Danny Newman

Some rather sad news…Micah and I got a rejection letter from TechStars today.

Micah has a good recap of everything on his site.

SXSW was amazing, but now I’m sick.

Can’t wait til next year.

This video is the shiv!

The 4GB and 8GB iPhone’s were released just about 8 months ago. Of course, newer, fancier 16GB were recently released ‘forcing’ some iPhone owners to upgrade.

Even though he’s the World’s #1 Douche Bag, Micah (awesomely) gave Christy his ‘old’ 8GB iPhone. Let me tell you, this thing looks BRAND NEW. Christy, excited to start playing with her new toy, plugged in her iPhone. We ‘restored’ the iPhone, thinking this would start the process of activating the phone. After restarting, restoring, resetting everything we were still not prompted to activate the phone. Grrr.

Doing a little digging, I found out that the only way to reactivate a previously used iPhone is to go to an AT&T store and ask for a new SIM card. We haven’t done this yet, but I’ll update this post with how (hopefully easy) this process is.

UPDATE: That was really easy

I get calls and emails daily asking about short codes. I will attempt to answer all of the most common questions regarding common short codes in this post.

First, what is a shortcode?
When calling your friends, you dial a 10 digit number, in my case, 303-475-9204. You also use this 10 digit number when sending a text message (SMS). This 10 digit number can be thought of as a “long code”. Short codes were introduced to make sending SMS messages to an application easier. Short codes in the US are either 5 or 6 digits. If you are coming from the web world, you can think of a short code as a domain name. It is a unique identifier for your service.

How do I get a shortcode? How much do they cost?
Registering a short code is fairly simple. While not as easy as registering a domain, its the simplest piece of the shortcode game. You can search for and register US shortcodes at the Common Short Code Administration website. I have discovered that registering a numerically ‘fun’ and memorable sequences of numbers is far better than registering numbers that ’spell’ something. The first short code I registered was ‘66246′ which spells MOBIO. Cute, but not memorable. Short codes like 22022 and 40404 are much better and easier for end users to remember.

Ok, you’ve found a shortcode you love. You now have to fill out about 25 questions regarding your intended use for the short code. The easiest thing to do is to just base your answers on the examples they provide you. This step may seem a bit intimidating, but don’t sweat, just make sure your answers are fairly accurate and you are (obviously) staying within the law. After submitting your application, you will be hit with the big news, this dang short code is going to cost you $1000 PER MONTH!

A “vanity” short code, one that you choose, will cost $1000/month. You can choose to pay this quarterly, biyearly, or yearly… There is really no benefit to prepay more than the $3000 each quarter…

A “random” short code is one that is chosen by the CSCA. It will only set you back $500/month. This is a great choice if you have an application where the short code itself isn’t necessarily part of your campaign. Just an FYI, don’t think you will get lucky with a random and get something like 55555, the CSCA has gone thru and tagged any potentially good shortcodes and don’t include those in their random codes.

The CSCA will review your application and (most likely) approve your application within 24 hours.

I have a shortcode. I dropped $3k on it. Now what?!
Like I mentioned before, you can think of your short code is like a domain name. Now you need “hosting”. There are 2 components to short code “hosting”: aggregators, and mobile platforms.

Companies that connect directly to the mobile carriers (in the US, these include: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc) are called aggregators. They, like their name implies, aggregate and manage the sending and receiving of SMS messages to the carriers. The carriers don’t want to deal with the potentially thousands of end points, so have put these aggregators between them and the mobile platforms.

A mobile platform is the logic behind the text messages. Because SMS is stateless (there is no reference to any previous messages, etc) it requires some sort of intelligence to handle incoming and outgoing requests and to store a user’s session information.

Carrier approval
If you are coming from the web world, this step comes as the biggest surprise. You have your shortcode, you found a mobile platform, your application is ready to go- now you get to wait 30 to 60 days (or more!) for each carrier to test and approve your application before making your short code live on their system. This literally means that you had to pay your $3k to the CSCA and there is the possibility you won’t even be live on a single carrier before you have to pay your next $3k. Testing and approval on AT&T and Sprint is usually very quick. Verizon is a little tricky if you are sending “binary” content (ringtones, etc) because they deliver it all via MMS. T-Mobile is the toughest carrier to get approval on. They require $500 just to test your app, and at least my experience, will fail it for any reason. Don’t give up! They will approve it eventually.

Those are the basics. I will do another post soon with any follow up questions anyone has. Please email me or leave me a comment.

So I downloaded the awesome new theme you see now. I don’t mind linking to the place I downloaded the theme from in the footer. I wanted to add a nice little copyright thing down there so I opened up the footer.php and what do I see?!

<? eval(gzinflate(base64_decode(’
bZC9bsMwDITnFOg7XD21g+PdVWSgS7t1CZCxkCLa
EixLqqTECNCHrxX3ZwkXHu7IDyA7zh7qGpIG49B7
nymirvn93WbDGmXOq+qCDhgofySjSIr4+PSMrkR/
M0UvEkbtqhVTFRtggUNRMoMjBXlpwQR0pH5X6ZxD
2zTzPG8nMdLnyRzH7dFPFX931jjCgWQymfByMlZR
ZI3gEE7dRswktU/ZuGEgGtMKWgh4W12U9dcS4Qvi
LIwV0hL6SASRW+x9uIXNPswha5roB4mDjypESgn7
q124rAnLtVjq9yH/XXp1uQqdJ8tZ9w0=
‘)));
?>

That’s not cool! I’m a good person, I’ll link to your damn site… don’t force me to add all sorts crap by encoding it! I googled around to see how other people were solving this problem. I found a couple of PHP scripts that decode this crap, but none worked for me. I then realized that if I just change the ‘eval’ to ‘echo’, the code within won’t execute and sure enough, print out exactly what its hiding.

Here is the encoded text if you want it:

!– begin footer –>
</div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
</div>

<div id=”footer”>
<p> designed by: <a href=”http://www.makequick.com”>Online Website Builder</a> and: <a href=”http://www.webhostinggeeks.com”>Web Hosting </a>Geeks | available free at: Top<a href=”http://www.topwpthemes.com”> Wordpress Themes</a></p>
</div>
</div>
</body>

</html>

NOTE: I am not condoning any kind of copyright violations or any thing like that… this is totally just and FYI.

Well… After getting my blog off of Blogger and on to Wordpress, I started playing around with my permalinks and realized I was on a Windows machine and couldn’t build the links the way I wanted them. Windows?! WTF?

I reinstalled on my linux box but was getting a server error. Alex King said it was probably an .htacces problem, he was right of course.  I added “php_flag zend.ze1_compatibility_mode Off” to my .htacces file and thought I was off to the races. I clicked on the import button to import from my wordpress.com account (for the 2nd time) but was greeted with a blank import page…

I couldn’t figure out a way around this so I ended up dumping the db from the windows machine and just reimporting it…worked like a champ…

After all of the comments on my last post, I finally made the switch from Blogger to Wordpress. I still love Blogger and recommend it for getting a blog up *fast*.

I had some trouble doing the actual transition. I followed Alex King’s recommendation and kept getting errors. My recommendation for anyone wanting to do the switch quickly and easily is to:

• Follow the instructions to get wordpress installed on your server
• Make sure you are using your Google login for Blogger
• Point your Blogger Publishing Settings to blogspot (I chose dannydannydannynewman.blogspot.com to make sure I didn’t have to type anything twice
• Set up a free wordpress.com account (takes 3 seconds)
• Import your Blogger account into your wordpress.com account (Manage > Import > Blogger)
• You will be asked to grant access to wordpress (say yes)
• After importing, select export
• Save your wordpress export file to your computer
• Now, go to your new wordpress install and simply import the file you exported from wordpress.com

Now I just need to make this thing look pretty. Anyone have any good wordpress templates?

And yes, I know I need change permalinks… will do that asap

I want to blog more.

I feel like I need a subject to focus on to really make sure I stay on track. You know how bad I am at concentrating on one thing. Having this blog (the one you are reading now) with no clear direction or theme makes me want to write about everything… or nothing (how profound :). I have at least 30 ‘drafts’ that never made it live for one reason or another…who knows, maybe this post will be trapped in there as well.

Please reader (I’m pretty sure there is only one of you out there), help me come up with a clear and focused theme for Danny posts. To help you get started, here are some things I’m interested in:
Entrepreneurship
Startups
Mobile
Renewable Energy
Traveling
Art
Architecture
Furniture
Gadgets
hmm…probably other stuff too…

Thanks!

Wow! I haven’t blogged in forever. It’s 5:00am the night before a big presentation….Austin and I are still at the office. I want a nap…but decided to write this post instead.