Black On Stuff

I have been using my iPhone for quite a while now and got used to it. I didn’t had any big issues with it so far. I even got used to do some particular things on the way back home from work, while sitting and waiting in traffic. What can you do with your iPhone while waiting to move your car meter by meter?

Here are five important things you can do in your car, besides regular phone calls, ipod, music and videos:

1. You can read your RSS feeds. I’m using SmartRSS, but you can find several other rss readers out there. Nice graphics, well implemented into iPhone look and feel, works great. Too bad not all rss items have a longer description so you can read most of it while in your reader, without the need to view the full html page.

2. You can check your twitter messages. What are you doing? I’m stuck in traffic! It’s a good moment to express your feelings about this, blame someone and send recommendations about the streets you should avoid. I’m using twinkle, a twitter client for iPhone that has two special things: location (you can actually see who’s twitting near you) and pictures (you can take a picture with your camera and attach it to your twit). The location is a nice feature if you’re not following that many people and the picture works great if you want to express more than 140 characters (1000 words perhaps?)

3. You can check your email! If you have a yahoo or gmail account and using it actively, you’re all set. Even if you have a regular pop3 or imap account, that’s the way to read your email in the car. If you’re using MS Exchange, then tough luck, you’re stuck with yahoo and your day by day spam messages. The built-in email client seems to work ok, too bad it loads images by default when you’re viewing the full message.

4. You can chat in your regular instant messenger network. The ONLY truly client I have found is Fring, an instant messenger integrator with everything in it: yahoo, msn, icq, skype. It can even act as a sip phone or can connect to twitter. I’ve been using Fring on my Windows Mobile PDA, so I quite knew the application. It looks different on the iPhone, its development is in alpha stage but hey, compared with the web browser clients I’ve seen so far, it rocks! Like I said, I haven’t found a real application for iPhone that integrates at least three of the networks above. They’re all web applications, specially designed for the phone, but that’s it.

5. You can browse the Internet using Safari. That’s the last thing on my list and also on my car “can-do” list. With its gprs connection, you have to wait infinitely for a page to load. But do you have anything else to do while waiting and waiting in your car? I guess not, so browse away!

That’s about it. These are the things I’ve discovered you can do each day in your car. Of course, there are other tasks you can do from time to time, like updating your software or playing a game or testing new applications, but you can’t do all these things on a day by day basis. All the things above require an Internet connection, so your monthly bill might go up. It’s already up with the fuel price reaching new limits and you being stuck with the engine running, polluting the planet and not-wanting to use the subway! Get a bike and use just your ipod!

twitter.com, digg.com, linkedin.com, xing.com, hi5.com, myspace.com, facebook.com … all these websites seem to be quite trendy. You hear about them each day, people are using these websites as a way to communicate, to get in contact, to share thoughts. All of these, plus blogging is just a part of what is generically called web 2.0. But is this something real? Is everybody going nuts? Is everybody trying to communicate in other ways than the regular email and instant messaging ? Why should I use twitter to tell everyone what am I doing? Do I have the time to do this? Why should you use digg.com? I mean, do you even understand something when you go to this website frontpage? What is it all about? Just a bunch of links and a way to comment on some news. Websites like hi5 or myspace.com or facebook.com even requests your yahoo username and password so they can automatically connect with your friends (read it like this: spam your friends). Isn’t this a security risk? What if someone breaks into their servers and gains access to so much login information?

Anyway, I personally think that all these new web services are for the people who either have too much free time and no actual “first life” or for someone who wants to reach those people and try to sell them something! It will be a very sad world when everyone will be online, directly connected to everything! Will you still notice that it’s spring again, that the trees are green and the flowers are blooming? Unfortunately we are turning into these online connected machines, with no real personality but with a full virtual life.

Starting today you can follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/cristianbadea

Two weeks ago I’ve bought an iPhone. Although I do not use AT&T as my mobile carrier (I do not live in US), I knew that the phone software can be hacked. Of course, you can buy already hacked phones via eBay but I took my chances and purchased a new one directly from an Apple Store in San Francisco. The information here is my early experience with the phone, the buying experience, hacking and using the phone day by day.

The phone in US, directly in a shop is quite cheap (especially if you come from Europe). I paid only USD 399 plus taxes, so a total around USD 430 which means around 300 Euros (for the 8GB version - there is another version with 16GB of memory and it costs USD 499). Once you want to use the phone you need to get an AT&T monthly plan or to transfer your current plan to your new phone. Since this is only possible for US, Google is your only friend. Once you start searching for a solution to your problem, tons of websites start appearing, each one offering advices, hacks, tools. You start finding worldwide communities of iPhone users, all of them depending on periodic hacks to Mac OSX for iPhone. You can also find a lot of paid services that can unlock your phone or software that you have to pay for. Ain’t that cute?

It took me around 2 hours to find the right solution, the only one I’ve tried to unlock my phone and the only one that seemed stupid proof enough: ZiPhone GUI. My iPhone firmware: 1.1.3. Just two clicks, two waiting minutes and you’re done! You can get in and start using your phone. Note: once you modify the phone firmware, you loose your warranty (I haven’t read that anywhere, is what the guys in the shop told me).

After almost two weeks of using the phone, I can make the following comments (I will talk mostly about the bad parts, all good parts are obvious: slick phone, quality processor inside - especially the graphical one, everything seems well thought and calculated to be in the right place at the right time):

- one thing you notice instantly if your using your phone in roaming is that it only recognizes a number if it’s a perfect match between the phone in your address book and the calling one. This means that if you have the number 555-1234-123 in your address book and you receive a phone call from +1 555-1234-123, the software doesn’t know that the first part is only the country prefix and you already have the number in your address book. I can live with that, it’s not such a big issue.

- another thing you notice (probably this should be the first one) is that the phone doesn’t read any of your current contact information from your SIM card. It can only syncronize with your Outlook contacts (or other address books) and use the information from that address book, or you can build your own new contact database from scratch, directly on your iPhone. This is good and bad: good if you already maintain an Address Book, bad that you are used to have some phone contacts in your phone (or at least I’m talking about me). There is software available that can read your SIM card and export that information to your address book. One example is iSIM from Makayama Software, which happens to work with Avangate for their online sales.

- if you’re sending an SMS message, the application doesn’t know of any characters limits for the SMS body, so you might end up sending multiple messages and being charged more that you’re expecting.

- a basic feature is missing (probably intentionally): you cannot change your ringing tones with new ones. You can only use the predefined ones or buy other ringtones from iTunes Store.

- as a device without a physical keyboard, I’m missing my speed-dial feature from my old phone

- size: the phone is big enough not to be carried directly in your pocket without being scratched. Compared with my old Nokia 6230i, that’s a problem.

- battery: probably if you’re using the iPhone only for its phone features, without browsing the Internet and accessing applications, the battery will last for one week. Once you start using it, the battery will go down instantly and you will notice that. It’s very similar with my PDA, which as long as you don’t use the screen, you can have it on stand by for days, but once you start doing something requiring the display, you start losing battery.

- I like the fact that while with your phone near your ear the display will shut down automatically. It has some kind of sensor near the ear speaker. Speaking of sound quality, at first I though the quality was way to poor to have a conversation (and I have found lots of forums posts confirming that), but then I realized that the screen has some kind of plastic protector on it to be protected and once you remove that from your speaker, you have good sound quality, you can hear loud and clear anyone on the phone.

- on my old phone I was using the Wallet application, a place where you can store sensitive information, passwords, cards etc. This application is missing from this phone, however you can find several other independent applications that can fill the gap. I have installed and used Lockbox.

- there are no installed games by default, you have to look for them elsewhere. But the good thing is that you don’t have to go too far to search for an application, the phone has some kind of software repository maintained from some online feeds. It’s under an icon called Installer. I don’t know if this application comes by default with the phone or it was installed by my patching application, but it’s a good thing that such module is available.

That’s about it for now, I will make later edits if new problems or issues might occur with my iPhone. I have to admit that I was impressed by the large number of applications for this phone, the phone seems to be reliable enough to be used as a phone (my primary use) so probably it’s just a matter of time to get used to some things not being available by default. The other cool things that this phone has can easily balance the situation and you can get over features that you might need and don’t have.

Last weekend I attended the 7th annual european conference for the independent software vendors. The conference was held in Köln (Cologne) Germany, in the Marriot Hotel. Each year there is another city where the conference takes place, like Strasbourg (France), Brussels (Belgium) and Cambridge (UK). Next year (2008) it will be done in Berlin for the first time. There is a reason for choosing this city: the wall of Berlin is the place where East meets West, so the organizers wanted something in the middle for both Eastern and Western European countries.

It was my first time at this conference (Avangate’s second time) and I must say that I was expecting more people to come. The speakers and the presentations were interesting but this is not the only reason to come. I was asking two guys from SmartSoft (Bulgaria) why they came and the answer was very natural: “we need to recharge our batteries, we have so many things to do (like web optimization, marketing etc) and do not have the time to do it and the conference just confirms us that we still need to do it. And there’s the beer too :-)” … That sums up why a software developer should be there: to meet people in the same business, to learn something from the people that already did it and of course to drink beer.

My overall feedback is this:

The location: Very good
The speakers: Very good
The topics: Good (can be improved)
Number of participants: Normal

The one thing that’s missing this event is the advertising. My guess is that not too many people know about it. And it’s a shame, because the organizers are doing the best they can to get key speakers and offer actual subjects.

The event started with a happy note with a remix of John Lennon’s “Imagine”: “imagine there’s only one browser, it’s name is Firefox, and we’ll only have to build just one website …” … I don’t know the words, maybe someone can post it somewhere as I catched on my camera just the end (available on YouTube).

Other resources:

Pictures of the event (and more) at shareware-beach
Pictures of the event at Avangate

Last weekend I’ve been to Moscow for the Autumn session of Isdef conference. It was my 4th time in Moscow for ISDEF, representing Avangate. We have sponsored this event, as we did it for the last two years. A three-day event with meetings, parties and networking.

The organizers continued to setup the conference outside Moscow, like it was also in the spring, but this time it seemed to be a little too far from the city (20 km, Foresta Tropicana Hotel). Sure, the location was perfect for a nice quiet weekend with the family but not for a conference of such scale. Fresh air outside, green grass, some snow around the buildings. The conference is quite big, lots of participants, one of the biggest software communities I’ve seen. Having the presentations divided in two different buildings (one it was a big white tent, like a bubble, usually used probably for sports activities during the cold season) was not such a good idea for the sponsors. First day of conference seemed like nobody knew that there was also an exposition hall.

I have noticed an increased number of foreign participants which leads to the conclusion that the Russian software market is getting more attention each year. And for the right reason probably: the software developers are coming from all over Russia and neighboring CSI countries. There are people coming from more than 5000 km away, from the Irkutsk city near the lake Baikal. So having an on-the-fly translation service, like it was last year, it might have helped the foreigners to understand the Russian presentations.

The first two days were dedicated to Russian speakers and some of them seemed to have a really good speech. Me personally, I’ve found some interesting subjects that were worth listening (like the one Natalia Kaspersky had), but unfortunatelly, without a translation service I had to settle for the English presentations only.

On Sunday (3rd day) almost everything was in English. And of course, each eCommerce provider (our competitors) had 20-30 minutes to present something. I will not say any names, but it was a mixture of plain company advertising, technical things and nice reporting/statistics bars. Laurentiu kept the Avangate presentation about the difference between Resellers and Affiliates, to emphasize the Reseller role in a growing International Business (and of course the need for a PRM system e.g. myAvangate).

One new thing for this conference was the eCommerce providers panel, where Avangate, Plimus, Cleverbridge and DR were put face to face to answer general questions like “what are your commission rates” or “where did you get the company name” or “what should we expect from you next year” or “why are you better than the other ones”. I do not want to start a discussion about any of these subjects, I will write another topic someday.

Overall, the conference proved to be quite beneficial for us, even though the conference setup was at a lower level, compared with the old conferences. Meeting new people and sharing information with current partners was one of our accomplished goals. Vodka is still the Russian official drink, no beer at the official parties (barbecue and banquet). And even if we were in a hotel with a tropical flavor, there were no real fruits anywhere.

Some facts about the place:

- there is a plane in the middle of the resort

- the taxi from the Sheremetyevo airport to here should be around 2500 rubles (and not 4000 as most of the foreigners paid)

- you get to see the country side of Russia while driving to the resort

- the receptionists do not speak/understand english that well (we have arrived at around 1pm and they said that the room will be ready at 5pm; we asked for a room with a lake view and the girl at the reception made some phone calls and returned with the keys to our room, to be ready in 20 minutes - and not in several hours. I wonder what did she understood. Because the room didn’t had any lake view but quite opposite, the forest).

And some pictures I’ve shot:

I have received yesterday an email from yahoo with the message that yahoo photos will no longer be available starting September 20. They give me the chance to move my pictures to Flickr (or even Shutterfly, Snapfish, or Photobucket) at a click of a button. I have a few albums on yahoo, so the moving will not be a problem. Yahoo made it clear that moving to their service, Flickr (which I’m not currently using) would be the smartest choice, so I have decided to go with them. I had the surprise to receive a Pro account for 3 months on Flickr

But my personal choice for a photo-sharing service is Tabblo. Great tools for album creation, easy to use, comments enabled. Give it a try!

So I have decided to uninstall Ubuntu. I had it on a big partition of 50GB and another one with 2 GB for swap. I had only a few problems with this system, but the main reason to get rid of it was because switching between two systems was quite annoying. I mean you either have it all in one place or not.

I have found that accessing NTFS partitions was quite easy, even in write mode.

I have found that accessing ext2 partitions from my XP was easy too. For this I was using Ext2 IFS for Windows, a driver that maps the linux partitions into XP drives. I was disappointed to see that I could tamper Ubuntu from XP, read and write configuration files etc. Not too safe.

The interface on Ubuntu was quite nice but I messed up something related to transparency and windows effects so the interface was running quite in slow-motion. Too many settings related to these kind of enhancements so I wasn’t able to setup the default settings.

The system update procedure was very easy, even tough there were a lot of packages to update each time.

I tried to install my TV card to watch some DVB TV on my Ubuntu, but this was quite impossible. The lack of drivers for this is something one should think before trying to use another system.

So here is how I have uninstalled Ubuntu: delete all two partitions and reformat them with an XP compatible file system (FAT32 or NTFS). To restore the masterboot record, most of web articles were pointing me to use Windows Recovery Console available only from XP install CD and an utility tool called fixmbr. But since I could not find my XP cd I had to look for another tool. The best one I found was MBRWizard who does more than just fixing the MBR but that was enough for me.

The command line for this was “MBRWiz.exe /Repair=1″. Simple, huh?

So remember: if you’re not ready to fully go using just one OS, you will not be able to use two at the same time.

When using the Avangate AfterSale Message feature for the order finished page, you can add any type of tracking code. Including Google adwords for conversion tracking. Since we have received a few question on how to get this code, here are the required steps:

1. Access your Adwords account
2. On “Conversion tracking” section click on “Get conversion page code”
3. Choose “Per sale” and then the default adwords text
4. Since this code will measure how many sales the Google Adwords advertising has generated (conversion rate), this code will be placed on Avangate’s “Thank you for your purchase” page. The page is on SSL, so “https” must be selected in “Security Levels”.

The generated code needs to be added in Avangate Control Panel, section “Marketing Tools / After Sale Message”. Most of pay-per-click advertising programs are offering tracking capabilities and generally, the steps are the same.

But in the end it matters only how the gathered data is used / transformed in information.
More information about Google Conversion Tracking can be found (of course) on their website: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=27338&topic=60

“eCommerce times” writes an article about Google’s entry into the online payment market, while making a comparison with Paypal and adding some facts about Google Checkout.

The interesting thing is that our romanian branch is quoted in this article:

E-payment services are not new. ePayment Solutions, GECAD ePayment, Intellipay and Neteller carved out viable e-payment businesses. However, countless other vendors entered and exited the market as many consumers didn’t have a compelling reason to use the services, merchants balked at the added expense and vendors could not figure out how to turn a profit in this space.

Currently we’re not considering Google as a competitor for ePayment, especially because they are aiming the US market, while ePayment is only for the local east european market. But some competition would be a valuable thing, even if this would be such a giant as Google.

This year conference is not only one day as the ones last years. It’s for almost three days, from Friday evening to Sunday noon. It’s the third time we’re sponsoring the conference. Friday was just a networking party, a so called “barbeque party” although there was no barbeque but normal catering, but inside a big tent in a park near the hotel. The usual drinks were there: wine and vodka (Russian Standard Vodka), orange and tomato juice and still water. Not too many people, but a great live band.

I was expecting more people this year but until now (Saturday evening) I guess there weren’t more than 150 people (optimistically speaking). The location of the conference (Holiday Inn, Vinogradovo) is not very accessible because it is outside Moscow, there is no direct subway from/to town center. I spoke with someone from the organizers and he told me the reason this hotel was chosen: the participants will not leave early after and during the conference, because they cannot physically do it (or it is very inconvenient).

Anyway, I cannot tell anything about the presentations, because they’re all in Russian. Our presentation is scheduled for tomorrow at 10am and it will present a perspective of automatization in software sales, with a touch of our new product, myAvangate. And it will be in English. Probably the only one in the conference.

I will also post some pictures after the event, cause I don’t have a way to download it to a computer (no cable available).

Business networking is good at these kind of events and after being here twice last year, I get to know most of the participants. After each conference we end up with a few new shareware authors which are using Avangate services and it is a good time to make live presentations of our system.

Of course, DR is sponsoring today’s banquet, as they usually do. A good time to “steal” another one of their clients …

Did I mentioned we have a special offer for all ISDEF participants, including free myAvangate for one year and a special rate for Avangate eCommerce Platform? Now I did it!