A Consuming Experience: freebies

Showing posts with label freebies. Show all posts

Thursday, 30 September 2010

iPhone 4 free case: last chance TODAY to get one!

TODAY 30 Sept 2010 is your last chance to order a free iPhone case from Apple - see the Apple iPhone 4 Case Program - if you got yourself an iPhone 4, which I recently did.

The point of course is that the iPhone 4 suffered from signal problems if you held it in the way that most people hold their phones when talking, so in an attempt to firefight the resulting PR disaster Apple started offering free cases which solve the antenna issue.

These blogs have reviews and pics of some of the cases available.

To get your free case, on your iPhone 4 go to the App Store and search for "iPhone 4 case", you may have to scroll a bit in the results to find it. You order the case through the iPhone 4 Case Program app.

Personally, I went for the black Speck PixelSkin HD case (see photos) and I'm very happy with it. Smart, unobtrusive, and it seems pretty tough and hard-wearing.

Only downside is there is no screen protector (but most of the cases don't seem to offer any), and if like me you have feeble fingers, turning the iPhone on and off takes a bit more doing as you have to press it very firmly through the case for it to register.

I wasn't sure from the pic whether dirt might get trapped in the grid lines but luckily the design is such that the grooves are too wide and shallow for that to happen.

Sunday, 21 February 2010

Google offers UK SMEs free website & setup

If you run a UK business that doesn't already have a website, here's a tip: Google London are offering to give you a free business website, including a free .co.uk domain name for 2 years, and "on the spot" help from Googlers to set up your customised site, if you're able to go to their Victoria offices on Thursday 25 Feb 2010 (this is happening between 10 am to 3 pm). Also, you'll get that all important Google goodie bag!

The free site will be set up using a "Getting British Business Online website wizard" (would like to know more about that tool) and no doubt the site will be using Google Apps since Google are involved and they feature Google Docs. It seems there will be help with online marketing too, or at least registering with Google to be indexed: "All sites created will automatically be registered in Google's search engine and so will be listed for relevant queries".

Registration closes at 5 pm London time Monday 22 Feb, that's tomorrow, so if you're interested register now for a spot, and make sure you bring all the business info with you that you'll need on your site.

This is part of the Getting British Business Online campaign launch event - currently it seems that over 1.5 million British SMEs are still without a website and "During 2010 we aim to get 100,000 small businesses online with their first website, for free."

I've not heard much about that campaign to date, though, apart from a Business Link page of 26 Jan 2010; the GBBO site seems more geared towards "partners" than SMEs seeking help, but if you have a non-London business and want help as part of this campaign, try this page and pre-register with GBBO. A small irony is that they're trying to get businesses online who aren't already, but as part of the form for pre-registering, they require an email address as compulsory!!

(Saw the Google link on ECCA).

Saturday, 18 August 2007

Delicious (and Feedburner?) freebies

That granddaddy of social bookmarking sites del.icio.us is giving away del.icio.us goodies - stickers and bookmarks, as in, for marking your location in a hard copy book. Clever idea, that.

Just send them a pre-stamped envelope addressed to yourself - details here. If you send them a note with a useful or amazing Delicious story, you might even get a T-shirt.

What about us non-USians, though? How do we get hold of US stamps? Funny how the Americans never seem to consider that they may have customers outside the USA. E.g. unless you set your language preferences to English - US not UK, the British don't count - Google's Picasa didn't use to work properly, and for a while you couldn't access the full features of Gmail. (Some might say that that approach simply reflects a more general tendency of many Americans to be rather insular, not interested in or caring about what might be going on in the rest of the world outside of the vast and much-more-important-than-anyone-else US of A. But I won't as I am the very epitome of tact, me.)

It does seem though that normally Americans don't say in their initial info what people living outside the USA are supposed to do, and then they get a flood of questions asking precisely that.

Feed prestidigitators Feedburner, in offering their own flame-bearing swag, recently suggested (after the many queries that followed their original offer), that stamps.com might be an option - they let you print out valid US stamps. I've not tried that service myself and they seem to require a monthly subscription, but at least they offer a 4-week free trial with $5 free postage "and a free Stamps.com Supplies Kit ($5 Value)", so that might do for some people - hey you could even try for both Delicious and Feedburner freebies, assuming Feedburner still have some swag left.

Neither Feedburner nor del.icio.us have positively indicated if they'll take international reply coupons, which is a shame as I suspect some people might prefer that to signing up for stamps.com. UPDATE: Feedburner do take IRCs, see the comment below, thanks Traci!

So. Anyone got some spare US stamps they wanna donate to me??

(Images borrowed from Delicious and Feedburner to illustrate this post, but if anyone has a copyright or other problem with that please let me know and I'll take it down immediately. Not risking any more BBC YouTube-like complaints.)