Tag: networking

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Everyones talking about it – the old man of IT?

So there is this article at http://www.nzherald.co.nz/small-business/news/article.cfm?c_id=85&objectid=10599533
Patrick Kershaw works in IT, and apparently believes that twitter is no good for marketing. Whilst im sure hes a nice person, and great at his job, i wonder if hes based his opinions on trial at all?

Whilst anyone who’s been on twitter realizes there are a couple of profiles about that tend to fit most businesses & people online.

The Talker

There are the celebrities who just post to raise profile and, according to Patrick “personalise”, and generally more often than not show fans they are just  normal people, in fact often small minded and somewhat clueless. I have to admit however, some celebs have actually proven they are better than i originally thought! More often than not they post and never reply to anyone. They may have over 1,000,000 watchers, but only watch 90 or so people themselves, proving in effect that a) they dont care much for your opinion anyway, and b) its really impossible to keep up with that many people!

Spammers

These are the people that just mass follow people, and spam their link any way they can. Often bots, but occasionally some person has it in their head and heard that twitter was good for marketing and just spams all their followers till they get blocked.

Normal People

These are your every day people, some get along, some don’t. They come to socialize and generally “hang out”

Pets

These are usually done by “Normal People” who just thought it would be funny to have a pet stream. Depending on how ‘funny’ they are is how many followers.

Legitimate Businesses

Now this is where we come down to the biggie. According to Patrick this just doesn’t make money and bring in people other than a particular market. Im confused where he gets his information here because i travelled from Cambridge to Auckland just to visit @thewinevault – and i dont even drink, I have however recommended him to many who do. I happen to know hes extremely well liked because hes NOT actively trying to spam his website and business all the time, but takes the time to talk to people as a normal person.

Ive seen @rgoodchild procure a lot of business and interesting ideas for her own businesses and her website http://www.askrachel.co.nz , ive seen a group of 20-30 people turn up at @giapo ice cream parlour on queen street because they talked regularly on twitter (and often im seeing people tweet about his ice cream!).

Then there is of course the bigger players, @vodafonenz who almost caused mutiny when they handed his twitter account over to marketing the 3g guy.   I firmly believe he fixes more problems on twitter than the customer support currently, and in 1/8th of the time. He’s the first place i go for support when i have a problem, and one of the best things vodafone ever did for company image.

Until recently i had never heard of idealog magazine ( @idealogmag & yes i dont get out much!), however having spoken to many of their employees online i even bought a copy recently.

If i ever need diet advice the first person i go to is @RealNutrition ( http://www.realnutrients.co.nz/ ) who is not only friendly, but not overly pushy about marketing.

And not to forget @THEFALLSNZ ( http://www.thefalls.co.nz/ ) who is hosting the next ‘tweetup’ and can pretty much guaruntee a party of at least 30 people or more! http://ow.ly/qaGW

@coupdemain from http://www.coupdemainmagazine.com say “we would be nothing without twitter. twitter is pretty much THE reason we had like 164,386 hits on our site last week.” (link)

So to most people on twitter, who move with the times. Patrick seems to sound somewhat like that proverbial old man down the road who lives in the dark ages, refusing to accept new technology.

Quick update note: Im a system administrator by trade, i run servers (web/mail/etc).  I dont have my own company but do web hosting for friends, and friends of friends. I’ve had more website hosting requests in the last 6 months than i can keep up with , and had to automate things as if i was a proper company. This is business purely based on twitter, my prices are nothing fancy, about the same as any other decent hosting company, and to be fair because im so busy im often slow on the update to respond to any requests. Most people see my twitter stream and realize that im actually busy not ignoring them, and dont appear to have a problem (though im trying to automate things to save the lagg!)

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Turning your Cell Phone into an Access Point

So i got an iPod Touch 32Gb the other day. I got sick of waiting for  a 64GB model.

I had the choice of iPhone which is 16GB (found the Cricket iPhone APN settings already) and nowhere near big enough, or iPod Touch which is big enough but has no GPS or Phone. Other than the wireless it has no way of accessing internet if im in the middle of nowhere. I figure i had a perfectly good phone (Nokia E65, all the features, but none of the size!).

So last night i was thinking, my cellphone has WIFI …. if i can turn my Cellphone into an ad-hoc access point then I can route the iPod Touch through it … so i promptly went hunting about on the net and stumbled across joiku.

So i grabbed the free version to test it, and low and behold it works brilliantly. Then i setup the iPod to use it and it fails … turns out it has a Proxy and needs to proxy things.

So I looked about online and found that to setup the proxy on the Ipod Touch I had to click on Settings -> Wifi -> Connection Name (the blue arrow) -> scroll down to proxy and make it ‘Auto’

Then in the box below this put in http://192.168.2.1/wpad.dat – for some reason it doesnt pick this up.

So i tried manual. That doesnt work either. So now im at the frustration point. I wasnt going to pay for the good version if I couldnt even get the light version. Why did i need a proxy in the first place? that seems a pretty silly way to go about doing things. After a couple of days messing about with this I decided there must be a better option, If there wasnt I would have to write my own.

I googled about for a better solution, and found http://walkinghotspot.com/

Paid the $25USD, it sent me a URL and emailed me a pin number to use so i could download it. I went to the URL (which was just http://walkinghotspot.com/s60 ) and i was able to download without using my reg code. Needless to say this frustrated me somewhat having paid for it and any old person could download it.

So i sat down and installed it on the phone, got a tad confused with the strange setup it has, but worked it out eventually. After many hours i kept getting “connection error #2 please check network settings”. So i kept going over and over every single setting i had for both phone and connections.

Another day of frustration goes by (ok i have a day job so i cant spare more than a couple hours on things like this). So at Lunch I gave the installer to husband (hey it didnt ask for a pin number yet!), and he installed it. He also has an E65 phone (yeah yeah we are both geeks), and fairly good technical knowledge.

He starts it up, and away it goes … and it connects!! … and then asks for registration code , which we didnt have at that time  (we were in the middle of the shopping area).

So i figured if it worked on his phone, and not mine, i must have some setting wrong. So i sat down this evening with both phones side by side going through every single setting. They were all identical. grrr! I was about to fully reset my phone at this point, but I had to go out and take my youngest son to the school dance.

The oldest was texting me asking for money so i text the bank seeing what my balence was (I still had to go shopping yet). Bugger, i got the ‘you have no credit’. I was on my way shopping anyway, so i grabbed more credit ….. and then of course it hit me! DUH! it didnt work because i had no friggen credit! im such a fool!

So i promptly went home,  and tried again, same error … I got this 2 more times, then moves the phone to a different angle and tried again … it promptly logged in!

I then registered with the key they gave me, and now my ipod Touch is able to access internet using the Cell Phone as an access point.

So my main issues would be that Joiku is garbage and makes you use some proxy, I need to make sure i put money on my phone (i get free calling to family, and dont really use it otherwise so i forget), and that I live in the edge of a small town with no decent coverage 🙂