Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Those crafty iPhone hax0rs have gotten secure shell access running on their iPhones, thus turning them into little linux boxen.

So today I am depressed by the general state of affairs in the US stock market. It just wasn’t a happy day, with all the slightly less than shining Q2 reports coming out, and investors dumping stock and tanking the market. I think the following chart, from my Facebook Stock Quotes application, says it all:

There’s only 1 stock that actually went up today in my list of 12, and it’s Phantom! Phantom is the game console company which doesn’t have a product and is described by Wikipedia as:

On February 21, 2006, it was revealed that the Phantom gaming console was put on hold indefinitely. It was also revealed in an SEC filing that Infinium had lost over $62.7 million in 3 years, over half of which was spent on marketing the company and its products which have not yet made it to market. Over $24 million was spent on salaries and consultants with only $2.5 million going towards development. Infinium claimed that they still intended to release their “Lapboard” if their financial situation improved.[13] The “Lapboard” repeatedly missed release dates of the second quarter of 2006, October 2006 and November 2006.

What a world we live in! Maybe next week will be more “green” for America.

I got an email from a PR person working to promote a new multimedia cellphone service called RemoTV. Unfortunately, their press release is filled with typos, braggadocio they can’t back up, and points to a website that doesn’t contain any technical information about their service. Where’s the demo? Here’s their press release, with errors corrected:

Hi Elliott –

I hope all is well. With the hype that’s been circulating recently concerning Apple’s iPhone, people who can’t spend $600 and don’t have a day off work to get one [removed ,] are getting a bit antsy. Why does this one device have so many monopolies on technology? Not any more….enter stage left: RemoTV!

RemoTV (which launched its Beta site in June) is the newest addition in the wireless entertainment market. I think the readers of Business 2.0 are going to be psyched [removed siked] to learn of it! [removed .] Basically, RemoTV (which is FREE for all users!!!!!) is a way to host all your entertainment files [what are “entertainment files”?] (photos, music, video) from your computer – giving cell phone users the capability of [removed , at any time,] signing in and having their favorite music videos, hottest songs, or prized picture albums directly within reach! If your phone is web enabled you’ve got [removed the] most tech elements an iPhone offers – FOR FREE!

5W Public Relations
45 West 45th Street
5th Floor
New York, NY 10036
www.5Wpr.com

I’ve removed the individual identifying information, which was another three lines in the huge footer, as well as three phone numbers, and two more paragraphs of gibberish.

My first problem is that a professional PR firm with clients including Evian, McDonalds, Chamillionaire, Snoop Dogg, and GQ can send an email which is unreadable in English because of its grammatical missteps. It also features terrible punctuation and spelling! Honestly, 5W PR, if you can’t write a press release which is generally error-free, I believe you should just stop writing them. And stop being a PR firm with clients.

The second thing is that their promise is not believable. I simply can’t watch video streaming over my computer at another computer on broadband; there’s not enough bandwidth. How are they going to pull it off on slow, slow GSM networks?

This Penny Arcade strip about Die Hard 4 is hilarious: “Which Webs? All of them!”

A man in Australia destroyed an electrical substation and 6 cell phone towers using a tank or armored personnel carrier that he refurbished:

In case you don’t believe it–I did not at first–there’s a news video to back it up: