Elvis Blogs - Elvis McNeely

iPhone Gear is almost most done. I am so eager to finish this that I can taste it. This past week I have been talking with wholesaler's and distributors about the iphone accessories and it seems there is a bit of a delay due to Apple's involvement in approving who can make compatible accessories. It seems that Apple has their hand in receiving royalties from 3rd parties who make accessories for the iPhone - which is slowing the production of things down. Seems a bit too much to me that Apple would to that length to make money, I mean, maybe it is better for the 3rd parties (manufacturers) to not make accessories to begin with. I bet if all manufacturers making accessories were to drop making things for Apple - Apple would begin to be more grateful and allow things to run more smoothly. I did notice that Everything iPhone has put up a store and it seems to be selling some items. I am sure it is the case on eBay as well, those who bought the iPhone bought extra accessories to sell them on eBay once the demand became greater, driving up prices.

One note of bad news. I applied to be a Apple VAR reseller, to sell accessories for the iPod and iPhone but I was reject. I spent over an hour filling out their application which is 60 some questions long with all kinds of "if you answered yes to 34 please answer this" as well. I bet in the end the application had some 90 questions which half of them didn't even pertain to my business model. I had to call Apple to get a status update. The Apple rep in the VARs department declined to tell me the status but said I needed to email Apple with a request. About an hour later I received an automated response saying I was declined. I must have been put into a "decline pool" to where they could send that automated response to me. In the end, my business model didn't match theirs. Thanks Apple :(

So, at this point I am guessing I have about a week left of work. I do have some products to add to the iPhone & iPod accessories to the store section of the website. That should be done at the end of the week. A quick note, iPhone Gear Callout will be announced soon, asking iPhone users and others to take part the community side of the site. In return I will be offering store credits for those who participate in the forums and add different types of content to the website. I did a test run and found that I could rack up $10 in store credits within 2 hours easily. I will explain more about store credits at a later time. Anywho, the projection date is for July 22nd.