Dreamhost sent out an email, posted a blog entry, and many other blogs started writing about the mixup. The billing team at Dreamhost has taken a very non-chalant tone in all of their customer contact pieces, and they continued this tone, even in a HUGE mixup that they made. They actually billed $7.5M to customers today, which isn’t bad for a single day of billing I guess.

The honesty and humor was a perfect mix of being up front as well as keeping their same tone to keep me feeling good about hosting my domains with Dreamhost. A great company who I highly recommend… unless they triple bill you.

For a good reach check out their blog entry addressing the issue: Dreamhost Blog- “Um, Whoops”

The obvious reason they are announcing this in a press release is to beat the thunder that Apple will be announcing tomorrow. Nobody knows exactly what Steve will be announcing on screen, but most people think that one of the minor announcements will be that you can rent movies through iTunes. Not a bad move, but if they only have one or two studios on board and Netflix has over 6,000 movies, well I think we know who the winner would be. However, if Apple were to announce some other new offerings to help people watch more movies through the iTunes rental store, it may put their limited selection in high demand.

The title of this post refers to the banners that have been hung outside of the Mac World Expo which begins tomorrow. The predictions for what it means are all over the place, from WiMax, to Slingbox, to computers that don’t need any cords for charging or connecting to other machines. My predictions are an ultra slim macbook (under 12 inches), an updated appleTV (maybe stream HD to your tv from your computer), updated cinema displays (with isghts built in), and for good measure lets hope that this MacBook Air is happening.

I doubt they will be announcing anything that I will be NEEDING, but who knows what my reaction will be once I see the new toys. Last years event almost sent me to the U Village Apple Store during my lunch break…if only the iPhone had have been available that day, I would have been $500 poorer.

Any guesses what will be announced today?

Jawbone, is representing at CES with a booth, and not only that, they are using up some of their new money on an amazing PR move. Jawbone, is accepting any other phone headset as a trade-in for their amazing headsets. I have one and LOVE it. It has made using a bluetooth headset bearable and actually very enjoyable.
This move puts the amazing headsets in the right ears as CES is mostly attended by bloggers and reports, so therefor the loss leader will quickly turn into alot of written words about how peoples lives have been changed since they started using their free Jawbone headset.

Engadget story

One useful thing that has been done with twitter though, has been conference "casts" if you will.  A large conference called TechCrunch40 was going on the past two days, and a group of individuals got the twitter user name of techcrunch40.  Therefore people could follow their take on the conference, only problem for the conference was they were being honest, and mostly mocking the presenters and the conference itself.  Then randomly, after this twitter account had quite the following (almost 300 people in two days) Ev Williams, twitters founder, changed their name to nottechcrunch40. 

That kind of thing might fly with your buddies, but if you’re trying to create a tool to be used by a critical mass you shouldn’t change a users name (not delete, change) because you don’t like what they are saying (Williams is on the board for TechCrunch40).  The users said nothing offensive, and although I was not at the conference, I would imagine many of the things said were true.  I agreed from what I had read online and what they were saying. 

Ev has made alot of very smart moves (Blogger and Odeo) and I think twitter has the potential to be something very useful.  I hope to one day make a third of the great decisions Ev has made.  This move, however,  is something that should not happen if you’re trying to create something on a large scale.

Google has now opened up "Presently" which is their new competitor to Microsoft’s PowerPoint.  It looks pretty straightforward, and like Googles other offerings, very basic.  That’s what’s great about their products, but it’s also what will hold them back from being "Enterprise Ready."

I like the look of it, and from what I have seen thus far, I think I may use it for small team collaboration.  It will take awhile for this to infiltrate any non startup offices, but it’s a start.  The reason I have used Googles "Docs" and "Spreadsheets" have been because they’re easy to use and easy to share and collaborate with friends who have gmail.  If you are working on a small presentation and don’t want to spend the money on Microsoft Office, you may want to check out "Presently."  If you’re going to be working on a single computer and don’t have to share the document all the time, I’d stick with PowerPoint for now.

Also, on another interesting note.  I read about this on TechCrunch.  They have said that Google was supposed to release "Presently" at TechCrunch40 tomorrow, but that the site is now live.  Seems kinda weird to scoop your own conference doesn’t it???  The site’s live so I guess they have to say something, but truth of the matter is, I doubt many people would realize until the news hit TechCrunch and Digg.

It was in the blogs and on the news last night. This morning though, neither paper ran the pictures of the men. The PI said that they would not run the pictures because of civil liberties and privacy issues and the Times said nothing about it (from what I have seen). Am I missing something here? The FBI needs help identifying two men who were acting suspicious on what some people have called a very high risk potential target in the Seattle area. The paper won’t show the picture because

But running a photograph of two men who may as easily be tourists from Texas as terrorists from the Mideast with a story that makes them out to be persons of interest in a terrorism investigation seems problematic, to say the least.

Yea, the men could be from anywhere. Yes, they may be up to nothing. Yes, the FBI doesn’t often do this. But, come on are you not reporting this David McCumber because you just want to cover the story when something goes horribly wrong? Sunken ferries probably sells more than two photos of people that the FBI wants to talk to.

Here’s his explanation on why the PI is not running the pictures.

Here are the pictures.

[Update]  Thanks for Aaron pointing out that the article (with pictures) is now on the Seattle Times websites front page.  I haven’t looked at either papers print copy today.  The P-I is still standing by its choice not to show the pictures.

Truemors has since launched a Facebook application, and now to help with the spread of the app. Kawasaki is offering a signed copy of his book to the first 200 people who install the app., invite friends, post some "truemors" and send him an email.  At first I laughed at the notion of Guy using his book, his autograph, and his tech celebrity to help spread Truemors on Facebook, but when I thought about it I figured it is a great idea.  Imagine the 200 people who get books sign up, they invite 10 friends each, they have a 20% success rate.  Those people invite a few friends, soon you will have 10’s if not 100’s of thousands of people who will have at least seen one friend join truemors in their news feed.  Not bad.  Now lets hope I was in the first 200 and get my autographed copy of The Art of the Start.

Not that this site is anything special but I did receive an email from an old friend who doesn’t appear to be using Facebook with this quote in it

"…had to do a google search for you.  You are very easy to find!"

I guess that helps show two things.  My name "googles well" and this site has helped make me easy to find when someone is looking for me.

This is remeniscent of the time that engadget reported a rumor on Apple delaying the iPhone and their new OS when the stocks took a huge hit, but quickly recovered.

Why is Apple such a volatile stock that goes up and down with the rumors so quickly?  Is it because it’s so new?  Because people love the company, but are always scared of the comeback kid and wondering if they are for real this time around?  I don’t know, but it’s crazy that this has happened twice withing the past two and a half months.

It’s to late, and I can’t put together coherent sentences so I will link to a few roundups of the event.

Redfin’s blog

John Cook’s blog

Hopefully there will be another one of these, even if it’s smaller, before the end of the summer.