So very nearly ordered an iPhone....

I blogged before about how I was going to wait for Orange to release their prices, as I expected that it would mean O2 (my preferred network) would then be forced to bring their price down.  WRONG!  Orange matched O2 pricing, and I've been pondering for a week or so when to order.

The the Times tell us here that Tesco would be releasing the iPhone ahead of Vodafone and TMobile, and I'd certainly put money on Tesco starting a price war.  Oh dear, when should I get my iPhone, I wonder?

I want an iPhone - but now is not the right time

I have been pondering for some weeks whether or not to get an iPhone and last week decided to take the plunge.  Given I had to be in the office on Friday, and I needed to be at home for the iPhone to be delivered, I put off ordering it until this Monday.  Good job too!  On Friday Orange announced they (my provider) O2 no longer had exclusivity with Apple, and you will soon be able to get iPhone on Orange UK.  Then, hot on the heels of that, it seems that Vodafone UK will follow suit in the spring.

Hold tight!  Prices will have to come down with this level of competition around, and I can certainly wait in a recession for lower prices!

Taxi!

Dependent on the time of day and your location, hailing a London cab is often a random game of chance - will you, or wont you, manage to find one of those welcoming golden lights which stays lit all the way along the road until it reaches you? A game of chance, of course.

Prefacing this with a "I have not used this service yet", it was a very pleasant surprise to hear of a fab use of technology in the London cab market. TweetALondonCab - yes, send a direct message on Twitter saying where you want to go from and to, and a cab turns up. Start by checking their Twitter page and their website to see how it works. Good luck, guys, you are ahead of the game.

Spotify is so much cheaper than iTunes - it's free!

For those of you who spend too much time at your PC/laptop and want an easy way to play your own selection of music as you work. Better still there's no downloading from iTunes and even better, the basic service is FREE! As I type this, I'm listening to some rag-time piano by Scott Joplin. You need to go to Spotify.com and download a very small app, and it's dead easy from there. The freebie service includes adverts every so often, but hey, they're short and only ever one at a time - so nothing like your local commercial radio station which seems to be playing more and more advertising minutes per hour than you thought was legal.

UPDATE:

Unlimited Streaming Music on iPhone: Apple Approves Spotify

UPPER CASE or lower case?

I get asked this one on a fairly regular basis, so let's cover it off here.

Email addresses
These can be upper or lower or mixed case. Your email system does not care, and in fact will convert it to lower case. So, if it makes it easier to read on business cards etc, use mixed case like JohnSmith@MyCompany.com

Website addresses (aka "URLs")

• Your basic domain name can be mixed case - so www.MyCompany.com and www.mycompany.com and www.MYCOMPANY.com will all get to the right place
• After the basic domain name you need to match the correct case or a browser may not find the right page. So http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/cart/view.html is not the same as http://www.amazon.co.uk/GP/cart/view.html for example. This is because some websites are hosted on an operating system called Unix which does care about UPPER and lower case.

Passwords are usually case sensitive and I would encourage you to use upper and lower case letters and digits in any password - this makes it much more tamper-proof.

Cloud Computing

"What on earth?", I hear you say! A good start (if you like lots of detail) is the Wikipedia definition, but I'm planning a short update here to give an overview.

The simple approach is that Cloud Computing is where you are storing information on the web, rather than on your hard drive or a memory stick, and you do not necessarily know or care exactly where it is stored. So examples would be

• GMail but not Outlook
• Google Documents but not MS Word or Excel
• Facebook
• Flickr and other photo storage sites
• etc

Benefits - you can work from anywhere and know that you have all the information available at your fingertips. a personal "Paperless Office" - hence the title of this blog. And yes, I do operate a paperless office! Those of you who have seen my desk will laugh, but any hard copy here would have arrived by post and will ultimately be destined for my bin or my shredder.

Word of caution. If you are storing business information in this way, you ought to find out where the data is physically stored as any legal issues with the data could need to be handled under the laws of that country.

Recession Tip #4 - Money for old mobiles

Heard this advert recently to get money for old mobiles. Searched in bottom drawer and found four "candidates" and checked out their values on Mazuma's website. One was too old, but the other three were OK and they quoted me a figure of £61. I had thought about selling them on eBay before, but you only get decent money there if you can unlock a mobile from its network (mine are all O2 configured), and you have the charger and the manual - which, as it happens, I do for each mobile. Condition not important, just that it works and the screen is not too scratched.

So late in the evening of Monday 12th, I get my quote from Mazuma after getting the IMEI number from the barcode sticker underneath the battery. They send me a freepost envelope. I put three mobiles in a little padded bag inside into their envelope. It sits on my desk 24 hours as I was not going to the Post Office that day (to get a postal receipt). They receive it, verify the details I filed online. They confirm by email all is OK. Cheque arrives Tuesday 20th - total eight days including one day of delay I built in. Perfect!

It all works like this - I verify that was exactly what happened. Free money! Go for it!

Recession Tip #3 - Renegotiate your company car lease

Some of the people hit worst by the Recession are those where certain financial "events" hit them this year - consider, for example, someone coming up to retirement age who cannot work on for health reasons - but the value of their pension fund has been trashed by the stock market changes in the last 9 months. Could you survive on 60% of what you planned to?

On a much smaller scale, but having personal financial impact, the lease of my company car expires in April 2009. So I got a quote from my lease company to replace the car with a brand new one of the same spec, and the new lease was 20% more expensive than the current one - due presumably to them marking down the likely end-of-lease resale figure. Ouch, particularly when my limits are in terms of the lease price not the value of the car itself.

So I looked at other options. Cars from other similar manufacturers such as Mercedes are out, because the lease company is owned by BMW and they tweak the lease prices to buy market share. Cars from a bit further down market were not ticking my boxes. Talking to a friendly BMW dealer 100 miles away, they priced up a private lease on a pre-registered heavily-discounted new car, and still could not beat the price I was offered for a new list-price car.

Then the light-bulb moment! Extend the current lease. Fortunately I am well within the pre-agreed mileage I set when my current car was new, and I now work from home so I could extend the three year lease to four years without extending the mileage. The answer - I keep my car an extra year, and the lease price is down by 10%. Then, when I come to replace it the new model will be out, I can hope that the economy will have stabilised etc, but at least I can plan ahead with a lower lease price until April 2010.

Recession Tip #2 - eBay sells NEW items, not just old ones

eBay is great, and I have sold a lot of stuff there - a feedback figure of over 300 for a private ad-hoc trader shows the level I use it... for selling old stuff and buying new stuff. Yes, buying NEW stuff.

Here's an example from today. I need a SCART to SCART lead. after buying a 3-way SCART box and forgetting I needed a cable to connect it to the TV. Doh! My local catalogue shop Argos sells them for £4.79 (see here) and I could walk there and back in 10 minutes. Checked eBay and just bought a new one for £1.98 including post and packing (see here), a saving of 59%. Next, I thought I would price up a 4-way extension bar. Argos was £5.47 (see here) and eBay £2.94 including delivery (see here), a 46% saving.

Point made?

Recession Tip #1 - Amazon Seller Account

Practically everyone I speak to about Amazon thinks the site is just one big company selling loads of stuff, gradually expanding in to new markets. Some say they have noticed the "Used and new" prices but very few have ventured further.

So, how can you as a consumer benefit in the Recession?

• If you insist on buying something new - for example, the item is a birthday present for your mother-in-law and you want to avoid a family row. Check out the "used and new" prices - often there are shops selling surplus stocks at lower prices, but still New items. Remember Amazon are crafty because they have full and easy access to these prices and can alter their own selling prices accordingly.
  
• If you just need the item, and want the cheapest price. Check out the "used and new" prices - significant savings to be made, but remember you pay post on all items.
  
• If you only need the item once, for example a DVD. Buy it new (see above) and then re-sell it on Amazon Market Place. The difference is your rental cost of the item - compare that to Blockbuster or similar.
  
• You have items at home in very good condition but you don't need them, particularly books. Sell them on Amazon Market Place.
  

Amazon Market Place - The selling costs are a little higher than eBay, but only charged if you sell the item. The ease of listing is staggering, and the items are listed until they are sold, with a standard 90-day period and easy re-listing process. See my current listing of books for sale

Look out for more Recession Tips soon