Category: technology

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technology travel

Starbucks Experience – coffee, cakes and Wi-Fi

Due to some personal commitments (read: being engaged to a wonderful beautiful woman) I spend quite some time in a Starbucks near 7th Ave South and East 11th Street, New York, NY, waiting to pick her up after work. Regular visitors and staff already know me well enough to stop making passes on me, as well as learning that whatever I order is “to stay” and not “to go”. So, this post isn’t about them.

Before the ill-known Wi-Fi take-over by AT&T this Starbucks’s connection never had an issue. I come here with either one of my three laptops (my personal favorite T60p, smaller X61s or horrible company issued HP Compaq 6710b). None of them had any troubles connecting to T-Mobile’s Wi-Fi. Not until some time after AT&T took over.

Now, I am not trying to bash AT&T altogether. I am happily using their 3G with either BlackJack or Tilt (sometimes with my laptop tethered) while my fiancee’s second most loved thing on Earth is her iPhone (I hope I still hold the first place). What I was expecting to see from this clash of providers is that at the converted locations customers would experience intermittent outages while on T-Mobile hookup. You know – login process times out on you couple of times. Then some of your web sites are so slow that you can’t really so anything. Then the connection is dropped for no apparent reason. And that is just what I have been fed up with for previous two weeks. So much so that I had changed my weekly routine that I only have to spend one day of the week at that location.

A ticket submitted to T-Mobile customer support two weeks ago finally got answered today. In brief it says: “Yes, it’s a converted location, if you have any problems – call this number or that number”. Surely, just a template, with some name attached to it. Two weeks to send a canned reply – something tells me it isn’t a company that cares about me being their client. After all, if I decide to go with AT&T for Starbucks’ Wi-Fi, it’s going to cost me two times less money. Once the takeover by AT&T is complete, there would be not much incentive to keep T-Mobile, right?

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business technology

Cheap hardware? That’s expensive!

About every two months one of the computer magazines – be it ComputerShopper, PC Magazine, PC Wworld or any other publication – comes out with this flashy and attractive idea of “cheap computer”. Whether it’s a cheap laptop or cheap desktop – it’s always a good thing, you should save a bunch of money and feel good. Right? Right?

Not so fast. The cost of your computer is not only that number on the receipt or a credit card statement. At least – not for a small business owner. While it is widely perceived that small businesses should live on a shoestring budget and (widely used example) reuse old home computer for their businesses, the idea isn’t quite perfect.

The reason in a so-called “cost of ownership” that most starting up business people have no idea of. If you know what that is – skip to the next paragraph. In layman terms the “cost of ownership” is how much you spend (or loose) by owning that specific tool or service. For example, if you have an old car that you use to deliver widgets to your customers, the cost of ownership would be all the money spent on repairs and parts to make sure your car will be running tomorrow.

But what’s the cost of ownership for an old PC? There aren’t that many parts to replace and no oil or gas to refill. However, what that old PC would probably hit the most is your time – because it’s old and slow. Sure you can upgrade it – add memory and new hard drive, but the old thing would still be a bit sluggish. So instead of booting up in less then 45 seconds it will boot up in three minutes. Add another minute to start your inventory app – be it something proprietory or plain old Excel. Add some more time on number crunching and some more to process your accounting sheets. A minute here, a minute there, just a little slower saving or loading – and you’re looking at an extra hour or two for a day. That’s about 6 working hours wasted for a week – if you have Sunday off. Bad news – now you have to work on that Sunday, since you are loosing 6 hours of productive time from Monday to Saturday.

So what now, does every small business enrepreneur should rush off and buy a shiny new laptop or speedy new desktop? Perhaps, but only if you feel like your system could be more responsive. It’s hard to give any kind of specific advice here. My guess is that even if you bought your PC (desktop or laptop) only two years ago – you didn’t purchase the latest and greatest piece that was out there. Most likely even then it was a low or medium level PC with only enough RAM and hard drive space to make it worth purchasing. Upgrading it won’t really improve your situation – so maybe a little research on the internet and extra couple of hundred dollars will buy you a much better rig that will save you more then just money – your precious time.

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technology

It’s The End Of The (Telephone) Line

The End Of The Telephone Line - Small Business, Marketing and Web Design Blog Yesterday I canceled two last services that were reminding me of the era of old computers, modems, connection problems and other geeky fun that I was having. The Plain-Old Telephone Service (POTS) is not functioning in my Brooklyn apartment anymore, cell phone is more then enough.

Alternatively, I can always use Skype and Gizmo – call quality is almost the same, if not better. Since I signed up with OptimunOnline’s Boost service I get a bit better speed, open ports 25 and 80 (for e-mail and HTTP services). Aside from annoying calls at 8 in the Saturday morning from some collection agency who’s hunting people who used to own my phone number a year ago the cost of having an old-style phone line is just the same as a decent DSL line. Latter, however, is capable of much more then just voice transmission.

The whole process took me less then 7 minutes. This is including dragging through automatic menu and paying the balance online. Verizon really does a good service at canceling a service, unlike some other companies who really resist your quitting, like Netfirms or Earthlink.

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