Every once in a while you come across an interesting tech article that gets to the HEART of what distinguishes successful well-run companies from their competition.  Often, what is said is common sense, but put in a particularly pithy manner.  In the Baseline.com article How Stupid Companies Treat Customers, Dennis McCafferty makes a few key points that are often forgotten.

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And so, after a long break, I resume my writing.  At the moment, we are reassessing our entire web presence, figuring out what form and format best suits our mission.  Since I am spending a great amount of time rewriting much of the website, there is little “technological” inspiration for this blog.  And so, I turn to in the other direction.

On Friday, we are going to a Suzanne Vega concert, the first “rock concert” I have gone to in a long time.  We fired up our “paid” account on Spotify.com to refresh ourselves on Ms. Vega’s early works, and her more recent works.  It was interesting listening to the song of Luka (the girl who lives upstairs) and woman who lives under Avenue-L, through the eyes of my son.  He noted the use of “acoustic” guitar and the absence of technological amplification, lack of synthesizers, and the purity of her sound.  He observed, “she is against technology”.

How true, and yet as we stream her music digitally, through a service that didn’t exist when she wrote it, and pass it wirelessly through our own home on devices that never existed when she wrote this music, I consider that as much as things change, they stay the same.  The words are still as haunting, the music still primal, and the emotions so real conveyed in her music.

For all the technology that we surround ourselves with (2 servers, 3 workstations, 4 laptops, 2 tablets, 3 cellphones, an iPhone and 3 iTouch’s, Playstation, XBox 360, PSP, Nintendo DS, screens, TVs, printers) as well as multiple cloud services for storage on Microsoft 365, Salesforce.com, NetDocuments, Box.Net, DropBox, SpringCM, iCloud, Amazon, Credenza, and Azure, and social services (Facebook, LinkedIn, Chatter), we are still the SAME social animal that evolved from Australopithecus Afarensis in Africa.

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In an old post I set forth my standard for evaluating software (See KRONOS – Evaluation Criteria for Software).

.  Keystroke Count
.      Return on Investment
.          Opulence and Intuitiveness
.              Networkability and Integration
.                   Options and Customization
.                        Suitability for the Task.

W  * A * T  * C  * H

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Ever lost your phone, but neglected to get insurance? If you are like most and have a cell phone contract, you can only upgrade your phone every two years. If you do want a new phone before the expiration of the 2 years, you need to pay “LIST PRICE” which is usually outrageous.

We lost a “cheap” phone 2-months before the discounted upgrade period started on Verizon. We had wanted to get an Android to test out the mobile apps on the Android platform, but certainly did not want to pay list price. The solution we found will make you laugh, http://myphonedied.com/. Yes, that is the name of the site.  And tell me you didn’t look at the girl on the left before you fully read this post. There you can get USED PHONES that are carrier-specific for dirt cheap prices.  The phone should arrive in a few days.  $18 will hold us for 2 months until we can get the discounted “new phone.”