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) :

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_smfmNOCPhA

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...

These are some lessons I have learnt, including some services I have found to recommend bloggers to sign up for their benefits. Actually the title should be "from my first consistent month of blogging", considering that I tried to blog previously but failed to persist after a couple of posts. But anyway, I have persisted. 1. Ego checking with positive results I mean ego checking as in searching for my name on the Internet. If you type "Sunny Wu" on US Google, this site, usually comes up as the second result. The first result, is Sunnywu.com, which is not owned by me. Too bad that this site is currently hosted in US servers, therefore if you use Australian Google, this site is listed lower down the result list. On the other hand, if you search on Yahoo, whether it's US or Australian, this site usually is listed as the first result. With MSN Live search, this site is somewhere down fourth or fifth on the result list. Overall, I have tried to make myself easier to be found on the Internet, for better or worse... 2. Being thick-skin pays off After the release of the new iMac and reading a post on 37Signals, I have made a new post regarding a potential new colour for this new iMac here. After that I have made a comment back on the 37Signals post and also submit my blog entry to TUAW and they post it. In total I have more than 900 views, during those two days as a result. The page view total may sound low, but for me it is pretty big, considering that I usually only get ~10-20 page views a day in average. The lesson here is that, as long as you think you have a blog entry worthwhile to share, be a thick skin and tell them, aka hard-sell it. 3. Search Engine can always take people to your blog ... somehow I signed up Wordpress.com Stats plugin, which shows the queries people redirected to my site through search engine queries. These are some queries which show my blog entries as first-page results:

• "google apps addressbook api"
• "google apps contact manager"
• "google reader external program"

Before blogging, I always thought that this is like finding a needle in a haystack. Or maybe I should have more faith in The Long Tail. :) 4. Lots of ways to earn money - But can you? During this month, I have made myself learn how to earn money on the Internet. I have signed-up in Google Adsense, AuctionAds, Amazon Affiliate,Commission Junction. They are some sites which almost anyone can qualify. There are a lot of ways to make money, but I am still learning how the whole eco-system works. To learn more, I recommend visiting Problogger, John Chow Dot Com, Shoemoney and Dosh Dosh. 5. Statistic is fun It is pretty interesting to see figures on the how/who/where/what/etc of my blog's visitors. I recommend signing up these services for learning more about your blog:

• Google Analytics(lots and lots of info, a must-have!)
• Feedburner (finds out who subscribes your blog's RSS feed)
• Performancing Metrics (good for small blog with few visitors)
• Crazy Egg (good for seeing how people focus/click on your blog's front page)
• Wordpress.com Stats Plugin (for Wordpress only, but the best thing is that its stats excludes the blog administrator visits - more accurate and useful when your visitor count is low)

6. Bandwidth is irrelevant I have used around 350MB of bandwidth, out of the available 100GB of bandwidth... 7. Writing is easy, but the plumbing is not... Writing is fairly easy to me (for things I want to say anyway). The problem is that it's annoying to format your blog entry, like section titles, list, uploading and resizing images, etc. Also, providing references (i.e. add links to sites you mention) is mundane work, too. The default Wordpress editor feature is quite minimal, I can do more with features like more formatting options or more convenient Flash/Javascript embodiment (e.g. for Youtube video). I am still out looking for good Wordpress plugins which can help me to spend less time on "plumbing" but more in writing. 8. My post seems too long If you read this sentence, thanks for staying with me for so long in this post. It is too easy to write and I tend to over-stretch my word limits - after all, I do not tend to read long posts on others' blogs. I need to trim down, or another way is maybe adding page breaks or formatting the blog post entry to increase the readability. This is a great guide that I think I will try. 9. Get A friend to motivate/hassle you to blog It is fairly easy to drop off blogging. it will be great to have some friends to subscribe your blog and ask them nicely to remind you to blog, whenever you have dropped off. I dropped off for 10 days during the past month, but my friend reminded me. Thanks mate! 10. What you said - Please share your advice Maybe you could tell what you think I should improve for my blog, e.g. topics, site design, writing style...etc. Just leave a comment below and it will be greatly appreciated!

I have been using Mozilla Firefox for a few years already. One of the best feature which Firefox excels in is that it allow developers to create "add-on", a small software that add new features, and this leads to innovation in Firefox customization such that a lot of great useful add-ons are improving the Firefox Internet browsing experience. Locationbar² is one of them. It provides multiple useful features: Increase the location bar readability Using an example below, normally, an address is shown like this: With Locationbar², it is improved to this: Basically, the website's domain name is shown more obviously, with the grayed out subdomain and spaces to separate with the rest of the address. It also hides out the protocol name (like http, https). However, this will not affect you from copying the address - once you put your mouse pointer on top of the address bar, you will be presented the address in the usual format. Easier phishing detection Phishing is a Internet scam that basically misdirect people to give out confidential information to "fake" websites. I will use the following example to highlight how Locationbar² can help users to detect fake website. I got this email today "from" Westpac" which wants me to login to its website to confirm some info: If I click the "Click here" link, it opens a seemingly innocent looking banking login web page: But if you notice the address bar: It clearly shows that the domain name of this website is "form2700.com", not the typical "westpac.com.au". It uses "online.westpac.com.au" as a sub-domain name which pre-pends the real-fake domain name. Without Locationbar², it can easily mislead a user by the word westpac and also the not-so-obvious "form2700.com" website, like: That's why this is an excellent feature for phishing detection. Mouse-click to select the whole address Go to File Menu->Tools->Addons->Locationbar2 Preferences, and tick the "Click selects all" box, whenever you click your (left) mouse button on the address bar, the address will be automatically selected and you can do a quick "Ctrl-C" or choose "Copy" from the Edit menu to copy the address to wherever you want, e.g. to your Email client or Word document. I find this option very convenient for address copying. Conclusion I would recommend anyone to try this out, especially for the casual computer users, who may need to be more aware in terms of verifying the web pages they are directed is whether legitimate or not. Also, there are other customizable settings which can be used to improve the address formatting that any users can manipulate to their liking. You can download this plug-in here. If you have not had Firefox installed, you can get it below, accompanying with Google Toolbar, for the ease of use of various Google Services: Disclaimer: I will get referral commission if you download and install Firefox on your computer if you download Firefox through the link above. Just a referral experiment to see if anyone will find this entry useful enough to get Firefox :)

Adobe has upped the ante in the competition between Silverlight and Flash - it will catch up in quality of video streaming by offering a beta version of Flash player that supports H.264 codec - the same one used in iPod and iTunes video today (or tomorrow, depending which timezone you are). The news are available here and here. Tinic Uro, a Flash engineer from Adobe, has provided more insights on what various codecs and standards the new Flash player will support. Finally, we have a user-friendly way to watch near DVD (I would not be greedy and ask for Hi-Definition) quality online streaming videos. Actually, this comes at the right time when I previously made a point on how unsatisfactory Flash video currently is when showing action-packed clips. Also, it will be interesting that Youtube, which already has converted user-uploaded videos to H.264 format for Apple TV, can probably make them available online to all Internet users through this updated Flash player version later the year. The adoption of standard H.264 codec will be a good thing from both user and content/video producers points of views, in terms of ease of video access and video production delivery. One concern I have is that, with higher video quality/resolution support coming soon, it will be unavoidable to see subtitle-style in-show advertisement, similar to what most TV shows have these days, which is not really feasible with the current supported lower resolution of Flash video. Embrace more ads!

This has nothing to do with startup but this deal can be a bargain for a startup developer, or anyone who is looking for a new desktop and a LARGE 27" LCD at a bargain price. Currently, the Dell 27" LCD is selling at $1799 alone. However, I have found a deal found through buckscoop, you can get an extra desktop computer for only $66 more! Be careful though, this deal may finish by Thurday night! To get this deal (modified from the buckscoop source):

1. Click here or go to Dell and enter E-Value code Q240822V-web in the E-Value code box
2. Look down the configuration listing for the monitor section and upgrade from the 22"TFT to the 27" Ultrasharp for $973.50 more
3. Now go to checkout at $2072.40
4. Here we will enter the 10% discount code of 39131CC55486 to reduce the total by $188.40
5. Total price payable inc delivery is now $1865.16

If you buy it for your business/company, don't forget you can claim your GST back too and push the total down to $1695.60. You can read the reviews of the Dell 27" 2707WFP LCD here and here. While the desktop will not run the latest PC games well, it is an alright business desktop for typical word-processing and web browsing tasks - probably good enough for some lightweight web application development too. It has the following highlights:

• Pentium E2160 1.8Ghz (relax, it is actually a basic version of Core 2 Duo branded as Pentium, not a Pentium 4 running at 1.8Ghz, the speed itself is okay for its price, see a review here)
• 2GB Memory
• Windows Vista Business (not your usual crippled Vista Home Basic version, see the comparison here), offers great backup feature for safeguarding your valuable data!
• 250GB hard disk storage
• DVD Burner

You may notice that I provided a different E-value code than the one written from the top of the buckscoop message thread. The reason is that you can get more value - better CPU and 1GB extra of memory for basically ~$12 more. I have prepared the perfect excuse for you to get a massive 27" LCD - you can increase your productivity, see a study by an Apple consultant study here and here. Time to upgrade your 17" LCD NOW! Personally, I have made more than a few purchases from Dell in the past few years and I found the products satisfactory, be it laptops, desktops or LCDs. Also, there is this Total Satisfaction Policy offered by Dell that lets you return the products within 15 days and get full refund (minus delivery cost). But read the fine prints though. Disclaimer: No, I don't earn any commission if you indeed make the purchase...

I was reading on 37Signals on how iPods influenced the design of iMac. Actually, I would think the U2 iPod, with the black and red colour combination and iPod nano Product (Red)'s aluminium casing, together can potentially produce a cool looking iMac Product (red) edition? To be honest, between this imaginery product and the current new iMac, I would prefer this red hot colour! What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comment :) p.s. iWork 08 is available as free 30-day trial download here. p.s.s. Is there something I can use instead of Photoshop for simple colour filling on Mac?