September 2011 Archives

Fans of low-brow debates like myself will be mortified. The Sun's online Forum is to close on Friday 30 September.

I'm mortified. All I've got left now is the Nick Ferrari phone in on LBC.

The closure of MySun raises a few questions though. If the publisher of one of the world's best selling newspapers can't make online content profitable, who can?

When I worked at The Sun online I was told they had never received a single video message from a reader, despite inviting readers to send in their message practially every day.

Perhaps the 75p a minute tariff overweighed the benefits of having an amateur video published on the Sun online.

I was a great fan of the debates on the Sun online (as long as you avoided all the horrible nationalist stuff).

Where else could you see topics like these being debated:

How do I let people know about my charity work without being too obvious?

Who would win in a prison fight between Piers Morgan and Chris Huhne

And, my favourite, from the Women's section

What is it about armed robbers?

The site closes tomorrow, so enjoy it while you can.

Britain's technology is playing its part in the Large Hadron Collider Project. Just look at the efforts of UK based American testing outfit Coverity, which has identified 40,000 bugs in the software 

With over 50 million lines of software code presiding over 600 million proton collisions, the Large Hadron Collider was always going to be a work in progress.

According to analysis by development tester Coverity, there were 40,000 defects in the software.

Having flagged these up for its client, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (better known as CERN) was then able to get on with the important business of understanding the big questions about life, the universe and everything.

Some software projects suffer when developers try to recreate the wheel. What's it like working for a client who wants to recreate the Big Bang?

Satisfying, says Jennifer Johnson, Coverity's marketing VP: "By helping CERN achieve better governance of its software development process, we helped the CERN's quest to understand the universe."

One of the Large Hadron Collider's core software ingredients, ROOT, allowed CERN's physicists to store, analyse, and visualise petabytes of data about the experiment. 

Axel Naumann, a member of CERN's ROOT Development Team was quite pleased with the British company's contribution.

"Like CERN, Coverity finds the unknown; its development testing solution, Coverity Static Analysis, discovers the rare, unpredictable cases that can't be recreated in a test environment," he said

But is the Large Hadron Collider plug and play yet?

Data centre retailer Colt, which claims to have pioneered the home delivery service for datacentres, has shipped a big order to an address with a questionable credit record. Is Colt's unconfined joy over this deal (they even put out a press release!) premature?  

Colt has announced that Verne Global chose its modular data centre for a zero emission data centre campus, based in Keflavik, Iceland.

The firm makes the data centres in the UK and will ship to Iceland early next month, with the system becoming functional by the end of the year, says Colt.

Colt claims its four month build time is 18 months quicker than a traditional build and says the modularity makes it a scalable long term proposition.

Yes, but has Verne Global paid yet? Did they sign for it? What if no one was in, would Colt have just left it on the door step?

I'm sure Colt's shareholders will want to know. Come on Mr Ruddock, explain yourself.

Photo courtesy Comstock

No evidence of corruption has been found in the NHS IT cock up that has cost the UK taxpayer £12.8 billion.

The root causes, according to a spokesman for Campaign4Change, which campaigns for Government IT reforms, are accountability (50%), over ambitious salesmen (30%) politically driven motives (10%) and sheer impracticality (10%).

As the spokesman pointed out, big national IT schemes tend not to work. Many in the administration were working on their first IT project.

There's still much to be investigated, and too many missing details to list, says the Campaign4Change spokesman.

"We need a full breakdown of all the central costs, such as hotels, travelling, expenses, PR," he says.

"Then we need the costs to the NHS of the wasted work. We need details of the LSP's (local service providers) contracts themselves. We need full breakdowns of the money paid to the LSPs, which some say is excessive.

"Tony Blair was too easily lobbied by Bill Gates and other suppliers on how easy it would be to modernise the NHS using computers."

The tax payer isn't finished yet, There's billions worth of bills still to land on the doormat, warns the campaign, and yet more is due to be spent with CSC and BT.

The final costs probably about £8bn-10bn, much of which is questionable value for money.

What were the fundamental mistakes?

The programme (NPfIT) was always too ambitious. It's a bit like building a bridge from UK to US - a good idea but impractical.

But when salesmen suggested the technological equivalent of doing just that, within the NHS, Tony Blair, his officials and health ministers ushered the computer suppliers into their offices and said: "Would you like a chair?"

They had good intentions - modernising the NHS - but it's hard enough to replace one patient administration system within a single hospital, let alone replacing and integrating systems nationally.

Energy management systems are a £7bn market already. It was our taxes that created this market, so we might as well get involved, if only to get our investment back.

So who are the runners and riders in the race for supremacy in this market?

AlertMe offers 'affordable' (why doesn't anyway use the word cheap any more?) home energy management and connected home services.

And best of all, they're looking for channel partners, presumably comms and networking resellers and OEMs. 

Based on a single Home Area Network (HAN) and cloud-based controls platform, AlertMe allows consumers to monitor, control and automate your energy use, heating, Solar PV and security while online.

As a reseller it's another new service you can offer customers to 'improve the relationship'. 

I'm not sure how much money this will earn you, but they claim you can cut energy consumption and bills by 20%!

Only, don't tell Chris Huhne; he'll use it as an excuse to whack up our taxes again. 

Analyst Tiffani Bova, Gartner's VP of world wide sales and channel strategies, says that the channel will play a huge part in the delivery of cloud services, despite what Salesforce.com's CEO Marc Benioff may say.

Last week, Benioff held a revivalist-style rally for Cloud converts at a packed Royal Festival Hall. Even some analysts went native and an IT big wig from a big German bank got so carried away he nearly threw his hands in the air and testified to the Lord of the Cloud. 

After the event, gangs of IT directors and CIOs roamed the South Bank, looking for IT resellers they could fight. A torch bearing mob threatened to storm the offices of nearby IBM, but nobody could access Google maps as the local wi-fi was slow.

But, a week later, a more sober analysis of the effect of the cloud is now possible.

"Considering that Salesforce is looking for developers, I wouldn't say he's too anti channel now," says Bova, "What's he doing keeping app exchange? Why have your own app incubator if you don't like working with partners."

There will always be a need for someone who can take the customer through the last mile, according to Bova. The integrators will be the only people with the skills to quickly gel and fine tune cloud services with the customers infrastructure.

The cloud will change the dynamics of the channel though. The buying patters will change because the reseller will no longer own the customer. Big companies will have their own IT staff, who will know enough about the cloud to order their own services, so the reseller will just get the end part of the job, integration.

The only time resellers may make money on making recommendations will be with the smaller clients, where the margins will be pretty slim.

The good news is that 60 to 70 per cent of IT purchases will go through he channel. The bad news is that the role of the reseller will be more focused.

But even that could be a good thing.

I'm constantly amazed as the omnipotent power of marketing in IT. Mumbo jumbo really has conquered the world.

If you repeat a lie often enough, people will inevitably start to believe it and pass it on. You wanna get a solar panel, they'll say. I know someone who generates so much electricity he has to sell the surplus back to the electricity board.

Nobody has ever produced a single case study of this happening. I almost bought a wind turbine for my house but, at the last minute, the vendor backed out because I wanted to publish the results. There's confidence.

There's the same blind acceptance of every marketing claim about the cloud.

You're already using the cloud but you don't know it, evangelists will say. 'Hands up here anyone who uses Gmail?'

Gmail? Good grief! Gmail is dreadful. As if being ploddingly slow (that's the cloud for you) wasn't bad enough, they've built in some new unwanted features that make finding a message pointlessly fiddly.

Am I the only person driven mad by that cascading thing they do with all the emails from each person? So when you have to search for the email that someone says they sent you last week, you end up having to place your cursor on the right message header needle that's buried in a massive haystack of old correspondence.

Pah!

I never thought I'd say this, but give me Microsoft any time.

Microsoft. Now there was a company we could trust.

I missed the event, but a tip off from a former tabloid journalist told me that the Tableau's partner programme might be worth investigating

Research companies Gartner and IDC both recently rated Tableau as the fastest growing business intelligence vendor in the world. 

We'll have to take their word for that, because I don't have a business intelligence tool at my disposal. No, hang on, yes I do, because Tableau has given me a review account. Set your Google Alert for 'Tableau Review'.

If you don't want to wait you can download a free trial.

The beauty of Tableau, so its makers claim, is its simplicity. It takes the data you already have and makes it easier for you to lay it out into impressive formats. It won't be long before someone claims they've 'consumerised the business intelligence market'.

Apparently, it has the capacity to work out the best way to represent your data - whether that's a pie chart or infographic or venn diagram.

There's been good feedback from Cheyne Capital and Oxford University. They claim they can knock out reports in hours rather than weeks. 

Sounds good. But every product is 'plug and play' these days. Even the Hadron Collider.

Still, the partner programme might be worth checking out. Or you could wait for our review.

Social CRM (Customer relationship management) has produced mixed results for retail giant Arcadia after angry consumer complaints against its Topman brand were made public by its social CRM systems.

After dozens of customers posted angry responses on its web site in response to an obnoxious new t-shirt range the company was forced to clear its shelves.

One garment appeared to glamourise domestic violence by celebrating excuses such as 'You provoked me'.

Another caused offence on a different level with the slogan 'Nice New Girlfriend: What Breed Is She?'.

The feedback from shoppers informed Topman executives that these deliberately un-PC marketing messages might backfire.

Presumably, the thought never occurred to them until then. Blimey, the things CRM can teach you!

'Apparently Topman think domestic violence makes a hilarious T-shirt slogan,' said one poster on the website.

Another told Topman 'you should be ashamed of yourselves.' Er, hello? Shame?.

Sensitive Arcadia marketing executives seem to have held a swift meeting and decided that the market isn't ready for celebrations of violence. So in one respect, social CRM is doing a brilliant job, by giving 'customer-centric' and 'people-focused' executives some valuable feedback.

On the other hand, social CRM puts these sentiments on public display, and naturally the Daily Mail has also brought the story to a much wider audience.

The word is spreading on Topman and Topshop. The idea that they are ghastly and tasteless is (as they say in marketing terms) 'gaining traction'.

At a Billy Graham-style rally in London last week, Marc Benioff told his converts to reject their government and follow him into the cloud. It was all very humbling.

They can make you feel very small, these charismatic CEOs of billion dollar corporations.

But Marc Benioff has got a knack of addressing  an audience and making it seem he's only interested in talking to you. 

So, yes, there were a few other people there, but I still insist that Benioff gave me an exclusive interview (the other people there - analysts, newspaper journalists, people off the telly - were just MicroScope wannabes anyway) 

Benioff leaned over, put his microphone to his lips, and whispered conspiratorially in my ear. He told me something about the UK government that made me feel terribly small again. 

Your government's reliance on G Cloud sucks, he said. I'm paraphrasing. 

In the US, Benioff said, the federal government plans to close half of its data centres in the next few years (in fact, the figure is 800 data centres by 2015, 40%). 

Britain could emulate this by investing in cloud computing, he argued. "My message is: go cloud or die."

Given the influence of visiting UK bigwigs, don't be surprised if the UK government announces new cloud computing targets. I'd be surprised if Francis Maude knows the difference between day care and data centres.

These charismatic US CEOs are incredibly influential. In the last government, Cisco's man in the UK had the ear of Peter Mandelson. It's obvious that Salesforce obviously has legions of believers who see Benioff as some sort of messiah. 

"If you think that was bad, you should see some of the Salesforce events in America," said one analyst.

Benioff is not against all data centres, however, He announced plans for Salesforce.com to open a UK data centre in 2012. "We should shut all the inefficient data centres," he said.

Keep quiet about this - it's an industry secret - but some IT companies can be a bit dull to work for. But how do you move up the ladder?

If your current job leaves you creatively unfulfilled, and you want something impressive to put on your Linkedin profile, why not create a mobile app? You'll never get rich, but it'll impress future headhunters or clients.

We asked Oli Christie (left with comic Dom Joly), CEO of mobile games studio Neon Play for his 10 top tips on creating your own successful mobile game. As a quid pro quo, I should mention that, with over 23 million downloads and seven UK number 1 games, Neon Play is the top independent mobile games studio in the UK. Neon also developed a game for Dom Joly. 

1.  Have a cracking, unique idea. Everyone always says they have a "great idea for a game", but there are 500,000 apps to compete with, so it's not that easy to find one that's never been done before.

2.  Keep it simple. Games like Doodle Jump are very easy to play, but a challenge to master. That is the mantra you should follow for a successful game. 

3.  Do your research. Chances are that your amazing game idea has already been done, so have a look at the App Store and see if there's something similar. If there is, go back to the drawing board or find an interesting different angle.

4.  Don't quit your day job. Only a tiny percentage of apps make a profit. You will not be the next Angry Birds, so manage your expectations. If it succeeds, then quit. Focus on Apple first and Android later.

5.  Talent required. You need a designer and a developer as a bare minimum. If that's not you, ask your mates, go online, but find the best you can afford. Maybe do a rev share. Or programs like Game Salad make it possible to make your own game.

6.  Test, learn and refine. Get as many friends and family to play the game. Don't say a word and watch them play it and see if they get it and which bits they don't. Don't take feedback personally, but change the game where necessary. Playability and fun is key.

7.  Set your price. Do you charge a flat rate 69p for your game? Or go free with advertising? Or the most profitable way is "freemium", which is a free game with features in the game that players buy to enhance their gaming experience. Kerching.

8.  Standing out from the crowd. With hundreds of new apps being released every day, you need to get promotion for your app. So find an interesting news angle, get some PR, use Facebook and Twitter, plus do a promo video for YouTube. Every little helps.

9.  Review sites. Send your game to all the major app review sites and journalists. You get 50 free promo codes from Apple (so they can play the game without paying for it). Good reviews and a high star rating help sales.

10. Listen and learn. Get feedback, fix bugs, do updates. As your fan base grows and you earn more revenue, do a bit more research into other ways to earn money. There is huge potential to earn big bucks, but do not underestimate that it is very, very hard.

In the latest instalment of his PR MasterClass, Gavin Bird, CEO of Condescentii Digital, reminds us that this is a people business.

Journalists, bless them, couldn't function without PR. That's why they sit by their phones all day, waiting for you to call them.

You should never leave a journalist alone with his thoughts, he's likely to get depressed. (Look at me! I'm assuming it will be a man. These days, it could be a lady!)

I tell my staff to phone each journalist ten times a day. But each call has to be different, or the hack is likely to throw one of his (or her!) hissy fits.

Yes, I know what you're thinking: precious so and sos aren't they? Well yes, but's that's the PR man's burden. Just think about the swimming pool, the car and the pesonal helicopter.

Remember, every call you make is 'content'. And what does content have to be? That's right, compelling and engaging!

So here's my list of ten engaging calls you MUST make to any journalist.

1. Hello, I'm not disturbing you am I?

2. I know this isn't quite what you're looking for but...

3. Which publication was this for again?

4. I forgot to ask, but what's your deadline?

5. My client isn't around, but can I give you an old press release? You can have it as an exclusive!

6. When is this going to appear?

It's important to let the client know when their coverage is appearing. Any journalist will be delighted to interrupt what they are doing to help your company's internal admin processes.

7. You've asked me to send a picture. What sort?

8. My client doesn't have a headshot. Wasn't the picture of the XB675 Blade Server good enough?

9. What is high resolution? And what's a jpeg?

10. Hello? I hope you pick this message up. My client is unable to help you and I'm going home now.

There we have it. Those ten calls should get you through any PR journalist engagement, and leave the journalist feeling thoroughly compelled and contented.

There's just one phone call to make now.

"Hello, I'm not disturbing you am I? Can you tell me why you didn't use our press release?"

Panic can set in when a cloud service is over subscribed. In their desperation to keep the plates spinning, the staff and systems will bumble all over the place, like a team of Norman Pipkins, the comic creation of Norman Wisdom. 

Are you about to experience the Wisdom of the cloud? Craig Beddis, regional SVP at UC4 Software, seems to think so.

There is no doubt that enterprises can benefit from putting applications in the cloud to take pressure off their own internal systems, Beddis writes.

However IT managers need to ensure that the cloud provider can cope with spikes in demand or they may experience periods of downtime, perhaps even caused by high usage from the cloud provider's other customers.

Where business-critical applications are moved into the cloud and any downtime could have serious repercussions, businesses must ensure these issues are written into the SLA with the provider to guarantee even high levels of capacity and therefore uptime.

Where possible, IT managers should try to provide as much information as they can to the cloud provider about anticipated level of demand and when and why they should occur, which can be monitored using intelligent automation tools.

Even if specific capacity levels aren't stipulated in the SLA, IT managers can communicate expected high levels to the provider as soon as they are aware of them, which is mutually beneficial as it helps the provider manage and plan their systems and allows the customer to better manage the relationship and therefore levels of service, even if it's not in the formal SLA.

Mike Ramsey, a fictional IT manager, runs the IT operations at a large UK retailer with 40 stores across the country. One of Mike's biggest challenges is how to maximise sales from the company's website and has spent the last five years building a sophisticated e-commerce system. Last year he began looking at ways to cut costs and make customer transactions more efficient and decided to outsource this service to a cloud provider.

By putting customer transactions in the cloud and allowing a third party to carry them out, all customers' details were held on the cloud provider's server. Formal SLAs meant that Mike knew there was high security of this data and if this server went down as it was mirrored in a back-up so that transactions could be carried out 99.99% of the time.

However, when a new online marketing promotion meant that on one day 50% extra customers accessed the site, the transaction system slowed down and many prospective customers became frustrated and left the site without placing an order. 

When he enquired about the problem with the cloud provider, he was told that capacity was too high for the provider to carry out all the transactions with other external traffic their server was experiencing at the time. They apologised but said that this will happen from time to time and that no form of compensation was available as it was not stipulated in the SLAs.