2006 June 13

Verizon Responds: Tells You and I To Go Pound Sand

Verizon Wireless has responded to my post and subsequent executive email about their very inappropriate appendage stuck on to every image or video message. By the way, to see how many messages are already out there, look here at Technorati and here on Google’s blog search. Again, this currently is less than 20,000 posts which is a nit in terms of the millions of blog posts (and the number of emails sent with this appendage are unknown) but mark my words: this will create a hue-and-cry amongst bloggers within the next six months as it renders the smartphone’s camera and video capability undesirable.

Take a look at the letter and see for yourself, but basically Verizon Wireless said "we’ll try" during a system upgrade "next year." Remember, Verizon is interested in maximizing revenue and don’t care what you and I want to do with their service as long as people keep buying and using minutes. For example, the appendage they stick on that message is roughly 4 kilobytes. There’s undoubtedly some spreadsheet jockey that’s plugged in that 4kb times the number of messages and has worked out the revenue possibilities of that extra payload attached to every multimedia message. So until people get pissed and make it known how upset they are, Verizon Wireless has no incentive to change.

It should be noted that I fully expected this outcome when contacted by Verizon Wireless Executive Relations as I’ve played executive roles myself. This is standard operating procedure by executive staff’s to have people to "just handle it" and placate the voices in the wilderness. The kicker? Based on all the feedback I’ve received on these posts, there are alot of people as Verizon customers who have exactly the same thoughts and, unfortunately for Verizon, they’ll wait until the negative buzz reaches a crescendo before putting a spin on it and handling it further. Also, the blogosphere is materially changing conversational marketing and these things don’t just dissolve into the ether.

I should also note that SixApart (owners of my blog host Typepad) has acquired Splashblog and they strip out the offending code which is a workaround for blog posting (but not email). Unfortunately they offer ZERO support for Splashblog and I can’t get the "Post to Remote Blog" to work.

Rich multimedia PDF’s with Flash

For several years, my wife’s business (trend forecasting for the home furnishings industry) has been delivering PDF ebooks* for her market along with her core newsletter, The Trend Curve(tm). They’ve been remarkably successful and her customers have repeatedly informed her about how wonderful it is (as one use) to be able to get in a conference room, project the ebook up and have a mass meeting to go over and discuss the trends with an entire team.

Though interactive with links, I (as her one-man technoweenie advisory board) have resisted adding richer media to the PDF’s due to learning curves and other issues. Primarily this reluctance has manifested in me since it’s amazing how many support calls her staff receives (though still a pretty small number) come in from people whose OS "associations" are incorrect and when they double-click on the PDF ebook it opens in Notepad or some such other application! They have no clue on how to re-associate PDF to Acrobat Reader…so you can imagine how this less sophisticated audience would do if they needed to deal with current versions of Quicktime, Windows Media or some such other install.

As such, I’ve been reading John Nack’s blog (he’s with Adobe) and trying to stay up on what’s happening with Project Apollo — which I believe is going to vault the PDF container forward by years and I can’t wait! Though today there are ways to add Flash to PDF, it is not optimal nor are the tools there for most Quark or InDesign page layout or prepress folks to easily deal with richer media and Flash specifically.

A rich media container holds the promise of providing content creators with a medium to deliver significantly enhanced and more valuable products. This was certainly behind Adobe’s $3.4B acquisition of Macromedia as well as the upcoming battle-of-the-titans (Adobe and Microsoft) when it comes to rich internet application user interface delivery…which is another post unto itself since it will be such a huge accelerator of next generation internet applications.

*I’ve been asked, "Do you use Digital Rights Management (DRM) with your ebooks?" The answer is "no" but with this qualifier: since most of these Trend Albums(tm) she produces contain roughly 125, 300dpi images (so you can zoom into them to see detail), the resulting PDF is 200MB’s or so. This alone minimizes the ability of people to email it around (most corporate email servers limit attachments to 5-10MB’s) and it seems only the most sophisticated users understand — or want to take the time and hold the risk — to copy and move a file this size to others.