I thought spring was on it’s way, until I looked out again this morning. This is the second day it’s snowed for, it cleared and now it’s snowed and covered the ground again. More snow to come tomorrow. 2 inches down already and another 6 inches forecast. That’s not including tomorrow.
Just way too much snow here…
Posted in Something for the Weekend
UPDATE – ZINIO is back online and service fully restored.
You’re probably reading this because you’ve been Googling and have a problem getting your Zinio mags and aren’t finding any help. The simple answer is if you’re reading this in early March 2011 then it’s because Zinio has a massive outage.
I started these blog posts and tweets because Zinio wasn’t communicating with their customers. A 48hr outage then a few days uptime then another 48+hr outage meant very little communication coming from Zinio. This is not designed to be anti-Zinio and Zinio do understand that, but it’s born out of frustration both from myself and many other thousands of Zinio customers not receiving any information about the service they have invested in.
Here’s a quick summary…
What’s gone wrong?
Zinio have a major outage and are working to restore the service. Zinio will publish information on what went wrong after the event and what they will do to resolve this I am told.
Why is it taking so long?
It’s a complicated issue, it’s not just a hard drive crash in a RAID array as I understand it. They are also working on reinstalling the platform to restore service more quickly.
How can I trust Zinio again?
Zinio have a good 10 yrs of service in this area and are not a new startup. Typically most companies have a good run then hit into problems at some stage. Zinio are now in this phase and I am told they will do their best to ensure that this and other problems don’t happen again once they have restored service.
Why haven’t they updated their home page? It says will be back shortly…
Their maintenance message was really only designed for planned maintenance. This is very unplanned and they are locked out of modifying the page unfortunately. They have setup a blog at http://zinio.wordpress.com.
Why weren’t we told as customers what was going on?
Zinio were undoubtedly trying to reduce the PR nightmare as many companies would in this situation by trying to restore service quickly and trying to reduce bad PR and that ultimately meant not communicating with customers admitting the problems. This isn’t new, most companies on their first major outage fall into this. The key is to communicate with customers, it’s not good PR to tell people that service is down because media outlets get hold of this and make a mountain out of a molehill, however communicating with paying customers to keep them on side, to not lose the business that has been built up is key. Zinio understand this now and are communicating much more on their blog which is what I was trying to achieve from these updates.
When will service be restored?
Zinio are hoping for Saturday 5th March in the morning EDT (East Coast US time). With the nature of the problem anything could affect this window, but Zinio are hoping to restore service around this time. If complications set in then it may take longer.
Will I be compensated?
Zinio do understand that their customers are key, it’s what has built their business and that without you as a customer their business wouldn’t be what it is today. Although I can’t say what level of compensation will be provided, yes I have been told by Zinio that they will be trying to put it right with customers affected by the service outage. What that will be I don’t know, that will be down to Zinio to decide. Whether it means extensions to your existing subscriptions, additional complimentary subscriptions of your choice or refunds will be down to Zinio. I think due to the level of outage that maybe it should be a combination of all three, but that’s based on a feeling as a customer.
Was Zinio hacked, have they gone under?
No, that has been the unfortunate perception by some because of the lack of communication. Zinio have also put an answer to this on their blog. They did also have an unfortunate outage on their phones but these are back operational.
I want to read the magazines I have, what should I not do?
Okay, don’t uninstall the Zinio app or delete your magazines, otherwise you won’t be able to access them throughout the outage. Also try not to restart your iPad or iPhone because this will also log you out of Zinio to authenticate you. Hold tight and hopefully you can still read what offline magazines you have on your device and you will receive all your magazines once Zinio is restored. Any issues that should have been sent out to you through this outage you will still receive when service comes back.
What happens when service is restored?
The first thing is that you might see the service restored then it goes back offline again. This can happen when trying to restore any kind of service, it might be that it comes back online but configs or service packs or other items need to be applied to servers to ensure stability. So if you do notice it goes down soon after for a little while longer, please understand this. This isn’t something Zinio have mentioned to me but it’s something through my experience of managing servers can and will most likely happen.
More information is available at their blog but I will keep you updated here in the event that information does dry up whilst trying to restore service.
This is a great advert for Cravendale Milk!
Posted in Something for the Weekend, Videos
I had the chance of speaking earlier by phone with Zinio’s CMO/EVP Jeanniey Muller. Zinio are currently working around the clock to restore the service to all of it’s customers and magazine partners.
Although the situation is no doubt complicated with regards to any kind of technical outage, they’re trying to bring back and restore the service as quickly as possible. This obviously can bring further complications when it comes to technology but Zinio are hoping to restore service early on Saturday morning US time. Obviously with any kind of technical outage like this it’s not possible to guarantee or pinpoint a day/time, however Zinio are hopeful Saturday AM will be an achievable target if everything goes smoothly.
Zinio have provided an updated status page at http://zinio.wordpress.com and have asked me to pass this along to anyone reading this. Zinio understand their customers frustration and will try to provide more updates to customers. This is the first major outage for Zinio in their 10 years of service. Zinio will continue to update the status page link above and try to engage with customers over Twitter and Facebook to provide regular status updates.
Our sincerest thanks from Zinio
We realize that this is not the level of service that you expect from Zinio. We are working tirelessly to return the quality of service you have come to expect from Zinio over the past 10 years. Please bear with us during this time.
Zinio has now hit into a major PR disaster with the Zinio Digital Magazine Newstand being down for just under 48 hrs over the weekend of the 26th and 27th February and a further 34+ hrs of downtime in less than 3 days after the initial service outage.
The first outage was caused by a power failure according to Zinio
To have two outages in less than 3 days isn’t uncommon, but to have 2 major outages, the first lasting just under 48 hrs and the second lasting 34+ hrs and rising is very unusual. To have a second power outage is extremely unlikely and it seems that Zinio are being plagued by faulty hardware or corrupted databases. Any power utility company would have restored power within a matter of hours.
The only message thousands of loyal customers are receiving from Zinio is
With no proper communication from Zinio or their Marketing team, this is turning into a PR nightmare for Zinio. Many customers have subscribed to several hundreds of pounds / dollars of magazines, personally I have spent over £1000 with Zinio.
As a once loyal Zinio customer I have now had to pay additional money to Apple to get my magazine subscriptions through Apple due to Zinio not being able to provide my PAID subscriptions. I’m sure Zinio will not be refunding me for these purchases, and to be honest I don’t care now. I just want access to my magazines and as Zinio have proved they cannot provide that and cannot provide a reason for the down time or an estimate on when the service will return, there’s only one thing most of us are thinking. Have Zinio gone under and not able to pay their bills?
I’d just like to take this chance to apologise to anyone that has subscribed to Zinio on my recommendations (from emails I’m receiving I know that’s a lot of people). I feel your pain too with the amount I have invested in Zinio and am truly sorry that we are all suffering from the lack of service and communication coming out of Zinio.
If Zinio ever recover from this they will have lost a very large percentage of their customers. Customers are voting with their feet and 38% of Zinio customers have now rated the iPad app as 1 star. If Zinio don’t want to lose their customers they need to turn this around and be honest with their customers and tell them what’s going on.
Just as I’ve been saying for the past 4 months that I will not buy the iPad 2, it’s not going to be as revolutionary as I would hope and I can get buy with my existing iPad, Apple move the goal posts once again and leave me in disarray.
So with the ability to do full 720p video recording at 30 fps with the rear facing camera (yes there’s two…one front and one back). The rear camera will also do up to 5x digital zoom and the front facing camera (solely for FaceTime use) will record at standard VGA resolution (640×480) but still at 30fps.
The new covers don’t really win me over but the screen to reduce fingerprint and glare will along with a dual-core processor doubling the speed of processing making games and the general operating system much more responsive.
Not forgetting that the iPad 2 will be 33% thinner and just over 600g, this makes it a much more desirable device.
I currently have the 64gb model and to be honest I’ve never filled it up, I’m usually around 35gb used which means I couldn’t go for the 32gb model otherwise I would be continuously out of space. Now I’m left wondering whether I do buy an iPad 2, and then what do I do with my existing iPad? Sell it or keep it? Apple is becoming an expensive past time with their annual releases!
Zinio is a large digital publications company that was founded in 2001. They’re main business is to take a large selection of paper based magazines from around the world and digitalise and sell them so you can download and read your favourite magazines on your PC, Mac, iPad and iPhone. Like Amazon with Kindle, their DRM model works very well and doesn’t impede you in which device you want to read the magazine on. Zinio have a great selection of magazines on their digital shelves and this is what really makes Zinio a popular digital provider of content. However, Zinio seem to be hitting into some very serious downtime issues this past week which they’re having difficulty in resolving.
Unfortunately last weekend Zinio had just under a 48 hour outage and 3 days later they’re into another 12+ hour outage of service.
The service outages means that customers who have paid for their magazines cannot access the Zinio service to download the paid content.
The email from Zinio in the first outage to customers…
I wanted to reach out to you personally to thank you for your patience this past weekend and check to make sure your Zinio access was working properly. As you noticed, Zinio experienced some systems problems that impacted your ability to shop and read your magazines. These have now been fully resolved. On behalf of the entire Zinio team, I wanted to apologize for any inconvenience this unfortunate outage caused.
Zinio was able to restore service on the first outage approx 48 hrs later. However, Zinio’s down again 3 days later and has not been able to provide it’s service for over 12 hours. It seems like there’s no out of hours coverage at Zinio for it’s service due to the downtime over the weekend and overnight all being outside of core business hours which doesn’t bode well for Zinio. Zinio has been around for a number of years (since 2001) but there are more companies coming onto the scene to compete with Zinio. Apple more recently started selling Magazine subscriptions for the iPad through iBooks and a number of magazine companies have already started offering their magazines through iBooks or through their own apps on the iPad.
I’m an avid Zinio supporter and have spent well over £1000 on magazine subscriptions with Zinio so hopefully that shows my level of commitment to Zinio! However, Zinio being down twice in 4 days for a serious amount of time has now put me off making two further magazine subscriptions with Zinio and I’ve just given Apple the money for these. After the first 48hr outage I purchased some additional magazine subscriptions and I haven’t been able to download these new magazines because Zinio’s service has gone down a second time. Zinio also offered me some complimentary free magazine subscriptions on top of this due to the last outage, but again they weren’t showing in my account just prior to the second service outage.
It’s one thing being bad for Zinio’s customers seriously making them look elsewhere for magazine subscriptions but it’s more serious for the magazine companies that partner with Zinio because new customers can’t purchase magazine subscriptions resulting in loss of sales.
I really sincerely hope Zinio can rectify these outages and improve the level of service to it’s customers and magazine partners and pull through this.
Apple today announced the release of the iPad 2 shipping March 11th. Apple started off the announcement by giving some staggering statistics.
In the past year (2010) Apple has sold nearly 15 million iPads and a staggering 100 million iPhones. Compared to Apple’s closest competitor for iPad clones, this is a staggering amount.
The new iPad 2 is one third (1/3) thinner, comes in white or black (yes white!) and shipping March 11th 2011. It comes in familiar models, same storage, same price as original iPad:-
Battery
The iPad 2 has the exact same battery duration as the first edition iPad, basically 10 hours of battery life or 1 month standby time
Display
Performance
The iPad 2 comes with the new A5 processor that is twice as fast as the original iPad.
Two powerful cores in one A5 chip mean iPad can do twice the work at once. You’ll notice the difference when you’re surfing the web, watching movies, making FaceTime video calls, gaming, and going from app to app to app. Multitasking is smoother, apps load faster, and everything just works better.
Superfast graphics with up to nine times the graphics performance, gameplay on iPad is even smoother and more realistic. And faster graphics help apps perform better — especially those with video. You’ll see it when you’re scrolling through your photo library, editing video with iMovie, and viewing animations in Keynote.
Covers
The iPad 2 will come with “Smart Ocvers” which bends and wraps around the iPad and allows you to use the iPad 2 as a typing stand. Smart Covers come in five polyurethane colors for $39 plus five leather colors at $69.
iOS
iPad 2 will ship with iOS 4.3 (not iOS5 like some people were suggesting). Enhancements include improved Safari performance with Nitro JavaScript that sits on top of iOS. iTunes Home sharing of videos straight to the iPad or iPhone using it as a video playback device with streaming via AirPlay.
Video and Cameras
Video out support for full HDMI output at 1080p will work with all apps. Two cameras (front and rear) the rear camera can shoot 720p video.
TV and Video
Shipping
News Corp along with Apple have created a new kind of daily newspaper called The Daily. It’s been described as a revolutionary newspaper, 365 issues a year, viewed in a proper iPad display rather than trying to take a page and project it onto the iPad. It’s also been a long time coming, much being talked about over past months and it’s supposed to revolutionise how we view news content on tablet devices like the iPad. In short, it’s supposed to be the first claim of a proper newspaper being radically redesigned for the digital era.
That’s a lot to live up to! Let’s see how well The Daily has done in living up to it’s claim.
So how good is it?
Well, the first thing I need to tell you is that it’s only available in the United States of America. Anyone outside of the US of A will not be in much luck. You can get around Apple’s bureaucracy and create a US iTunes store account, login and then download but that’s a lot of hassle for the regular person.
I gave The Daily a try to see what all the hype was about and you can see in the screenshots below what it looks like.
Opening The Daily you’ll see the following for the first time
So far so good until you now start to try and actually do what they want you to do and that’s read the newspaper…
Unfortunately as you can see from the above screenshots you most of the images don’t load for each article, and you might as well be reading The Daily in plain text in a text editor. In-fact you would be much better and have a much richer content by just opening up Safari and going to the web to read an article on a news website.
Getting past the “We’re only going to provide it to US customers” which is a big hurdle to overcome, I can really on say so far that trying to read the articles is troublesome at best. The navigation (carousal) that you can spin to get to the next news article is slow, the animation is very jerky and makes you long just to have an index page where you can just tap a photo that doesn’t try to over do the animation.
That said, if I could get past the above problems, there’s then the other problem of the news content is only updated on a daily basis (like a newspaper). I’m sorry but that’s not good enough. If I want to read a newspaper then I would go out and buy one. When it comes down to news you want to get the up to the minute news, so for me Twitter, blog sites and news websites are still going to be my main focal point in getting the latest news.
All in all with not being able to read The Daily as you’re supposed to, I’m glad News Corp have provided The Daily free as a trial. I really can’t see many people signing up for the subscription model unless they sort out these problems. People crave news now, they want it when they want it. This is why there is a decline year on year for newspaper sales, and I think it shows that News Corp just don’t understand this theory and why they’re publication circulations are down year on year.
Posted in Applications, iPad, Magazines
A survey that was carried out with 1,000 iOS devices that synchronize with Appsfire’s mobile app discovery and sharing platform revealed some very interesting statistics about iPhone app usage. Summarised in the infographic to the right shows compiled statistics that most iOS users prefer native apps to web apps.
The average iOS / iPhone user spends 84 minutes a day using their device with applications installed onto the device and only ten minutes on the web using web-based applications. Each iOS owner has on average, 108 applications installed on their device, 20 applications are shipped with the operating system and 88 are installed from the iTunes App Store.
Appsfire also suggests that 58% of installed applications are free, 23% are paid and 19% are the default apps on the handset.
Source: TUAW
Against some advice I decided to buy the Monster Beats by Dr. Dre Studio. A little on the expensive side but I have started listening to a lot of audio on the iPhone outside of the car or my iPhone docks and I wanted a really decent sounding set of headphones.
I haven’t had these long so I can’t comment on the headband breaking (some videos you can see on youtube) but I must say these are a really good set of headphones and covers a large dynamic range. Even though there’s reports of the headband breaking I don’t misuse products that often or stress them out so I’m hoping that I won’t be affected by this, but only time I guess will tell.
The Studio phones are great and they lock around your ears real well, extremely comfortable and even with no music playing lock out the sound pretty good. The downside to the Studio headphones are that you need to use 2x AAA batteries in them and you don’t want to leave the power button on as the batteries will drain. The batteries are supposed to last for around 50 hours of music play back but I suspect this depends more on how loud you have the music playing. So far I haven’t been able to measure battery performance. It’s a little disappointing that you will have to carry around a spare set of AAA batteries as you can’t use the headphones without these, they’re completely dead otherwise, but it really does improve the quality of the audio.
The ear cups fold in to make them more portable and you get a free zip-up semi-hard case that’s padded to stow them away in when traveling.
The big downside for me is that I bought them both for listening to music outside of an iPhone dock / hi-fi but also for conference calls as they look very comfortable (and are). However you get a lot of cell phone interference coming up the audio cable or through the air to the left speaker and that kind of puts you off when talking or listening. You don’t hear this much if at all when listening to the music but if you hold the iPhone up to the ears you can hear it loud. I really don’t know why Monster would consider including a 3.5mm cable with in-line microphone when this occurs. Maybe they never tested it with a phone combination in their Quality Assurance testing?
Monster provide two cables, one is a red cable for regular MP3 players/iPod Touch which has 24 carat gold connectors and then a black cable that has the same 24 carat gold connectors but has an in-line microphone.
Anyway that aside, the headphones are really good, I’m very impressed with the dynamic range, the bass and the overall sound quality. I only have to have the iPhone on 50% volume most of the time and 60% max and that’s so loud that I can’t hear anyone else talking that’s next to me. You’d never want to put the iPhone up to 100% volume with these as it will be just too loud.
For anyone interested in how bad the GSM interference is on the headphones, here’s a good Youtube video that demonstrates it.
The iPhone and iPad can make some great music together. What can it produce? Watch these videos for AT&T.
The great Google vs Apple debate still wages on between customers. Some prefer Google phones with Android and some prefer Apple iPhones. Currently from a unit sales perspective and app download perspective Apple are still in the lead but Google are coming up fast from behind.
However, your device is only as good as your last update. Having a device that won’t upgrade to the latest Operating System version is of pretty no use to you. Why? Because these mobile operating systems move quickly and anyone that doesn’t keep their phone updated to the latest mobile OS means that apps and games stop working because they drop support for older OS versions pretty quickly.
For regular readers you’ll know I have iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad but likewise I also have a HTC Desire and Samsung Galaxy S, so I have devices from both platforms – Android and iOS so get to experience the nirvana of both.
Apple provide a mobile OS upgrade every 3-4 months, they don’t provide it OTA (Over The Air) as you have to connect your iPhone to iTunes to download and install it. Although this can be a hassle and I would much prefer to download it OTA over WiFi or 3G, it’s an easy process, it works well. iTunes backs up the device first – just in case the update crashes the phone so you can restore it, giving you the best of both worlds.
For Android you receive your updates OTA (Over The Air) – no need to connect your device to a PC or Mac to get your updates. However, your phone doesn’t get backed up so if something does go wrong, then you’re to put it likely going to have a bricked phone. That said, the percentage of bricked Android phones from failed updates are so small you never really hear about it being a problem.
For me the biggest problem is how to get the updates. App and Game developers update their apps to support the newer OS versions and drop support for the older OS versions, mainly because they can’t have devices running on every OS version to test as it would be a nightmare. With Apple, they push out an update every 3 or 4 months and EVERYONE in the world gets the update to install. No matter what network or which country you are in, you get the choice to get the update and install it, and all at the same time (albeit maybe a few hours different).
Here’s where the problem comes with Android. You have Google who write the OS, the manufacturer that creates the phone and the mobile network / cellular provider, e.g. AT&T/T-Mobile/Verizon/O2/Orange. So what happens on Android is Google says…Hey, there’s a new OS version out, please push this out to all your users. The hardware manufacturer can block the update going out and not provide it to customers of their phones for whatever reason they see fit. If they do agree to allow the updated Google OS update out, then the mobile operator can also block it and say they don’t want the update to go out to it’s customers.
So, what happens with Android? Most customers don’t get the updates when they should. HTC Android customers in UK get updates at different dates to say French or German or Italian or US customers. Likewise some manufacturers like Samsung block the updates. Or even if the update doesn’t get blocked then the mobile operator then can block it or delay the release date further. This completely fragments Android to the point that a lot of Android customers still get devices that can’t be updated.
Take Samsung with the Galaxy S. US customers received updates pretty quickly but they were staggered across the mobile operator networks, some European customers then received the Froyo 2.2 update a few months later. I’m still waiting for 2.2 and am stuck on 2.1, 6 months later due to Samsung not rolling out the update properly to customers. My device shouldn’t be blocked by a mobile operator because, it’s an unlocked device, I paid around £499 unlocked, yet thanks to Samsung’s terrible update policy because I paid a larger sum of money compared to others that got there’s a lot cheaper on a locked network, I’m stuck behind on 2.1. So no joy in receiving the Froyo 2.2 update, most likely no joy in receiving the Gingerbread 2.3 update and likewise I doubt I’ll get Honeycomb 3.0.
If Google with mobile operators don’t get a handle on this soon this will absolutely kill the Android market. There are so many customers out there angry because they’re not getting the updates they need. With Apple although not ideal having to connect to iTunes, it works, everyone gets the update and the only OS version fragmentation are down to customers that choose themselves not to update to the latest iOS update.
I have been tearing out what little hair I have left over playing audiobooks. I have been trying to listen to audiobooks on the iPod Nano 6G. It’s great until it goes into power save mode then it forgets where you last finished off and provides no bookmark facility.
The iPod player on the iPhone 4 works much better and does remember your position until you decide that you need to power cycle the iPhone and then….guess what? It forgets where you were before you restarted.
The audible.com app which is free on the iPhone came out a while ago and I did take a brief look at it when it was released, but either I failed to see at the time or a new feature has been added, but now the Audible app allows you to pick up audio books that you purchased through iTunes. Not only that but also to allow you to bookmark them….hooorah!
No more scanning through chapters of an audio book trying to work out where you finished listening.
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