Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Date: November 21st, 2008, Filed under Reviews

Chicago, Il

By A.B. Dada

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When I founded my Christian print and design co-op, we had produced almost all of our productions in house — close to 100%.  Over time, we found other print shops around the country were producing better products, faster, and at a lower cost.  In the previous 3 years, I’ve tried all our competitors, and have entered into agreements with some to do some bartering for products.  By passing on a discount, or a higher quality product, our customers are more satisified, and don’t have to find 10 different suppliers to meet their needs.

Unfortunately, some companies were a complete disaster.  Let me tell a story about the worst of the worst: 4over.com, or just 4over.  4over was founded by Zarik Megerdichian, a man with quite a vision: to become the best trade service printer.  Zarik has been quoted all over the Internet (and the print industry) as saying that customer needs come first.  In reality, Zarik’s words are not even close to true.

Zarik brought on a finance officer, Todd Halfmann, to work with finance relations.  Todd Halfmann, as the head of the financial operations for 4over.com, is supposedly to boss in charge of money issues.  As I’ve discovered in the past 3 months, this is also not true.

In my opinion, Zarik Megerdichian, and Todd Halfmann, provide the absolute worst business in the industry.  Their customer relations skills are worse than useless, and their attitude toward customers large and small are also contrary to the promises that Zarik and his “team” of customer service workers supposedly strive for.

The situation, for my business, was one of convenience.  We can match 4over’s prices, and their quality, but not their speed.  By using 4over for about 5% of our orders (with our customers’ approvals), we are able to turn certain jobs around faster.

4over offers a “service-for-a-price” multitier system.  Basic customers get the same price, and turn-around.  If you pay more monthly, you can supposedly get faster service and a better price.  The tier that I have experience with, the Platinum tier, is $299 per month.  It offers you turn-around as fast as 2 business days on many items (this has NEVER happened), and a better price.  Overall, the Platinum tier is supposedly offered to give a customer better service.  4over’s promises are complete untruths, and I have a year of trials of their Platinum tier service level to prove it.

On repeated occasions, I tried the Platinum tier.  On EVERY occasion that I attempted to be a platinum customer, not ONE promise was kept.  Faster service?  No.  On-time deliveries?  No.  Better service for job status?  No.  4over’s website promises that every job’s current status can be instantly discovered by visiting their website.  I have over 22 jobs where their status NEVER changed, and even after they were received by the client (late!), the status on the site still said “pending.”  When the regular customer tier says “2-4 business days” and the Platinum tier says “2-4 business days, but with a priority on orders,” one would think that at least SOME Platinum orders would be produced and shipped early.  In 4over’s case, this is not true.  I never once had a Platinum order be produced with any priority over regular tier customers’ orders.

When I had problems, I contact customer service.  What I received was nothing: no return phone calls, rare refunds that cost me more in my time than I received, no calls or emails from management, and mostly a “screw you” attitude.  So I moved forward to discover who ran the company, and after a day or two, discovered Zarik and Todd’s email addresses.  Emails to both men resulted in NO response.  Phone calls, voice mails, and transfers from other departments went ignored.

After almost a month of trying to find someone to respond to me, Todd Halfmann and Zarik Megerdichian sent their goon, Varaz, to try to fix the situation.  Varaz spent little time before he told me that my business was not big enough to warrant personal attention.  He said that I am not worth his time, to paraphrase.  This is a company where the owner and founder spews falsehoods about customers always being right.  In reality, Zarik Megerdichian is a man with no dream, with no mettle, and with no problem shutting down good, ongoing, longterm customers.

Todd Halfmann took over from Zarik’s goon Varaz.  Halfmann said he would look into a refund, which he didn’t do at all, according to two of my sources now working for 4over.  Halfmann said he would look into extending my Platinum tier membership at no charge, since I had spent $1800 on 6 membership upgrades and never received any additional benefit.  Halfmann lied here too, offering me only 1 month of upgrades during a time period that I did not need it.

I highly recommend against 4over as a trade printer.  ViaPrintFirm.net has better pricing, better service, and faster turn-around.  Their customer service is friendly, and fixes problems INSTANTLY.  Their management and owners are top notch executives with a desire to keep customers forever.

Zarik Megerdichian and Todd Halfmann?  They don’t care.  As is obvious after talking to a few of their production staff, their company is having their own share of problems.  I’m guessing financially their expansion into Ohio is leading them to bleed money, which is a terrible problem if you have cut-throat pricing.  I can only hope that both men will be out of jobs within 2 years, and that this post will remind future customers to stay far, far away from 4over.com.

If you are with the media, or would like to inquire with Zarik Megerdichian or Todd Halfmann directly, please e-mail me and I will provide you with their direct extensions.

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Date: October 26th, 2008, Filed under games

Hey Nick, your email bounces back so I figured you’d get the RSS feed for this.

While I don’t have it, the Guitar Hero World Tour cheat code to unlock all songs for the X-Box 360 is Blue, Blue, Red, Green, Green, Blue, Blue, Yellow.

Go to Google dude, it’s there

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Date: September 2nd, 2008, Filed under Google

Chicago, IL

By A.B. Dada

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Over at Om Malik’s blog in a post titled Why is Google Releasing a Browser?, I posted the following comment:

I don’t believe that Google thinks they themselves are releasing a browser. They’re not. A web browser has always been about one thing: rendering web sites correctly, but still making the user aware what they’re running.

What Google is obviously doing with Chrome is getting rid of the web browser and replacing it with a transparent new platform. The web when it started was merely a one-way device: showing people information. With the advent of AJAX and other two-way forms of communications between the client and the server, we’re returning to the days of pre-Microsoft’s rule of the desktop platform. I said for years (starting back when I ran a multinode BBS in the 90s) that client-server would reign supreme.

Google knows this. Operating systems, as they run today, are aging and will slowly die. Wasting trillions of unused processor ops while your PC sits dormant is a huge waste of resources and energy. With the return of the client-server environment, shared resources will be the most efficient way to create a more useful network. Google knows this, as well.

As we progress to faster forms of wide area networking (”the Internet”), the difference between locally installed and maintained applications and remotely access applications will get slimmer and slimmer. Remotely accessed applications offer non-power users a great enhancement: never updating applications, never worrying about security or bug fixes, never worrying about installing applications that may be incompatible with whatever OS or other app you’re running, and having a remote store for your data, which can be backed up without your intervention.

Google is wise to go forward with a transparent platform for their future apps. Google Docs is a huge boon for my business. I use it 2-3 hours a day, and haven’t loaded Microsoft Office or OpenOffice in months. Google Mail for Domains is also amazing, as I never have to worry about archiving or backing up my emails. Google only has one issue right now: the compatibility of the user platform.

With Chrome, Google has taken a step forward to getting rid of the browser entirely, not making a new one. They’re ready to take over the desktop by giving users an excellent option: not worrying about what they’re running on their end, and allowing Google to freely maintain the users’ applications and data, transparently, safely, securely, and even at no cost.

Microsoft is screwed.

I truly believe that Google is marketing Chrome as a web browser, but in fact they want nothing to do with web browsing.  Website are Google’s secondary source of income through the AdWords/AdSense partnership, with Google’s search engine offering their main source of income through the same program.  But Google’s desire to be the search champion is unimportant in the long run.  What Google is doing looks back to what I’ve been saying for 2 decades: the desktop is dead, and client-server will reign supreme.

When I was 15 years old, I realized that if humanity ever discovered an instantaneous, delay-free form of communications (SciFi then, but a true possibility in my own lifetime), processors and computers at the home or office would be useless.  The computer you’re using right now to read this is wasting billions, even trillions of operations per week.  While you pause to read a single word, your PC is sitting basically dormant, sucking up energy, occupying your processor with an idle task of waiting.  The server that is giving you this page is doing something else: it’s maintaining hundreds, maybe thousands of sites, divvying up its own processor constantly to share amongst the domains it hosts.

Google has taken Microsoft by storm by offering their magnificent Google Docs online application: a free server-hosted set of programs similar to Word, Excel and Outlook.  I use all of them daily.  My own domain email is hosted, freely, by Google Mail for Domains.  It’s exceptional.

With Google Docs, I don’t think about backing up my data (I still do), because Google hosts it.  They handle making sure the data is available.  I don’t have to buy software, install software, worry about patches or compatibility issues, or spend even one penny frettying about a budget.  Google owns it, I use it, and I’m happy with it.

The problem Google has always had is incompatibility on the user end.  Because there are so many web browsers, Google spends an incredible amount of time making sure their free web applications run properly on all the various browsers and versions.  Google doesn’t want to have to do that.  Chrome is not a web browser, it is an operating system.  It is meant to run transparently, instead of logo’d and branded such as Firefox or Internet Explorer.  Google will still have to support all the other browsers, but by having their own, they can work hard to make sure that it works with the applications the web users want.

Over time, the idea that users will care about Windows or OS/X or Linux will slowly pass from the mainstream thought.  The web, and the client-server atmosphere, will be more important than what you run at home.  Theoretically, with an efficient and fast web operating system (”browser”), you could have a computer with 64MB of RAM or less, with no hard drive, and only have a screen, a keyboard, a mouse device, a WiFi or 3G connection, and you’re set.  The processor won’t matter (sorry Intel).  The RAM won’t matter (sorry Kingston).  The hard drive won’t matter (sorry Seagate).

We’ll still need high end PCs for gaming, but even that may go away depending on how efficient and fast communications is.  As the web gets faster (not in overall speed, but in reduced latency), Google applications, and other web apps, will be more important to the corporate and home and education users.  Google knows this.

As I said in my GigaOm comments, Microsoft is screwed.  So is Intel, Seagate, and anyone else still relying primarily on the desktop operations of the past rather than focusing on the more efficient and future-strong client-server market.

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