Plans2Reality

Jawbone Shows How Customer Service Is Done

Jawbone apparently had some technical issues with early versions of their new UP health monitor. Did they hide behind lawyers? No. They stepped up and did the right thing. Read the letter from the CEO, below.

Jawbone understood that p*ssing off the early adopters would kill the product, and maybe the company. Why don't more companies know this? Does yours?

 

LETTER FROM THE CEO

• THE UP™
• NO QUESTIONS ASKED
• GUARANTEE

To the UP community:

Earlier this year, we unveiled Jawbone’s vision to help people live a healthier life with UP. We’ve been thrilled by the passionate response to this product. We heard from tens of thousands of you through emails, tweets, blog posts and on our forums about how you’re changing your lifestyle and becoming consumers of your own health. In just four weeks, UP users have collectively taken over three billion steps, gotten more than 300 years of sleep and captured hundreds of thousands of meals.

While many of you continue to enjoy the UP experience, we know that some of you have experienced issues with your UP band. Given our commitment to delivering the highest quality products, this is unacceptable and you have our deepest apologies. We’ve been working around the clock to identify the root causes and we’d like to thank everyone who has provided us with information and returned their bands to us for troubleshooting. With your help, we’ve found an issue with two specific capacitors in the power system that affects the ability to hold a charge in some of our bands. We’re also fixing an issue with syncing related to the band hardware. Typically, these issues surface within the first seven to ten days of use. The glitches are purely performance related and do not pose any safety risk.

We’ve also received helpful feedback on the application experience, including bug reports, ways to make signup and finding friends easier, user interface suggestions and new feature requests. Your comments are invaluable as we continue to improve, so please keep them coming and check back frequently for updates to ensure you’re always enjoying the latest features and enhancements.

We recognize that this product has not yet lived up to everyone’s expectations – including our own – so we’re taking action:

The UP No Questions Asked Guarantee

This means that for whatever reason, or no reason at all, you can receive a full refund for UP. This is true even if you decide to keep your UP band. We are so committed to this product that we’re offering you the option of using it for free.

The program starts December 9th and full details can be found at http://jawbone.com/uprefund.

For most of you, this program is simply meant to offer peace of mind. Please continue to enjoy your UP band and keep sharing your experience with us. If you encounter any problems with your UP band, contact Jawbone directly for your choice of a replacement and/or refund under this program. It’s that simple.

Jawbone remains deeply committed to addressing all issues with UP, investing in the category and giving our customers the tools to live a healthier life. We’ve temporarily paused production of UP bands and will begin taking new orders once these issues have been sorted out. In the meantime, we’ll continue to release app updates for existing users.

We regret any disappointment we’ve created for our community of users and appreciate the trust you’ve put in us. The fact that you’ve taken the time to talk with us and help us make a better product is simply phenomenal. Our customers have always been part of our team and we’re incredibly grateful for that.

Please know that we’re doing – and will continue to do – everything we can to make things right. This is just the beginning for UP and we are excited to keep improving until we realize the powerful vision of what this category can be.

If there is absolutely anything else we can do for you, please let us know.

Hosain Rahman
CEO
Jawbone

 

We will gladly eat on Friday the burger you bought today

The people at Kenmore are idiots. Or at least, they act like they are.

Last Sunday, our newish (four years or so) Kenmore refrigerator stopped being cold inside. We moved some food to an ice chest, ate some more, and tossed the rest. The power was on, the freezer section was cold; the light even came on. Just no cold in the fridge part.

Monday morning we call Kenmore's 1-800 number for service. Kenmore's website is all about the Blue Crew and how fast and professional their service is.

The first available appointment is Friday. Mind you, it is Monday morning, about 8:15 AM, and it is FIVE DAYS wait for an appointment. The telephone dweeb was not even apologetic. Friday morning, no sooner. Yes, she understood it was a refrigerator. Friday morning.

Not being sure what other options were available, we scheduled the Friday appointment. Friday was better than never, one supposes.

The telephone dweeb then asks for a credit card number. We are supposed to pre-pay the visit. A five-day wait, and we have to pre-pay? At this point, swear words occur, and the TD is given clear and unambiguous instructions to inform management that they are brain-damaged, etc, and we were even kind enough to say it would be OK for management to call us if they'd like an explanation, in words simple enough even they could understand, that this was NOT GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE.

We then called a local repair guy. He came out that day, determined that a fan had failed, and replaced it with one he had in his truck.

Folks, here's a tip: if _any_ sort of repair or dealership or service or whatever has the parts in stock, it's because the parts fail routinely. If you take your car into the shop, and they say they've never seen _that_ part fail, but they do happen to have one in stock, ask to go back into the parts room and see how many more than have. Odds are it will not be a small number.

Our service guy confirmed this. He replaces this fan routinely.

So, farewell, Sears! Kiss off, Kenmore! Once you were an American Icon; not you've been blue-light-specialed. You sell junk and your management are clueless dweebs. <sigh> 

 

Driving the Design Win Process

This blog began as a somewhat gadget-driven blog, but I am not receiving enough free gadgets in the mail, ;-)  so I am going to broaden the scope, to include topics surrounding effective and CLEAR communications. There will be emphasis on technology, but also on communication about technology. After all, if you can't explain it... well, you get the idea.

Many technology companies measure sales (in part) by the number of design wins. So...

- What is a Design Win?  (And what isn't?)

- How do you know when you have one?

- How do you get them?

Fix your Mac at iResQ (iPhones and Pods, too)

I had a sick Mac Mini - it would not boot. I sent it to iResQ and they fixed it and had it back, all in less than a week, and less than Apple was going to charge.

iResQ sends you a shipping container. You put your computer in and send it back. They examine, call you, and you approve the repair. It's dead-bang simple, really.

So, five stars, two thumbs up, etc to iResQ!

They also fix iPhones and iPods, though I have not used that service.

Solar Panels: Why Quote the Wrong Spec?

Here at Plans2Reality World Headquarters, we have been looking at solar panels for electricity. This has provided an interesting and instructive lesson in marketing along the way. I shall christen it:

Bragging About the Wrong Thing

Solar panel makers love to brag about two things: their watt-peak (Wp) rating and their efficiency. Oddly enough, neither one matters. Nope, not a bit. Not one d*mn bit at all. 

(Let me interject here that _all_ panel makers are equally involved. In private conversation, many have told me they agree with the analysis I am about to present.)

First, Wp. The peak-watt rating is a measurement of instantaneous power output from the panel, taken under an incident light intensity of 1000 watts per square meter, and at a cell temperature of 25C.

So what's wrong with this? The panel will never actually see these conditions in the real world, and there is poor correlation between these "STC" ratings and real-world performance.

1000W/m2 does approximate the noon-day sun, but most of the time it isn't noon. Furthermore, most solar panels are NOT installed in sun-tracking mounting systems, so at best the panel "sees" full sun only at noon. The oblique angle the rest of the day reduces incident light. (Actually, most smaller arrays are installed so the panels aren't at the optimum angle even at noon - residential rooftops are usually not at the correct angle, but it's easier, and nicer-looking, to mount them flat against the roof.)

So your panel will never generate its Wp rating, due to sun angle. But wait, there's more!

PV panels are quite temperature-sensitive - some more than others, but all are to a fair degree. And when you place an object in the sun, it gets warm - warmer than 25C most of the time.

How much warmer? Well, That Depends.

The exact amount of heat gain depends on the specific PV material. Some panels will get warmer than others. In addition, the degree to which the panel cools off, that is, sheds heat via conduction and convection to the environment, varies substantially among panels. There have been attempts to quanity this (NOCT, PTC) but these are at best compromises.

Net-net of all this: the Wp rating of the panel represents a power output you will never see in real life. Couldn't be much more meaningless than that, huh?

So what specification SHOULD we be talking about? 

We should be talking about kilowatt-hours per dollar. Why? The answer is quite simple: Solar panels are installed to generate electrical energy. Electrical energy is measured - and sold - in units of kilowatt-hours. So why not measure our PV installation the same way the electric utility measures the electricity it sells us?

It's just that simple. Really.  I am putting up PV panels so I don't have to buy kilowatt-hours from the utility. Great. So tell me how much the kilowatt-hours from the PV panels will cost.

Nothing else matters, folks. Nothing.

Next installment: Efficiency doesn't matter either.  ;-)

The Wonders of Time Machine

I've been using Apple's Time Machne for many months now. It is indeed invisible in normal operation. I finally got a chance to test in. I had a corrupted file, so, off to Time Machine!

Couldn't be easier. Flip back thru time 'til you get to a date & time you want, then grab the files.

The more I know, the more I love my Mac.

A Decent DNS Tool

Mac OS X 10.4 and newer versions have a GUI for configuring the DNS. It appears not to suck. I was actually quite impressed with its ease. To be fair, it is a bit strait-jacket-y (is that a word) in that it has some very definite ideas on how config files should be named, and it definitely seems to force you to having exactly one name associated via an A record with an IP; all other names must be CNAME. (I think; I am still learning.)

But it works, and there is much to be said for that.

Electronica 2008 - Day 1

Munich - while the mood is a bit subdued, attendance is good and there is more hope than worry in the air. Much of the emphasis this year is on 'green', and not just eliminating lead. Ultra-low-power radio technologies are everywhere; some are even 'zero-power'. EnOcean, for example, has developed energy-harvesting technologies and combined them with sensors and radios. Of course, it's not truly zero-power, but the point is that it harvests the energy it needs, rather than requiring a battery.

This may spell the end of Grenley's Law #2: every wireless devices you own adds two wires to your desktop.

In other news - literally - the amount of press coverage and news in English has increased noticeably. It's rare now to see a vendor who doesn't have English product information; and the press are putting out English show dailies. E&E to Go was a leader in this, but now Markt&Technik, who publish the best-read daily, have added English as well. (Way to go, H, and nice work, D!)

US companies should consider carefully whether to attend, and to exhibit, at Electronica. For IC, passives, and the rest of 'real electronics' it has clearly emerged as a world show, and the world leader. Half of attendees are non-German.

All for now - time to hit the road for day 2!

Mac OS X and Parallels - Update 2

Short Version: Parallels Version 3 not quite perfect.

I upgraded from Parallels 2 to Parallels 3. It works, but.... there are some differences. Sharing of folders between XP and OS X is different; so I had to revise some shortcuts. No big deal.

More annoying is the fact that changing the virtual machine's type of network connection (shared vs bridged) generates an error message that wants you to restart OS X. (!) Further research is called for, as they say.

Overall, Parallels continues to work just fine. I'm happy with it. Still, I am looking forward to running XP under VMware, side by side. Stay tuned!

Thanks, Veterans! And Those On Duty Now

The title says it all.

You are remembered, and appreciated. As you always will be, so long as there is liberty in the world.