Palm’s patience pays off with the Pre
Saturday morning Cameron and I ventured out at 6 AM looking for a Sprint store in Chicago (we were there for Adwords Seminar for Success, Pay-Per-Click training which was really good).
We were 5′th and 6′th in line and the store opened at 8. We managed to get 3 Pre’s between us (I got one for myself and one for my wife) after waiting a couple of hours.The phone is amazing - I do have some gripes (the email app seems too clunky, the battery life isn’t great and I often find myself wanting to type when I’m in landscape mode, which isn’t possible), but overall the phone blows me away. I love loading up one window and running a big report and going and doing something else while it runs.
This post isn’t really about that, though - if you want a more in-depth review check out PalmPreReviews.net, Cameron’s Pre site.What I’m really impressed with is the leadership and vision of Palm’s management - a year ago I thought the company was on life support and would be going under. I loved my Centro, but was looking longingly at the iPhone and even the Samsung Instinct. Palm seemed to have lost the “cool factor” they once had.
And boy did the press notice - they were beat up for being out of touch and stuck in a different era. The Foleo was an epic disaster that made everybody wonder who could have allowed such a catastrophe to happen. But with an ace up their sleeve Palm just bided their time.
There was some chatter in late December/early January that Palm was introducing a new phone - finally we got a peek at the Pre at CES and the rest was history - five months later and they were finally available. A lot of people try to tell me that Palm built the Pre in those 5 months - that’s simply not possible. In 5 months they probably had enough time to find and fix major bugs and sharpen up a few features, but they couldn’t have done the bulk of the heavy lifting - that must have been in the works while Palm was constantly being criticized for being behind the times and clueless about what consumers wanted.
So what’s the moral of the story? Don’t listen to the haters. Palm didn’t even worry about it because they knew they were going to release a device that would raise the bar, even for the king of cool, the iPhone. They played it cool and now they have the last laugh.
Google Analytics Broken?
I can only get Google Analytics to work about half the time these days (I get an messagewhen trying to login that says “An Error Has Been Detected”).
This is happening for every site I monitor (which is significant). I don’t know if this is just a problem for me or if other people are seeing it as well but it’s really frustrating.
Sprint wins
…the contest for the lamest cell phone of all time.
(Disclaimer: I use sprint and I like them, but I also hardly ever use my phone for calls, mostly just email. My only theory is that Sprint wants to make their users happy with whatever phone they currently have when they see this thing.)
Sewell 13′th fastest growing company in Utah
Last year we were the 4′th fastest growing company in Utah, this year we were 13′th. A couple of our employees were discouraged by the results (since they weren’t as good as last year), but basically the way they calculate growth (percentage growth) does not make sustaining a high rank very easy.
I was impressed to see some big companies, however, making the list - the one I remember being surprised with was SkyWest. I mean, they are comparing their percentage growth to companies doing a few million a year. They went from almost $2B in 2005 to over $3B in 2006 - that’s impressive.
Congratulations to all the companies recognized in the Utah 100 and a special congratulations to Doba, the fastest growing company in Utah for 2006.
VentureBeat Hacked?
Could just be a little glitch but all I’m getting at Venture Beat right now is a wordpress database connection error. I’ve fried more than my fair share of wordpress sites (mostly just my friends’, fortunately - hahhaha) but still…
See the new Sewell Direct
It’s been a long time coming but we are finally showing off the new version of Sewell Direct. The main reason for the switch is to improve functionality on the backend (ie, stuff you don’t see), but at the same time we also updated the aesthetics.
I like the new site a lot - see the old Sewell here until we’ve worked out all of the bugs and publish the new site to the default url. If you have any specific tips or questions feel free to email me or leave a comment.
CES Wrap-up
CES was fun but it is nice to be back. As usual I didn’t spend time at many of the high-traffic, cool booths. They are too crowded and none of them want to work with a small internet retailer - maybe some day. We focus most of our energy on finding emerging suppliers willing to work with us - we think we found a lot this year. I’ll write about a few of the cooler products as we add them to our site (but not too many - this is, after all, still a marketing blog).
I had planned on finding and taking some pictures of the new Comcast Tivo but I never got around to it - sorry Zach.
Probably the coolest part of the show for me was seeing a free 3 Doors Down concert - that’s one of Jen’s favorite bands. We also saw “O” at the Bellagio which was pretty awesome. Other than that Vegas was just Vegas…
CES 2007
I probably won’t be posting much over the next few days because I’m in Las Vegas at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show). If I see anything earth shattering I’ll post but I’m pretty sure MacWorld is going to be getting more press than CES this year.
Yahoo and page views
Over the past couple of weeks I have seen a ton of reports showing how much “market share” Yahoo has been losing because they have less pageviews than other competitors.
I know quite a few people who use Yahoo email and I’ve seen the new AJAX-y interface which actually looks pretty nice. The result is less pageviews (since users don’t have to refresh the page for every email message).
Yahoo had to make a tough decision before rolling out the new web client - did they want to make a better user experience or boost up their pageview statistics at their user’s expense. Fortunately Yahoo chose the former and is providing a better user experience.
Unfortunately a lot of people are capitalizing on this decision and not-so-user-friendly sites are claiming more traffic because they force their users to refresh the page in order to get anything done. Some even go as far as to auto-refresh the page every six seconds - definitely not an improvement to the user experience!
Matt Cutts, characteristically showing that he has a brain despite the fact that he is a high-profile Google engineer, comes to Yahoo’s defense on the pageview metrics. Hopefully more high profile techies will recognize that Yahoo is willing to take some heat on metrics to improve the Yahoo experience - perhaps YHOO trading near their 52-week low is a good buy afterall.
Super Mario 3, World 4
If you remember World 4 from Super Mario 3 than Big.com may seem a little familiar to you - it’s just a search engine with extremely large text.
It’s kind of a cool idea for a search engine since I would think it would be popular with people with bad eyesight and older people but I did a few searches on it and the relevancy was terrible - wait, I just noticed that there is an “Ask” logo at the bottom - that explains it.