While this is good news for the consumer, Apple and other smart phone makers will not be losing any sleep. Any time an upgrade of the system occurs; the mobile device will act erratically or may just not work at all until the upgrade is downloaded. Once the down load occurs, the device will have to have a new jailbreak to reload the non-approved applications.
It then becomes a never ending game of upgrade vs. new jailbreak. Several systems have been developed to stay ahead of the game the most notable being iPhone Dev Team.

Before the new ruling thousands and thousands of consumers have been jailbreaking their phones. Obviously, there is a serious market out there for applications that are not totally controlled by the mobile device makers.
For its part Apple has kept tight control over the applications it allows for its iPhone and that is not likely to change that policy. It has turned a blind eye to the jailbreak issue, and has never taken anyone to court. So for all practical purposes, not much has changed.

Warranty issues are a whole different problem If you jailbreak your phone and then have a problem with it, you may be on your own. The company has no responsibility to cover the product at that point and this ruling did not change that.
The other problem with jailbreaking your phone is ending up with an unusable phone. his is called a brick because if the jailbreak goes wrong, your phone is now an
expensive brick, or a fancy paperweight.

If you have already bought your bumper, Apple will be refunding your costs. There are several ways that is going to happen. If you bought your bumper from Apple online with a credit card, your refund is probably already being processed and will be applied to your credit card.  If you bought your bumper from Apple online with a gift card, a new gift card will be sent to you.

Bumpers that were bought from retail stores are a bit more problematic. You will need to take your receipt to the store for a full refund. Do not delay, as this offer expires September 30, 2010. If you bought a bumper from AT&T there is a form to fill out. Here is the link to find forms and a more in-depth explanation of the process. http://www.apple.com/iphone/case-program/

The launch of the iPhone 4 in white has been delayed to let the company get this fix completed, I suspect. My guess is that when the iPhone 4 in white is released, the bumper will be part of the package or some other fix will already be in place. So have a bit of patience, it will be coming. Hopefully, it will operate better than the original.

If you just want your money back for the iPhone 4, Apple will refund your money. Just take your undamaged iPhone 4 to your Apple retail or ship it to the Apple online store within 30 days of purchase and they will take care of the refund.

The first product of any new technology usually has a bug or two to work out. Some bugs are bigger than others. That is just part of the game if you are going to have the newest technology. That is not to say that Apple doesn’t have a responsibility to fix the problem. Hopefully, the bumper takes care of the problem and then we can all wait with breathless anticipation of the next new technological breakthrough.

So if you don’t yet have your free bumper or case, now is the time to make that happen. If you need to get a refund, get that done this week. If you are like me, you will put it off until the last possible day or forget about it. Click the link above and get the process started now.

Barnes and Noble started the whole deal out by announcing that they were lowering the price of the Nook to $199, from $259.   They have also come out with a cheaper WiFi only version for $149. That’s not a bad deal, considering the amount of ebooks available from the bookstore giant. You could read the rest of your life.

Amazon has struck back though. They have lowered the cost of their base line Kindle to $189.  So, this places them in a clear price war with Barnes and Noble.

Sony is going to be the loser in this deal. Their low end model is $169, but lacks many of the wanted features of the other two. Sony had better get busy and cut a new deal.

The giant in the game, for now, is the iPad. It’s $500, but adds a lot more functionality to the game.  It does everything but kiss you goodnight.  Further, Apple is re porting that they have averaged 2.5 book sales for every iPad sold, since the launch a couple of months ago.  There’s some real cashflow.

So, look for more good deals over the summer. Also, keep an eye on Ebay. There are almost always good deals to be had there.

Happy hunting

Ray Province, M.A.

By pure definition, a business blog, or corporate blog, is a blog that is located on your company website.  An external blog would be one located on, let’s say, Blogger.com.  It can be a great way to draw people to your website more often. Especially if you add RSS feeds, bookmarking buttons, etc., to make it easy to keep getting new information on your company.

The biggest thing to remember is that you need to have quality content. Many times, corporate website blogs get filled with verbal garbage, just designed to hit keywords.  Well, you may draw someone to your site once by search methods and SEO, but you won’t keep them coming back. If you provide quality content, it will keep people coming back for more. That’s the kind of advertising side of why to start a blog for your business.

The other point to remember is you want to keep new information coming.  Static information can only be spun so many times, before people get tired of it, and move on.  You may fool them a couple of times, but that will be it.

Video can also be a nice addition to the blog.  A few scattered videos will really get people interested in visiting your site. I try to use articles and videos both, in a ratio of 10 to 1 (articles to videos).  The articles help with SEO, the videos help the human eye. In fact, I am about due to shoot some new video on this blog. (You see, even people in the business of SEO have to remind themselves to do the basics!)

I really think that it’s time to look at quality, ever fresh content more, and keyword saturation less.  I am now cutting back to around 1-2% keyword saturation.  I also still try to bury the title in the first and last paragraphs.  SEO gets your visitor there once.  Quality, new  content will keep people coming to your website for years to come.

We’ll talk to you soon,

Raymond C. Province, M.A.

Celtic Ozark Solutions

Ray Province

The BlogPress iPhone ap makes blogging on your website a breeze.  I am always looking for iphone aps that help me be more productive, when I can’t be in front of a desktop or laptop computer.  The BlogPress ap has made it possible for me to blog whereever I am.

I have the ap set up to handle all my blogs on Blogger.com  It can do much more, though.  It also handles my blogging on WordPress and Joomla.  This includes my websites like this one, which are built on a WordPress theme.  There are setting for MSN Live Spaces, Movable Type, TypePad, Live Journal, and Drupal.  You can also hook in Youtube,  Twitter, and some other sites.

For my wordpress sites, I had to activate the XML-RPC settings in the Settings>Writing section of my admin console.  There is also a setting there to active Atom style protocols.  This allows the iPhone ap to publish to a private website.

In Joomla, you will have to download and install the MetaWeblog plugin for Joomla. It grabbed it from the Joomla extensions site.  You also have to enable web services in the Global Setting section of your admin console in Joomla.

You may also want to grab the free iPhone ap for Dragon dictation. You can then dictate your blog, and paste it into the page you set up in the BlogPress ap.  Pictures can also be added this way. 

The BlogPress iPhone ap makes blogging on your website a breeze. I hope you will give it a try. Then, the world can become your blogging office!

1. Make sure you are sharing some basic information about yourself. One of my biggest grips are with people who think that personal information is a waist of time on Twitter. Granted, people may not want to know that you just brushed your teeth. However, they do want to know that you are human, and have to do the mundane stuff also.

2. Personal information does not have to equal private information. There are aspects of everyone’s life that can be shared. You don’t have to give out DOB’s, phone numbers, age, etc. just to be considered a true social media buff.

3. In terms of timing, you need to tweet some personal information once a day for the first 30 days you have new followers. I do not always do this for all new followers, because I get around 25 new people a day to my Twitter account. I do this during times when I am intentionally adding a lot of new people. Otherwise, I try to share some personal stuff 5 times, for every time I share one piece of business info.

Take time to get to know your new followers. Tweeting with new followers to pay off over time. You just have to be willing to put in the upfront work.

Ray Province
Celtic Ozark Solutions

Ray Province is an IT Programmer by trade, and owner of Celtic Ozark Solutions, an IT company that specializes in website development, website content, and social media marketing and integration. You can reach Ray at celticozarksolutions@gmail.com or @celticozarkian onTwitter.