You can be the wonderful woman who dreams up the nicest new treats! Use our good cake mixes, so the routine work’s all done. You add the special touches that matter.
You don’t see good ad copy like that often. Does this mean she’s gone? Where’s your Better Crocker now?
On your iPhone.
Say you’re travelling and you get the urge to bake a bundt cake — an Almond Pound Cake with Cherry-Berry Sauce. No Internet connection at grandma’s house? No problem: get the iPhone and click on your new app: the Better Crocker Mobile Cookbook. It’s cool and it’s free, according to Mobile Marketer:
The iPhone application is a mobile version of the Betty Crocker Cookbook. It is free and includes 4,000 tried-and-true recipes.
“General Mills’ strategy is to make our content available in places and devices where our consumers can benefit from the information,” said Mike Bettison, Web site manager at General Mills, Minneapolis, MN. “The strategy with the iPhone application is a great example.
“We’re watching smart phone adoption with interest and the Betty Crocker Mobile Cookbook, which offers about 4,000 recipes from BettyCrocker.com, is a good opportunity to expand our reach,” he said.
Every business should be thinking of ways to get their products/services on the iPhone via a custom app. That’s just smart marketing. From the people who came up with Box Tops for Education, would you expect anything less?
Bundt cake? You know where I was going with that. One of my favorite movie scenes, from My Big Fat Greek Wedding…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vxZHU0oijE]
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Open up the floodgates: Apple is working on a deal with Verizon Wireless:
- Apple has been scouting out EVDO and CDMA Engineers for months in their online iPhone job postings (here, here, here and here). Yes, some of these skills overlap with UTMS and CDMA can also refer to the broad swath of 3G Technologies…but come on…don’t put “EVDO” on the job description if it ain’t true.. (BTW, WiMax is also littered throughout Apple’s Job postings…interesting/digress)
- No matter how big AT&T is and how much range they cover, leaving out Verizon and to a lesser extent Sprint, will be eliminating a broad swath of the US wireless market. If Apple is serious about competing with Blackberry, Symbian and Android, they will have to broaden their carrier footprint. One carrier does not a platform make. Apple will need a way to grow its market after AT&T is saturated.
- LTE technology won’t be mature until well into 2010. Apple can’t afford to wait that long to broaden its carrier footprint
- Who is happy with Rogers in Canada (*crickets*)? EVDO opens up to new carriers there as well.
- Verizon wireless is a partnership between Verizon communications and Vodafone. Vodafone, you’ll recall, has contracts with Apple for iPhones in around 15 markets around the world. Apple has a working relationship with Vodafone (and Tmobile obviously).
- Apple has just started going “Open” in a few markets, including Hong Kong. This will likely increase the number of unlocked 3G iPhones on the world market (South Africa is also open). While this won’t benefit Verizon directly, it certainly shows that Apple is considering being more “carrier agnostic.”
- Tim Cook, famously said that Apple wasn’t married to the one carrier/country model. As Apple expands, it is going more and more open.
- Verizon’s iPhone Cheat sheet was weak and their arguments about Stevo getting old were silly. They’d rather play ball with Apple than try to defend itself against it.
- Apple originally wanted to go with Verizon for the iPhone. Some of the original disagreements included “not carrying the iPhone at Best Buy and hardware reliability” – see quote below. AT&T was a second choice. When Verizon balked, Apple went to AT&T…Think Verizon is happy about that decision (no) or willing to reconsider Apple’s overtures (yes)?
The word from my Verizon Wireless operations engineer is “it ain’t gonna happen” and that the AT&T deal is on for another four years. At least that’s what he’s been told.
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