I managed to snag the newest iPhone a few moments ago after arriving an hour early to the local AT&T and I have a couple of first impressions I’d like to share.  Just a little background information, I’ve had Blackberry’s, HTC’s, and every version of the iPhone thus far so I’ve had a pretty well rounded experience with phones in the last couple of years but I’m still not at that level where in my head  I can tell the difference between certain chips, resolutions, etc.

The first thing I noticed about the iPhone was how slim the phone wasn’t.  Yeah, you read that right…  I was expecting it to be a drastic decrease in thinness after Steve Jobs’ presentation and claims but it isn’t much thinner than my 3GS.  In fact, if I didn’t know any better I would almost think that the 3GS is the newer iPhone just because of the transition from smooth to a more boxy approach.  (Usually phones do the opposite and go from boxy  to smooth with design).  That being said, it’s still not a thick phone and the box design is growing on me.  It seems they even went as far as to change the USB cord to have a box design too as well, which is kind of weird.

As you probably know, the camera was upgraded from 3 MP to 5 MP which I didn’t realize was that big of a deal on paper but it really is a huge deal.   The camera is A LOT better and I haven’t done much video but I can only imagine at 720 HD recording, it’s nice as well.  I can definitely say that the LED flash will be a huge help for snapping photos in dark environments, which by judging from my 3GS photos, I frequent.

One of the other big points Jobs’ talked about was the “retina” screen which I really had no idea what that meant initially, the clarity is amazing.   Definitely a huge improvement from the last resolution as it goes from 480×320 to 960×640!  Last but not least, the battery seems sizably better than my iPhone 3GS battery that has been in use since launch date.  I started to think my battery was wearing down with age as I constantly worried about having enough power to last me through the day but so far playing with the iPhone 4 for about 2 hours has done little to the battery so that’s another pro for me personally.

The circumstances in which I got the phone are kind of funny and it kind of helps me sum of my own review of the iPhone in a way.  Basically a buddy and I arrived at the same time at the AT&T store and were 12th and 13th in line.  I happened to be in front of him just by chance and snagged the last 8GB while he got a raincheck for later today.  As he was playing with it in the car, he announced he wasn’t sure he was going to go back… Now you might think that’s kind of crazy for someone who was willing to wait in line for an hour initially to upgrade for $400 but it’s kind of the truth.  Although I am a huge supporter and stockholder of Apple, I’m not so sure this upgrade from 3GS is for everybody.  It’s not exactly a revolutionary device for everyone in my eyes and unless you can gain buyer’s satisfaction in gaining battery life, screen resolution and camera benefits, I would recommend passing it up.   Now I’m not saying that it’s not a quality product from Apple but for $400, under the right circumstances, an iPad may be a better choice to fulfill your Apple fetish.   However, for me personally, this was a great buy and I’ll be enjoying my iPhone as long as I don’t hold it the wrong way?

(Credit to ArsTechnica for the awesome picture of the iPhone 4.)

In October we purchased ad serving software from the third largest ad serving company in the world: Zedo. This is a solution for affiliate marketers that gives them the power to test/rotate banners and optimize their campaigns among many other things. First off let me mention I wouldn’t recommend this software to beginners to media buying or whatever method you are planning on promoting simply because of the pricing. The pricing can get expensive depending on how much volume you are running but it’s a bare minimum $1,000 start up fee. I’ve heard rumors you can waive this fee by signing a year contract, $1,000 minimum but I figure if you can’t afford the startup fee you won’t be able to front $12,000 either. We primarily use this software for our media buys and even though it is a bit pricey, it definitely has helped us out when optimizing our campaigns. Ryan is planning on doing an analysis of a couple of ad serving platforms so keep an eye out for that in the near future.

The main reasoning behind purchasing this kind of software is because we were tired of dealing with DART. We have never used DART for our own ads but some of the sources we were buying inventory from had chosen to use it and it was a real headache. First off, it doesn’t load on Mac computer even with a Chrome browser, which makes no sense to me personally since DART and Chrome are from the same company… Secondly, maintenance and slow update times made it very frustrating. Zedo solves both of these problems while putting a lot more control in our hands for our campaigns. It updates frequently and even has a live impression count on banners. Unfortunately the CTR/clicks is usually off by a lot so it doesn’t help too much other than to check whether your banners are live or not. The great part about Zedo is you can add/remove banners whenever you’d like instead of having to wait for the party that owns the media to take them down. This got frustrating on the weekends when we couldn’t test a banner on Friday – Sunday because of the inability to take it down. We started to really believe in the old belief “if you want something done you have to do it yourself” after a while…

Whenever you buy the software you automatically have to pay for the first training call. I can’t say this was a very enjoyable experience to be honest. We were placed on the phone with three Zedo support representatives and although they were very nice and attempted to be helpful it was a little confusing. The three people were all located in three different countries: USA, somewhere in Europe, and Sri Lanka. The lady that did the most talking and the walkthrough was from Sri Lanka and the language barrier between our questions and her answers was pretty substantial. So if you do plan to buy this software, don’t be surprised if you have to teach yourself the ropes. They do give you a visual walkthrough while you are on the phone though so if you are technically savvy you can figure it out with some practice. I was just a little nervous figuring out while we were spending $3,000 a day on a campaign; talk about playing with fire! Despite the training call the support has been good though. They have a live chat feature and usually their outsourced help can be pretty informative.

The features of the software are definitely helpful in optimizing campaigns. With a variety of graphs and reports that you can generate, not to mention breakdown of your CTR, clicks, and conversions from your banners, you definitely have more power to optimize and make your campaigns more profitable. The only downside to the tracking is that there is almost always a discrepancy between the impressions you are actually billed and the impressions that this kind of software records. I have heard the industry average is 10% but we’ve seen as much as 20% on our end. Again, the software will show 10-20% less impressions that what you were actually served. As long as this number is closer to 10% and you are dealing with a sizable amount of volume, this usually isn’t a big deal because you can still figure out which ad/banner is performing the best.

Overall, the price tag of the Zedo software can only be worth it if it’s worth it to you in terms of convenience. The way we reasoned paying $X,XXX a month was that we believed that the convenience of being able to edit/add/remove banners anytime of the day/week would allow us to increase our profits exponentially. If you have some of the same grievances we’ve had with DART and/or you aren’t harnessing all the powers available to optimize your campaigns, Zedo is definitely a tool that you should explore.

Last night around 7:00 PM EST we were hacked by an unknown party that tried to implement a virus to all visiting user computers. Thankfully we had a 24/7/365 security team that works with Ryan look at it so we were able to cover all our bases and get things back up fairly quickly without losing any data. Our security team tells us they were able to breach our server through FTP and we think this has something to do with the “upgrade automatically” feature of some of the plugins we are using since you do have to type in your FTP information. Perhaps a particular plugin might have stored our FTP password in a log or something so we will be more careful with that and suggest you do the same if you run a WordPress blog.

While we are down I had the chance to read through the PPV Playbook that’s being offered by a fellow blog on AffBuzz. PPV seems to be the latest rage on the Internet marketing scene after re-bills are starting to tank in popularity and this guide comes at the perfect time. The book is about 25 pages and covers a lot of ground which include network reviews, HTML code to enhance conversation rates, general basics of PPV campaigns and rules of thumb from the owner, David, as well as niche/promotion ideas for a handful of campaigns to get started. All in all it took me about 30 minutes to read the guide and even I felt like I learned some stuff. The HTML coding that he gives is pretty basic but it is definitely nice to have if you ever need it. I don’t think many beginners would have access to that very quickly without this guide.

The PPV Playbook retails at $47.00 with an affiliate program that pays out $20 per sale. Instead of us earning $20 per sale we arranged a special deal that foregoes our chance to make money and passes the savings to you. If you click any of the PPV Playbook links on our page it will automatically take you to a page where the price is $10 off. If you are serious about learning PPV and you need a crash course, I would say this guide is worth every penny. A lot of the tips he provides are tips you could learn the hard way but chances are you are going to pay more than $37.00.

Again, if you click any of the links on our page you can score the PPV Playbook for $10 off the retail price of $47.00. I would recommend capitalizing on this deal as soon as possible, it won’t last too long especially at over 20% discount. Additionally,PPV Playbook did not request a review nor pay us to do one.