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To fly but not serve (how to lose customers and negatively influence people)

Posted by 17 April 2012

Businesses thrive on loyalty: I want to share a great lesson in how to kill it.

I’ve always been a loyal British Airways customer since I lived in France in the late 90′s, and recently had my first ever cause for complaint – which I have to say is a pretty good track record.
When I say loyal, I really mean I’ve often spent more with BA than competing airlines – or not shopped around at all – because of my perception of their superior service.

 

Unfortunately, dealing with their ‘customer service’ team has become a lesson in how not to serve customers. Here’s how not to treat loyal customers who make one complaint in 20 years, courtesy of BA.

 

  • Skim complaints, then find the least ill-fitting generic ‘responses’ from a list.
  • Hope that the customer doesn’t notice your non-answers.
  • Never put the message thread in your replies, hoping the customer forgets what they said.
  • Make ‘closing’ complaints in your ticketing system more important than the response.
  • When this all infuriates the customer sufficiently to complain via social media, delete the public comment and tell the customer in a direct message to ring your ‘customer service’ number.

Repeat until previously loyal customer goes to your competition.

And for maximum impact:

  • Make the experience directly contradict your new, expensively promoted slogan about service being at the heart of what you do.

 

 

Their ‘To Fly. To Serve.’ explanation in full:

 

“To Fly. To Serve.

These four words were painted on the tailfins of our early aircraft. And our pilots still wear them with pride. In the lining of their jackets and on the peaks of their hats.

They’re rarely noticed, but they’ve always been at the heart of everything we do. Because they’re not a slogan. They’re a promise. We’re committing to this promise again and we’ll continue to build on it. With the certainty that we face our future with the same pride we feel for our past.

To Fly. To Serve.
It’s what we do. It’s who we are.”

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Interview with Huddlebuy

Posted by 19 October 2011

Huddlebuy (the “Amazing deals for small businesses, startups and professionals” people) recently interviewed me for some national PR thing they are going to do. Here is the transcript:

 

H: Tell us who you are and what your business does.

I’m the Managing Director of SSL247 (www.ssl247.co.uk), we are consultative suppliers of SSL, or to put it meaningfully, we help companies pick the best encryption software for their website and supply it to them with the best support and least fuss possible. We’re probably in the top 2 or 3 of what we do in Europe.

H: What inspired you to start this business?

My inner geek. My Dad’s engineering background rubbed off on me growing up and that led me down the computer route at an early age – even watching him knock up a two-car garage or helping him underpin the house foundations didn’t quite get me into physical engineering, but I know it got me into playing with programming, software and even building PCs. Fast forward a few years and I’d worked ‘in the internet’ for a while when I discovered SSL and knew I wanted to get involved.

H: How is Facebook and Twitter used in your marketing scheme? What’s the best way to go about using social media as a marketing tool?

We didn’t feel Facebook really fitted with our Business to Business audience or our product, but we do a bit of Twitter. I’d say the best way is to take your time to understand it before doing anything – is it really relevant to your business, or would you just be doing it because others do? Don’t be afraid to do nothing on Facebook and Twitter, especially if you are B2B. I’d say small, local business selling direct to the public might easily benefit without much effort, but at the other end of the spectrum can be a lot of work for little or no return. At the end of the day, a great Facebook and Twitter strategy – even a great location based social networking strategy like Foursquare – doesn’t pay the bills. What pays the bills are sales, so remember to stick to the knitting: there is nothing wrong with a dabble in social media, just remember your priorities…

H: How do you acquire most of your customers? What activities have worked best?

From day one we’ve used Google Adwords, but we also have been getting good word of mouth referrals from early on too. We use a mix of web, and offline things like trade shows, brochures, the usual really.

H: Do you have any advice for other companies on how to cleverly manage your resources?

Companies should always be managing their resources cleverly, even when we don’t have economic doom and gloom in all the press. From day one we’ve always aimed to make the frugal/practical balance when it comes to purchasing and managing resources – it’s quite easy to end up using as many clichés on this topic as that guy on the last series of the apprentice, but being penny wise and pound foolish doesn’t work any better than believing looking after then pennies means the pounds will look after themselves! Balance is the answer – get your people the best tools you can realistically afford, and also remember that the cheapest supplier is probably cheapest because they don’t employ anyone to answer the phone or respond to emails when things go wrong with your goods/service/delivery – your job is your job, not chasing rubbish suppliers all day long,

H: What’s the best feedback you’ve ever received from a customer? Any great stories?

From the outset I wanted us to provide the kind of service I wanted to receive – none of those auto-responder emails to tell you your email will be ignored for up to 48 working hours, that sort of thing – so as a result we get a lot of good feedback and always have. We’re not selling emergency wedding supplies, so are never going to get the “You saved my life!” kind of gushy customer stories, but some big names have been happy to make their testimonials public: Sega, Europcar, United Nations, those kinds of organisations and all the way to schools and small businesses.

H: What sacrifices, if any, have you had to make?

I can’t say I’ve had much holiday since pre-2006, and what I have had tends to be pseudo-holiday anyway. I think the first time I had a real break from the company was 3 years after starting it, when we finally had enough people and processes to enable it – but that was still relatively early days, so the laptop and Blackberry still came with me, and got very much used every day. A fabled work/life balance is actually unrealistic if you run a small business, or an early years company – a bit like expecting a parent to switch off being a parent for a week. If your job is to be aware of what is going on all the time, and your job is to be (legally, emotionally and ‘organisationally’) responsible for something permanently, then putting that on pause whilst you lie on a beach for 2 weeks just isn’t possible.

H: What is one piece of advice you would give to anyone wanting to start their own company?

Be really sure it is the route you want to take! It won’t be right for everyone, and some people make better employees than entrepreneurs, and vice versa: looking back I was probably not the best employee on some levels. Referencing The Apprentice again, Lord Sir Alan Sir Sugar said Helen would have won if he were looking for an employee, but Tom won because he wanted someone to go into business with. You could say she didn’t win, but that is still quite an accolade…

H: Give us a pitch for new customers.

If you value your time, and solid, expert advice (and need SSL certificates!) give us a call on 0207 060 3775.

 

Link: Huddlebuy

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Learning from US marketing techniques.

Posted by 3 September 2011

Spending 3 weeks in the US recently got me deliberating US v’s UK or US v’s European marketing/advertising. There is a lot more ‘noise’ in the US, more restaurants wanting your business, more radio stations, TV channels, endlessly spewing out ads – it feels like there is more ad content than, er, content a lot of the time. Ads on TV, credits for next show start, then back to ads again.

Maybe the scale and population of the US and the sense it’s more designed and less evolved than a lot of Europe, and designed relatively recently means you get big concentrations of stores, restaurants, diners, dentists, garages, filling stations all vying for your dollars. I can’t imagine a quaint English, or picturesque French town/village (substitute European country of your choice) full of neon signs or vast roof-top donuts.

 

Try getting planning permission for that in Royal Tunbridge Wells

 

I soon moved onto reflecting about how you’d stand out in all this
relentless commercial bickering, if you were one restaurant of 10 in a small geographic area, and concluded that one effect of this ‘advertising noise’ is probably the succinct sales/marketing messages that seem more prevalent in the US.

Throughout 3 weeks I consistently concluded US marketing/sales messages are just shorter, maximising quick impact – which is the holy grail of sales/marketing messages.

This led me to thinking of a novice marketer or business person starting a business in the US v’s starting in Europe and having to suddenly take a self-taught crash course in marketing. I’d be prepared to bet that the average American would have been exposed to more ‘background advertising radiation’ that the average Brit or European, and would therefore be naturally better, and have a big head start. Certainly the American would have more inspiration available on their doorstep too. This more ‘concentrated’ approach to messages, getting more impact out of fewer words and less space/time is pervasive in the US, across all media – from print, to signage, to TV/Radio and online.

 

The story doesn’t end there though. European marketers have a lot to learn – and possibly more so for Brits because of our shared linguistic base. What takes 3 words in English might be next to impossible to express succinctly and powerfully in French or Spanish for instance. We know – we translate our SSL sites into 5 European languages, and what often takes little space in English has to be omitted in German or Italian, because the sense just isn’t conveyable without a longwinded sentence. (See related post – Surprises from Google’s first brand director).

 

I recommend anyone involved in, or interested in sales/marketing/advertising to head over and study their US counterparts, take notes, digest, and get inspired. On that note, take inspiration, then adapt for use over here, don’t think US copy imports without tweaks, it doesn’t. I lost count of the number of times I saw a slogan “Got xxxxx?” with xxxxx being the good/service/product for sale. “Got gas?” etc.

The most confusing for us was “Got bail?” – I really don’t know what that means. So remember, not everything imports without being tailored to its new market, marketing/advertising included. Even if you did sell, er, um, bail in the UK, I don’t know if “Got bail?” would help you do so.

So, tip of the summer, ingest as much of your industry messages as you can from a trip in the US, then unwind for a few days in the majestically beautiful Big Sur in California and let all sink in. I just wish I could speak fluent Chinese or Japanese to head east and compare..

 

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Surprises from Google’s 1st brand management director

Posted by 23 July 2011

 

Google’s 1st ever brand management director speaking at the LSE:

 

Pro: being able to feel some of the warm and fuzzy Google history like you’d worked there yourself

Con: was a bit of a book launch (but then we all knew that from the outset, so fair’s fair)

Surprise 1: hearing long-defunct internet brand names

Surprise 2: see below..

 

I heard Douglas Evans talk at the London School of Economics recently, about the early days at Google. It was a blast from the past, being reminded about how even companies like Google didn’t have any sections marked “revenue” in their business plans, mainly because they didn’t have business plans.

Doug’s “rein” was 1999 to 2005, and he was the 59th person to join Google and was their first director of marketing and brand management – he says he wanted to give Google a “human voice” from the outset. He also joked that employee number 58 was a massage therapist – hard to imagine now: no revenue, no revenue plans, but a masseuse on the payroll..

Doug’s talk was a book launch in disguise really, and I imagine the book is as full of enjoyable corporate folklore as he was – all interesting though. Their “under-promise and over-deliver” ethos started with customer number one, Netscape (ooh the nostalgia!).  Google became the search provider for Netscape which multiplied Google’s server overhead seven-fold overnight. This was so far beyond expectations they shut Google.com down to better serve Netscape. Nice touch, but probably something you can only do when your own website doesn’t generate any revenue.

Hearing names like Inktomi was a trip down memory lane – once a giant of search, powering major global search engine results – I doubt I’ve thought about them in 7 or 8 years, when ten years ago they were a major destination for online advertisers, and I eagerly advertised across their network with over-optimised 468×60’s.

Possibly enshrined in folklore again, but we heard how Larry* was a big Apple fan at the start – maybe hard to believe now, but that was of course when Apple meant “alternative to a PC and windows” not “Android competitor”, something Douglas glossed over to stop fact getting in the way of a good yarn.

Something that interested me personally was hearing about their internationalisation headaches. SSL247 now has a (mere) 8 different country-specific sites, in 5 languages, and believe me, even as a ‘linguaphile’ that is enough sometimes to wish the whole world spoke just English. Or Flemmish, or an ancient Icelandic dialect, but just one language – you get the point. With just a UK and a US site, you are already dealing with two languages, cultures and conventions. Anyway, even the light-hearted daily image changes on Google posed problems – as you can’t put a Wright Brothers homage on Google Brazil like you can everywhere else in the world because the Brazilians feel they invented flight. I feel your pain Google!

 

That was the biggest surprise of this for me – Google’s search dominance isn’t that amazing given the sheer mass of brains and engineering talent they have, but their biggest triumph is their ability to take huge-scale internationalisation in their stride, and make their core products work globally. That to me is the real Google forte..

 

* Or Sergey, but definitely Sergey or Larry.

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When copywriting goes copywrong

Posted by 13 July 2011

Firstly, sorry about the painful pun. I’d forgive you for leaving at this point, I really would.

I recently saw some really bad copy though, that inspired a rant. I was in an ice cream parlour, and read the following (brilliant) descriptions of some puddings/deserts:

 

“Ribbons of sweet raspberries ripple through vanilla ice cream layers”

“Black forest-fruits with a drizzle of toffee & a sprinkling of vanilla”

“Blackcurrant bursts of velvet & cedarwood whispers”

 

Mmm, you must be thinking, fantastic – if a little exuberant – sounding descriptions of presumably mouth-wateringly indulgent dishes. Those sweet treats must be as heavenly to devour as they sound deliciously intriguing. The issue I have with these particular descriptions (other than the strange hyphenation of ‘forest-fruits’ and the ampersands) is that they are wine descriptions.

 

WINE.

 

On a pub chain’s wine list:

Wine with your ice cream madam?

 

I know wine tasting notes can be elitist, understood at an instinctive level only by Oz Clarke, and laughed at by the James May* in all of us but – excuse my outburst here – what a load of crap is copy when your descriptions much better fit another (food as opposed to drink) product?

 

“Ribbons of sweet raspberries ripple through vanilla ice cream layers” couldn’t shout ‘I am ice cream’ any louder. Maybe the wine list is subliminal advertising designed to get the punters salivating and ordering food?

 

Often, less is more with copy. Reminds me of a company I used to see – the oddly named Jun Air – their slogan was “Quiet air compressors”. Perfect. Not “Low noise solutions for your air compression needs” but “Quiet air compressors”.

 

Copy is subjective, I know – but I’ve been a freelance copywriter on and off over the years, in many industries, writing on diverse topics – from sound insulation, to accommodation, to party goods via private air charters.. you name it. Escort services was the weirdest; selling a service to sell people selling sex. I wrote the UK care instructions for the Yves Saint Laurent pen range about ten years ago too. On the down side, one fitness instructor client hated what I’d written, paid me and went elsewhere to get it re-written. Must have been something I wrote..

 

Here’s the pub, the copy on their site reads much better.. good beer garden by the way.

 

* Oz and James’s big wine adventure, highly amusing.

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Tips for young entrepreneurs

Posted by 28 June 2011

I’ve recently written tips for young, budding entrepreneurs on teenentrepreneurblog.com – a US site which has attracted a fair amount of media attention.

You can head across the Atlantic and read it over there, or read it over a cup of tea below.
One thing I have to say is how much better (more succinct) the bio is now it has been Americanized.. anyway:

 

Today’s blog post comes courtesy of Oliver Wilkinson. He is based in London, England and is the owner/founder of Europe’s largest SSL reseller – SSL247 – and also the co-founder of France’s first disruptive online recruitment company, jobiso.fr. In today’s post he shares his favourite tips for emerging teen entrepreneurs.

As a big believer in young business talent, I’d like to share some tips – learned through experience – about honing your skills as an entrepreneur. In my companies we thrive on the entrepreneurial spirit in our young employees, and consider mentoring them is key to their personal and professional growth – so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to write a guest post for all the keen young readers of teenentrepreneurblog.com… My post is applicable if you want to set up in business on your own some day, or already have a venture of some sort. Even if you just want to add more strings to your bow to be a better employee some of this still counts: an entrepreneurial mindset will take you further even when you work for others.

Tips for Teen Entrepreneurs

1) Start early: The biggest tip I could give anyone is: start early. Aged about 10, myself and 2 friends sold farm waste to gardeners as fertilizer, by pushing barrows door to door in the village we lived in. At the time it was fun, and looking back it taught us how work is proportional to reward (if you get the model right) and that how bulk deals beat lots of small ones hands down. This also leads nicely into #2:

2) Start small and build. Practice whilst it doesn’t matter. What I mean by this is start some sort of business venture, no matter how small, before you need to make a living out of it. One fun business of mine was building and upgrading my PC. Around when ebay launched I used to buy new PC components and auction the old one, frequently selling the old for more than the new (better) component cost me. Remember PCs cost a lot more 10-15 years ago than they do now.. This all taught me ‘real life’ marketing and copywriting, and the value of simplifying offers to get a good price. I soon learnt that attention to detail; better pictures, better copy and throwing in free shipping got me a top price. I also learnt that buyers will spend more for less if you sell it well. Because I wasn’t trying to earn a living from it I was free to experiment and get things wrong – and implement things I learnt in copywriting books. I also always had a state-of-the-art PC too! Ebay is still good for this..

3) Write, write, write: Realize the power of good writing skills. Good writers are even more rare now than they used to be, partly because of how email, SMS, IM and tools like BlackBerry Messenger have taught us to “write”. Selling and marketing both need great copywriting skills, as do persuasive emails. As more people get lazy with their writing, being able to write becomes more and more powerful as a competitive advantage. If you can write good copy, you can sell anything online. If you can’t, you either won’t sell, or will need to hire someone to write for you. In my businesses we’ve seen that often the sales person who sells the most is the best writer: talking the talk is easy, backing it up with an effective, pitch-perfect email is much harder.

4) Master the art of bootstrapping: Aim to “bootstrap” first. Don’t get tempted by the media that the only way to start (or grow) a business is to pitch your idea at a bank or investors until you get a big lump of cash. Fund it yourself, by working on the side, or living with family for another year or two instead – it might be slower, but it teaches you the real value of money (spending other people’s cash always means more gets wasted), plus once you do make it work you’ll have a much better story to tell at the end. Also, the business benefits from day one because it has no debts. The other down-side to other people’s money is the pressure they bring to get results their way, on their time scale. This means you have double the work: running your business plus keeping them happy. With TV and media finding the whole Venture Capitalist deal glamorous, it can be easy to forget bootstrapping – but owning 100% of something smaller is way more satisfying than owning just part of something bigger..

5) Be curious and adventurous: Think like The North Face. They say “never stop exploring” and I say “never stop learning”. You should be learning all the time, from books, blogs, podcasts, seminars, conferences, even through people you meet. In my experience, the people who aren’t as successful as they want to be in life are those who stopped learning the day they left formal education.

6) Be memorable…and first!: Remember to strive for individuality, and inject personality into what you do. Entrepreneurs often fall into the trap of just copying what else is out there and form another “me too” business. Euripides – Greek tragic dramatist (484 BC – 406 BC) – said “The wisest men follow their own direction” and whilst you *should* follow the masses when comes to operating within the law, when it comes to everything else you should be doing it your way. Getting scared by the competition and following what they do will kill your creativity – and if you are going to set up a business of your own, it should be about you, your personality, and doing it your way. I’m not saying don’t take advice, or don’t observe what’s out there, but do make it about you and follow your own direction. Innovation rarely comes from simply copying..

7) Make it Happen. Act. Not acting classes (unless you think it will help your personal development, see point #6), but action. Take action. Do something. Start, get going. Take that first step. Back when I was setting up SSL247, I persuaded an ex-coworker we should form an automotive research company. I had proven online sales and marketing skills and would be responsible for web development, and he had all the industry contacts and was an established analyst. We both had years of experience in doing what we were proposing – years of successful experience. He’d write it, I’d sell it – except he never did write, and I got bored of chasing him (partly because I had another business, and partly because I didn’t believe he’d ever go for it). In the 4 years since then, SSL247 has doubled in size 5 or 6 times and I’ve set up another 2 startup business. I know if he’d just pushed himself to write that one report, that we’d probably have a business today. The difference between us is just action – I acted on my ideas, he didn’t. So…go and start something!

About the Author:
Oliver Wilkinson is based in London, England and is the owner/founder of Europe’s largest SSL reseller – SSL247 – plus is co-founder of France’s first disruptive online recruitment company, jobiso.fr. Ever since writing Europe’s first B2B study of banner ads’ effect on indirect response in 2001 he has regularly been published online and in traditional media.

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Rollercoaster love affair with a …. coffee machine

Posted by 18 June 2011

A blog about usability, user interface design and coffee machines.

“Electronic gadgets are frustratingly fickle when there’s a human interface… certainly sounds like a hard and terse taskmaster.“

Brewing in progress, please waitWhen I first started working “in the internet” about a decade ago, I saw how utterly rare it was that error messages were written by someone with a marketing or copywriting or usability background. Errors were written by software developers back then, and were almost universally scary or meaningless and often both. With a foot in each camp of techie and marketing I instantly saw the value of good error messages and how making ‘bad error messages good’ plays such a huge part in (increasing) ecommerce conversion rates.
Fast forward 10 years to my up/down love affair with Gaggia number 4. Bear with me on this, there really is a link. I’ve owned multiple Gaggia models now, selflessly giving number 3 away – mainly so I could justify a selfish upgrade – and the current one has a digital display and some built in computing power. One button gives perfect espresso tailored to any whim, and another instant steam for milk frothing. It extracts more flavour from fewer beans than the last one (with exactly the same type of beans, this is a fairly scientific test) and genuinely relegates a lot of coffee-shop coffees to the “disappointingly rough and bitter” camp. And it is quick, quiet and not particularly massive. It really is up there for producing coffee to rival your favourite professionally brewed beverages – easily as good as Costa if not better, way better than Starbucks – through tricks like built in water filters, adjustment for water hardness (testing kit included for programming it) and fine-tuning of length, strength, aroma, grind length and grind finesse. It even has a motorised drip tray that makes pleasing sci-fi esque sounds as it motors up and down courtesy of touch-sensitive controls.

 

It is brilliant, and would be a wrench to live without, except it has one major flaw which has only just dawned on me. Most of the time I approach it bleary eyed mid week, barely sighted, or rise at the crack of mid-morning at weekends and it does everything perfectly. Occasionally I find the coffee serenity spoiled and bemoan that “sometimes I feel this thing owns and controls me, not the other way round”. I think I’ve even been as far as voicing “sometimes I feel like I’m this machine’s bitch” – usually when it needs its nappy changing (the grounds bin), or needs more water, or needs the filter changing, or – and this is the biggy – needs descaling. Descaling only comes round about twice a year but takes forever, and needs an attentive master to follow its instructions to the letter for an everlasting 25 minutes of filling and emptying and flushing. Believe me, be at its relentless mercy during that process and by the end of it you feel you should back away gratefully bowing.

 

The moment of realisation about my (part-time) feelings of being the 2nd class citizen to its superiority came recently when I first started properly paying attention to its little screen. In normal mode, when it is dispensing its delicious hot brown nectar, it is polite. “Brewing in progress, please wait” type of messages.


Brewing in progress

When the dynamic changes, and it occasionally switches to maintenance mode and turns from domestic goddess to bossy matron, the please’s just dry up. “Empty drip tray”. “Close steam knob”. “Replace filter”. “Descale now”. “Call me Mistress”. Ok, so I made that last one up, but believe me, that’s how it feels at times. Not only does it go from servant to master, but when it does it drops all its good manners and all semblance of politesse at the same time  – a real double blow. Making perfect coffee politely one minute, rudely bossing me into boring, servile domestitude the next. Mainly when I’m in a rush.  And it never says thank you either – not even when it gives you a sequence of jobs in one sitting.

It got me thinking about how the whole experience of owing the machine (which I essentially get a huge amount of daily pleasure from) is skewed stupidly – at times – by these terse messages at exactly the worst time. I’m not saying I need an elaborate 90’s welcome reminiscent of a Japanese midi hifi system, but if it upped rather than diminished its manners when it needed my input, the sweet journey through life that it (ok, I’ll come clean, I sometimes call it Lady Gaggia) and I are on would be all the more rewarding, at least for me. So Gaggia, and software designers, take note..

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Invisible computers, privacy, and advertising hell..

Posted by 25 May 2011

‘Pervasive computing’ can be seen as the opposite of the PC concept – a 30-odd year old concept that the computer is personal, or that we’d all have one, and that such a machine would carry all our personal data. This still holds true to some extent, even if we have multiple personal computers each and use cloud storage: I for one have the burden/luxury of a laptop, iPad, smartphone and a netbook for instance..

Mark Weiser – said to be the father of ubiquitous computing – made the following observation: “Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives.”

I was recently listening to Alois Ferscha, Institute for Pervasive Computing, Johannes Kepler University in Linz talk about how  simple everyday objects will become intelligent and have augmented utility as pervasive, “invisible” computing becomes the norm. An office chair could detect who is sat in it via a biometric footprint – using numerous data sets, including things like weight, weight distribution, pelvic bone measurements etc – then tailor that desk/desktop computer to that user by loading settings, favourites, emails etc. I presume it would also log you out of your session each time you stand up to go for a coffee or a trip to the loo as well. The team in Linz had also been working on belts that talk to public space infrastructure and in the event of an emergency evacuation talk with the building’s network to guide you to the nearest exit via vibrating pulses on your belt; left, right, forward etc. Until that point, your humble belt remains just that, yet steps in only when its computing power is called for. Other every day objects like car keys will contain small data sets about us and tell intelligent advertising screens what to show us: showing me an Aston Martin ad instead of a Diesel Fiesta for instance – dangerous.

The discussion soon turned to privacy; who owns all the data Google, Facebook or our mobile phone network collect about us, and what happens to choice and the joy of a new discovery if every shop and museum space and advert around us decides what to show and what to omit each time we get close?

Amongst other things, this made me think about how these hidden devices are going to need lightweight embedded SSL libraries like www.yassl.com but also how the privacy issue has ballooned. It occurred to me when I first got a credit card that the card company was effectively collecting data on my whereabouts, albeit in a “lower resolution” than a mobile phone carrier does now – yet I’ve never heard anyone complain about that..

The “lower resolution” of data concept came out of a conversation I was having afterwards with Quality Nonsense (https://twitter.com/#!/qualitynonsense) which then spawned my heart-warming realisation that my life is (currently) devoid of fear that technology will encroach on my privacy. The London Underground CCTV (the tube is the largest single ‘consumer’ of CCTV technology in the world) might capture my every move, but so does anyone who happens to see me. The 3G card in my iPad, or my laptop, or my phone (and sometimes all 3 at once) might tell Orange/T-Mobile where I am, but so what? I know there is a spectrum of privacy, and over a certain line I’ll be uncomfortable too – but surely it is those with the most to hide who shout the loudest about privacy?

Weiser once outlined a set of principles describing ubiquitous computing which provides great food for thought:

  • The purpose of a computer is to help you do something else.
  • The best computer is a quiet, invisible servant.
  • The more you can do by intuition the smarter you are; the computer should extend your unconscious.
  • Technology should create calm.

I suspect being shown Aston adverts everywhere I go is not a recipe for calm in my life though.. maybe more is at risk than I thought.

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Is Foursquare dying a death?

Posted by 18 May 2011

I’ve been using Foursquare for over a year now, and thought I’d share my observations.

 

After a year, I still get the overwhelming feeling that Foursquare hasn’t helped me ‘unlock my city’ (or anyone else’s) as their strapline promises, and at times it has been a pointless chore checking in to venues for no tangible benefit, however after sticking with it through – and way beyond – the point where I wanted to give up, it has proven to be strangely useful or insightful at times, just probably not in the ways the creators (or I) expected.

 

One sure sign for me that – at least in the UK – only early adopters are using Foursquare was the 2010 Notting Hill Carnival. As the second largest street carnival in the world (yes, you read that right), hosted in the largest city in Europe, you’d expect a few Foursquare checkins amongst the revellers. In 2010 one million people visited Carnival, yet on Foursquare, I was one of only 120 checkins. I went both days, I checked my app frequently, yet this rough figure prevailed for all of it.

 

Maybe not the right crowd then? Well at tech events – World Hosting Day in Germany, Tech Crunch Recipes in Paris, Internet World or InfoSecurity or Wired’s “Failfast” in London (etc) you do see a few fellow users who have checked in, and certainly in terms of percentage of total visitors way more than the Carnival, but still a meagre token gesture of a virtual attendance.

 

My first surprise Foursquare epiphany came from a fairly gruelling travel schedule of holiday to a VeriSign roundtable (Barcelona) to a social event back in the UK, all back to back. It was Foursquare (courtesy of the Jet Setter badge it smugly awarded me) that told me through the jetlag, tiredness and general disorientation that I’d been through 5 different international airports in as many days. I was so surprised I initially didn’t believe it and had to count – but 4SQ was right:5 different airports – Mexico, London Gatwick, London City, Barcelona, (Barcelona) and Leeds Bradford – in 5 days… I can’t say my life improved with this realisation, and maybe it just worsened my dazed state, but I can say I wouldn’t have noticed without Foursquare. Maybe this is the latest generation of diary keeping?

 

I’ve also been sat in a bar with a fellow Foursquarer, and been surprised to have a mutual friend walk in knowing we were there. Quite a pleasant surprise to broadcast your location to those you opt to tell with just a couple of clicks.. it does also suggest you should pick your Foursquare friends carefully though – and your Twitter followers/Facebook friends if you keep those additional sharing options ticked in your app.

 

As for the app itself, the big downside on the Blackberry version is its flaky use of the Blackberry GPS. Every time Foursquare returns “Sorry, we can find no locations nearby” I get annoyed a) because the error is worded to suggest I am in close proximity to nothing like I might be in the stratosphere rather than central London, and b) because I can guarantee that if I switch straight to the Blackberry map and tell it to turn on GPS, it will find my location with ease. I don’t know what the iPhone version is like, but I do know it runs quicker (check in next to an iPhone user and they are done in half the time).

 

So after all this, what is the biggest benefit? Well, even with rising to the heady heights of “Super mayor” (10 concurrent mayorships), and ‘gaining’ Jet Setter badges and reminders I’ve been out too much mid-week (the ‘Crunked’ badge) I’ve still yet to find myself mayor of a venue that gives the current mayor a free pint, or a food discount: I suspect because with few users there are even fewer businesses prepared to put time, effort and money into marketing a discount for one person at a time. I’ve also not ‘met’ anyone locally as a result of using it either.

The biggest utility of Foursquare – at least for me – is the ability to, with a few clicks and one line of text to:

 

Update my Linkedin

Tweet

Update my Facebook status

‘Shout’ my status on Foursquare

 

and share my location across all these networks at the same time.

 

That’s all my network(s) informed with very little effort. One tweeter I know well is involved with historic building restoration, and he uses Foursquare to great effect like this to meet and connect with new contacts locally when he visits a historic building. I’ve seen him rapidly interact with those maintaining Warwick Castle whilst we were in the castle grounds and his location sharing made a big difference to how effective he was.

The web might be global, but I do like the power of the “local internet”, even if I have to make a begrudging admission that Foursquare does have a use. I’d like to suggest they have a ‘grown adult’ setting which turns off all things badge and mayor, and leaves me to location sharing and network updating without the pointless game/’fun’ element..

 

 

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Tech Crunch Europe’s recipe for “Parisienne Valley”?

Posted by 11 May 2011

Hot on the heels of Wired’s Failfast, is my attendance at TechCrunch France’s “Recipes”  for starting, running and growing a successful business in France. The recipe for the event itself was good – attendance was around 400 strong, the environment was a (sleep inducingly warm) lecture theatre in top business school ESCP, and – as well as organisers Tech Crunch Europe – the lineup included some great French entrepreneurs and other Francais with very credible business insights. Maybe the intimacy of the Wired event spoiled me, or maybe basic structural elements were wrong – air-con turned on hours too late, the first break was after 3 hours, a live 3 metre high twitter stream  behind the speakers distracted attendees, and none of the speaker segments or Q & As were focussed or short enough – but the event failed to be particularly enlightening or insightful.

 

Tech Crunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher

Tech Crunch Europe Editor Mike Butcher - fighting for audience attention with a giant live Twitter feed..

 

Maybe the recipe was good then, but proportions wrong – however it still interested at points. Given my personal insight into the differences between setting up and running a business in the UK and in France (one key French word needed here – bureaucracy), I asked the panel if it needed to be easier in France.  Giles Babinet, ex- musiwave.com and current business angel opted to answer, and although he missed my point slightly he said that the one part of the French recipe that needs tweaking to improve the French ability to compete with the Valley (a strong theme as you’d imagine) is that the UK universities are very easy to work and collaborate with (R & D for example) whereas in France it is very difficult. He went on to say that this edge is compensated for as the fact we speak English is a threat to UK tech start-ups – it is too easy for (bigger) US competitors to come in and copy UK businesses before they have carved their niche/acquired a critical mass – whereas in France, US companies aren’t as interested in monitoring business in the first place, and if they are, have a hurdle to cross linguistically and culturally if they want to move in.

Both blogeezer and I felt the event was probably more geared at business students – of which I’m impressed to say there were a few who had paid to attend – and that we personally could have given a real and practical insight into how French labour laws and business red tape could be improved and minimised respectively to benefit the French business landscape, so came away feeling we’d not gained anything. A shame – especially when a post-event beer costs over double what it does in London… maybe another point France needs to address?

 

Highs

Participant interaction and involvement before, during and after the event courtesy of Twitter and Foursquare. Damn we’re tech!

Realisation I can’t beat a ‘silicon roundabout’ crowd at an event in Soho for inspiration, and that I really am living/working in the right city.

Lows

Trying to use a laptop in a narrow seat and unmovable, off-centre, slanted tray designed for plume and parchment use only.

Reminded me how lecture theatres seem to stifle interest and inspiration, even in the self-motivated. Especially when over heated, and under ventilated.

Conclusions

I need an ipad 2 for such events, hurry up with my order Orange.

I’m glad I left university.

The “French touch” seemed to add a stuffy, uninspiring, and frankly elitist veneer to something that really could have been better.

 

Must...stay...awake...

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