Captured by Iranian authorities on suspicion of espionage, 14 imp-like, US trained ’super spy squirells’ found to have been fully kitted out with undercover-op equipment, ranging from the humble GPS tracker to the advanced recording gear, complete with ‘pre-digested’ power supply. Nutty, eh? Could perhaps, the once fabled Secret Squirell have had a hand in the downfall of our beloved furry friends? Why were the crafty critters in Iranian borders in the first place? Here are a few press photos the squirells had time to pose for before their ensuing arrest.

In the above photo, agents James Bond, Jason Bourne and Ethan Hunt can be seen clearly rapelling down an Iranian sniper-base.

These squirells will show you a thing or two about hand to hand combat.

And as if that wasn’t enough, the turret-mounted-squirell-killer just PWNED me at Battlefiled: 2142. Kinda sucks, huh? Username ‘Zaulaui’. My Dad reckons people teamkill me so much because I sound like a terrorist. Go figure.

It seems however, the trail has gone cold for the Iranian authorities. “Mohammadi asked me if I knew where the squirrels were from, and I told him that I didn’t know. Then he came to his own conclusions. ‘I bet they were British squirrels, they are the most cunning,’ he replied.” My dear fellow, real British squirells, though far and few, are red, unlike their grey, dominating counterparts. It’s not the first time though that animals have been used on the battlefiled either. The CIA (Cat Infiltration Agency) has been at it for years. I’m sure there were whispers of remote controlled turtles a while back too. via MSN.

Disecting the iPhone bit my bit. Not amusing in the slightest…

The latest style - straight out of Macworld. The iPhone costume (subject to availability).

As recommended by Woz himself, blended iPhone, with a touch of oregano and sprinled with dried tomatoe, makes an apetizing starter at even the most exclusive of resaurants.

Nothing like a bit of Classical Apple to finish off a hard working week. Especially when David Pogue’s singing…

And there you have it. ‘iPhone mania’ at it’s peak. Now where did I put my phone?

Nintendo hasn’t struck me as finickity in the past for it’s incredible designing, but looking at the Wii and DS this morning, it struck me simply how beautifully elegant the two gizmos are.

I dug deeper and found Nintendo actually has a little tradition going, when it comes to colour scheming their consoles. With the Wii available in very few colours at present, I think we can be expecting a whole raft of game-specific models to pop up, along with other colours and limited edition promotional units. Why do I say so? Take a look at this little ‘DS timeline’ I’ve compiled for you.

Nintendo DS Colour Schemes

- Crystal White (February 18th 2006)
- Smart Black (February 18th 2006 - Europe Only)
- Ice Blue (March 11th 2006)
- Enamel Navy (March 11th 2006)
- Noble Pink (July 20th 2006)
- Onyx/Jet Black (September 2nd 2006)
- Coral Pink (October 27th 2006 - Europe Only)
- Metallic Rose (June 23rd 2007)
- Gloss Silver (June 23rd 2007)

Nintendo DS Limited Designs

- Final Fantasy III ‘Crystal White’ (July 12th 2006)
- Pokémon DAISUKI ‘Crystal White’ (July 13th 2006)
- Pokémon Dialga ‘Jet Black’ (September 28th 2006)
- Pokémon Palkia ‘Jet Black’ (September 28th 2006)
- Jump Ultimate Stars (Date Unkown)
- Love and Berry ‘Metallic Pink’ (Date Unkown)
- Winning Eleven ‘Jet Black’ (Date Unkown)
- Mario vs. Donkey Kong (March 19th 2007)
- Final Fantasy XII Revenant Wings (April 26th 2007)
- Pirates of the Caribbean (May 19th 2007)
- Pokémon Center Pikachu ‘Exclusive Yellow’ (June 1st 2007)
- Nintendo Connection Tour ‘Jet Black’ (July 2007)
- Kirby: Squeak Squad (July 9th 2007)
- Brain Training 2 ‘Crimson Black’ (July 20th 2007)
- Wonderful World ‘Gloss Silver’ (July 27th 2007)
- RX-93 ν Gundam ‘Crystal White’ (August 9th 2007)
- Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates Gemini ‘Crystal White’ (August 23rd 2007)
- Wario: Master of Disguise (September 10th 2007)
- MapleStory (Fall 2007)

Ranging in availabillity from there being tens of thousands of a single ‘limited’ design available, to only 15 of a single design in existence, each DS in unique and has it’s own values, both monetary and sentimentle. Whilst looks make the console look just that… Fantastic, at the end of the day, gamers are on the lookout for innovation, ease of use and usability. The DS’s browsing features, (which for the record, were announced on my 12th Birthday) whilst not incredible are good enough to be marked as passable. The rumble pack is a nice addition, adding extra ‘feel’ and involvement into the console. On August 2nd, an official camera attachement for the DS is expected to start shipping in Japan.

What sparked this post? Word that Canada would be getting an exclusive onyx/crimson version of the portable, duel-screened handheld console that we all love to love. Looks snazzy enough to me and the retail price of just $160CND is certainly appetizing enough for me.

So I’m not a hardware hacker. So I’m not a gaming expert. So I’m not a l33t g4m1ng monster. But I love my Xbox, I love movies, I love my games, and I sure do hate region-locking. Hackers on the XBH forums managed to change DVD key and Game Region Code in the Xbox 360 ‘Key Vault’. I’m seriously confused just reading the article at Xbox-Scene, but I trust that these guys know what they’re doing.

As for landmarks and interweb fame. All I did towards this was to reverse the plaintext KV signature to figure out how to modify and resign the KV contents. And even this work was built on the efforts of other hackers. For example, I didn’t locate the region code in the KV and a lot of the SHA1 and RC4 encryption code was reversed and documented by others way before I started looking at it. *If* the region code tests are successful, then the following people contributed *much more* to this achievement than me.
Takires, TheSpecialist, Robinsod, tmbinc.

The following assumes you have the correct 1BL key and CPU key set in the flashtool.
1. Dump the NAND from the US 360 (528-bytes-per-page)
2. Open in the latest flashtool (v0.8) and click [extract]
3. Edit extracted KV.bin and change 16-bits at offset 0xB8 from 0×00FF to 0×02FE
4. Open in flashtool and click [patch], check the “patch keyvault” box and select the KV.bin modified in step 3
5. Click [OK] and choose output file
6. Flash output image back to the NAND of the US 360
7. Try an EU game or two.

Let’s all fade silently into the background and pretend we understand what these ‘uber’ hackers have done here, right? This is a tech blog afterall, and we’re meant to understand complicated offsets, flashtools, NANDs and keyvaults, of course. *shifty eyes* Don’t be expecting a report from me anytime soon regarding such complicated simple things. Let’s go party this night KV.bin away!

On a more serious note, my CTO tells me that this is all perfectly normal, and that simply put, the 360 has been hacked for good. If all this is right, expect a chip (or two) on the market very soon, automating the process.

Gamers, Geeks and Googlers unite… For caffeinated sunflower seeds are here to the rescue! Long hours coding, scripting, working on projects, blogging, fragging, or whatever activity you find yourself wrapped up in at 2AM can sure be made a whole lot more enjoyable when your mind is active and working as it should be.

SumSeeds are a wonderful treat - straight from nature to your home (with a detour through a science lab!) They are quite frankly sunflower seeds imbued with the powers of caffeine, taurine, lysine, and ginseng (just like an energy drink) all the way through the shell and into the seed. And sunflower seeds are a natural source of protein, vitamin E, zinc, and iron.

How the heck do they get the caffeine through the seedy lil’ shells? The less questions asked, the less lies are told… Or so it seems. A whole lot healthier than Buzz Cola, Crackheads and all the other assorted chewable caffeinated monstrosities. Bawls aren’t all that bad either.

The next LAN-Party you’re at, expect to see a whole bucket load of these ‘healthy’ caffeine infused sunflower seeds. ThinkGeek have done it again.

Carrying on with controller speculation and overly-hyped gaming announcements after yesterday’s “Big PS3 debate”, Microsoft have announced a brand new Xbox 360 only game, complete with brand new game-show-style controllers.

Scene It!, Lights, Camera, Action includes four such controllers in addition to the ‘core game’ with 1600 Hollywood questions for all the family. More questions will be available for download from the Xbox Live Marketplace (presumably for a small fee - expect $3-$10 depending on pack size).

Though full details haven’t yet been revealed, the game reportedly shows clips/shots of films and movies, with players required to select an answer to a simple question such as ‘Which film is this still taken from?’ before answers are given. Presumably Microsoft, inspired by the massive success of the Wii, see the full potential in ‘casual gaming’ and are attempting with this latest move to tap into the market. Somewhat reminiscent of the previously released ‘Buzz!’ game from Sony, which you may remember also proved popular, I imagine Scene It! will quickly rise to the top of this week’s Xbox 360 bestsellers list.

On a sidenote, look out for the controller with the big red button.

Copy the best, or so they say. Sony have finally caught on that the Xbox 360’s (and even the old Nintendo Gamecube’s) ergonomically designed control pads DO actually rule the roost and fell a thousand times better under thumb than the old classic centeral joystick controllers. With nothing ‘officially’ confirmed and only a terrible leaked photo ‘accidently’ posted on the Lucas Arts website before being ‘hurridly’ taken down, details are sketchy and industry-watchers are skeptical.

In other, possibly related news, is Rumble coming to the PS3 at long last? Fanboys were screaming and on-lookers were laughing as reality sunk in back when the PS3 finally got off the ground and launched. The widely loved and all-encompassing rumble (TouchSense?) had been removed. Rumble was to be no more, and confined solely to the days of PS2 classics and old-fashioned Ratchet & Clank runabouts. Now with Gadgetell are reporting that rumble may return? Coupled with ‘leaked’ photos of a new controller design, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if Sony did opt for a controller re-design whilst adding in new features, in order to ‘attempt’ to catch up with the dominating Xbox 360 in the muscle-console market. I expect Star Wars: Force Unleashed will be one of the first games to take advantage of the rumble capability (on the PS3 at any rate) and that the new controller design will compliment the game well.

Of course, Sony can confirm everything or nothing. At the end of the day, whatever they don’t end up saying will probably be (from the large scale point of view) far more reliable than any claims they do make. Heck… Look who’s talking. “Launching August 1st.” Not so likely… We’re just “Coming Soon” now see?

Overview

So I picked up a copy of All Marketers Are Liars (no affiliate link) by Seth Godin the other day and admittedly, I’m impressed. Making yourself, your service, your product, or even just a client heard in a busy marketplace can be at the best of times ridiculously difficult, especially when you’re competing up against hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of well-established competitors. Your friends will tell you you’re heading into a saturated marketplace. Your family will tell you you’re doomed to fail. Even your business partners will be skeptical.

The result? A gaping void between success (lift off) and failure (crash landing). Being a big fan of Free Prize Inside (in my opinion Seth’s best book) my advice would be to flick through FPI before starting (or at least getting too far into ALAL) so you have a bit of background knowledge and a general feel for the way Seth writes and expresses himself. A must read? Definitely. Both All Marketers Are Liars and Free Prize Inside have become almost irreplacable business reference guides for me, in my day to day goings on. Grab yourself an excerpt from All Marketers Are Liars here to get a taste for Seth’s style. There’s nothing worse than ordering a book (or an eBook for that matter) only to find it full of rubbish and yourself in a position unable to return the item.

Basic Outline

Set in stone at the core of the book, and though it may sound stupid to some, is the need for a truly incredible, remarkable, recolutionary product. Something I know Affiliate Defined is. Going with the theme of the book, the Affiliate Marketing arena (and even just the AM training arena) is unbelievably full and is in many places bursting at the brim with offers, ebooks, audio courses teleseminars and one-on-one training phone calls which can ‘all be yours’ for $97. The fact Seth outlines, is that if you do indeed have the superior product in terms of quality and offering, and you have routed out a select group of early-adopters who are prepared to convince themself that their purchase has been worth while, they will ’spread the word’ and do the work for you. Affiliate Programs help with this, offering incentives for people to indeed promote your product, with the opportunity to make $XX at the same time a rather attractive option.

As usual, Seth has come up with a number of fantastic ideas, methods and tactics which you can put into context based on your own niche, and Seth also sets the cornerstones for you to build on, sparking up fresh, new, unique ideas inside your own mind. Being an early-adopter in the case of such tactics is essential, and this is the whole point of the book. By jumping on and getting access now - you’re effectively giving yourself the chance to implement all the content within the book (or as it happened, in my case, audiobook) before it becomes common practice and mainstream.

Every marketer tells a story. And, if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche Cayenne is cooler than a $36,000 VW Touareg, which is virtually the same car. We believe that $225 Pumas will make our feet feel better than $20 no-names… and believing it makes it true.

I guess it’s viral. And as is the principal with viral marketing, it’s basically all on autopilot with very little effort on your behalf. My advice to you? Spend $25 and grab the book from Amazon. I’m not here writing an affiliate review today - just writing a down-to-earth review highlighting how I feel you can benefit from even just ‘checking out’ Seth’s great book. The final descision is yours though. Will you make the leap?

Go figure… Whilst I was away myself in the peaks, a guest post I’d written for the almighty shoe just a few weeks back was published.

Upselling - The Why, The Where, The How

We’ve all seen the silly little ‘one time offers’ when buying Internet Marketing products. For just an extra $50 (on top of the original $100 selling price), you can get yourself access to 250 free Private-Lable-Right products to sell as your own! You know the drill by now. Similar to a real-life situation, this ‘platinum’ or ‘bonus’ offer converts as high as 60% or 70%, meaning that from a publisher’s point of view, after someone has pressed that elusive order button, the chances of them buying again (still in their feverish ’spending frenzy’) is higher than it would be on a simple product sales page presented AFTER purchase.

It’s not just Internet Marketers, though, who exploit this profit-pulling tactic. How many times have you heard the simple, innocent phrase… “Would you like fries with that?” How about behind-the-counter displays and special offers so often seen in the stores? If the conversion rates weren’t so good, and the money not so easy to make - why would people carry on using the ‘one-time-offer’ as their primary way of following up buyers with a sale?

It’s best to push your offer to someone IMMEDIATELY after they order. Not inside the members area. Not on your blog. Not through an AdWords ad, but after they click that order button, have their credit card out and their wallet in hand. It’s simple psychology - and as a 13-year old affiliate marketer, if I can manage - you certainly can too.

It’s not a massively complicated backdoor in the search engines which will get you banned instantly. It’s not a cleverly thought out blackhat backlink building trick to make you the envy of all others. It’s a simple tactic. You simply add in an extra page to the order process, a page which offers an extended product, with an “I’ll wave goodbye to this fantastic offer forever” link at the bottom which simply takes the buyer to the original core product’s salespage.

One thing needs to be made clear however. The upsell is a hard-sell wearing a hat. It’s not a nicely-nice “for an extra $XX you can get this!”, but rather a ferocious, pressure-inducing “You will NEVER see this page again” kind of offer. Some marketers choose to stray away from such hard-selling tactics, but almost every ‘big-name’ successful marketer who you’ll see out there will be using a one time offer in some form or other.

As a blogger, you may be thinking that a one time offer will be extremely hard to implement since your blog isn’t promoting anyone else’s products and isn’t purely money-making related. Write a short 5-page eBook, make it freely available and then when people hit the ‘download’ button - present them with an irrefutable upsell - something that could bundle together a series of other eBooks you’ve written, or even just rights to some PLR products.

I don’t want to drone on too much - but the upsell is one heck of a powerful weapon. Use it wisely and reap the rewards.

Hope you enjoyed the article. On a side note… John Cow was ‘ere. The comments were pretty darn hilarious too ‘who is this midget posing as a 13-year old?’ amongst other related hoop-lah. I don’t recall mentioning it, but Shoemoney is one of the cool-dude hoop-shooting Internet Marketers who I’m interviewing for Affiliate Defined. As part of the extensive upsell package.

This is a guest post that has been written by Max Hawkins, of TechRave, currently standing in as admin this week while David is away.

Initially, Pownce looked to me like one of those things I wouldn’t really care about, and throw to the side while I concentrated on other websites that took my fancy. But after discovering Invite Share yesterday, and very quickly getting (15 minutes after asking for one!) an invitation to Pownce, I registered, logged in, and was VERY surprised at how great it actually was.

First off, the sites design is fantastic. It is clean, sleek and everything is easy to read. But that is just the home page. Logging in reveals much, much more goodness.

Your personal page is aesthetically pleasing, with your description, invites, and friends down the left, your message/file/event text box down the middle, and various other options, such as filters (for seeing messages, files, replies etc) down the right. There is also a small box indicating things that you should do once you get your Pownce account up and running.

From this panel, you can post messages, files, links and events. A great feature of this is the ability to make what you post public, only for your friends, or only for a certain friend. Another neat feature is being able to put different friends in sets, so you can send your message to some friends, but not all. This provides a massive improvement over Twitter, where everything is public, and everyone will see your message, no matter what. This is what gives Pownce the cutting edge over Twitter.

The settings are quite fully featured all ready, and you have a lot of customization over what you can do with your account. Basic things such as selecting what notifications you want to receive are standard, as well as strong privacy controls. You can control who sees your email address, gender, age and so forth through here, and you also have a lot of control over these. Changing the theme is also an option, but at the moment, there are only four available to select from. Until great demand urges for more, these themes are pretty nice anyway, and I like the one I am currently using, a sort of dark brown type thing.

Also available is the desktop version of Pownce, which requires Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), which makes it possible for you to post messages and files without being restricted to the browser. Screenshot below.

Hold on, nothing is that good? Well, there is a slightly bad thing about Pownce. You can only upload files of 10mb or less. Anything more up to 100mb, you will need to get a pro account, which comes in at a low price of $20 (£10) a year. Not bad really. I’d maybe wait until they have the system a little more live maybe until you go and buy, just so all the bugs can be ironed out from any testing that is left. Still, $20 isn’t much. Certainly is an affordable price for a year anyhow. And hey, they need money for hosting…

Currently, not much has really been happening on Pownce for me yet, but with offer of some free invites, I am sure some of you will want to be my friend . There are 5 to be grabbed now, as Andrew Sommerich has already snagged one. Maybe if you ask him nicely! And also come and visit me on my Pownce profile.

Anyway, to sum it all up, Pownce is the Twitter Killer. As soon as we can introduce Twitter junkies to this, they won’t want to turn back. Twitter will be out of business before they know it….