First of all I registered a few years ago to be a beta tester. Since then I haven’t been offered anything to beta test.
Today I recieved an envelope, via UPS that I had to sign for, and the contents is another envelope with a card with this web address on it: http://products.wd.com/powerof2/ and a kind of transparent film slide type thing (sorry, I don’t know how to describe it better). That is it. There was nothing else inside the envolope.
So my question is, why was I sent this? And why was it sent via UPS and had to be signed for? Are the people who registered for beta just really people who have been added onto a marketing mail list?
I got it 2 minutes ago. I slapped it on my Samsung note 10.1 and it wasn’t the right size. Anywho, the wesite listed just has a tease video. Interesting.
Congratulations on being selected for our teaser. We wanted to give you a sneak peek of what’s coming and invite you to join the experience online. The film included in the mailer is a special material that you place on top of an iPad (or other 9-10” screen), play the video on the page, and interact with the content. Each day we will reveal another clue so stay tuned for what is to come. For the engineers and coders out there, we’ve even included some binary messaging for you to decode. Feel free to share the experience with your friends and family!
Got mine also. Hmm… The suspense is killing me. The black envelope and card is pretty slick. Not even any Google hits on a search for this. Must under the radar for most…
I got my envelope today and I was like 'At last!! I get to participate in one of the Beta’s I signed up for!"… well … no. My iPad is gone now so I have no way to participate (at least via iPad). :( We had a financial emergency and had to sell the iPad in order to cover some unforseen bills.
Hoping I can still at least follow along online… but it’s a real bummer :( I wanted in on the secret >_<
It’s pretty presumptuous of WD to assume that everybody has an iPad or equivalent. I guess they don’t care about customers who either can’t afford or don’t want a tablet computer.
We PC users are a dying breed that nobody—including Microsoft, and now, apparently, WD—cares about any more. You’d think a company that still depends primarily on hard drive sales would be different, but I guess not.
Welp, you don’t really need an ipad. Just get a ruler and resize the website to that size, and you can participate just fine. Little bit of tape. It’s a redneck solution (which suits me just fine), but it will work if you feel the need to partipate in the same formfactor.
If you wanted a more “technical” solution… We could make some assumptions… like that this clear plastic doesn’t have any sort of filter on it and that there’s a few transparent pieces on the steering wheel for number read outs and glowing buttons to appear on. If that’s the case… You could scan the image into the computer, making sure the scan is 9-10" full size, then use a little program known as “OnTopReplica”, which uses the Windows 7 window redrawing function, to select the program window with the picture,redraw it, select area for size, adjust transparency, and then “Enable Click through” which allows you to click -through- the OnTopReplica to the windows underneath it… and then place that OnTopReplica window on top of the website when it goes online.
As for what it is… Pretty sure it’s something us Beta testers recently tested. Beyond that, I forget how much we were released from our NDA, as my memory is a bit foggy. It’s a few days though, so all is well.
As for what it might be I agree with you and if we are right, I’m a little confused. Here’s hoping they have something else up their sleeve and we are wrong.
Hah I wasn’t sure if we were allowed to talk about this, I messaged Debbie to be sure but it looks like the cat is out of the bag. For what it’s worth, I have a bit of experience with ARGs so I had fun with this, though I may have been looking a bit deeper for things that aren’t there =)
If anyone doesn’t want to manually decode the binary in the buttons, click here for the binary and the translation. For the bottom image click here.
Yeah, Well I’m out I guess, never could afford an IPAD, being on Disablity, 200-300 bucks a month left after the Mortgage doesn’t leave much, Food, Doctor Bills, Meds, come out of whats left.
So it’s just some kind of silly marketing hype after all. It’s a product that’s already been beta tested and WD is just sucking us in to ooh and aah over their latest toy. I for one could not be less interested.
WD Black2? - SSD + HDD… Yes the marketing hype sucked me in… I was not waiting at midnight, but waiting patiently this morning… Lets hope there is one in my mailbox this week! That would be a surprise!
