BuzzRocket's Blog


I’m a Mac.

We really are different! Not like we needed an infographic to prove it, but this very cool one from Hunch.com maps it all out for us. Based off a recent Hunch study, the infographich shows that us Mac users account for less than 11 percent of the world market share. Mac users tend to be younger, more liberal, urban and like to be seen as different (no surprises here). What else about did Hunch find out about Mac users?

  • We like to party. Mac users are 50 percent more likely to throw a party than a PC user.
  • We suck at math. PC users are 38 percent more likely than Mac users to be able to solve an equation (but we’re better at conjugating verbs, so take that).
  • We’re sophisticated kind of pretentious. Preferring a Vespa to a Harley. Pellegrino to Pepsi. Shwarma to a Patty Melt.
  • We consider ourselves early adopters. – Think those insanely long lines for the iPad 2.

What are you? A Mac or PC?


White iPhone 4 in the house!

Coming to you this Thursday …


More iPhone 4 Love

If it wasn’t obvious from a previous BuzzRocket post, iPhone 4 Challenge at TEDx, I love the iPhone 4, which has proved itself again today at a Writers Boot Camp Business Breakfast session, featuring Shira Lazar, an EMMY nominated TV and Web Personality who continues to bridge the gap between traditional and new media and be a prominent leader and voice for the digital age.

The moderator, Jeffrey Gordon, politely reminded the crowd to turn off their phones before the session started. Lazar quickly interrupted, saying, No! Leave them on. Tweet about this. I want you to tweet.” A girl after my own heart.

 

 

I quickly pulled up my Evernote app and started voice recording the Q&A, then popped over to Hootsuite to start tweeting realtime updates about the event. I was able to multitask and jump from app to app, updating, documenting all without a hitch.

 

 

I realize that many people, like my mother, use the iPhone to check email, take pictures, text and, yes, make the occasional phone call. But when you take advantage off all its capabilities, it truly is an invaluable tool that I’m very proud to have – even in LA, the land of dropped AT&T calls.


iPhone 4 Challenge at TEDx

As I posted yesterday, I had the distinct honor of running the TEDxGoldstar blog throughout the day for the truly inspirational event. To make things (more) interesting, and to avoid lugging around a cumbersome laptop, flip cam, camera, etc., I challenged myself to run the entire blog off my iPhone 4. This made some question my intelligence, sanity … perhaps wonder if I had a gambling problem. Hey, this was TEDx: The perfect place to exhibit such an innovative tool like an iPhone.

I’m happy to report that my challenge was an absolute success. I was able to capture and edit HD video, take pictures, post real-time updates, add the TEDxGoldstar Interactive Host blogs and promote everything via twitter through my tiny, powerful little phone. I felt like I was living out an iPhone commercial’s dream.

The capabilities of the phone were nothing short of incredible, but I also have to attribute a lot of the success to the Tumblr iPhone app, which made uploading new posts a seamless process. Even uploading videos took but minutes from the phone (compared to 20-30 minutes from my computer). Tagging the posts was simple, as well.

My only complaint is that the keyboard on the Tumblr app doesn’t flip, so I was forced to type on a tiny vertical keyboard, which was fine at first, but by the eighth straight hour of blogging, I was ready to chuck my iPhone off the roof of the Downtown Independent, where TEDxGoldstar was held.


Verizon iPhone 4 Announced

Free at last! Free at last! At a press event this morning Verizon President and COO Lowell McAdam joined Apple COO Tim Cook to make the much-anticipated announcement to offer the iPhone 4 starting next month. For years iPhone users have been criticizing the lackluster service offered by AT&T.

While no carrier is perfect, thousands of angry AT&T users have been eagerly awaiting this day and are ready to jump ship. Even The Woz wants one.

During the announcement, McAdam discussed the reliability of Verizon’s network and ability to support data.

Hopefully this competition will lead to better service and pricing from AT&T (we agree with The Woz: competition is good). We should note that not all of AT&T’s customer service issues (upgrade options) are their fault. They do stem from the tight contract they have with Apple. It should be interesting to see if Verizon will suffer from some of the same problems.


#FAIL! Top 5 Social Media Blunders of 2010

It’s December, which for many of us means the holidays, excessive drinking and eating, Ugly Christmas Sweater parties and reflection. If you’re writing for a blog or publication, it means pumping out a barrage of lists summing up the year. So, thank you Tumblr. Your utter failure for more than a day inspired this list we’ve compiled of the Top 5 Social Media Blunders of 2010.

Google Buzz
Part email, part Facebook, part Twitter, part Friendfeed, part Foursquare, fully lame. Google launched this social network on Feb. 9 and by Feb. 16 it was slapped with a major lawsuit. Google Buzz was integrated into Gmail, irritating many users, who were automatically signed up, revealing private information without permission. After many privacy violations, a class action lawsuit, Google Buzz has recently settled for $8.5 million. Buzz is still around, but has yet to make any sort of splash.

Twitter Hack
September 2010, hackers exploited a security flaw on the popular micro-blogging site, retweeting malicious code, activating pop-ups, and even exposing users to hard-core pornography.

Tumblr
Earlier this month, blogging host site Tumblr crashed for more than 24 hours, leaving millions of users shut out from their accounts, unable to access the nearly 11 million blogs run through Tumblr.
“During planned maintenance that was not intended to interrupt service, an issue arose that took down a critical database cluster. This brought down our entire network while our engineers worked feverishly to restore these databases and bring your blogs back online.”

Facebook Crash
A technical glitch blocked or slowed access to Facebook for several hours in late September, blocking many of the site’s (at the time) 500 million users from the news feed of updates from their friends.
Facebook called it the worst outage they’d had in over four years and blamed a software flaw that caused a cluster of its databases to be overwhelmed. Facebook said it had to shut down the entire site to stop traffic to the databases.

Ping
Apple’s stab at social media. Debuted in September with their iTunes 10, Ping allows you to follow friends, musicians and others and read about what music they “Ping” and “Like.” Failures here are that you can’t follow your Facebook friends and you can only comment on music purchased through the iTunes store, which for me is not an accurate portrait of my music collection. Though it’s taken a while to catch on, it does feel like the early days of Twitter to me, where people are following others, trying to sort out the purpose of this new social network. It’s definitely a great marketing platform for those in the music industry.

It’s not all negativity at BuzzRocket. All of these failures are a result of the tremendous growth and innovation of social media.

“Failure is the tuition you pay for success,” Walter Brunell