Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog

A few weeks ago, a new company bought the license to sell Apple product in Israel. Today, I read an interview with Eran Tor, the GM of that company, iDigital, and one of his quotes caught my attention:

אין משרד פרסום שלא פנה אלינו, כי כולם מבינים מה הולך להיות פה.

My own translation: There is not a single advertising agency that has not spoken to us, because everybody understand what is going to happen here…"

Yes, the advertising agencies understand that plenty of $$$ are going to be spent, but what about the consumers? Who is going to care of their needs and make sure Apple products are full localized to Hebrew? and how about allocating some of these marketing $$$ in order to buy apple.co.il? or making sure the iDigital site works properly on Safari for Windows and does not break(see below)?!

And what about the language used on the site? The English & Hebrew mishmash sounds really bad. Couple of examples:

• What does this mean in Hebrew?
  

• How should it be called? Mac or מק or מקינטוש

 

At least, iPodHE, the utility that adds Hebrew support to iPod (but not iPhone) is finally free.

An interesting launch strategy – ask users to leave the page open in browser for hours/days in order to create a large pool of initial users with great hunger to try your new service.

As it currently looks, I think we are a day or two away from the launch of the new Hype Machine. Still, this is a great viral marketing tactic.

And it took Apple and it’s amazing marketing machine 5 1/2 years to reach this milestone…in other words one ipod every 1.7 seconds…(18,181,818 per year = 1,515,152 per month = 49,8001 per day = 2,044 per hour = 35 per minute)

Another impressive achievement is the sale of 2.5 billion songs on iTunes….more

But, and here’s the but…The fact most songs these days come at 196 kbps makes songs sound quality just horrible, with no decent depth & spectrum. Will the next generation have any ability to distinguish subtle sounds or appreciate the mix of music, dust and scratches on a vinyl record?

Photo: by jbl_nyc.