Sony

Sony are one of those companies that don’t understand the Internet (or technology in general). It’s amazing really considering that they’re (at least in part) a tech business.

One of the largest file sharing websites on the web, the Pirate Bay, is in court in Sweden for various breaches of copyright. Not necessarily an unfair claim, but that’s another blog entry. What I want to get to is what Sony said in court today.

Sony says they have suffered many lost sales, suffered damage to their goodwill and other damages to their market.

Henrik Pontén from Svenska Antipiratbyrån (Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau) said that their position is very similar to that of the IFPI. Their claim for damages is based on what it would’ve cost for The Pirate Bay to have acquired a global distribution license. This value was doubled to account for an alleged “loss of goodwill”.

Sorry Sony. The loss of goodwill has come from a lot of places, but not through any fault of the Pirate Bay’s. It’s come from your unauthorised installation of rootkits/spyware onto your customer’s PCs. It’s come from providing an uninstaller for you spyware which is worse than your spyware. It’s come from doing things like suing your own customers for making copies of songs they bought. And further loss will come from suing Pirate Bay. How you could possible think otherwise is beyond me.

Space Wedding

Quick joke for the Trekkies…

What did Captain Picard say when he proposed to his wife?

Engage!

Following on from yesterday…

…and the power of Corporate Blogging, Facebook have been causing a bit of a storm recently. A couple of weeks ago, they changed their terms and conditions in an apparent move to claim ownership of user’s content (including photos, status updates, notes, whatever). That caused a lot of articles to be written, lashing back at Facebook (more than 750 according to Consumerist.com). At the time, Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, responded with answers to some of the questions raised by the changes. And as of today, Facebook are reverting to their old terms and conditions whilst they sort out some better wording. Facebook is large enough that this probably would have been forgotten about in a month anyway, but by listening to the community and blogging some responses Facebook have definitely saved some face.

 

I do have one thought about all of this though. Assuming the old adage that "all press is good press" is still widely believed, could a company use something like this purely for marketing purposes? What if no-name company does something "bad" just to get blogged about, and then reverts the "bad thing" to turn it into good press? Imagine…

1. Logging company X chops down a tree which is home to an endangered bird.
2. This is not liked, blogosphere goes nuts.
3. Company X blogs "well we had to do it".
4. Equally not liked, more craziness.
5. Company X then opens up a wildlife preserve, apologises and promises not to do it again.
6. Company X is now the most famous logging company in the world, and by now your thoughts on them are neutral – "Yeah, they did a bad thing, but they did a good thing to make up for it". But the important thing for Company X is that they are now much higher profile than before.

It’s a dangerous game to play (your "good thing" has to be enough to cover up the "bad thing"), but get it right and there’s money to be made. Not all press is good press, but bad press can be turned into a "good thing".

Gaping Void

I’ve been reading through Hugh MacLeod’s blog archives. I started off looking for a very specific image, but then kinda wandered off and started reading posts from 2005. It’s amazing how much those on the Blogosphere A-List thought blogging would change the world. In some ways it has, but a lot of companies and marketing people still don’t understand how the image of Dell, Microsoft or Google is affected by the blogging, or how it can possibly help them. If they did, a lot more people would understand "Why Corporate Blogging is Good". And how to avoid a calamity like the Kryptonite Factor.

The Perils of owning an iPhone

Today, my iPhone died.

No idea why, but whilst developing an application for it using Xcode, I lost the ability to deploy my application to my phone. Xcode told me to try restarting my phone… I did, and my perfectly working phone never managed to make it back to my normal home screen. After staring at the "Emergency calls only" screen for a while, I tried the various things one does at this point.

1. Restore the phone using iTunes – except that iTunes couldn’t see the Phone.
2. Remember that Xcode can do restore and use that… the restore fails halfway through "BBand update error".
3. Try restoring with Xcode again. This succeeds, but the iPhone needs to be "activated through iTunes.
4. Open iTunes, which offers to restore the phone from a backup. After trying this, I return to step 1 with a broken phone again.
5. Bang phone against the desk a few times. Didn’t help.

Carphone Warehouse (where I got the phone) won’t be able to do much more than send the phone to Apple, so I’ll probably make a trip to the Apple Store instead. In the meantime, I’m trying to restore the phone from XCode again, and merely activate the phone through iTunes, rather than restoring a backup. Let’s see if that works…

UPDATE (2 minutes later): No it didn’t. Phone is asking for emergency calls only, iTunes says "There is a problem with your iPhone". I’d guessed this.

Delivery estimates…

"Your order is estimated to arrive between Monday, December 8th – Wednesday, December 17th."

That’s great, but just tell me you don’t know when it’ll arrive except that it will probably be before Christmas. That’s all I need to know.

Price Comparison on the Go

I’ve just been told about a short interview with our CEO about Sccope that’s just appeared on YouTube. Let’s get it some traffic…

Price Comparison on the Go

She’s Electric

From She’s Electric by Oasis…

She’s got a cousin

In fact she’s got ’bout a dozen

And she’s got one in the oven

But it’s nothing to do with me

I write this because it was only last week I realised that the song wasn’t talking about a cousin in the oven. I don’t know what took me so long, but not that verse doesn’t seem quite as wierd as it did before.

Sccope update

I’m merely an off-the-record unoffical commenter on the situation at this piont, but there’s been another article about Sccope entirely un-initiated by us. The small-ish tech new site Pocket-lint probably picked up on the story from the Times article I posted yesterday…

A new price comparison service, Sccope, has launched that claims to let users find out the lowest prices of products wherever and whenever they are shopping.

Sccope claims to get users the latest and lowest prices on their mobile or online in just a few clicks.

I’d love to give some unnoficial numbers out on how many people visited the site and used the SMS service, but I’m probably not allowed. What I probably can say is that we’re working hard on improvements to Sccope, rolling out updates to the service as often as we can. And currently, that’s more than you’ll hear from anywhere else.

 

In the meantime, feel free to test out the Sccope website and SMS service (texts can be sent to 62555, standard network fees apply). Both work brilliantly for specific searches like "ipod touch 32gb" and I’d certainly appreciate the feedback to take to the rest of the team.

 

UPDATE: Shortly after posting I found probably the best article so far on Sccope at 160Characters.org, a news organisation specialising in mobile services.

Sccope

I wouldn’t normally link to this sort of article, but "Join The Rush To Be A Bargain Hunter".

If you are on the high street, you could take advantage of a new bargain-hunting service called Sccope. This searches the cost of a particular item in high-street stores and then tells you where you can find the best price.

You text 62555 with your specific product request to receive the latest prices back to your handset. For example, if you are looking for a Tefal kettle, you text “Tefal kettles” to 62555 and you get a reply with three options: 1. Tefal XH 500104, 2. Tefal Express Diamond Element Stainless and 3. Tefal Quick Cup.

If the Tefal Quick Cup is the one you want to buy, you reply and text 3. It then replies telling you the best price is at John Lewis at £47.95, but Tesco Direct is the most expensive at £55.00. Texts are charged at your normal rate.

I should also mention the website for Sccope. The South Carolina Coalition for Obesity Prevention Efforts are going to be getting more hits than normal today.