Sunny Wu Blogging Zone

1. Treating customers like superstars - certainly one of the ingredients of the successful Apple Retail Strategy?

The actual action (I was receiving the free T-Shirt box during the clip) :

2. Genius Bar - full of geniuses

Apparently they may do Apple II Mac Portable (corrected by KenC) support, too… more here…

3. Always do the best for the customer

I saw this from the “Grand Opening Visitor’s Guide” brochure:

Apple is committed to assisting our customers with special needs. If you plan to attend any of our events and will require a sign-language interpreter or other assistance, please let us know as far in advance as possible. We do our best, but require adequate notice to provide the resources you need.

I’m not sure if any other computer retailers would offer such service publicly? +1 for Apple Retail.

4. Worrying sign for Sydney CBD Apple retailers?

With One-to-One, Personal Training, free workshop classes, free wifi, tons of demo units on the floor, plenty of salesman and “geniuses” to help and most importantly, the Apple’s clean image and reputation of trust, it’s pretty hard to see how the Apple retailers can retain their customers. However, I’m all for competition to improve the general services and price advantages…

Fair dinkum, I just saw a guy bringing in his antique Apple II Mac Portable (corrected by OS11) to ask for technical support in the Genius Bar?

I do not major in History of Apple Evolution but I think it’s an Apple II Mac Portable?

Let’s start a Caption competition (no prize!). Here’s my crappy attempt:

Guy in blue shirt: “I’m pretty sure the manual says it comes with lifetime warranty.”

Genius: “(I hope not..) Could I entice you to purchase a slightly more powerful iMac downstairs? It’s about the same size - BUT with a 20″ LCD screen!”

If you have a startup idea and you believe that you can build it on top of Amazon Web Services infrastructure, then maybe you should take a look at this new competition.

$50k cash + $50k AWS credits for top winner and $5k AWS credits for four second-place winners. Great way to bootstrap!

Two Amazon Web Services which are most famous at the moment are probably Amazon S3 for data storage and Amazon Ec2 for “in-the-cloud” computing. While the latter may not be as robust as the former service, with the competitive pricing structure and on-the-fly and on-demand scalability and , I certainly believe they are feasible options for startuppers to consider and deploy their applications on.

From the terms & conditions page here, it seems that you won’t lose any copyrights or patents or ownership of your startup if you apply to the challenge.

Here are a couple of examples of AWS usage by startups like Smugmug and Pownce.

Too bad only US residents are eligible though, otherwise I may have a couple of ideas or two that can be applicable…

p.s. This is probably the first post of this blog that’s related to startup

It was “cheapskate” Tuesday and after a day of writing and writing in work, I went with a couple of friends and get the cheap $9 tickets to watch Bourne Ultimatum in Greater Union in CBD.

Personally I am a fan of the whole Bourne series - not exactly for the action details (after all, I am from Hong Kong and we have seen the best Kung-fu action stuff back in the 80s/90s), but rather the suspense and the twist of the super-secret CIA operations.

The latest and the supposedly-final-episode of the series, Bourne Ultimatum, is I think the best of the whole series. I would not go into the plots, but I can say that during the movie there were a lot of twists and “a-ha” moments. Especially the way the story was continued from Bourne Supremacy to Bourne Ultimatum is very smart and neat.

The plot and more descriptions of the movie is at Wikipedia and trivia and goofs are on IMDB.
There are the usual Kung-Fu actions, explosions, trademarked car chasing scenes and last but not least, the bystanders getting affected by the car crashes, explosions, stolen properties, fire-shots caused by all the CIA and Bourne actions. There is a mystery to me - how does Bourne get all the money needed to survive and travel around the world?

Anyway, I give this movie is definitely a 90%+ rating, and hope that there will be new movies in the whole Bourne franchise. I strongly recommend you to watch Bourne Identity and Bourne Supremacy first to enjoy the finale of this trilogy.

From a geek point of view, the whole Bourne series do not dig into the technologies in details. Although the FBI or CIA in the movie uses the state of the art technologies to tap into phones, track wirelessly through GPS/satellite, Bourne himself usually just goes into an Internet cafe and search for info and that’s about it in terms of computer interaction. These are some real-world brands and technologies I noticed:

Google - Bourne uses Google to search

Google Maps - The CIA uses similar maps - or most likely since they are derived from Keyhole Inc

HP monitors - Seems like they are the standard CIA equipments…

MMS for communicating with “assets” or assassins to assign tasks, e.g. who to kill.

Motorola - Everyone, good or bad, uses Motorola mobile phones apparently. Bourne got a nice Motorola Razr prepaid phone for one of the rather short-lived acquaintance. I don’t remember I saw any blackberry though?

IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad - The agent Julia Stiles is playing seems to take a Thinkpad out of her bag?

It’s an industrial hazard that I took notice anything technological when watching movie…

Confucius style to be exact…