Dear Friends,

Happy Thanksgiving from the Small Dog Electronics family to yours! I’ll be carving turkey on Thanksgiving and then my favorite part, eating left-overs all weekend. There is so much to be thankful for but for our family here at Small Dog Electronics we are supremely thankful for you, our many loyal customers. We have grown to be the largest Apple Specialist in New England with your support, guidance and we understand that it is you that ultimately pays our wages.

You have probably noticed that you’ve received Kibbles & Bytes a bit early this week! We have some once-a-year specials in line for you at our retail stores and online at Smalldog.com/holiday, and we wanted to give our loyal Kibbles readers the first look at our exclusive Black Friday specials. See all of the details below… I’m planning on visiting all three stores on Friday to see if I can help with the shopping frenzy!

If you follow the Latin roots of the word “incorporate” (I took 4 years of Latin in high school), it literally means “to form a body.” When a company forms that body, it has a larger footprint upon society than any individual. That impact is felt through jobs, environmental footprint and the impact upon people’s lives. With that larger footprint comes a larger responsibility. This is the basis of our commitment to socially responsible business practices. We measure our success in equal measures by the bottom lines of People, Planet and Profit.

A vital aspect of the People part of that equation is how we treat you, our customers. We base much of our incentive compensation upon a customer satisfaction metric called Net Promoter Score. You may have noticed that we survey every transaction and ask one question: whether you would recommend us as a company, based upon that transaction. We take that 10-point scale and call all the 9s and 10s promoters, the 8s, 7s and 6s as neutral and the rest as detractors. We come up with our NPS score by subtracting the detractors from the promoters and every week, Hapy calculates our NPS scores for the company and each department.

We read and respond to every comment and if we see our NPS scores dropping, I can literally walk around the company and overhear my employees talking about what we can do to get the scores back up. Customer satisfaction is a primary driver of behavior, policy and practice at Small Dog Electronics.

The big news this week was the release of iOS 4.2 for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. While the iPhone has had some of the more notable features such as integrated and threaded mail and multi-tasking for some time, the upgrade to the iPad has added new functionality to an already great tool. One of the most frustrating parts of my experience with the iPad has been the lack of multi-tasking. I am up most nights answering questions and planning products with our Asian suppliers as they have a 12 hour (13 now!) time difference and I’m also having discussions via instant message with the other Small Doggers that are night owls. (ahem, I think he means us… -KH & ES)

I also use this time to catch up on my email load and many times I would be answering an email when an instant message notification would pop up. I’d have to leave mail, launch IM+ (my integrated instant messaging program) and respond to the instant message, then leave that program and re-launch mail. Now with multi-tasking on iOS 4.2, I can access any of my open applications without having to quit and re-launch. That alone makes the iPad much more useful to me, while I am sure the mail enhancements will be even more useful for others. Ben has more for you below on iOS 4.2.