Archive for January, 2007
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Top or Bottom
Just five Internet Service Providers account for 88 per cent of the UK broadband market,
following the series of high-profile acquisitions that have taken place
of late.
In June last year, 10
providers shared 82 per cent of the market between them. Of those 10, AOL , Telewest and Virgin have since merged and AOL has been absorbed by Carphone Warehouse , while BT and Tiscali have both expanded their user
bases with the acquisitions of PlusNet and HomeChoice respectively.The latest figures compiled by Thinkbroadband show that BT including
PlusNet and Virgin Media (the new name for the combined ntl:Telewest an
Virgin businesses) each have 24.6 percent.According to recent Ofcom , just five percent of UK households subscribe to the UK’s 686 ‘niche’
providers. But when it comes to business broadband provision the
picture is very different, with around 30 percent of UK companies
relying on niche providers, who are able to offer tailored packages
and a much higher quality of support services.At
the same time as this research has come out a number of other articles
have appeared reporting a high amount of dissatisfaction. So what should you look for in an ISP?
The key to this centres around customer support and the level of
support you require. If you have to call someone, you want a quick
answer to your problems or at least an idea of where the problem lies.
Smaller companies do this better because you can usually speak to
someone, without going through a call centre. -
Vista and Office2007
Hello. You may be aware that Microsoft will finally lauch its Vista and Office 2007 products this week. So it may be worth waiting a month before installing Vista on your hardware as this will give other people time to find the bugs first. Office is worth an install though as a lot has been improved.
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Foot Prints
You can’t seem to go anywhere at the moment without a mention or seeing footprints. Footprints in the snow on Wednesday, carbon footprint, ecological Footprint, customer footprint, the list goes on. But it was the foot print in the snow that lead me to think about the amount of time we go down the same paths. So with this in mind when / if you explore a product, be it hardware or software, share the results with your colleagues so that path does not need to be revisited for some time after. This helps in productivity and company knowledge and communications.
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Mobile to YouTube to Blog
Ok, so the grandparents live abroad, they sent the kids some presents for Christmas, and the kids need to say thank you and wish them a happy new year. They could write a letter, but ‘Hey’ this is the modern world and I have video on my mobile, and a blog. How difficult could it be? First the plan:
- Take video
- Upload to computer
- Upload to YouTube
- Take embedding code from YouTube, paste into HTML of blog post
- Send email to grandparents with link to blog
- EASY!
This particular plan took around 3 weekends to fulfill. The first part was easy enough, once I realised that the software that came with the phone was really difficult to get working and just used the phone as an extra drive instead. ‘Hold on though, what file format is that? 3GP! I haven’t seen that one before, lets see if YouTube will take that’.
The answer was “No” unless you want to send the file via email from your mobile. I needed to convert the file. It didn’t take too long to locate a free bit of software from a company called Miksoft that would convert the 3GP file into an AVI file, and it seemed to work fine. ‘Hold on though, that 1.5mb 3GP file is now a 200mb AVI file, that will take an age to upload and look, the limit when uploading a video to YouTube is 100mb - AH! But I have a smaller file here, its not the Grandparents one, but at least I can try this one, get it up on YouTube and execute the rest of my plan for satisfaction’s sake’.
I uploaded the file, looked at the thumbnail result on YouTube only to realise that the image was upside down. ‘Its only the thumbnail’ I told myself - it wasn’t - the whole damn video played upside down - ‘It didn’t do that in Windows Media Player - Now what?’.
‘I know, I’ll get some more conversion software’. I tried loads of different variations, but pretty much all the software I downloaded was for evaluation only and wouldn’t convert the whole file only half of it (you have to buy the product to get the full functionality). A friend suggested MIcrosoft Media Encoder. Now that would surely work, and it was free. It didn’t.
I did a series of searches prefixed with the words “How to..” and finally found myself on the Miksoft site again, but this time on its message board. The first question I saw was “Can anyone tell me why my videos keep coming out upside down?” The solution was another piece of software. ‘Ok just one more download’. My programmes menu was almost cascading off my screen by now with all the new software I had installed, so one more wouldn’t make any difference.
The message board suggested re-processing the AVI file through a piece of software called VirtualDub. This I tried, but the file size was still enormous at the other end. ‘Perhaps it would now go through windows media encoder and I could convert it to a WMV file, thus compressing it. I tried it, it worked - Yippee.
Uploading to YouTube is simple if you have an account, and not a whole lot more difficult if you haven’t, so this bit ewas easy, as was copying the conveniently provided code to embed the video and pasting it into the HTML of the blog. Just one thing to look out for is the size of the embedded video window, which you might need to adjust to fit the post column of your blog.
So I did it, and its easy. Well it will be for you guys if you decide to do the same, just use the links above, it will take you minutes rather than days, since I should point out that the description above is really only a precis of the numerous variations, combinations and file conversions I tried without success. And just to prove it works:
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A blend of marketing activity
The festive period offered the chance to catch-up on a little not-for-work web stuff which for me started on Youtube. My intention was to investigate how to upload a video of the kids to the site and then embed the code for the page into our personal blog so that grandparents and the like could receive a more personal, and visual, happy new year message. However, with time on my hands I found myself quickly distracted by some of the bizarre offerings on the Youtube home page, one of which struck me as vaguely compelling.
The link was titled “Will it blend? - ipod”, and just a click later I found myself watching the introductory sequence of a presentation by Tom Dickson, a man in a white lab coat and safety goggles, who asks the question - “Will it blend?”.
Tom produces his old ipod, and while explaining that he had upgraded to a Nano, and with the warning “not to try this at home” displayed at the bottom of the screen, Tom rather casually chucked his ipod into the blender, closed the lid and hit the switch. Within what seemed like seconds Tom stopped the blender and emptied what looked like a collection of old metal dental fillings onto his workbench. Up until this point, and perhaps because I was on holiday, I had assumed this to be some kind of spoof, or a derivation of the old Joe Cartoon animation “Frog in a blender” (NOT FOR THE FAINT HEARTED).
It struck me that this would be a great way to market a blender, particularly since it combined two of the most pervasively popular forms of entertainment - music and home video, and their most commonly accessed means of delivery - the ipod and Youtube, with something as boring as a blender, and it made it fun. I started to think of what else you could do to build on this theme. How naive I was - Tom had it covered. Further investigation, since I was now in work-mode, revealed the following marketing mix.
Not only had Tom blended an ipod, he had also blended a golf club, light bulbs, oysters, a can of soup and any number of miscellaneous items and all his ‘work’ can be seen at his site http://www.willitblend.com/. At this site visitors can also purchase ‘Will it Blend?’ merchandise - t-shirts and caps. They can see examples of blending activity that you can try at home, visit the site of the company that Tom works for - Blendtec - and visit its site dedicated to industrial blenders. Furthermore, and adding into the contemporary mix of marketing, the inquisitive can also check out the “Will it Blog” section where (and this completed the circle for me) they can contribute to the debate regarding the final price of the blended ipod on Ebay where it was auctioned before Christmas. Now that is a well blended marketing mix.
