4 Easy Ways to Send Free Faxes on the Internet
I’m not really the sort of person who uses a fax machine, but I have co-workers who can’t imagine working without one. Say you need to send an urgent fax and your machine isn’t working. In such cases, you can either borrow one from someone else or go to any internet cafe to use their paid fax services. Or you could just stay at your home or office and use the following free services on the internet to send Faxes easily:
FaxZero is considered to be one of the most successful web services that let you send free faxes in a few simple steps. It limits the service to 2 faxes a day to the US and Canada as long as they don’t contain more than 3 pages each. You can send free faxes without signing up on the websites.
The easiest way to send a fax is to just type or paste the text of your fax into to the “Enter the Text” box. Or, you can click the “Browse” button to fax a file on your computer: you can send a PDF, Microsoft Word (.DOC) file, or Excel spreadsheet (.XLS).
Check out FaxZero
Next up is ScanR. It is an all in one intriguing service that turns your camera phone into a scanner, copy machine and fax machine. It lets you upload and scan digital photos of whiteboards, documents, and business cards. It also lets you view your scans online, share them with friends and coworkers, create and download PDFs, and fax scans worldwide.
I have personally been using Drop.io for quite awhile now. In addition to just sending free faxes, it also offers other great features for secure conversations and more. To use Drop.io simply register for a free account, upload your document and click on “Send as fax”. Enter the fax number and send it. The service is simply amazing but limited to United States only.
Check out Drop.io
Qipit is a free service that includes sending domestic and international faxes. The costs that you have to bear are related to what your wireless carrier charges you if you are using Qipit with your mobile device. Qipit helps you upload photos of documents, business cards or receipts from a mobile phone or digital camera, and improves the image quality through a patented technology called Realeyes3D. You can easily send your images in a PDF format via Email or a free fax in no time.
It features
- Turning documents, notes and whiteboards into digital copies (PDFs)
- Email or fax qipit digital copies via email, your online Qipit account, or right from your phone
- Store all of your paper documents and notes as digital documents for easy archiving and sharing
- Tag your qipit documents for easy searching and sorting
- Publish and share your documents on the web
5 Free Web Services to give your Photo that Crazy Touch
Some of the most awesome websites let you add funny effects to your photos with a just a few clicks of your mouse button. All 5 services listed here are online and are totally free of charge. You don’t even have to sign up or register in order to add effects to your image. Simply visit the website, choose your effect, upload your photo and you will be done before you know it.
JpgFun
I have been using JpgFun for quiet some time, not only because it offers lots of effects but they keep on adding new ones every now and then. Jpgfun is an easy to use online service that allows you to edit your images with various funny effects.
To add your image on their ready-made effects all you have to do is:
1. Upload Your photo
2. Select what effect You want to use.
3. Mark the area You need.
4. Click ‘Create Picture’.
Once it is done processing your image, you can easily download it or use the embedded code on your website to share it with your friends.
Check out JpgFun
Fun Photo Box
This is another excellent tool to give your photo that crazy look. Fun Photo Box allows you to select an effect right from their home page so that you don’t have to browse through the whole website to figure out what exactly you have to do.
- Simply choose the effect you want
- Upload your photo
- and save results.
The process is really very simple and you don’t need to register or sign up on the website to perform these actions. Fun Photo Box supports the most common image formats which are JPEG, PNG and GIF. The maximum size of a photo can be up to 4MB. You can even post these pictures automatically to social media networks directly from the website.
Check out Fun Photo Box
PhotoFunia
PhotoFunia is an easy to use online photo editing tool that gives you a fun filled experience. You upload any photo and just wait to see the magic. PhotoFunia has the ability to automatically identify the face in the photo and let’s you add cool photo effects and create funny face photo montages.
Just select an effect you like from over 100 different effects, upload your photo, and PhotoFunia will handle the rest for you.
Check out PhotoFunia
WriteonIt
A fun website that allows you to create fake photos, captions and magazine covers. It offers more than 50 picture styles to choose from. Just like any other website you can add funny effects using Writeonit in 3 simple steps and unlike other websites Writeonit allows you to add text to your image as well.
Check out Writeonit
FaceinHole
FaceinHole is another great service that lets you add up your pictures in lots of pre-given pictures. With FaceInHole you can put your face on other photos and create fun pics. See how you would look like with a different haircut, morph your face into some famous picture or put yourself on a famous movie poster or CD cover.
Check out FaceinHole
10 Mac applications that promise to improve your productivity
Featuring some of the most useful applications that will definitely help you improve your productivity on Mac. These utilities are available totally free of charge and can be downloaded right away.
SketchBox is a multifunctional sticky notes manager for your Mac Desktop. Unlike other Sticky notes it doesn’t limit itself to just writing text but you can even draw and set individual reminders for each sticky to use them as visual alarm clock.
SketchBox Sticky notes consists of three layers: The drawing canvas, a little text editor and an intuitive alarm timer that combines the best of analog and digital clocks. While editing text you can still see your drawing in the semitransparent background and vice-versa.
Anxiety is an excellentt To-do list application for Mac OS X Leopard that synchronizes with iCal and Mail. It is extremely lightweight and aims to provide a streamlined, easily accessible interface to add and check off your tasks, while remaining poised to melt into the background at a moments notice.
Anxiety’s sleek interface provides just what you need to jot your tasks down, without burdening you with cumbersome large windows. With a tiny desktop footprint and clean minimalist aesthetics, the application is simultaneously small, beautiful and effective.
Camouflage is a tool that allows you to hide all icons behind the wallpaper. If you were looking for Camouflage you probably have a messy desktop, so you should put this window in list-view to have a much better overview over the tons of files
Key features include
- Perfect system-integration: change your wallpaper and Camouflage will show the change instantly.
- Works with multiple monitors: attach new monitors and the icons will instantly be hidden.
- Drag & drop: drag files on the desktop and they will be copied onto your real desktop.
- Finder integration: click the desktop and Finder will be activated and opens or selects a separate desktop window. (You can disable this with the Popup Desktop option of the menu. To still open a window, press the option-key while clicking the desktop, or by double-clicking on the desktop)
- Support for Path Finder
- Ability to show and hide the icons
- Works with desktop managers
- Ability to ‘click through’ Camouflage to get the normal Desktop-Context menu
iClockr is a simple tool to show you a simple way to track your time. The concept of iClockr is based on 3 columns including
Projects: A project is a bundle of tasks
Tasks: A tasks is a bundle of durations
Durations: A duration is the smallest brick to calculate your total time.
iClockr is a great tool to Track Timeline for Different Tasks and Projects.
Appointments is an application designed to keep record of customers, contact persons and important events related to them. Information is collected in a structured way: there are separate dictionaries with customers data, contact persons, appointment managers etc. which are used to create appointments record. The application provides convenient user interface tools for sorting and filtering stored data.
Key features include
- Document based architecture
- File based datastore and
- Multiuser access
To take screenshots of the entire page I personally use Fireshot. It is like the perfect add-on for Firefox that also provides editing tool. On the other hand Mac users like to take advantage of a small utility known as Paparazzi.
You can grab a free copy of Paparazzi from here.
iStat pro is a highly configurable widget that lets you monitor every aspect of your Mac, including CPU, memory, disks, network, battery, temperatures, fans, load & uptime and processes.
It even allows you to filter out specific disks, network interfaces, or fan sensors, if you’d like.
AppFresh is responsible to keep all your applications,widgets, preference panes and application plugins installed on your Mac up-to-date. AppFresh works by checking the excellent osx.iusethis.com for new versions and lets you download and install available updates easily.
AppFresh provides a central place to control the software updates available to your Mac, integrating most popular and most common update checking technologies such as Apple Software Update, Sparkle, Microsoft AutoUpdate, Adobe Updater, osx.iusethis.com and more.
TextWrangler is the powerful general purpose text editor, and Unix and server administrator’s tool. You can use this text editor for a wide variety of tasks from cleaning up data, to editing configuration files on your Mac or server, to writing HTML or coding.
Key features include
- Powerful single and multi-file search & replace
- Flexible ‘grep’ style pattern-based search and replace based on PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expression)
- Sort Lines and Process Duplicate Lines plug-ins offer grep pattern support for sorting, extracting, and handling text
- Find Differences to compare two versions of a text file and merge the differences
- Support for a wide variety of BBEdit plug-ins
The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for “BOMArchiveHelper.app”, the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder.
It can also handle filenames in foreign character sets, created with non-English versions of other operating systems. I personally find it useful for opening Japanese archives, but it should handle many other languages just as well.
These applications can definitely come in handy in everyday life routine.
24 Useful Applications for any New PC
When I was working at the call center a year back I use to setup lots of computers there. It has always been a pain to download individual programs for each system according to the users requirement. To avoid wasting time I had a few useful software always saved in my USB stick.
Recently I’ve come across something that is way more useful than I thought it would be. A free 24-in-one installer pack that allows you to install almost all the necessary applicatons a new PC should have.
Smart Installer Pack is a combination of tools such as browsers, messengers, torrents and Pc cleaners. The package includes Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Widgets, Skype, Google Earth, Winamp, Firefox, Bittorent, Gmail Notifier, Rocket Dock, Codecs Pack, Adobe Flash Player,Apple QuickTime, SunJava, Adobe Reader, WinRar, Open Office, Daemon Tools, ThunderBird, Gimp, Picasa, Avira Antivirus, Google Chrome, CCleaner and KmPlayer.
The best feature includes quick installation of each program. To get started all you have to do is download Smart Installer Pack, click on the icon of the application you want to install and it will be done within a matter of seconds.
Key features of Smart Installer Pack includes
- Easy, intuitive user interface design
- Contains usual start-up software
- Greatly improves the time needed to install that software, eliminating some of the unnecessary searching, downloading, etc
- All free
- The installer comes packed in a convenient executable file
- You can choose which software you want to install using suggestive icons
- The application is made as small as possible
You can grab a free copy of Smart Installer Pack from the official website.
Interview with the Internet
The Internet.
I was only allotted a few questions, so I tried to cover as much as I could while attempting to draw out evocative and prudent responses. I understand that I was bestowed the responsibility to speak for many, so I hope I was able to draw out some answers to your own questions.
My Interview with the Internet
Me: Thank you for this opportunity, Internet. Let us begin.
Internet: Let’s.
Me: Sunday school had taught me that God is everywhere. I was told that God surrounds us and is in each and every one of us. You, Internet, are everywhere. I breathe you into my lungs, you pass through my head like radio waves do, you’re in every building, you float through the air, and I bet that if I had a waterproof laptop I could find you underwater. Internet, are you God?
Internet: Oh, I wouldn’t say so. I am not everywhere, only wherever humans are. Humanity is my restriction. Some people have argued that I am all-knowing. It is true that I contain nearly all of humanity’s knowledge, but what you humans do not know I also do not. My vast knowledge may seem all-encompassing to a human, but compared to the knowledge of a god I am negligible.
Me: Internet, will you ever be free to use?
Internet: There are a number of pioneers out there who are attempting to provide free usage for everyone, but it doesn’t seem likely. There is a system already in place where you pay monthly fees to access me. Companies restrict your usage depending on how much you pay, and there are others that are restricting your access if they find you using certain downloading programs such as torrents or P2P networks. There are too many ways for companies to take advantage of what I have to offer for me to ever be truly free.
Me: What do you think is your greatest contribution to society?
Internet: Well, I’d say that would have to be its evolution. Life as you know it has changed drastically over the last two decades. Businesses and the marketplace rely on me to make all sorts of transactions for them, so much so that they wouldn’t know what to do if one day I just disappeared. Beyond the fiscal world, I have been an integral force in evolving human communication and creativity. The freedoms of speech and expression can surpass national laws and restrictions. Any and every person has the ability to share their voice on the web.
I am also proud that writing has made a comeback as the prime form of communication. Telephones were the death of letter writing, but now emails and text messages have brought writing back, baby! I’m a big advocate of writing if you couldn’t tell, my entirety and existence is pretty much based on it.
Me: Over your short commercial life, you have evolved greatly. Internet, what do you think of today’s Web 2.0 and your future?
Internet: Web 2.0 is great in many ways. People find me easier to use these days and have become very good at searching for the things that interest them. Attention is being spread across my infinite number of websites, giving web entrepreneurs a better chance of being seen. The Web 2.0 movement has made the web better because there is now more competition amongst websites to capture the spotlight and bask in its glory.
The blogosphere is excellent as well. As I already said, everyone now has the opportunity to get their voice heard. I think this is great. People have different opinions, and some are very extreme. Whether what you have to say is good or bad– it is just wonderful that you have the chance to say it.
The future, I’m not too sure about. Things could get even better, but if the big guys get there way with things then it all could go to shit. I know that most of you have read about the different ideas being thrown out there, initiating class systems for web usage and web hosting. It’s total BS. Things have already started going in that direction. Companies want to make it so the big spenders get better and faster web hosting while the average user gets the crappier end of the bargain. It’s really up to what you guys can accomplish and what you guys fight against.
Al Gore did NOT invent the Internet.
.
Internet: Thank you. I don’t want it to be that way. I encourage you to speak out and use whatever I can offer you in your quest. With your immeasurable numbers, anything is possible.
Me: One last question, Internet. Did Al Gore really create you?
Internet: (laughter) No.
Me: Thank you, Internet. It’s been a pleasure.
Internet: The pleasure has been all mine.
15+ MP3 Search Engines To Find Your Favorite Music Online
Whether you agree or not, the RIAA is fighting a losing battle. Every music fanatic believes that music should be shared with everyone without any restrictions, and that it should be enjoyed by everyone.
There are a number of sites on the web where you can listen to and download music for free. The number of such websites is increasing rapidly with artists, music fans, DJs and the casual web surfers sharing music everywhere on the internet.
Finding such ‘freely shared’ music is not difficult. In fact it’s quite easy. To make your task easier, we at zMogo have compiled a list of 15+ MP3 search engines to polish off your thirst for free music online.
A word of advice: If you really like the music by your favorite artists, go and support them by buying original audio tracks. The RIAA is no doubt a bummer, but you should have your ethics set right. Well, for the rest…
Here goes the list »
Plorf | Listen ¢Å“†| Download ¢Å“†| Visit Plorf
Songza | Listen ¢Å“†| Download ¢Å“– | Visit Songza
eSpew | Listen ¢Å“†| Download ¢Å“†| Visit eSpew
DaftDomain | Listen ¢Å“†| Download ¢Å“†| Visit DaftDomain
MadDump | Listen ¢Å“†| Download ¢Å“†| Visit MadDump
MP3Area | Listen ¢Å“†| Download ¢Å“†| Visit MP3Area
MP3 Search | Listen ¢Å“†| Download ¢Å“†| Visit MP3 Search
MP3 Realm | Listen ¢Å“†| Download ¢Å“†| Visit MP3 Realm
Guerilla Radio | Listen ¢Å“†| Download ¢Å“†| Visit Guerilla Radio
Snuzu | Listen ¢Å“†| Download ¢Å“– | Visit Snuzu
SSMunch | Listen ¢Å“†| Download ¢Å“†| Visit SSMunch
SeekMp3 | Listen ¢Å“†| Download ¢Å“†| Visit SeekMp3
Woonz | Listen ¢Å“†| Download ¢Å“†| Visit Woonz
SkreemR | Listen ¢Å“†| Download ¢Å“†| Visit SkreemR
Kohit | Listen ¢Å“– | Download ¢Å“†| Visit Kohit
G2P | Listen ¢Å“– | Download ¢Å“†| Visit G2P
Apart from these, there are other sites like Last.fm, Tunerec, Muziic and many others where you can also find legal music streams.
(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.
Good Old Games Releases Beneath a Steel Sky For Free
December 18, 2008 by AshPringle
Filed under Video Games
The classic gaming site Good Old Games has added two free games to their collection of downloadable oldies.
This week Good Old Games released Beneath a Steel Sky, the classic post-apocalyptic point-and-click adventure game, to their catalogue as a completely free download.
Beneath a Steel Sky puts the player in the shoes of the main character Foster as he makes his way through the dystopian Union City in a quest to save his tribe.
Lure of the Temptress, another classic adventure game, was also released for free by Good Old Games.
Besides these two free games, Good Old Games also offers a host of other vintage games available for a fee. Every game is completely DRM free, meaning you don’t have to hassle with copy protection, and is compatible with Windows XP and Vista, removing the need to mess around with DOS emulators and virtual memory and all those headaches.
Each game costs either $5.99 or $9.99, which is a small price to pay for such high-quality, hassle-free classic gaming.
Some other titles in Good Old Games’ catalogue include some personal favourites of mine, such as Simon the Sorcerer, the Jagged Alliance series of strategy games, and the original Fallout series of RPGs.
It’s always a pain navigating seedy abandonware sites trying to track down a copy of a game I loved as a kid but can’t play because my old floppies have become corrupt. And it’s always made worse when I find that they don’t work on my modern computer, or that they can’t be downloaded for legal reasons, but also aren’t available for purchase due to their age.
Good Old Games looks to remove all that hassle for a price that is well worth the admission. As a fan of old games it is nice to see a site like Good Old Games give classic video games the attention they deserve with a professional distribution system, comprehensive support and a slick website.
Good Old Games updates their catalogue every week, and you can click here to check it out.
Stuff2Send.com Provides Valuable Service of Courier
December 17, 2008 by Tech-Marky
Filed under Web Stuff
Remember back when eBay first hit it big, and now there are a plethora of Internet auction sites? This next website, Stuff2Send.com, could be the next big thing on the Internet when it comes to shipping goods.
Stuff2Send is a simple concept to help a user find a courier. So if you are in need of someone to deliver some goods (perhaps stuff that someone brought from you on eBay), go ahead and post your need on the site. With any luck, someone who lives in your neighborhood will be going to where you need your goods delivered.
It also might be a good way to get some extra money if you want to be a courier. Let’s say you work downtown, and if you plan it right, you can deliver someone’s goods during your lunch hour and make some extra money.
Of course, there is a matter of how can someone trust the courier, but there is apparently some sort of safeguard procedure so this doesn’t take place. Things like feedback ratings and criminal record checks, for example.
Unfortunately, this service is currently available only in England. However, I think this is a service whose success will be seen by its number of imitators, and it will be available worldwide. The signup isn’t free, as it costs about £5-£15 a year.
Club Nintendo Offers Free Gaming Swag
Nintendo has quietly released their North American Club Nintendo service, allowing customers to earn coins for purchasing Nintendo products.
These coins can be earned by purchasing and registering your Wii games for 50 coins, DS games for 30 coins, and Wii Shop games for 10 coins (after linking your Wii Shop account to your Club Nintendo account through the settings tab in your Wii Shop channel). More coins can be earned by completing surveys, purchasing new releases, or indicating games you’re going to purchase before you actually purchase them.
Prizes range from 300 to 800 coins for items such as Wii remote holders, DS cartridge holders, and exclusive games (such as a Game & Watch Collection for the DS that is going for 800 points). The full list of prizes can be seen here.
The initial offerings are swell, but the Japensese Club Nintendo selection is full of popular DS games, music CDs, and more. The Japanese club has been up and running for some time now and has built its collection of offerings over this period of time. Hopefully this means that the North American club will see an increase in offerings over time as well.
The current state of the website is clunky at best. Right now if you go on the Club Nintendo website, you are going to run into error pages, timeouts, and issues with log-ins and switching accounts over from My Nintendo. This may be why Nintendo hasn’t made a big deal of the site yet, it’s more like a beta version than a finalized website. The constant interruptions are extremely frustrating, I am grinding my teeth to dust while trying to fill out these surveys.
Registrations are not retroactive either. If you’ve already registered games with Nintendo, you will not be able to get your coins for those games, and of course you cannot register them again. This is almost like a punishment for users who registered their games for the extended warranty Nintendo offers and is a slap in the face. I’ve heard from a couple of users that they received coins for their previous Wii and DS registrations, but most say they can’t and I am unable to test it out right now because of how buggy the site is.
But at least we do finally have a North American version. Purchasing Wii and DS games now is a little tastier since Nintendo is offering us some nice rewards for being loyal customers. Even with the current technical problems and non-retroactive registrations, I am a fan of this new service. The North American offerings are slim right now, but they are quality goods which would be nice to own or fetch a decent price on eBay with since many of the items are not offered anywhere else. If’ I’m going to purchase a game, this service isn’t going to convince me to buy anymore than I would otherwise, I’m glad I can add to my stockpile of coins and get some free swag. It really won’t take that many games to rack up enough coins to buy things anyway. Free swag for me!
This Week’s MacWorld and Environmental Performance News May Reflect Badly on Apple, Apple Probably Doesn’t Care
December 17, 2008 by AshPringle
Filed under Gear
This week has seen two news reports about Apple that are more bitter than sweet: the announcement that Apple will no longer attend MacWorld, and a third-party report ranking Apple very low on its environmental performance.
In a press release yesterday, Apple announced that the January 2009 MacWorld will be the last one that sees Apple’s presence. Further, Steve Jobs will not be giving the keynote speech, and instead Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, will be replacing Jobs as keynote speaker.
MacWorld has long been a primary event in announcing new Apple products and news, so Apple’s omission of itself from the event comes as somewhat strange news. Without Apple’s attendance it seems the “Mac” will be taken out of MacWorld, although MacWorld plans to continue its exhibitions regardless.
According to Apple’s press release:
Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways.
Apple has been steadily scaling back on trade shows in recent years, including NAB, Macworld New York, Macworld Tokyo and Apple Expo in Paris.
So what does this mean? On the face of it this seems to be a counterintuitive move for Apple to make; most companies would kill for an entire expo named after their products. MacWorld offered Apple a platform for advertising, publicity, worldwide hype, and highly anticipated product announcements, so Apple cutting itself out seems to be a waste of a deep connection with consumers and media.
But like anything Apple does this was not a brash or uneducated move. Removing itself from MacWorld is a move that is in line with much of Apple’s increasingly isolationist policy, as Apple tries to further itself as much as it can from any organizations or publicity that could shape its image in a way that deviates from its advertising plan. The language of Apple’s press release seems to support this, as it implies that Apple is looking to directly reach its consumers, presumably with no middle men in between to fuzzy the image.
Much of Apple’s success has come from its calculated advertising campaign, and MacWorld simply isn’t part that campaign; even though MacWorld is essentially free publicity for Apple, it is not publicity that is controlled by Apple, and so it might not be the sort of free publicity that Apple wants. It looks like a slap in the face to dedicated Apple fans, but Apple’s main priority is control over their image, and this move was made with that in mind.
A sample of Ceres' report, showing Apple's ranking
In related Apple news, Apple was recently given a very poor grade on environmental performance by Ceres, a coalition of North American investors, public interest groups and environmental groups that does independant evaluations of industry leaders.
The report, which ranks companies from all sectors of industry, ranked IBM, Dell and Sun Microsystems the highest in environmental performance among the technology industry, with scores of 79, 77, and 63 out of 100, respectively. While this puts the technology industry at the higher end of the environmental performance scale, Apple scored particularly low with a 28 out of 100.
According to the report, Ceres’ ranking method is based on five factors: board oversight, management execution, public disclosure, emissions accounting, and strategic planning and performance, which are divided into fifteen sub-factors. That’s probably almost incomprehensible to most readers, including myself, but the main takeaway point is that each factor is weighted differently, with strategic planning being the most important and board oversight being the least.
This report comes on the heels of a Greenpeace report that parallels Ceres’ negative evaluation of Apple’s performance. With two independent groups giving Apple the thumbs down on environmental policy it’s difficult to ignore the criticisms.
In response, Apple has made some moves to answer its critics by making its policies more transparent: Steve Jobs made this press release, outlining Apple’s plan to remove PVC and mercury from its products, reach a 28% recycling rate, and decrease its carbon footprint. Apple has also released information on the environmental performance of each of its products.
It’s encouraging to see Jobs taking the initiative to make his company’s environmental plans more transparent, but this is just a first step. If the Ceres and Greenpeace reports are any sign, more needs to be done, and this is reflected in Ceres’ evaluation method. Transparency, or public disclosure, makes up only 14% of Apple’s environmental evaluation, so it’s safe to say that Apple is faltering in the other areas that matter the most.
Whether or not you agree with the Ceres report, or Apple’s decision to cut itself out from MacWorld, it seems obvious that these recent bits of news don’t exactly reflect well on Apple. I’m a fan of Apple products; their computers just work, which is all I ask for. But Apple’s corporate policy has always struck me as being somewhat unfriendly, and these recent reports seem to support that.
Cutting out MacWorld shows disregard for a community that has supported Apple for a long time, and lagging behind so badly in environmental respects shows what a low priority Apple puts on its environmental image. But the fact of the matter is that this approach has worked just fine for Apple up to this point, and will likely continue to work, meaning Apple probably sees no need to change its behaviour.
These calculated corporate decisions, chosen seemingly with only advertising image and profit in mind, contrast heavily with the hip and popular advertising image that Apple wants to protect. It may only be a matter of time before the public’s perception of Apple begins to shift due to news like this week’s.
As such, Apple might do well to worry less about the public image they acted to protect by removing themselves from MacWorld, and focus more on the real corporate image that is being tarnished right now by their environmental performance.
Stumble It!