Reviews are not uncommon on JoeTech.com and some reviews I get paid for. This is the story how a company called FutureMedia Studio is intent on making sure they don’t honor their business agreements.
For the uninitiated, here’s how paid reviews generally work: A company (or an agent company) contacts the blog about a paid review. A price is agreed upon and money is paid to the blog (or agent company). Then the review is completed and published. I make a point to personally use or try anything I review, whenever possible, in order to provide a complete and honest opinion based on actual experience. This takes a lot of time but is a necessary part of the process.
What I Get Paid For
One common misconception is that “paid” means “positive”. There may be a couple blogs that will guarantee a positive review, but I guarantee an honest opinion. When I provide a paid review, the payment is for my time and honest opinion. This was the case when I provided a generally positive Infinity Control iPhone game review as well as my even more lucrative Boost Mobile review, in which I devoted half the review to relaying my horrendous activation experience.
Bad Business With FutureMedia Studio
Historically, I’ve done well with a review agent company called IZEA and their review service, Social Spark, which has pioneered the paid review process. Now and then, companies skip the middle man and come directly to me for a review. Recently, I was emailed by a new company called Review Roster that brokers reviews for Android and IOS apps and decided to try the service out.
My first review opportunity with Review Roster was FutureMedia Studio’s iPhone and iPad app, Perfect Reader. I provided the review as agreed (seen here) and waited for payment. As a new paid review business, Review Roster had not been collecting payment before reviews were completed. I discovered this after they informed me that my payment was delayed due to trouble getting payment from FutureMedia Studio. Review Roster now collects payment in advance. What struck me as odd was that the app got some great remarks from me, so it couldn’t be that they were unhappy with the tone of the review (although that shouldn’t matter). As it turns out, it seems FutureMedia Studio just didn’t want to pay.
I keep pretty busy, so I set the experience aside, got assurance that payment for future reviews would be pre-collected, and provided two subsequent reviews for Review Roster. I was paid for these second and third reviews without much concern and it wasn’t until recently that I thought again about the Prefect Reader review while reviewing traffic logs. I decided to throw out a tweet to FMS and RR and see if I could provoke a resolution to the problem. Here’s what my tweet read:
Still curious why @perfectreader never paid for the @reviewroster review I completed. #badbusiness
Keep in mind, this is after several emails with Review Roster months before to resolve the issue quietly. Sometimes you need a megaphone to get a company’s attention. This was clearly the case with FutureMedia Studio as they replied a couple days later with the following:
Someone at Review Roster contacted Tim at FutureMedia Studio and eventually got a response that was emailed to me a couple days ago. After reading the response, I knew immediately that I would turn down the proposed resolution to my complaint, but I decided to think it over before I responded. Essentially, RR forwarded the offer Tim made:
“I’m ok to pay that invoice as it comes from our team member. but could you please ask JoeTech to remove the old review as I really don’t need it. In exchange, I’d like JoeTech to review our popular book – MS Office 2010 Professional Handbook…Otherwise, I am not paying.”
I couldn’t believe what I was reading. FutureMedia Studio acknowledges that they agreed to pay for a service that was provided, refuses to pay, and now wants me to just delete my hard work and do another review just to get paid for the first one. I replied via email with a resounding NO, of course, adding that the offer is just insulting. Holding payment for a provided service ransom to squeeze additional work out of me is bad business.
What do you think?
Am I wrong? Do you agree with me? Would you be insulted by this response? Chime in and let this company know what you think about how they conduct business.
NOTE: While Review Roster stumbled a little at first, they’ve always had great communication and worked with me to resolve this.
UPDATE 07.28.2011: This morning, I’ve been informed that payment was made for my work and that Tim fired the guy who originally initiated the work. This is a horrible outcome, in my opinion. It’s great that the payment was eventually made, but I was far past expecting the payment and and to fire someone else for the negative press Tim caused is wrong. If you’re the guy who got fired or if you want to hire the guy, email me at joe@joetech.com. Maybe I can help.
They say that you should work smarter, not harder and I think about that a lot. Having a full-time job and also writing a blog and working on other websites and everything else I do means that I have to do these things faster if I want to enjoy life on the side. One of the things that has made me work a little smarter and not quite as hard is something called Dragon Dictation for the iPhone. Here’s a quick demonstration video showing how it works.
Using the App
Dragon has a commercial app that you can buy for your computer but who wants to spend the money? And if you can get something for free why not. This article is about actually getting something for free that normally would cost you money and using it to help you work smarter instead of harder so that you can enjoy life more. What you say into your phone gets translated into text so you can dictate e-mails, jot down things you’re thinking about while you’re on the road or whatever else you would normally do that might require typing sitting in front of the computer. As an example of this I am currently dictating this complete blog post from my iPhone while I’m on the freeway driving home from work. I’m wondering if this will work as well as I hope for a lengthy blog post, and this should be a good barometer of that. The goal is to read through what is dictated and put it into my WordPress editor do a couple small edits in and fix any possible mistakes before publishing.
I have taken a couple peeks not really reading too much while driving but in the peeks that I’ve taken I have determined that it seems to be translating what I’m saying really well. If there’s minimal errors to correct, I’ll go grab an image and just dress up the post a little bit to make it look good. Normally, I would spend maybe an hour or two writing this post and instead I’m spending a mere five maybe ten minutes max while I’m on the road doing something that I have to do anyway. Instead of just listening to the radio, I’ll have gotten something more productive done on my ride home, provided you guys with something informative, hopefully, that you can use it in your business or your even in your personal life and I’ve made my drive home a little bit more interesting because I’m doing something not quite as mundane.
Problems
The only problem that I’ve found with the dictation app so far is that it only allows me to dictate on the iPhone about for a minute or so before it pretty much stops. The upside is that the app will allow you to continue where you left off and will combine everything for you. What happens is it stops so that it can process all the audio, shows you all the text that you have so far, and then it allows you to continue where you left off. You just hit the record button again.
Conclusions
This post was edited, leaving in some of my rambling, but fixing spelling and grammar mistakes as well as some mis-translated words. In the end, I found myself doing a lot more editing than normal, but I had to do a lot less typing. Looking back, the bigger hurdle to overcome, perhaps, will be how much I rattle on when I talk as opposed to my (hopefully) much clearer written communication. Free is pretty much unbeatable, though, so learning to speak like I write may prove a worthwhile experiment to help me get more done during my idle time. If you have an iPhone and could optimize your time a little, head to the app store and search for Dragon Dictation and let me know what you think.
A while back, MyDomain.com launched a contest to promote their .ME domains and asked people how they brand themselves online. I and a lot of other people answered, and I was chosen as one of five finalists. As a finalist, I get a free .ME domain along with a year of hosting, but now it’s time to win the grand prize, $1,000 in Apple gift cards. Some time after April 28th, the grand prize winner will be chosen and until then, I need your vote. Voting is so incredibly fast and easy, there’s no reason not to. Just head to http://www.mydomain.com/brandme/ and find me (Joe Colburn) in the right-hand column, click Vote and you’re done. Every vote counts, so please “Like” this post or share it on Facebook below.
If I win, I’ll give two $50 Apple gift cards out to random winners. Your “Like” or share of this page on Facebook will enter you to win. Just be sure to post a link to your Facebook profile in the comments below so I can see it. Thanks to all the people who have supported me already on Twitter and Facebook. Contest aside, I feel like I’ve already won.
A couple weeks ago, Robert Scoble tweeted out a link to an interview with a couple entrepreneurs who did something I haven’t seen others perfect. They came up with a way to let anyone create an iPhone application without developer knowledge or a lot of cash. Of course, I was thrilled about the idea and a little apprehensive about the results, but I just had to try it out.
Their company, Genwi, recently launched iSites.us, a site that enables people to easily create an application for the iPhone and Android platforms with little effort, and little cash outlay. The whole process involves $25 (or $99 – see below), some image preparation, and about 10 to 15 minutes of your day. This is followed by a week or two of waiting, depending on demand.
Preparation and Planning
iSites offers a couple different pricing options. The more expensive option gives you full control over advertising, allowing you to have your own ads embedded in your app or none at all. The cheaper option (the one I chose) is $25 and includes their own ads in your application. The ads really aren’t in the way, so for me, this was not a problem. If you want your own ads, you’ll need to make sure you have an account with the ad network you choose, but either way, give it a little thought and determine what will work best for you and your budget.
Another thing you need to worry about is your brand management. Before starting, think about your application’s title and description as well as keywords. Additionally, there are a few images you have to have ahead of time. You need an icon, an iTunes display image, a banner and a splash screen image (see the iSites Learn More page to get a peek of the image size and file type requirements. It’s best to have these images all ready to go to streamline the creation process.
Finally, you should grab the category feeds for your blog or site so you can have categories in place when the app launches. The more frequent your content, the more categories you may want to have set up.
Creation and Approval
The creation process and completed application is better seen than described, so I’ve included a video showing the process. For the most part, it’s about 10 minutes of filling out web forms and uploading some images. After that, it’s just a game of waiting for an email announcing the completion of your application.
There may be the rare case in which your application is not approved. In this case, you’ll need to revise text, images, title, etc until it’s approved. When the whole process has been completed, you can just search for your app and download it.
Completed Application
Once completed, the application doesn’t have a lot of features, but it does have some of the important ones. When you start up the application, the first thing you see is the splash screen. I saw at least one other company creating iPhone apps while inserting their own brand here, so I really liked that iSites helps you insert your own branded spash screen here. The app then loads up to the Home screen which shows a listing of your recent posts with thumbnails where available. Each post can be selected to view and read. While reading a post, you can jump up or down a post, favorite it or share it via email, Facebook, or Twitter. The sharing options are a must for an application like this.
Over all, the application is really smooth and brings my blog to a whole new audience pretty seamlessly. Better still is the ability to manage it from the iSites web site control panel. From the control panel, I can change my images, description, etc. Additionally, I can add or change categories and other feeds. This really does feel like a pretty decent blend of control and simplicity.
Application Analytics
I love numbers. More than just any numbers, I love numbers that tell me people are reading what I write. Even before purchasing my app creation, I was a little excited about the prospect of seeing how many people downloaded my iJoeTech iPhone application. Once the app has hit the app store, you have analytics at your fingertips via the iSites web site control panel.
Amazingly, I had a nice bunch of downloads of my app before I even knew it was in the App Store. Pretty exciting. While it’s fun to watch, the numbers are important as a barometer for how your keywords and other criteria work to get someone to look at your app and then to download it.
What’s Missing?
I’m not sure if the analytics pages cover just the iPhone downloads or both iPhone and Android. I’d love to see analytics for both on the same graph. It would also be nice if the application had an option to open a post in Safari. Most of all, though, I’d love if there was some way for the application to hook into my WordPress and let the user submit a comment right from the app.
Conclusions
I’ve been wanting to create a JoeTech.com app for the iPhone for a while now and although I had seen other offerings, this one resonated with my mostly due to the ease of setup and the low cost. It truly is pretty amazing that I can give JoeTech.com readers a customized iPhone application so easily for only $25. I think every blog should have such an app and iSites.us is the place to get it done.
