Apple is definitely limiting the number of iPhones being sold today. Many of the moves they are making seem quite shady to me and are most likely planned to take advantage of many of us first movers. Why are they doing this?

It was no “mistake” that they priced the iPhone at $499 and $599 last year on June 29th, 2007. Me and my buddy were sucked into going and buying the 8 gigs to find out 2 months later they have dropped the price to $399/299. Seems logical at first, a nice apology from Steve jobs suggesting they messed up the price points and they wanted more users to be able to buy the iPhone and so they dropped the price and will now award a 100 dollar rebate. — But then what happens? I take my rebate and can’t get cash? — A real man would give me my $200 dollars back in cash that we all work so hard to earn. But thats fine we all overlooked that. (I actually ended up buying a $300 dollar ipod, thus spending more money with Apple.) Why is he abusing the early adopters?

Now they drop the new iPhone 3G that we have all been waiting for (not sure why it wasn’t 3G in the first place). I login to my AT&T wireless account this morning to see that for me the new iPhone will cost $400 + new 2 year contract on a more expensive plan, becuase I already have a contract with AT&T for 2 years and therefore cannot get an upgrade, but I can pay 400 + upgrade fee and extend my contract for an additional 2 years. — This makes no sense as many have already pointed out — you can cancel your plan for 175 buy the new iPhone under a new contract for 200 and you’d still save about $55 dollars.

After work around 6PM, I stroll in to the AT&T store where one of my good friends works. As I got in he was selling the last iPhone they had in stock for the day. I started talking to him to get more info on whats going on with this Apple stuff and whats the best way he can help me out. He began to say Apple limited his store to 40 iPhones for the day and later some guy came and dropped off 10 more around 4pm (that way customers who originally went to the AT&T stores will end up going to an Apple store that has stock instead).

I am not sure how reliable my friends information is but it definitely lines up with Techcrunch’s information. If you already have an original iPhone and cannot upgrade for the 200 bucks — PLEASE DON’T GO OUT AND BUY ONE FOR $400. (They’re going to drop the price in 2 months )

I have been meeting a lot of new entrepreneurs in the Valley lately and its great to have new people doing cool things. But over at Web 2.0 Expo this past week me and my friend ran into an entrepreneur new to the valley who started to tell us his story. He is from New York and arrived with only 5000 to his name in order to start or join a startup of his interest. Continue reading ‘Why does it feel like Hollywood in Silicon Valley?’

Today I’m spending my time hanging out at the Web 2.0 Expo and am currently involved in the Startup Metrics panel which is very interesting, it is by two of my good friends Hiten Shah and Dave McClure. You can find more information on this panel which I highly recommend you read the notes for if you are a startup and need to know what kinds of things are most important to track and what are the best tools to use.

You can find notes and tips over at my friend Jeff’s blog: Startup 101 Metrics.

People tell me day after day that MySpace is a waste of time for the youth of today. They spend less time doing homework and studying and more time browsing friend’s profiles and sharing information online. To an extent I agree, MySpace increasingly changes the priorities of youth today. I recently engaged in a long debate with my friend on this topic.

The way I see it children today, on average, know a lot more HTML and CSS than when I was in middle school(8 years ago) or high school(4 years ago). In my middle school days, if the computer lab teacher had asked “Who here knows about HTML?” — I am sure I would have been the only one with my hand up. Today I am almost certain 50% of these middle school classroom students have interacted and edited HTML and CSS code on their MySpace pages.

I think these basic ideas enable the children of today to be a greater pool of knowledge and mass when it comes to interfacing with the computer in the many years to come. Technology is, and always has been, defined by the way society uses it — I wonder how many elementary kids will know about HTML/CSS in the next 8-10 years.

After much pressure from the rest of my team at ACS, I finally switched my full time daily operations to my MacBook Pro. Continue reading ‘Once you go Mac, you can’t go back.’