I knew the pubic relations machine at Apple had reached a fever pitch, when even my Fiance’s grandmother asked me what I thought about the iPhone. As a lifetime Apple user and a more recent shareholder, I am excited to see Apple do well with this new device.

Apple has gone a long way to ensuring the success of their device by announcing their rate plans today. The pricing is reasonable and similar to what I currently pay for my unlimited data plan for my Nokia N70 on Cingular.

Everything about the iPhone looks like trademark Apple. The user interface is sexy, the advertising is compelling, and the distribution strategy is disruptive. Apple will sell you the phone, then send you home to activate it. No more waiting in the store in line to have an underpaid sales rep set up your service. All of this is done through iTunes. Talk about convergence.

Will I buy an iPhone on June 29th when it is released. Probably not. I am very happy with my phone now, and it allows me some features that the iPhone lacks. User installed applications and dial up networking (DUN) are my critical features. Apple claims that you can use web apps, but it is nice to be able to install your own programs. I have a couple on my Nokia that would be missed, such a Putty for SSH. As for the lack of DUN, which allows you to get your laptop online via the internet connection in your phone, this is a stop for me. I connect via my laptop all the time, and while it is not that fast, when you need to get a file or something over a remote connection, it is priceless. I am sure this will come in the future, but for now it is a no-deal.

Most people probably do not care about either of these features, so the phone may be for them.  If you think that $499 and $599 are expensive, remember the Razr was almost that price when it came out.

People love Power Point, I even like to use, but there are a lot of things you can do wrong. Comedian Don McMillian hits on most of them.

Life After Death by PowerPoint

*This is safe for work and has no improper language.

Originally Published in the June Issue of the Wilmington Business Journal (http://www.wilmingtonbiz.net/)

As this is my first article (for the business journal), I wanted to make a good impression on my editor and get it in early. Unfortunately, my computer crashed, or I accidentally deleted it, or my dog ate my hard drive. Actually, none of this really happened to me, but it did happen to the magazine Business 2.0, which is published by Time. They recently had a catastrophic hardware failure that caused the complete loss of the June issue. Lucky for them they had a paper copy, but page layouts had to be redone from scratch.

If you have ever lost a computer file, then you know how important it is to back up your work. If you have never been there, done that, consider yourself lucky—in today’s digital world, data loss is as inevitable as death and taxes. Therefore, you must have a backup strategy in place to guard against these would-be catastrophes.

For a backup strategy to be effective, it must be regular, complete and verifiable. If your backup strategy ignores any of these three components, you are asking for trouble.

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