My wife’s iPhone is on duty 24h a day and most of the time in places where it better should not be: loosely flying around in a handbag among a few million other things, on the floor in the supermarket, in our little one’s hands, somewhere on the playground… So it was time for a new back cover, as the corners had started falling of and revealed the precious inside parts closed to the dock connector. A replacement phone would have cost 270 CHF, the replacement of the cover 190 CHF, both amounts that I found unreasonable at this time so we went for a pick up a new shell and DIY approach for 30 CHF.
I used the ifixit guide at http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing-iPhone-3G-Rear-Panel/583/1 to go through the dissection. I did check the required steps before but I totally underestimated the size of the pieces and the density of technology. A lot of parts are held in place by adhesive tape and jam or are glued to the cover. Once you come passed the “Do not remove” sticker covering one of the screws holding the main unit inside the cover you start understanding the deeper meaning behind those words. But after about 2 hours the phone is back together and working. Looks like new. Quite a rewarding moment, when the Apple logo comes on after resetting the phone. Above is a picture of some of the tools involved. More pictures of the project here.
So, should you be doing this at home? If you think you know what you are doing – don’t do it. If you know what you are doing and you are not sure about the tools – don’t do it. If you know what you are doing and you are willing to take the risk and if you like playing with micro mechanics and electronics, just do it.

Addition to the ifixit guide: My replacement part was only the back cover, no front bezel. So I had to remove the glued bezel from the old one. Also, my cover was missing a hole for the screw holding the black plastic spacer that is used to lift the SIM compartment. This hole and winding had to be threaded in manually.

With 15 years of E-Business experience at dmc, the company I joined earlier in 2009 has seen quite a number of trends and hypes come and go. We have helped our clients implement some of the more successful ones and quite a few of our ideas have become E-Commerce best practices and innovative approaches to Travel-Commerce. We are looking forward to 2010 for more to come.
Here is my list of topics that we will be putting special attention on:

• Multi-Channel: Most retailers will continue to leverage a hybrid approach with a focus on E-Commerce but including offline and mail order channels in 2010. True Multi-Channel retail and travel solutions however leverage web technology to process customer, product and order/shipment data across multiple channels and devices to turn their various channels into a single, customer-focused retailing environment. This includes the mobile supported transition from online to offline mode and the support of online research for offline purchase (see also the ROPO study by TUI, Google et al.), and a thorough integration with order management, the right E-Enabled and E-Enabeling ERP solution and Multi-Channel Content and PIM solutions and processes.
• Social commerce and Off-Site-Focus for relevant user participation: After experimenting with several web 2.0 approaches, brands and retailers focus more and more on relevant participation of the users into the entire supply chain. Those interactions can happen on-site but most of them happen or at least will be triggered off-site – where the users are.
• Usability and Design: With more and more e-commerce features becoming a standard for any given shop, the main differentiation available is through products and content of course, but the usability and design of a storefront are definitely the right additional aspect to focus on.
• Shop-Platforms: Whilst some retailers, especially the online pure plays rightly consider their shop platform a major differentiating asset and thus prefer a bespoke solution (mainly for individual innovation/differentiation and control), more and more focus is on the marketing and merchandising side of things assuming all shop commodities being available out of the box or custom of the shelf (focus on time 2 market and cost). On demand shops like demandware, hosted solutions built on IBM Websphere Commerce or Intershop Enfinity and custom solutions based on the typo3 based dmc mb3p platform have proven to be valid technology foundations for the different models. Other shopping cart technologies like Magento or Oxid eSales will continue to gain attention but the service provider landscape for those newcomers still needs to mature. The right levels of ability to attract and convert, feature versatility, scalability and performance at a controllable TCO will continue to depend on the right combination and balance of business model, service provider and technology approach. Through our 15 years of experience in E-Commerce we have developed and refined the means to get this equation right for you.
• Internationalization: True E-Business happens on a global level and more and more brands and retailers pursue a global approach with storefronts for individual countries and languages and custom distribution setups. At dmc we have helped numerous customers to set up international E-Businesses including E-Commerce solutions and Travel-Commerce portals by developing and executing multi-year roadmaps. Our services include E-Consulting, E-Branding, E-Technology and E-Services for international E-Businesses.

Happy 2010 and all the best for your ventures and businesses!

Payvment is a US based startup with an online shopping cart offering as a webservice. They makes use of PayPal’s new Adaptive Payments API, which was developed in an effort to compete with Amazon’s Flexible Payments API. PayPal’s API gives developers, and Payvment in this case, full access to PayPal’s features, allowing them a lot more freedom in building applications, which includes the ability to accept and distribute payments. So now, with Payvment’s Facebook app, anyone can open up a retail storefront on Facebook.

Payvment’s network character disconnects the shopping cart from the store, just like in a store in store concept. Just keep shopping through different stores and put stuff in your cart. In other words, Payvment creates a unified shopping cart across Facebook for buyers. Standalone sites who want to use Payvment’s shopping cart experience can also implement Facebook Connect, to let consumers access their personal shopping cart from Facebook.

The Payvment technology is offered as a free web service. The only costs incurred are the PayPal fees for the user. According to Facebook and this screenshot, the solution should be available outside the US soon.

What’s the difference between a “disc” and a “disk?”: They’re pronounced the same, but, technically speaking, there is a distinct difference between a disc and a disk.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2300

My friend David showed this track to me two weeks ago and today I took my GPSies App to record the track:

Thank you David.

The conversation and the controversy on privacy also around mobile apps the their collection of only partially anonymous data will go on and with Google’s latest announcement it won’t get any better. And my point to accept sharing data with out loosing anything but for the benefit of a greater good gets lots of support through this:

If you use Google Maps for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone <..> your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you’re moving. When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions. We continuously combine this data and send it back to you for free in the Google Maps traffic layers. It takes almost zero effort on your part <..> and the more people that participate, the better the resulting traffic reports get for everybody.

Google’s response to your immediate privacy concerns is

We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going, so we built privacy protections in from the start. We only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions <..>. We use our scale to provide further privacy protection.

I do not think a “I’m doing 120 here on this little road – there can not be any congestion here” message from my mobile phone will hold enough usable evidence to fine me for speeding. And should I consider robbing a bank or killing my neighbor and have the intention to escape by car and know that this is my only weak spot to not be caught, I will seriously consider to opt-out of the service before departure.

If you’d like to stop your phone from sending anonymous location data back to Google, you can find opt-out instructions here.

Cant wait to see this work in Europe/Zurich/Stuttgart(?)…

Read more details on the Google blog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/bright-side-of-sitting-in-traffic.html

Publishers who distribute content, media and applications on the web want to understand how, where and by whom their assets are being consumed. This is a question very often answered by Google Analytics, a tool based on JavaScript and Cockies to track user behavior on the web that comes bundled with a nice analytics service and reporting engine to draw conclusions out of the collected data. Some people argue that the analytics are not all actionable or do not lead to any actions, but Google is the most popular today – by far.

With the mobile web finally becoming a reality thanks to the iPhone, the distribution channels of digital assets to consumers today include not only mobile sites but more and more also mobile applications and especially iPhone applications. For the consumer the difference between the two is small and sometimes even not noticed, but for distributors of content moving to iPhone applications is quite a change when it comes to analytics. For websites optimized to show on the iPhones web browser one can rely on the same tracking and analytics functionality from Google. But iPhone applications are not supported.

Quite early in time, Pinch Media started providing an analytics library and service very similar to Google Analytics that can be used for user tracking in iPhone applications.

Pinch Analytics is software that collects anonymous usage data from mobile phone applications, and presents it in aggregated form. <..> Using Pinch Analytics will provide you with information about how your application is being used, which you can then use to improve and enhance it.

So Pinch Media is really a Google Analytics for the iPhone and they also track the same type of data. But also since the revelation of the Palm Pre collecting user data and constantly updating the vendor about them, the community seems to see this differently. The current conversation considers tracking user behavior in iPhone apps spying on them and using their bandwidth for the tracked data stealing from them. Two of the differences are an assumed less anonymous character of a device id of the iPhone over an IP address and the higher accuracy of a geo location based on real latitude and longitude and not just the location of your provider IP location.

The German newspaper Die Zeit also considers Pinch Media spyware and suggests a firewall for the iPhone. At least the blocking part of such a firewall is now available to users of cracked iPhones through Jay Freeman’s privaCy tool.

Pinch Media have in the mean time reacted and now also offer a version of their tool with an extended option for users to opt-out of the user tracking. And this requires the developers to update the existing iPhone apps.

I am sure a lot of developers will update their apps and carefully consider whether to use analytics libraries or not in the future. The is in line with the typical patterns of the consumerized mobile and web business and this is good. But I do not like the term spyware. Wikipedia says about Spyware:

Spyware is known to change computer settings, resulting in slow connection speeds, different home pages, and/or loss of Internet or functionality of other programs.

Pinch media is able to derive relevant conclusions out of their intelligence that do not harm the user but help the developer of the application.

An approach I really like is the one of Twitterfon. They have a free and a commercial version of their app and for the free one they expect their users to agree to sharing some of their data. Get something for free but give something back that does not cost you anything that can be valuable for the vendor.

What do you think?

The by far most read post on my blog is my post on migrating mail archives from Microsoft Outlook to Apple Mail.

I’ve had numerous discussions with to-be-switchers about what was going to happen to their mail archives and future email. Because not all of them have followed Apple’s announcements and not all have made the relevant experience with the Microsoft Exchange support on the iPhone, I thought I’d post this information, that with the next release of OS X Snow Leopard, besides other Apple is going to introduce native support for Microsoft Exchange:

Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 built into Mail, Address Book, and iCal. Mac OS X uses the Exchange Web Services protocol to provide access to Exchange Server 2007. Because Exchange is supported on your Mac and iPhone, you’ll be able to use them anywhere with full access to your email, contacts, and calendar.

This means that with a standard setup for your Outlook you will not have to do anything or, with local archives, just need to follow my earlier suggestion, to have full mail support and a smooth transition to Apple’s OS X.

From the Google Wave Developer Blog:

To kickoff Federation Day, we open sourced two components: 1) the Operational Transform (OT) code and the underlying wave model, and 2) a basic client/server prototype that uses the wave protocol. The OT code is the heart and soul of the collaborative experience in Google Wave and we plan that code will evolve into the production-quality reference implementation.
The prototype is intended primarily as a simple “hello, world” implementation, to encourage experimentation using the Google Wave Federation Protocol. All of this code — nearly 40,000 lines of Java code — is available under the Apache 2.0 license, and we’ll be open sourcing more code as wave evolves. Check out the source code and get started with the introductory documentation.

Through their labs Adobe has launched a new service called Adobe Wave.

Adobe Wave is a client application (based on Air) that will keep you informed about updates to subscribed services. The subscriptions are handled by a service by Adobe.

With Adobe Wave, get all of your notifications through a single application. You don’t have to worry about downloading a separate notification application for each website.

Why can’t they find their own name? And how can they think this will not confuse the consumer? And why would they believe this confusion won’t be of a disadvantage for Adobe?

Check out the new offering here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wave/

I’ve been trying dozens of online storage and backup services in the last couple of years. I also have some experience with (Enterprise) Content and Document Management and have an understanding of the benefits and challenges with cloud based and SaaS services.

So here comes dropbox. Dropbox are quite successful in revolutionizing the way people (including myself) think about and access their files. In particular, they make it easy to securely share files with other people, sync them across multiple computers, access them from anywhere, and keep them. Safe.

I’m currently involved in three different projects with distributed teams and with no Alfresco or the like at hand, dropbox was the answer to all document based collaboration. And the feedback from the teams is: a very satisfactory one.

Dropbox has an online web client for document management including

• online storage and retrieval
• sharing
• versioning
• special support for pictures
• update notification (incl. RSS)
• account information and settings and
• installation support for OS specific clients

They provide clients for Windows, Mac and Linux and the web client has a special iPhone output version. I just love the Growl integration. Check the screencast for a detailed introduction and to see what I mean here.

Dropbox is a tech startup based in San Francisco. They are funded by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners and since launching end of last year they have attracted over a million users.

Get Dropbox here.

When Apple introduced the unibody MacBook Pros in 2008 I stumbled across a neat feature that I forgot about until today – I did not have the MacBook to test it:

MacBooks work with your iPhone headphones including the microphone and the button.

• If you click the button on your iPhone headphones, iTunes pauses. Click again, and the music resumes. A double-click advances one track, and a triple-click moves back a track – just like on the iPhone.
• The headphones’ built-in microphone appears as the input device “Microphone port” in the Sound preference pane.

Smart, simple, just great. Another truly useful feature…