etc) : you’re doing great. Your lack of skill hasn’t held you back, and the company will often go bankrupt before anyone gets around to firing you for incompetence.
When I left NCsoft, I was cold-contacted with some new job offers.
A typical example: “make a success of” a project that had already spent several years and many millions of dollars and was about to launch. But I wasn’t allowed to move said launch, and they had “infinite” funding (I kid you not).
There was a fat salary for anyone willing to shepherd that disaster (and, I suspect, become the public fall-guy). The game itself launched as they insisted, and was a laughable failure. I doubted it could have been fixed without another 12-18 months of development.
And me, personally? Nowadays, I run a freeform studio developing mobile apps and games for corporate clients. Each employee is responsible for themself and for their own decisions. If you need a project-manager to mollycoddle you every day, you can’t work here.
Personal responsibility, and personal authority; so far, it’s working pretty well…
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...Came up recently on TCE. I finally figured out a concise definition of the job role being filled by the “good/great” Tech Directors – someone who’s worth every penny of the $150k salaries they command:
“Figure out the worst things that go wrong which nobody is specifically to blame for, and make sure they don’t happen”
The point with TD is that 9 times in 10 you have a hierachical company structure:
Owners
…
Company Directors
…
Senior Management
…
Exec Producer
…
Project Management
…
Leads
…
Teams
…with the setup that responsibility flows DOWNWARDS (companies where responsibility flows UP are very rare in games industry, IME. Nice idea but very few companies have the culture to obey that ideal!).
So … e.g. … anything that the PM’s don’t think of, and don’t delegate to one or more leads … gets completely ignored/forgotten.
This is a gross generalization – in practice, people lower down tend to notice if something’s missing, and apply pressure up the chain until someone takes it on, or take it on themselves.
That works for small stuff. But the big stuff – especially something that needs two disciplines to fix, or that is too much workload for one person to “absorb”, you need someone with management power (i.e. the authority to take people away from pre-existing tasks).
That’s where the [X] Director comes in. (X = Technical, Art, Design, etc)
TD, AD, etc have the sweeping power to get different departments to collaborate, or to persuade a Producer to relinquish some of their team for a week to get a “more important but so subtle you didn’t see it yet” problem fixed.
a six-week paid internship, beginning in October. We’re looking for smart people who are interested in making social and story-based online games. You must be able to demonstrate experience of having worked on games in the past, whether you helped make a big game, or worked on your own in your spare time, and we’re particularly interested in:
* Front and back-end web developers
* Game designers
* Artists and graphic designers (aimed at games)
This is one of those “exceptional” opportunities – SixToStart is a tiny tiny company, but they have a habit of winning awards for their unique mix of modern games, at the cutting-edge of game-design, using computers as only a part of the overall game. Google if you don’t know them…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Typical Escapist. The very first page of their article on “Videogame mths debunked” waxes eloquently (and contemptuously) about supposed “facts” without much apparent fact-checking.
And then the following pages go off on a personal journey of ignorance and attitude. Nuanced opinion, researched journalism, or even useful commentary … this is not.
(The only scientificly valid studies I’ve seen for the brain-training game showed that it DOES have a positive effect. They also suggested that people who otherwise claimed to play it every day were apparently lieing, or blurring their memories of how often they played … which might explain the failures of some of the other “studies”, including the pop-science one that The Escapist bothers to cite)
Apart from Zero Punctuation (a canny acquisition on the editors’ part), TheEscapist seems to continue to be happy as mostly a waste of (internet) space. Sigh. I think EDGE has a lot to answer for…
LinkedIn has unofficially officially removed their “updates” system – you can no longer find out what’s changed in your contacts’ roles, busines, lives, etc.
Some idiot at LI corp – who apparently is unaware of the normal consequences of becoming the lowest-common-denominator (i.e. unless you are the market leader on size, and *force* your competitors out of business, you price yourself out of existence. Well, you’re nowhere near Facebook, so you’re most likely to just put LI bankrupt) – has replaced it with a massive, 5-page long aggregation of twitter feeds.
(currently 5 pages on my account, but who knows how long it will get if more people add their twitter accounts?)
There’s a website for that – it’s called Twitter.com. Funnily enough, I already have 5 different Twitter clients, and they do an AWESOME job of subscribing to the twitter feeds I want to read.
None of that is applied to LI, of course – LI simply *forces* me to view everything that is tweeted by anyone. It’s as if the LI management team HAVE NEVER USED TWITTER IN THEIR LIVES, and have no idea how it works. Amazing!
The (hypothetical) idiot at LinkedIn has clearly achieved something – they’ve given a very short-term boost to the “Activity” on the site. At the cost of removing functionality that used to be there.
I suspect this is the beginning of the end for LinkedIn. At this rate, it will get more and more useless.
I wonder, is there a community anywhere for maintaining business contacts, viewing resumes, while preventing spam and leaving you in full control of who sees what and who can contact whom?
(subtitle: EA/Mythic forces themselves into commercial failure)
8 months ago, I tried to play Warhammer Online.
This was after releasing press announcements and running a big campaign trying to get people like me to play. They’d been too lazy / stupid to remove the “you cannot play this game” message from their own website, even several days after the marketing campaign started.
Net result: I never got around to playing. They made it such a pain in the ass that even when offered this *for free*, I never got that far.
So, I got this message today. And this just double-underlines my previous point. Read this message, and ask yourself: does it entice me into the game?
End of Subscription Notification
Your subscription for Mythic Entertainment Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning for Game Account [username] has ended for the following reason:
* Subscription is not set to renew
If you did not authorize this, please contact support at (650) 628-1001. Phone support hours are 10:00 am – 10:00 pm eastern time, Monday through Friday. You can find further information on account security at http://help.warhammeronline.com.
Thank you!
This is an automated email from the Account Management site for Mythic Entertainment.
Games Workshop, Warhammer, Warhammer Online, Age of Reckoning, and all associated marks, names, races, race insignia, characters, vehicles, locations, units, illustrations and images from the Warhammer world are either ®, ™ and/or © Games Workshop Ltd 2000-2009. Used under license by Electronic Arts Inc
Let’s do a quick analysis. Here you have a DIRECT contact with the consumer – moreover a consumer who isn’t yet paying you any money, and who you know has NEVER logged-in to the game.
Let’s look at the content, as any good marketing person would.
Hmm. Respectively:
As I said 8 months ago, someone ought to deploy the PlayFish folks onto the smoking remains of Mythic. I very much doubt they’d allow such terrible excuse for marketing to go on…
(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5) Loading ...And, in the middle of the debate *that* stirs up, someone hits them with a copyright violation, forcing YouTube to remove the video. There’s no option to read why – although my best guess is that they “didn’t pay to license the music”. Ha! Can lawyers silence debate where the Third Reich failed?
There’s no link to who ARPA actually is, although it seems to be an Australian music-copyright org that specialises in “collecting money”.
I think this situation neatly sums up quite how much loathing I have for some of the selfish, greedy, petty-minded scum that fight for the preservation *and infinite extension* of Copyright law, and who seek to criminalise everyone in the world who won’t feed them money.
(and, incidentally, if this *is* over money – I’m surprised the challenge went ahead, given that Copyright law has specific terms exempting “commentary” (i.e. exactly this kind of situation). Actually, I’m not. It’s the kind of thing you expect of the “guilty-until-you-bribe-a-lawyer-to-prove-you-innocent” laws that the USA (especially) has put in place in recent years (and other govts to a lesser extent))
Is there a place to complain that UK government departments are breaking the internet standards and refuse to fix their websites?
Occasionally, you find sites that do this. Usually, when you tell the organization, they’re a little embarassed, and rush to fix them.
From HMRC, I got a polite, pedantic, *but entirely incorrect* response telling me that the “standard” was X, when I know that to be false (as does anyone who has read the offiicial standards, as documented by the Internet RFCs).
They apparently can’t be bothered to read the standards, and don’t care that they’re wrong.
No wonder so many people hate civil servants: holier-than-thou attitude coupled with being clearly, inarguably, wrong. Sigh.
Android 2.2 has a nasty bug where it disables the SD Card on Google Nexus One phones.
Fine, I found a workaround. But there’s a down-side – what happens when you only AFTERWARDS remember that it’s got the ONLY copy of several hundred photos, including plenty of uniques that can never be re-captured?
No way I was getting the photos back – after all, it *formatted* the card.
But … saved by Google’s poor OS … a couple of days after I’d formatted the card, I had the thought:
Hmm. This Android OS has a lot of design flaws and bugs. I wonder if … “formatting” the SD card doesn’t actually format it, but simply marks all the files as deleted?
After all, it’s flash memory – older Flash cards could only be formatted a set number of times before they’d stop working. Maybe, just maybe, Google’s OS doesn’t do what it says it does…
Yep, turns out that’s what it did: mark all the files as deleted, without actually deleting them. So I was able to get back about 95% of my photos. I could probably have got all of them if I’d known in advance that the format … doesn’t format.
Card Recovery is awesome. It’s an excellent example of one of the best sales techniques:
I got to the end, and was expecting something vicious – $500-$1000 price (after all, they have you in a vice at this point). Their software proved it was possible – the data was still there – so I prepared myself to manually recover the files, even if it took many hours. I’ve been using computers so long that I’ve had to do data-recovery by hand more than once, in the days before data-recovery firms existed.
Most “data-recovery” firms do this: get the customer in, get the physical media off them, show a tiny piece of data to give the customer hope (oftenn deliberately NOT mentioning how much data is missing), then charge outrageously high prices for their services, because at this point it’s hard for the customer to back out of the deal.
CardRecovery was barely $50.
No hesitation, I bought it on the spot. Especially since I’ve now got this handy utility should I ever need it again in the future…
Google’s Nexus One auto-upgraded a few weeks ago, to Android 2.2
It immediately broke itself. It was no longer able to use the SD card.
As a side-effect, it was impossible to install any applications. Making this a very expensive, very heavy, very slow excuse for a mobile phone.
The error was that the SD card permanently unmounted itself, with a message in status bar “SD card can now be safely removed”, accompanied by an error if you tried to install anything: “your SD card is unavailable or missing” (or words to that effect.
Factory-reset of the phone? Still broken.
By fiddling around, I eventually found the solution (and you’re probably not going to like this): Format the SD card.
Yep. It seems that Google changed something between Android 2.1 and 2.2 that – in some cases – makes it unable to read the SD card any more.
For the record, other things I tried include: remove the card physically and reseat; dismiss the error messages and try again; install apps from private sources (e.g. our own apps we wrote).
There’s a conference in Brighton this week, and one of the industry media – GamesIndustry.biz – has a base here, so they’ve been cropping up a lot in the reporting. In passing, I noticed some glaring howlers in their web-design. The 1990′s called, they want their web-design templates back…
Three glaring errors I noticed in particular. One of these they’re in good company – it’s the same thing Rupert Murdoch has done, along with sticking his fingers in his ears and screaming “NA, NA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! GO AWAY AND TAKE YOUR STUPID INTERNET-THINGY WITH YOU, YOU FREELOADING BASTARDS!” (not a literal quote, of course). Although a lot of people seem to think that’s a weak strategy even for the mighty news empire…
What do you see when you view a page on this site?
If you have a laptop, and you surf their site, does the battery last noticeably less than normal? (hint: yes, it should – I’ve seen this happen on a wide variety of PC and Mac laptops)
Why?
Because they put not 1, not 2, not even 5 … not even TEN … but up to FIFTEEN SEPARATE FLASH ADS all animated SIMULTANEOUSLY on every page.
Flash wasn’t designed for this – the flash runtime can overhwelm a modern computer with just 1 rogue flash app; 15 is begging for trouble.
I suspect (because some of my former employers used to purchase them, regularly) that these “mini-ads” are a decent source of revenue for GI.biz. It’s a pity then that they’re mostly Flash, because that means an awful lot of people in the target audience (game developers), see something like this:
Incidentally, I offer a tip-of-the-hat to Relentless, whose animated-GIF has so many frames of animation that it smoothly animates some stuff that looks straight out of a Flash ad. Smart move on their behalf – they DIDN’T use a Flash movie.
OMGWTFBBQ! That must take TONNES of animating frames! Why, yes – it uses an *unholy* 50 kilobytes, just to display one ickle GIF. Shocking. And yet … in 2010 … such a tiny tiny file in the scheme of things that it suffers nothing for not being Flash. (Flash was originally needed because internet bandwidth was poor; it only gradually grew into the all-singing, all-dancing beast we love today)
Try viewing any article on the site.
Follow any link that a friend sends you via email
Click on a link in any blog post or forum post.
Actually … you’ll have some trouble there. Lots of blogs and forums no longer link to GI.biz. Why?
Because anyone who follows the link only gets to see ONE SENTENCE of the article:
Hmm.
If you try to sign-up on their site for an account using Gmail, the site refuses to “allow” you to create an account. It seems they have hard-coded a list of email domains that they consider “unacceptable” for game-developers to use.
Funny. I’ve been using gmail for my professional email for many years now. It seems a fairly common practice. Google’s … well … Google is a pretty well-known company these days. Their products are … well … kind-of popular. No?
I tried emailing the site admins to ask if there was a way I could create my account anyway – it’s fairly easy to check that my gmail account is bona fide. A funny thing happened.
Their website has no email addresses. Instead, it has a javascript that creates email-addresses on the fly. It’s a neat little javascript, and used differently would be pretty cool. But the way they chose to use it has two obvious effects:
O RLLY?
No, not really. I’ve got nothing against the news-site, and I’m well aware that this is only an echo of a bigger, louder noise: mainstream newspapers are in their dieing throes, lashing out at anyone and everyone in their panic.
But I’m suprised that a tech-industry focussed site chooses to fight so hard against the medium that so much of its own industry relies upon and worships. The first and third items above I would normally attribute to ignorance and just spending too little money for their web design team. But the middle one reflects an active decision to block the internet at large – even though the workaround is to create a “free” account, it’s an artificial barrier entirely of their own making.
I’ve spent a lot of time this year working with or around mainstream journalists, magazine staff, and authors. I’ve noticed a lot of this stuff going on. This is just a personal opinion, but … I humbly suggest that whenever ANY news/journalism site acts as though it’s at war with the very medium that the world + dog uses for spreading said news … that whatever else happens, it’s probably not going to end well.
…and Amazon’s intelligent recommendation engine leaps into action:
(if you don’t know who Tim Langdell is, and you work in the games industry, just Google him.
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