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Twitxr spam

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I am quite surprised about the lack of respect for privacy and anti-spam laws that many startups are showing nowadays, with the excuse that being social and web-two-d0t-ohish gives them carte blanche to jump over all the hoops. Today’s case: Twitxr.

A friend got this in his inbox:

——– Original Message ——–
Subject: Martin Varsavsky wants to keep up with you on Twitxr
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2008 01:01:07 +0000 (UTC)
From: Twitxr
Reply-To: no-reply@twitxr.com
To: notshown@nospam.com

See Martin Varsavsky’s pictures:
 http://twitxr.com/martinvars

Thanks,
The Twitxr team – http://twitxr.com

About Twitxr

With twitxr you can share a moment, a picture, a thought, instantly with your mobile phone. Where are and what are you doing your friends now? Twitxr tells you.

To start with, the email address this was sent to is from an old company he worked at, and which has not been used for over three years. It seems that Martin has just taken his list of email addresses, containing anyone who he has ever been in touch with, and copy/pasted them into the Twitxr database. Secondly, the email comes from a no-reply email address, and provides no way to unsubscribe from these communications. In fact, this email was not even used to subscribe to a Twitxr account!

Now, I believe there are many laws in Europe and the US that prevent this. We currently use a mailing list platform that requires us to comply with many regulations and provisions, so I know for a fact that it’s not as simple as copying a bunch of emails into a database and clicking ’send’.

Bluetooth broken by Siemens on the Gigaset SL560

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Had to buy a new DECT cordless phone today, as the kids finally managed to bust the only remaining good unit in the house – so I went shopping for a Siemens, as they have proven to be the most trustworthy and abuse-taking phones. This is the one I got, thinking how nice it would be to use the built-in Bluetooth to sync my agenda and use a headset for long calls.

Or so claimed the blurb, soon to be proven wrong. First attempt, sync my Mac’s address book, should be easy enough. The phone supports exchange of files in vCard format, but it failed to actually receive any, it just sat for ages with a ‘Transferring data’ message on the screen, until it bombed with not even an error message. Sending from the phone to the Mac failed equally well.

I then tried to pair my Jawbone headset with the phone, which was mostly uneventful (although it took two tries to get the headset into the preferred devices list). Dial a number. Press the call button on the headset so that it takes over. Watch nothing happen. Attempt to pick up an incoming call by pressing the headset button – fail again.

So off I went to the Bluetooth SIG to check the PICS on this piece of crap, and lo and behold, there it was – the SL560 supports Bluetooth 1.2, which in itself should not be a problem, if the right profiles are supported (and correctly implemented of course!). This is where things turn south, on the audio side, the phone only supports the Audio Gateway (AG) role, which is confusing to many headsets out there, which expect either a handsfree or headset profile to be available. Headset (HS) is specifically NOT supported on the SL560. Thus, expect many headsets to fail talking to this phone.

On the data front it doesn’t fare much better, with object push client and server supported, but only the basic requisites are implemented, being information on supported content, authentication and PIN exchange, object push, and vCard 2.1 format. Nothing else like business card exchange, or calendaring formats are supported. I have to try sending a contact from a Windows PC, as it wouldn’t be the first time Apple implements something in funny ways (maybe OS X supports vCard 0.1 Beta, who knows!).

Conclusion? This phone is going back to the shop tomorrow, and I’ll be getting a less fancy, more standard Siemens. Bluetooth SIG, it’s about time you start policing manufacturers with some degree of accountability, not merely watching the compliance reports come in. I can certify my Bluetooth device with just one test rig, and not test it with any real-world device, and still claim it is Bluetooth compliant, and I know from experience that such a device is bound to fail.

Chronopay is a joke!

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So I tried to add funds to an online music store today. Their payments are handled by Chronopay, which provide the most confusing, user-unfriendly payment system known to man.  You are asked for your name and surname, address, and card details (OK all normal up to here), but then…the issuing bank of your card? My bank has variations on the company name, which means I cannot be sure I’m typing the right thing here. After this step, I’m shown my bank’s ‘Verified by VISA’ additional check page, which asks me to enter a PIN that has been SMS’d to my mobile phone (whaaaa?). Entered the PIN which is accepted, and a few seconds later…transaction refused. All in a page using Times New Roman as the font – how ugly can you get? No word on why was the transaction declined, from the myriad of possible fields where data could have been input wrong. Call their service hotline (uhm, their 24/7/365 chat is “offline”, I guess this is a leap year or something), wait for 10 minutes, nobody bothers to take the call. Either they are very busy, or they leave some temp to take the calls at a very slow pace.  In all – it SUCKS! I tried this thing seven times, with various combination of inputs, and they all failed. Just to see if I was going senile, I purchased something else online, and it went through just fine.

Free WiFi at the Mobile World Congress

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While inside the conference you have to pay for WiFi, you could surf for free thanks to the Whisher ‘Red Bird’, which carried a mobile hotspot with a 3.8Mbps 3G connection. The signal was encrypted, and we provided the password on flyers handed out by the bird. After three days, we had a total of 87 people connected through this hotspot, which we think is a pretty good number! There was certainly always people waiting around outside, without much else to do than check email or surf the web for a while.

Typo3 — Alles easy durch guten Vergleich

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Eines ist sicher: Typo3 gehört wohl zu einem der leistungsintensivsten Web Content Managmentsysteme überhaupt. Dabei wird Typo3 kontinuierlich von erfahrenen Programmierern in seinen ohnehin schon herausragenden Eigenschaften weiterentwickelt und trägt allein aufgrund dessen zu einer zukunftsorientierten Funktionalität der entsprechenden Software im Bereich des wirtschaftlichen Webdesigns bei. Die mit dieser Thematik eher weniger erfahrenen Nutzer sind jedoch im Allgemeinen bei ihrer Suche nach einem geeigneten Webhoster für die betreffende Website auf Ratschläge von PC-Experten oder Fachzeitschriften angewiesen und sind dennoch oftmals im Nachhinein nicht immer besser informiert als zuvor.

User, die sich hingegen die Zeit nehmen, im Internet nach entsprechenden Anbietern zu forschen und interessante Typo3 Angebote zu finden, stoßen in der Regel nicht selten auf ein weiteres Problem: Jeder Anbieter preist selbstverständlich die eigenen Produkte und Serviceleistungen als die Besten an, die es gegenwärtig am Markt zu erwerben gibt. Ob diese Angebote allerdings auch in allen Belangen den tatsächlichen Bedürfnissen entsprechen, stellt sich häufig erst nach geraumer Zeit heraus. So unterscheiden sich beispielsweise auch die Kosten sowie der jeweilige Support der Anbieter oft gravierend. Wie gut, dass es auf diversen Infoseiten hilfreiche und relevante Tipps gibt, die effektiven Vergleich der Typo3 Angebote ermöglichen! Hier erhält ein jeder Nutzer viele Infos, die ihm die Entscheidung hinsichtlich der zahlreichen Typo3 Angebote erleichtern. Aber nicht nur das: Man hat sowohl die Möglichkeit, sich bestimmte Fachbegriffe explizit erklären zu lassen, als auch darüber hinaus aus dem Tarif-Dschungel der existenten Webhoster das individuell richtige Paket herauszufiltern. Nicht immer ist den Besuchern von Infoseiten auch bereits im Vorhinein klar, welche Leistungen überhaupt benötigt werden und welche spezifischen Anforderungen erfüllt sein müssen, um die individuellen Ziele bei der (Unternehmens-)Homepageerstellung- bzw. Betreuung in vollem Umfang zu gewährleisten. Selbiges gilt natürlich auch im Hinblick auf die richtigen Typo3 Angebote für die jeweiligen Seiten.

Sinn macht die Inanspruchnahme des Services von Infoseiten übrigens auch für erfahrene Nutzer. Unter Umständen kann es auch vorkommen, dass die Serviceleistungen des aktuellen Webhosters im Endeffekt doch nicht zu einhundert Prozent den tatsächlichen Kundenanforderungen entsprechen. Warum sollte man demzufolge die Chance nicht ergreifen und in Sachen Webhosting & Co. einmal über den eigenen Tellerrand hinaus blicken? Auf neutralen Infoseiten ist man jedenfalls stets auf der sicheren Seite, wenn es z. B. um Typo3 Angebote geht.

Typo3 Einführung (Frank Obels)

Updates on Whisher

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There is something in the air … OK, cheap attempt at being cool, I know… but this is more or less what the Whisher colo looks like right now. Well not that bad, but close. We are doing some major restructuring at Whisher, both conceptual and technical. Some features are being taken away, and new ones added which I think you will enjoy. Soonr just did something like this, taking away the Talk feature (Skype callback from your PC), which I guess was not being used much and wasted too many resources. It is a normal process in a startup trying to look for the right model. We have gone through several iterations which have seen two versions so far, and now the third is coming up – the definitive one.

I cannot really give much away on what is coming, only say that one of the changes affects the previous release of Whisher, and you will find that it has now stopped working (you may see a Jabber login error). For this I apologize, but it is a necessary step to get to the new Whisher. Feel free to vent on the comments. The Whisher website will be down while the new one is finalized, but both the blog and the forums will keep working (although with not-so-nice looks!).