Paul Jacobson

Tag: Don’t be stupid

  • @standardbankgrp is freaking me out a little

    I received a freaky call from Standard Bank a little earlier. I booked tickets for my family to Cape Town next week and the call I received was from the travel department at the bank (somewhere in the behemoth that is my bank) clarifying whether our tickets are for local flights or international. I’m not…

  • Shining a spotlight on the companies that spam

    I am tired of all the spammy phone calls, faxes and emails from companies trying to sell me stuff. It’s mostly legal but I think it’s time to shine a spotlight on these people. Update: At the moment unsolicited direct marketing is permissible under our law. Contrary to popular opinion, the Consumer Protection Act does…

  • Take that hooter and go bleep yourself

    I work in a converted garage which is adjacent to a converted house which serves as office space for my landlord, Hypertext Media (great people), and some other company with an endless supply of employees with cars who need to get in and out of the complex every 10 to 15 minutes. The problem is…

  • Diplomat Magazine's undiplomatic cold calling

    I just received an unsolicited call from the local marketing manager of Diplomat Magazine (I think that is who he was and where he works – he wasn’t very clear on the phone). He gave me a pitch about how the magazine goes out to diplomats and he would like to do something with my…

  • Missed opportunities in retail architecture

    I was at Design Quarter this morning and took this photo while on a walk back to where I was working. It reminded me how we have such intriguing and remarkable architecture in our shopping malls and next generation business districts and yet the companies which own or run these developments seem to regard efforts…

  • This is one reason BitTorrent is so important

    Big Media portrays BitTorrent as a den of thieves and other undesirables whose only desire is to share content illegally rather than address a dying business model. BitTorrent is used for illegal content sharing, for sure, but there are very legitimate and important uses for BitTorrent include the dissemination of open source software like Ubuntu…

  • Thinking iPhone 4 thanks to HTC

    Rich Mulholland showed me his iPhone 4 the other day and he made an interesting comment. Rich has historically not been a fan of Apple Inc although he generally uses its products. He said that he was hoping that the iPhone 4 would disappoint him like some other Apple products and it hasn’t. I’ve been…

  • Amazon Kindle free 3G – "free" as in $2 more

    It turns out that when Amazon says international Kindle users get free 3G for their 3G enabled Kindles, they really mean international customers pay an extra $2 for their books. I just read a post on Download Squad that points out a $2 discrepancy between Canadian (and presumably US) pricing and international pricing. Since I’m…