release

Nuts and bolts of Vista SP1 RC Refresh

It's called the Vista Service Pack 1 Release Candidate Refresh. It's supposed to be a bug-fixin', feature-enhancin' behemoth that makes Windows Vista leaner, meaner, taller, and sexier.

It'll do your dishes and take out your garbage, too.

Microsoft released this "Release Candidate Refresh" late last week--just one month after the initial release candidate made its debut. The company asserted that it wants additional information from testers, which indicates that even more bugs need to be fixed. But what does RC Refresh really do? Is it really that large? Most importantly, do you need it?

PR is part of the product design: Ford's social media news release

I know this blog is about product design and innovation but let's talk about PR for a minute. Why? Because the way you talk about your product should be part of your design process. The product design ought to incorporate the product story you want to tell. Sometimes, the story even becomes the product. Moreover, some may think PR is immune to innovation, but is in fact a field that is currently going through a series of pretty radical disruptions. The rise of social media has challenged the old way of promoting messages, and today's PR practitioners face … Read more

My TiVo gets me, it really, really gets me

Most of the swag companies proffer to entice reporters to write about them is predictable and boring--pens, book bags, shirts, etc. You know, things I can buy myself, thank you. But it's not every day I receive swag that's so utterly ridiculous I feel the need to blog about it. (So, good job, Hazmat Media, whoever you are.)

Inside a nondescript padded envelope delivered to my desk yesterday was a two-page, single-spaced missive titled, "My TiVo Gets Me." Best of all, it was accompanied by a black, felt headband sporting TiVo antenna ears.

According to the … Read more

Update: iPhone will be released on June 29

UPDATE on 6/4: Some weeks after this item was posted, Apple revealed its release date for the iPhone: On the first Sunday in June, the company said the iPhone would be available June 29 and began running a series of ads featuring the device.

ORIGINAL POST STARTS HERE: Ever since Steve Jobs' keynote at the Macworld Expo in January, we've known that the iPhone is being released sometime in June. But we haven't known exactly when.

Now Cingular is confirming that the release date will be June 11. A customer service manager at Cingular (we called 800-947-5096 … Read more

Wax apples: iPhone letter deemed a hoax

Gossip about the superhyped Apple iPhone is like the latest Lindsay Lohan tidbit. You may not know that it's true, but it's worth repeating just the same. Such was the case for the Crave blog I posted two days ago that predicted a possible iPhone release date of June 15. At the time, we warned you that Apple's "leaked" FCC letter could be a hoax, and yesterday our Phonescoop friends discovered indeed it was. As Engadget says, the document in question was actually a Photoshopped filing for Apple's Airport Extreme base station. Aw shucks. … Read more

Edelman's StoryCrafter enables next-generation press releases

Public relations megalith Edelman has launched a new Web-based tool to bring the press release, historically dry as a saltine, into the 21st century and the culture of Web 2.0. The tool, called StoryCrafter, can create "social media news releases" that incorporate RSS feeds, Digg and Delicious buttons, tags, talkback comments, and multimedia clips. The whole thing's a good idea, but it doesn't appear to be as well-executed as it could be: most noticeable for me was the fact that there's a lot of whitespace and consequently a lot of scrolling involved. Nevertheless, there'… Read more