Sprint Says, we can’t accommodate high-maintenance customers

Late last month Sprint sent out a crop of letters notifying a “small minority” of its customers they were terminated because of excessive calls to customer service. Terminated customers had their account balances set to zero immediately, but Sprint noted in the letters that the subscribers must sign up with a new carrier by July 30 if they wish to port their phone numbers with them. The letter reads:

“Our records indicate that over the past year, we have received frequent calls from you regarding your billing or other general account information. While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time has led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs.

“Therefore after careful consideration, the decision has been made to terminate your wireless service agreement effective July 30, 2007.”

A Sprint spokesperson said auditing their customers in this way is common practice, because the carrier has “to be able to quickly and efficiently serve customers.” During the first quarter of 2007, Sprint reported a loss of 220,000 post-paid subscribers.

For more on Sprint’s break-up letters:
- read this article from CNET
- check out this copy of one such letter

Credits to: FierceWireless

Do Yahoo Users Spell Better then Google Users?

Statistically speaking, it’s likely that you (whoever you are) use Google for most of your searches.  That’s fine – and I’m right there with you – but new information suggests that people who use Yahoo are better spellers.  Wo is us!

In a thread on the Cre8asite Forums, John Mueller posted the evidence.  “Looking at my logs, I noticed that an average of 5 to 6% of all visitors from Google used the spell-correction to make it to my site (this is the same across several sites, the rest of the numbers are from one site only for the last 6 months),” he writes.

“Of all my Yahoo users, only 1.8% used the spelling correction . . . which could mean that either Yahoo users know how to spell or Yahoo doesn’t correct misspellings that well, or perhaps even, that Yahoo sends users to the proper search results even if the query is misspelled,” Mueller continues.  “I wonder which one it is?”

So do I.  In that same Cre8asite thread, Bill Slawski, “rynert,” and “Mano70” posted similar statistics, and on Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz says he may add even more.  This presumably creates a fairly large sample size that spreads across several demographics; something’s definitely at work here.

Yet, having proofread this article several times (and having left the misspelled “woe” in place on purpose), I’ll leave the speculation to someone else – perhaps a Yahoo user.

The iPhone Magic, What else does it do?

The iPhone on eBay for $21 million Buy It Now or Best Offer

If you’ve been anywhere near the internet this weekend, you’ll know that the iPhone has launched in the States, to general applause, love and drooling. As usual with the hyped launch of any new gadget, there’s been a rush of eBay-related stories; as far as I can see, these are about evenly split between iPhones going crazy on eBay and iPhones not going crazy on eBay.

What seems pretty clear is that there is plenty of supply: as of this moment, there are over 8500 phones for sale, and auctions seem to be ending around the $650 – $700 mark, hardly a huge profit on the $599 retail price. The days of sellers retiring on the profits of one desirable gadget are, I fear, over; though for the imaginative, there is still plenty of interest to be found. One seller who’s used the spin to his advantage, advertising his phone as $21 million Buy It Now or Best Offer, has had 138 offers… all of which he’s turned down. Russell Shaw called this “hey look at me marketing”, and I’m sure we’ll see plenty more of it in the future.

Then there’s the woman who paid $800 to be at the front of the queue so she could grab the store’s entire stock to sell on eBay… only to find that there was a one phone per customer policy. Oops. Always read the small print.

Originl post by Sue from tamebay.com

Smashing the iPhone..

There are all kinds of people, here you can see a guy who bought the iPhone just trying to find out what it was made from so he smashes the phone in pieces on the FIRST DAY iPhone was released.

Then after he got some angry comments he went on to explain why he smashed it