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!"

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...

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 am a keen follower on the IT startups. I like to read about them and have some critical thoughts as a hobby. On my RSS feed reader, I have subscribed many startup news blogs such as Techcrunch, Mashable, Gigaom, Ycombinator News , Startupping forum and many others too long to list. After subscribing to so many of these feeds, sometimes it's pretty hard to search back a discussion or news thread regarding a particular startup from a while back. I found that using the general Google search engine is not an ideal solution, since it also shows search results which are not from the startup-focused websites I have read from. Therefore I have created a startup-focused search engine powered by Google Custom Search. I have exported my RSS feed list from Google Reader and added the relevant feeds' mother blogs into this customized search engine. Other than the websites I have listed above, I have also added a lot of other blogs focusing on startup news, but also personal blogs which (potential) entrepreneurs would mostly be very interested in. Some examples are: Personal blogs

• Guy Kawasaki
• Paul Graham,
• Joel Spolsky
• Niall Kennedy
• Mark Fletcher
• Don Dodge

Startup blogs

• 37Signals
• Micro ISV Journal
• Plenty Of Fish

Venture Capital blogs

• Union Square Ventures
• A VC

And a lot more of others sites were added - at the moment 82 and counting... I have also created a few "labels" such as "News", "Venture capitals", "Forums for startuppers" and "Reviews" which can be used to refine your searches towards your desired knowledge areas on the search result page. Certainly this search engine is still a work in progress. If you have any suggestions or feedback for me to tweak this search engine better for you, feel free to leave a comment under this blog post. So, give it a try here :)

Actually rather the first post of the new Australian financial year. I have been trying to blog for a number of times but every time I am not persistent enough and given up very shortly after starting. But as I am distancing myself from being young (aka getting OLDER), it seems that I always cannot remember a lot of my thoughts from the past. So this time, unlike other times, I set my goal as to document some thoughts on everything and make them as my analytical exercises. And in future, who knows, I can read and been impressed by some good stuff that I think I could not have written, or laugh at my stupid grammatical mistakes. It does not sound like a bad thing either way?! So this time I will make a difference and keep this blog alive for ... one month?

Joining the Midnight Launch - Bought Wii without pre-ordering After chatting to a friend online, I was pretty bored and went to local Moore Park Supacentre to take a look and see what's the fuss of the midnight launch of Nintendo Wii. I did not pre-order a Wii but then I'm hooked by the games and the system itself so I thought I maybe lucky to get one without pre-ordering it. I went there and waited on the queue outside the EB Games shop. I waited for about probably 20 minutes and the reason it took so long was because the shop manager wanted to process all the customers who had pre-ordered first and I and another bloke was the last to get the Wii. I forked out AU$396 on credit card (hurray for interest free period!! account payable in 40 days ...) and out I went. I did not get any accessories and extra games because I think I may be able to get them cheaper at Target or BigW later. But I do get a Wii VIP card from EB Games and supposedly EB will have promotion every month or two or so. The current special deal is $20 off Tony Hawks skateboarding - which is not my cup of tea. The salesman was trying to get me to pay $60 for a 2 year extra warranty offered by EB Games. I asked, "Does it cover the TV damage if my Wiimote flys off my hand and breaks it?". "No. lol" was the answer. Guess I don't need it then. Here Wii go Top 10 Not-so-obvious Observations

1. The game disc itself does not seem readable by normal DVD-ROM drive (on my Macbook at least).
2. Wireless connection onto the Internet is straight forward to setup. As a true Microsoft Windows user, the first thing I do before playing Wii Sports was to do a System Update thru the Internet connection. It takes around 15 minutes to complete (not sure how much the download was...)
3. Browsing the Wii Shop Channel (to buy classic games) is a tad slow, from clicking a link to the link being loaded completely takes 3-5 seconds. Maybe everyone else just bought the Wii has been overloading the server.
4. You can HANG your Wii - when I was typing this blog, the Wii Shop Channel was hanging for more than 10 minutes to try connecting to the channel and it seems like to get out of this hanging state is to reset the Wii - ouch.
5. The news and forecast channel is not working yet - needed to wait for the service to be activated.
6. Wiimote does not need any calibration and magically it just works. IT seems to do calibration when you are trying to click on the first button on the screen.
7. The Wiimote, for my configuration at least, is only good for a range of 3 metres, which is pretty short.
8. In Wii Sports, there is a "Wii Fitness" mode which lets you undertake challenges by playing the sports included (such as finishing a spare in ten-pin bowling). After a set of exercises, it gives you a score, Wii Fitness Age, this is the age after my first go:
   
   I have never felt so old in my life until now....
9. I am tired after two hours of playing of the Wii Sports. I can already justify my buying decision - FITNESS. Please, create a Kinetic port for Wii!
10. There is this frequent warning in Wii Sports: "Make sure there are no people or objects around you that you might bump into while playing". Pretty hard to do when playing 4-player tennis I would think...

Top 5 Thoughts

1. Must start looking for cheap Gamecube accessories (controllers) and games such as Mario Party from ebay.
2. Must look for cheap deals on rechargable AA batteries and charger in electronics store - I have a feeling that the battery on Wiimote won't last long.
3. While we are all in the Ashes Series mode, I am looking forward to Ricky Ponting International Cricket 2007 and see what kind of cricket game they can make out of Wii. If they can fit a baseball game in Wii Sports, it cant be hard to make one for cricket.
4. Will there be a ultimate work out game for Wii, using a Dance Dance Resolution dance mat, Eyetoy-variant camera and Wiimote+nunchuck? Considering that all three can be used on the PC I am looking forward to any potential homebrew game using all of these input-methods.
5. Play around the Wiimote with PC/Mac sometime.