Big Trapeze

This sucks. A couple of months ago I prepaid for a year of Sunrocket VoIP service…. I noticed last night I got a weird signal when I tried to call my house, and today when I tried to call it it rang incessantly with no voice-mail pickup. As of today, it seems, they’re dead. I never saw it coming, or never saw the rumors about them struggling, and now I’m left with no home phone–though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You can read more about the shutdown in Wired.

I called the Sunrocket customer support line and get a pretty abrupt “We are no longer taking customer service or sales calls,” followed by a disconnect. That’s going to make getting $200 back a little tricky.

What really irks me is that there was no warning… we were never notified about the immediate shutoff. Would it have been a bad thing to let their 200,000 customers know that they were going to have to close their doors, and at least give us a few days to find new service? Let’s not forget the Sunrocket “Member Bill of Rights,” particularly the last, regarding “Integrity and Trust.”

• Integrity & Trust: We endeavor to fully inform you of available options so you can make timely and informed choices. We will never abuse your trust through deceit, exploitation, neglect, manipulation, or discrimination.

They forgot to fully inform me of available options, unless this doesn’t cover “Screw the customer and totally shut off service.”
So, what’s next? I decided to find out who runs the joint–because I’m not going to get burned by them again. It turns out, Sunrocket was founded by 3 people with lots of telecom experience: Joyce Dorris and Paul Erickson from MCI, and Robert Mainor from Bell Atlantic. In February of 2007, they left Sunrocket for then unspecified ventures. Enter Lisa Hook, current (as of yesterday) CEO of Sunrocket. Hook is an ex AOL’er, as are several of the new managers of Sunrocket (most from AOL as well). She worked in the AOL wireless division during her stint there, and she’s also served as legal advisor to the chairman of the FCC.

But, somewhere along the way she forgot about the little people. I don’t know where I’ll head next for my VoIP service, but you can bet it won’t have anything to do with anything associated with Lisa Hook. More research and rants to come…

UPDATE 7/18/07 INTERNAL EMAIL TO SUNROCKET EMPLOYEES

• Unfortunately this email contains very bad news. We have just been informed that any and all last ditch efforts to keep operations running as well as a potential sale of the company have not gone through and that SunRocket will cease operations at COB today. As such, today is my last day and everyone else you may have worked with at SunRocket. … Regarding outstanding and future invoices: Sherwood Partners out of Palo Alto will be handling the close down of all invoices, current and outstanding.

And of course, it’s never official until The Times reports it…

UPDATE 7/19/07 EMAIL TO SUNROCKET CUSTOMERS

• Dear Customers,

  After significant effort by the Company to avoid this result, SunRocket is in the process of closing its operations and therefore will no longer be able to provide you with the phone service that you have been accustomed to. Â However, this email provides you with an opportunity to sign up with select service providers who we believe will offer outstanding replacement service

  In order to assist you, we have entered into negotiations with a number of service providers. Â As a result of those negotiations, we have entered into agreements with 8×8, Inc., provider of the Packet8 service, and Unified Communications Corp., provider of Teleband service to offer you the best options and we are proud to recommend the following alternatives to you. Â Please make your decision to move to a new service provides immediately as future service is uncertain.

That’s it… no “if you paid a year in advance, we’ll be happy to refund a partial payment to you,” or even “if you paid a year in advance, we regret to inform you that you’re screwed, and we’ve taken the money and flown to Mexico.”

My favorite slogan from the Sunrocket website is still SunRocket, the “no gotchaâ€? phone company…

The rush is on… come up with the first big 3rd party iPhone app. There are a few tools to help you get started:

Safari 3 (available for those on Windows too),

and

iPhoney (Mac only).

iPhone is an open-source browser simulator, and offers a very realistic canvas from which to develop and test your applications. I remember in the late 90’s when WAP was the next big thing, and I downloaded little Nokia phone apps to test WAP applications… it looks like we’ve come full circle…

I use a config file for most of my PHP projects–and it’s filled with variable declarations and constants I need throughout the site. I have to reference the config file in almost every one of my files for my site, and it might look something like

include_once('Library/WebServer/Documents/Gorilla/includes/config.inc');

The problem is, if I’m developing on one machine and uploading to another, the chances are the path will be different, like

/var/www/gorilla/includes/config.inc

So, instead of doing a global file/replace on every one of my files, or writing some weird “decider script” that used a $_SERVER variable to point to the right config file, I’m using the unix command “ln.” It’ll work for the Mac and other Linux flavors, and it’s saved me a ton of headaches.

ln -s /Library/WebServer/Documents/Gorilla /var/www/gorilla

The ln is “make links,” and the “-s” creates a symbolic link that allows you to reference the first link through the second. Make sure you have at least the base directory already (in this case “var”.) Now when you upload to your production server you won’t have to change hard-coded links to match your system. Just reference the production link, like

include_once('/var/www/gorilla/includes/config.inc')

and your development server uses the symbolic link to access your development file at /Library/WebServer/Documents/Gorilla/includes/config.inc.

I switched servers this week and made a cardinal mistake–I didn’t properly backup my blog. I’ve got copies of most of the entries, and I’ll be adding those today–but I’ve lost a lot of comments. Learn from my mistakes…

Well, it’s been a while since I last gave a glimpse behind the scenes of my new startup. My plans are to launch June 1st, and things are finally coming together. The site itself is nearly ready for launch, I have a few things I’d like to tweak, and a few browser-compatibility issues to deal with, but it’ll be done soon. Right now, I’m taking care of the unfun-ness of the business: meeting with the lawyers, accountants, and bankers.

The Lawyer
I met with a lawyer this morning, and he’s working on some Terms of Service I’ll need to keep myself out of legal issues. He was great–easy to talk to, had relevant questions, good ideas, and was encouraging.

The Accountant
I met with an accountant yesterday, and wasn’t too impressed with him, so I may look for another. I really don’t know what I didn’t like about him, it just didn’t feel comfortable. And when you’re starting a business, you need to work with people you feel comfortable with, and it just wasn’t that way with him.

I thought I wanted a lawyer and accountant that were young, progressive, technologically-minded people. It turns out age has little to do with it–and being a technophile may not be a requirement either. My lawyer is 65+, doesn’t have an email address on his business card, and has a circa 1998 brick phone. The accountant is in his late 20’s and has a Blackberry, but other than that showed little interest in staying current with techno trends or news. I’m meeting with another accountant Thursday and will know more then–maybe it’s just the nature of accountants.

The Banker
Banking is a crazy issue altogether. Banks aren’t in business to look pretty–they’re beastly about wanting money, and they’ll take it any way you can give it to them… finance charges, minimum balance charges, transaction-limit fees, average daily balance fees, high-activity fees, no-activity fees, ATM fees, merchant account fees… you get the picture. The beauty is, they take this money, plus any money you store with them, and make MORE money using your money, it’s really amazing–it’s the purest form of perpetual motion I’ve found. In my next life I hope to be a banker.

That being said, you have to deal with banks, so again, go what you’re comfortable with. I looked at accounts at all the big boys, Bank of America, Chase, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, but I ended up staying with a local hometown bank. They actually have branches in several cities, so it’s not like a mom-and-pop thing, but the beauty of dealing with a local bank is this: 1) You keep your business local, and 2) If you need something, like a rule bent here or there, they don’t have to call a corporate office 8 states away to get approval.

I went inside this bank, rather than getting online and opening an account–and I’m glad I did. They generously lowered my opening-balance requirement, and actually talked me out of an account that would make them more money because a different (free) account they had worked better in my situation. One of the accounts they offered had a monthly service charge but unlimited transactions of deposits and withdraws. Another account was free but limited me to 150 transactions per month. Since my site will take money from customers, I could outgrow the 150-transaction limit quickly, and that was concerning. She investigated and found out that the 150-transactions only counted as “in-person� transactions, and there was no limit to electronic. Being web-based, 99% of the transactions on my account will be electronic (web-based), so the limit was no longer a factor. If you’re signing up for an account that has a transaction limit, check to see if it only applies to physical, in-person transactions. Had I opened my accounts online, I would’ve messed up and gotten the account that had the service charge.

Just be comfortable
It all comes down to what you’re most comfortable with. If you’re not comfortable with your bank, your accountant, or your lawyer, it’s going to make it tough to talk to them when the need arises. Establishing good relationships with them can give you more ideas to help your business grow. Some ideas will be good, some just won’t work for you, but at least you’ll have a few extra brains to help you out. Both Lawyer and Accountant had some ideas for me that would make me more money off the site, but it’s advice I didn’t like–I’m not making this site to languish in poverty, but I’m also not looking to rip people off. The project is about helping people raise money, and the very nature of it is to help give, not help take away (things that will become more lucid after I launch…) Just remember–advice is not an edict. Take it, test it, and see what works best for you.

I’ve been using text-editors to do my web coding since Al Gore invented HTML, biofuel, and the Blackberry. I’m likely to bust out Notepad, TextEdit, Eclipse, or Dreamweaver to get the job done, but I’ve never been thrilled with any of them. Now I’ve got a new best-editor-friend: Coda, from Panic.

Panic has been making great products for several years now, and I highly recommend any web developer to check out Coda. Good bye, Dreamweaver.

First, a plug for Wufoo–it’s an excellent web-app from the guys at Particletree, and it enables just about everyone to make really slick forms. Now, on to the good stuff: I’m always looking for an unobtrusive bug tracker for my development projects, and by combining a custom-form from Wufoo and lightbox techniques, I’ve got pretty useful one.

* To get started, head to Wufoo and sign up for one of their accounts.

* Build a form using their very easy-to-use interface, they even have an example bug-tracking form. You can specify how you want the form handled after the user submits it, mine is setup to email me.

* Wufoo has now created your form, and given you several options for integrating it into your own website. You’ll want the option that says “Full Page Form Code.� Take their code snippet (which is a copy of the Wufoo code used to create your form) and paste it into a new, blank HTML file. I’ve called this file “load_wufoo.html.� Whatever you call it, remember it, you’ll need to reference it in the next step.

* Now you want to create another file which will incorporate a few includes (our lightbox files and the ubiquitous prototype.js) and call our bug-tracking form (load_wufoo.html) into a lightbox (don’t worry, you can download these a bit later in the post.) I’m using code based off of Noah Winecoff’s work with lightbox and iframes. You might want to edit the lightbox.css and lightbox-iframe.js files and adjust your iframe size to match the length and width of your form you built with Wufoo.

That’s it, you’re ready. You can get fancy with the way you let your users call the bug-tracker, but mine is pretty simple, and you can try it here:

* Download prototype.js
* Download lightbox.css
* Download lightbox-frame.js
* Download bug_track.html (this is the file that will display your link for users to click)
* The only other file you’ll need is the load_wufoo.html you create at Wufoo.

* You can download my complete source here. Be sure to change the line in load_wufoo.html that sets the source of the iframe (src=”http://username.wufoo.com/forms/form-name/” mce_src=”http://username.wufoo.com/forms/form-name/” ). Remember, you’ll get this code from the Code Manager section of Wufoo under the “Full Page Form Codeâ€? link.

If you’re like me (let’s hope this isn’t the case), you’ve started a lot of projects and never seen them through to completion. I’ve given up on more ideas than I care to mention–many more than I can remember. A lot of them were whimsical, but every once in a while one came along that really might have been good. Enter “iRoadie.� It was July, 2004, and while listening to an iPod I wondered how cool it would be to add your own drumline or guitar riff to a song while you were sitting there listening to it.

iRoadie was my idea for a series of iPod addons that get you “squealing lead solos along with your favorite metal song in no time,� or “pounding the drumline to your favorite anthem…�
Usually, my projects start with a rough layout or graphical design. I made a mockup of the iRoadie in Photoshop, complete with an Apple-styled preview.

I registered iRoadie.com (which I’ve since let slip away), but never put anything up there. I really intended on doing something with this project, but have no electronic skill or any type of casting knowledge that would help me build the units. So, I found a cheap children’s electric drumkit/keyboard combon on eBay, and devoured it with a soldering iron and screwdriver when it came in. My initial goal was to just get the pieces of the drumkit working and playing through the iPod headphone port, but I didn’t even make to that point before the dream fizzled. And that fizzling is what ends most of my ideas. Maybe you can make it work for you…

I couldn’t really find a good pre-made solution for this anywhere, so using state data from Infoplease, PHP’s CURL functions, and geocoding data (latitude and longitude data for each city, in case you want to do ZIP Code based searches) from Geocoder, I compiled a total of 259 cities around the US, including a few that probably won’t make any other list, like my hometown, and Scranton, PA (in honor of The Office.)

Almost two years ago I launched a little side-project called PodAPic. Basically, I take user-uploaded photos and turn them into iPod ads (check out the gallery). It’s been fairly successful, and a tremendous learning process–especially with marketing and customer relations. I really haven’t updated the look of the site since the launch, so it was about time. The refresh includes the new “iPod Nano� styled ads, and, as an added bonus, all photos are now $4.99 (instead of $5.99 - $9.99).

In my logs I noticed that on the previous version of PodAPic, I lost a lot of people after they uploaded their pictures. I was allowing users to upload a photo, add a caption, select a color, and then submit the information and confirm their entries on a second page. From this page, they could submit their order to me. My traffic logs showed a lot of exits from this page, so to combat that, I used Noah Winecoff’s take on Lightbox techniques to get the user image and offer the appearance of keeping users on the same page. I think it’s a more effective approach, and I think I’ll notice a difference on order completions.

Check out PodAPic when you get the chance–and if you like it, link to it from your blog and I’ll do a free PodAPic for you.