cyggie

"Every customer who buys an iPhone 4S at an Apple retail store will be offered free Personal Setup service, helping them customize their iPhone 4S by setting up email, showing them new apps from the App Store™ and more, so they’ll be up and running with their new iPhone before they leave the store." They don't need to be new owners. Imagine a sale team that will sit down with millions of your users (existing or new), showing them what new apps are out there, reminding them to buy from your store and walking them through on purchasing your product again. This will sure generate a big spike overall.

I blieve the idea behind this is not to push a subliminal message into the view's mind but to create a "stunt" that'll get people talking about their brand (and in a positive way).

Result I see so far from this commercial 1.) Wire has an article talking about BMW (and we're reading it) 2.) This is on HN already and will probably be on reddit/FB and other social site by tomorrow 3.) People will be talking about how innovative BMW's marketing is and associate that with their product 4.) Got me to sit here and watch the commercial with my full attention (last time I did that was checking out superbowl commercial the day after on youtube, and those cost them millions for the airtime) and want to experience the "real thing" afterward

Achieving any single one of these will make it a good marketing campaign, getting all 4 make this a GREAT marketing campaign.

Maybe it's taking so long BECAUSE they're not starting from scratch...

Most virus scan software could be configured to report back to a central location. All you need to do is set it up so the client VM only detect and report but do not remove/clean. Then write a software to scan the monitoring log of the main station every 5 minutes for entry. The software will then do a lookup on either McAfee or Norton's virus library on everything that was detected and depending on the item's "threat level" it'll be visually represented differently.

Maybe each VM could be a tree and each spam email will be a leaf... each virus will be a fruit... any exploit will be a bug and something that's bad enough to kill it will be a snake... :D

yup... $240M is nothing to MS... they'd probably pay that much just to -

keep google out

make the Live search the only integrated search engine of FB

make Office Live the official "share your doc/work with your friend/co-worker" app on FB... (think of how much marketing $ they'd save)

That 1.6% is probably just something they throw in to make the deal sound more reasonable... instead of just calling it kickbacks..

thanks... I'll keep checking your site incase you guys decide to hire more non-hackers.. :p

I'm in the same boat... I'm a technical person (read sys admin type) but not a hacker... I've even built my own company from the ground up (a trading company so it's nothing technical) and was able to make a living...

I've a bunch of (software/service) startup ideas but no idea where to begin... Most ppl I know are not hackers so I've considered just learning how to code myself, but I don't know how long it'll take... at this point I'm just wondering what I should do...

I've even considered applying for that entry level support job xobni posted here last week (btw are you guys still hiring... ? haha... ) just so I can get some experience in an YC startup environment... since most software startup only hires hackers...

now I just need to figure out if there's a way to do multiple label over IMAP

Just checked and it's there... "Forwarding and POP/IMAP"

What they're trying to do sounds great... but I wonder how well they really know their user base...

Scheduling: Without basic feature like scheduling, I CAN'T even test them out. Most "power seller" sell the same items over and over, so it doesn't matter how much I love the interface, if I have to sit there manually launching the listings myself, it's just not going to work...

Inventory management: The idea is nice, but guess what... I'd say 80% of the successful eBay seller will branch out to other platform like amazon & their own site. If you're only monitoring my eBay inventory, it's pretty much pointless... because the idea behind monitoring inventory level for eBay seller is so they don't over list and piss off their buyers, but unless it's synced up with my other selling platform, it's not going to do me any good...

As someone that's a professional seller on eBay, the URL will be the last thing I'm going to worry about (bookmark it, done!). What matters to me is how are you going to help me increase my sales and margin while lowering my eBay fee.

btw... what is the different between your service and something like Auctiva? As far as i can tell, they're already doing everything that you offer and they're FREE! (they take a cut from my insurance sales instead of 1% of total sale)

I've been playing with xobni for over a week now... the feature that I use the most (and pretty much the only reason that's kept me from uninstalling) is the search box. I know at this point xobni "show only a fraction of what we want to do"... but since most of us only have a 15 minute attention span, I hope you guys do it quick... :)

I believe the problem with the down voting button is it often reflect more on the opinion of the voter rather than how well the article was written or its usefulness.

Good article that agree with the user = comment/up vote

Bad article that agree with the user = ignore

Good article that disagree with user = comment/down vote

Bad article that disagree with the user = down vote

Unless everyone actually vote up/down purely base on how good the article is and not their opinion, removing the down vote button is not a bad idea...

The voting button is a good idea if it's a poll, but the "hotness" of something is probably better tracked by the comments and other actions a user take...

I know... I miss my 1 Gbit/s fibre to home connection...

I don't think the rest of the world is "catching up" with the U.S. They're simply going to jump over and skip ahead without having to deal with legacy systems...

The first 2 parts of the show

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9EkablfWVk - Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj8MNEgiDTU - Part 2

They tried to counter at 30% but decided to take the $200k / 50%

Now if they would only do a piece on how unsuccessful startups ruin relationships and destroy marriages...

But this is probably not the best solution. It's extremely difficult to draw a clear line between work and relationship especially when both of you are spending 90% of your waking hours on the same project. A problem with one side will very likely lead to a bigger problem with the other....

I'm surprise this is for the "September 10, 2007 Issue" The idea that the eastern world does not look favorably upon risk taker might be true 10 years ago, but thing has definitely changed since then.

Probably quite a few... they might not like it, but many are still forced to use it because of their work...

I'm interested... I actually uses outlook quite heavily (I'm not proud of it... but it gets the job done... :P) so I'd love to see what xobni can do...

oh... I'm sure they got it long time ago. But your "real coders" make up less than 0.1% of their customer base, while 99.9% of market will look for something that's cheap, cool, and EASY...