Book Review: Be Our Guest

Sometimes small books carry big punches, and that's just what Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service (Amazon affiliate link) does. The funny thing is, Disney doesn't do anything small. If you want to get an insiders view of how Disney makes the world a happy place, this is the book for you.

When ever I read a book about a global brand, I try and find some small nugget I can use or pass along. Here are three things I took away:

• Employees are Cast Members
• Customers are Guests
• It's all about the Magic

The number one goal is for every Guest to have a magical time. First impressions make all the difference. An exceptional experience keeps guests coming back generation after generation.

Because employees are cast members, they are part of the experience. All the characters are accessible. A photo with Cinderella, Goofy or Micky lasts a life time, and is filled with a thousand memories. From everyone in the ticket booth, ride operators and characters are tasked with making everyones experience at a Disney property magical. There's no other outcome.

There's no mistaking that an over the top experience is the bottom line for Disney. They server millions of customers a year, so I consider them a leading expert in the field. You can't go wrong by giving your customers the same level of service.

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Mozy Changes Backup Plans and Pricing

Mozy sent me an email this morning, which I'm sure went out to all their customers, outlining new pricing plans. According to the email, MozyHome Unlimited has been discontinued, and they are moving to a tiered storage structure:

50GB of storage for $5.99 a month for one computer.
125GB of storage for for $9.99 a month for up to 3 computers.

Not having an unlimited plan will force some to rethink what they backup. Most will probably fall into the 50GB plan, but with hard drives reaching the terabyte range, full hard drive backups will cost considerably more.

Mozy competitor Carbonite.com still has an unlimited plan which only costs $4.57 a month. I wonder if the move by Mozy will signal their competitors to follow suite, or keep plans and pricing the same.

Do you use Mozy? What has your experience been? I've used Mozy for a long time, and they have been 100% reliable. I've never had a problem backing up or restoring.

Update: Several people reminded me today that they have terabytes of data backed up on Mozy. After calculating the costs, yeah, it skyrocketed for sure. For example, if you have 1 Terabyte of data backed up on Mozy, your looking at something like $110 a month now up from basically $5.

• 1TB of backed up date - 125GB of alloted backup space = 975GB of storage not covered under the high end plan
• 975GB / 20GB = roughly 50 20GB block of storage that you must pay for each month
• 50 20GB blocks * $2.00 a month = $100 per month
• $9.99 monthly cost + $100 overage cost per month = $110
• That looks like a +/- 95% increase in cost

My math could be wrong, and if it is, I apologize, love to have someone gently correct me.

I wonder how many others have that much data backed up on Mozy. At $5 for a terabyte, I wonder if they were losing money. I think businesses should make money. And if this is what it takes for Mozy to make money, then I'm all for it. I just know several people who are looking for cheaper solutions now.

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One Final Mobile Post

Just installed the latest version of the WordPress iPhone app. The release notes say my mobile photo posting issue has been resolved. Well, if you can see this post, then it for sure is resolved. And a big thanks to those who made it happen.

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Intuit Is Pulling An AOL

This interesting ad came in the mail today. It's a TurboTax starter disc, just like the old AOL disc days.

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Favorite iPhone Apps Of 2010

I'm installing and buying more apps for the iPhone than ever befor. A couple of reason for this, but mostly, I'm eating my own dog food as it were. Paying for great apps instead of always looking foe the free alternative.

As a software engineer, I want people to appreciate my work, and I hope they find it valuable. One way thy can show me that value is to pay me for it.

That said, I installed a few apps last year that totally rocked. I'll share my three favorite apps of 2010. They are SpringPad, Camera+, and Mormon Channel.

SpringPad is an application similar to Evernote, but I like the way SpringPad visually represents my data. The iPhone app is every bit as good as the Web version. You can create multiple notebooks, and within the notebooks, you can create todo's, links, text, and web clips.

The feature that really won me over though was the way it handles web clips. It actually works. I can never get Evernote web clips to work. All I get is the page text and usually no images, so when I look at it, the page is all screwed up.

Camera+ is an awesome application. There are so many options that it would take me days to explain them all. But here are a few of the ones that won me over.

• Dozens of styles that allow me to alter the photos.


• A timer, like a real camera


• Edit existing images


• Share multiple images to Facebook, Twitter and Email. This is huge, and the one feature that really won me over. Most of the other apps only let you send one at a time.

The Mormon Channel is a pretty narrow niche, but for me it brings together all the amazing resources the Church of Jesus Chris of Latter-day Saints has to offer. Everything from scriptures, magazines, radio broadcasts, audio recordings, video records and more.

Another Mormon specific application that I am getting a lot of value from is LDS Scriptures App. This application is probably the most comprehensive LDS based application I've used. This application includes scriptures, manuals, magazines and other content. The only thing I wish it had more of would be audio and video content. But other than that, this is a rock solid app.

Other applications that I really enjoyed; Angry Birds, Facebook, TweetDeck, Pandora, Foursquare and DropBox.

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