Google Phone and Honesty in Business

I have been paralyzed by indecision on whether or not to buy another cell phone. The issues, beyond my own need to validate myself through a cool phone? The iPhone is cool, has loads of interesting if meaningless applications (other than Avego) and brands you techno-hip, but I hate the touchscreen keyboard and it doesn’t work well for corporate email/calendaring. The Blackberry has none of the Apple buzz but is much more practical AND has brickbreaker. Sprint Instinct is a Sprint phone. Nuf said. My Treo 650 still works well but the whole industry and public is basically shunning it and Palm. Do I want to be in the coalition of the shunned? And finally the upcoming HTC Dream AKA Google phone, which will be announced on Tuesday. I said I would wait until the Gphone came out before buying a new phone so the waiting may be about to end.

I am not sure if honesty is always the best policy in business. I went to lunch today with a former client who is with a new company. I thought it would be a good new business opportunity. I water and dine him over Pad See Yew with chicken, tell a few intelligent and funny stories and presto, I have a new client. Except he started the conversation with how much he hates his job and his company. From there, I could not smoothly ask him if a blog strategy would change anything. And when he asked me how I was doing at work, I went with the generic, unthinking "things are good" response almost by rote. That kind of killed the conversation since I didn't meet his honesty with an equal peak behind the curtains. So we bitched about California public schools and called it a day.

Tonight’s podcast is going to be on the financial meltdown, instant replay is killing sports, and celebrity blogging. I have to somehow figure out how to drive our listener base beyond 30 people. I admit, this is 30 more people than I would expect to listen to my uninformed opinions but I have done the Facebook group thing, the mass email, the blog banner (see above). Maybe having more friends would help.