Thursday, September 29, 2011
Geek Squad CEO interview
There is an interesting article about Robert Stephens the founder of Geek Squad. He says "not having money can be a real blessing.” One of his lessons was “before hiring a PR firm, do your own PR — you will realize what is good and be a better consumer to PR firms. ... In 2000, I called up Best Buy—I wanted to take over their service department ... They liked the idea. We dated for two years and got married in 2002.” In 2010, Stephens was named Best Buy’s Chief Technology Officer.
Thursday, September 01, 2011
Cellular carriers lie
Telus is my cellular service provider and I recently called them before I went to Europe to ask about the cost of using my BlackBerry while I was traveling. I was told that I would pay $10 per MB for data and based upon my daily usage in Canada, I was able to predict my cost because I wouldn't be using the browser like I might here in Canada. Perhaps I would get about 20 emails per day, and each email might be at most 5K so I might expect to consume 100K per day, or about a dollar per day.
What they don't explain is that every hour I would be billed 20K to maintain the convenience of a real-time data connection. Back in Canada, that connection is maintained for just 1K per hour. So I was billed an extra 450K (24 hours x 19K), or $4.50, per day in unexpected data!! Telus claim that they are billed the 20K from the foreign carrier, but those networks are running modern 3G networks and they would have as advanced billing capabilities as any carrier here and the data usage would be the same. Therefore, the carriers are charging a HUGE premium, perhaps in Europe, but perhaps by agreement between carriers on both sides.
If you want the convenience of having email arrive immediately while you are in Europe, then you are forced to pay $0.20 per hour and it would be advisable to turn off the device when you sleep which I never do here in Canada. Telus may not have told a direct lie, but they do misrepresent the cost of operating their devices outside their network.
What they don't explain is that every hour I would be billed 20K to maintain the convenience of a real-time data connection. Back in Canada, that connection is maintained for just 1K per hour. So I was billed an extra 450K (24 hours x 19K), or $4.50, per day in unexpected data!! Telus claim that they are billed the 20K from the foreign carrier, but those networks are running modern 3G networks and they would have as advanced billing capabilities as any carrier here and the data usage would be the same. Therefore, the carriers are charging a HUGE premium, perhaps in Europe, but perhaps by agreement between carriers on both sides.
If you want the convenience of having email arrive immediately while you are in Europe, then you are forced to pay $0.20 per hour and it would be advisable to turn off the device when you sleep which I never do here in Canada. Telus may not have told a direct lie, but they do misrepresent the cost of operating their devices outside their network.
Hubble movies
Normally we think of images made by the Hubble Space Telescope as being static views of galaxies or stars far away. But 14 years of images stitched together into short video clips provide a very interesting view of how stars form. 
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