August 2010 Archives

With September almost here it's time to put the trunks away in a drawer, deflate the lilo and put the sunglasses back in the case. If the British weather isn't enough of a reminder summer is over and there's some serious work to be done.

The next few months are going to be crucial for the channel and will be tough. October will be all about cuts as the details of the spending review become clear and that is likely to have an impact on November. Come December and some of us will be talking of Santa while others moan about the looming VAT rate rise.

For those in the public sector things are already difficult but the government is not full of idiots (Eton and Oxford would have a thing or two to say about it if that claim was made) and so there has to be some recognition that too much bad news might be damaging.

The hard medicine that we have all had to swallow was delivered in the emergency budget but it has continued to drag as the details are waited for. There has been little to distract from the gloom with even England's success on the cricket field being overshadowed by a betting scandal.

But as the views of a selection of industry players on page 10 shows there is still a huge amount of optimism and if any sector knows how to navigate through choppy waters it is the channel.

The channel has seen the green shoots and refused to be thrown off its course by the gloom and doom and as the industry gears up for the most important quarter things are looking fairly stable. The number of insolvencies are down, credit insurance is apparently coming back on track and the technological arguments for an upgrade are being led by a strong-selling Windows 7.

As the heads go down and the hard work begins the hope is that the next few months will be a return to seasonal spending that it strong for the channel. Cameron and company need to talk things up but they can leave the hard work of driving the recovery to the channel.

At the end of a phone call about some embargoed news that comes out on Monday I had to mention that its a Bank Holiday.

There was a pause as those on the line, both calling in from different exotic places overseas, struggled to understand just why the Brits wouldn't be working on Monday.

For one terrible moment I felt very lazy and found myself apologising for not being straight into work. But then I thought; hold on a minute, chum - I'm allowed a day off now and again and if the banks can't give us our money back or help resellers get loans the least they can do is provide an excuse for a day off.

Over a lunch the other day the subject of Twitter came up along with the usual debate about its value as a form of communication.

But there was another spin to the debate with this contact arguing in the last calander year providing content and engaging with social media had cost the company in excess of £60,000 in man hours.

This instantly challenges the notion that social media is 'free' because clearly there are costs to those that want to engage with it seriously.

it also makes you wonder if those vendors that are encouraging mass participation by resellers appreciate the costs involved might not be monetary but do translate to serious ones in terms of time and effort. Just giving it to a junior member of the marketing team to look after is not perhaps the wisest idea.

As the National Theatre found out last night after its tweet stream included a post calling a journalist an unmentionable name there are implications on branding and reputation that need to be considered with Twitter.

So it was refreshing to see that someone has gone to the effort of pricing up the time spent on social media networks. Resellers might well need to be conscious of a costing argument as they face discussions with vendors where the pressure to get involved online is significant.

It is easy to lose things, we have all gone mad looking for that missing sock or our mobile phones and car keys, but when it comes to a retailer losing your personal financial information it's harder to be forgiving.

After all when you walk into a store along with expecting the retailer to have a decent product range and a number of different price points you also expect that the credit card slips and other details will not end up going AWOL.

You expect this even more because outfits including Visa have talked of the efforts they are making to get retailers to look after that information and that has given rise to things like PCI, which comes into effect for major retailers at the end of next month.

But what the last couple of days have shown is that data continues to get lost and treated in a fairly sloppy manner. Credit agreements left in skips by Dixons and backup tapes simply vanishing over at Zurich Insurance are things that should cause some alarm.

On the positive side the fact that we all know about them shows that data loss is becoming more of a public issue and organisations like the Information Commissioner's Office will name and shame those that lose data.

But on the negative side it shows that it continues to happen and that there is still a very carefree attitude being shown towards sensitive data. Perhaps the threats of what can happen when security is compromised hasn't got through to retailers but it needs to and it needs to quickly.

You sense the naming and shaming and fines are only going to get more stern and steeper as time goes on. 

If you have ever come back to your car and found a fine attached to the windscreen or got a letter and a demand through the post for driving in a bus lane you will be familar with the pay in 14 days and get a 50% discount idea.

What is interesting to note is that this discount policy appears to be applicable to even the largest fines. At the bottom of the statement the Financial Services Authority made about its decision to fine Zurich Insurance £2.3m for losing customer data it had a little nugget about the discount procedure.

"As Zurich UK agreed to settle at an early stage of the investigation the firm qualified for a 30 per cent discount. Without this discount the firm would have been fined £3.25 million."

So next time you find that fine waiting and bemoan the games they play with the fortnight to pay or the threat of baliffs just remember the same technique is used whether its £50 or £2m.

There is something rather sick in the way that spammers use events, including natural disasters, to dump rubbish in user's inboxes.

When most people in Russia might have been worried about fires and heat waves spammers decided to use that opportunity to promote air conditioners.

The craze for Paul the World Cup result predicting Octopus is still being taken advantage of according to the latest Symantec State of Spam and Phishing report.

But if you thought you could see those spam messages coming the blank subject line technique is proving to be the most popular technique currently being used to lure users into opening emails they might try to avoid.

Taking the tongue out of the cheek for a while, the point here is that while most of us are heads down trying to get through the current recession and talk of double dip, there are some trying to add to the misery and load the inbox with spamming nonsense.

Symantec is already warning that next year's cricket world cup is being exploited and presumably the phrase 'double dip' will be one used by phishing folk over the next few months.

If spam didn't have security concerns and impact bandwidth the temptation would be to skim through an analysis of that market but what the Symantec findings show is that it is a widespread and serious problem where the unscrupulous target the innocent and that is no laughing matter.

I'm busy collecting the deed poll details just in case any of my social networking activity embarrasses me so much I have to resort to changing my identity.

This might sound extreme but according to Google boss Eric Schmidt he thinks children will have to change their names later on to distance themselves from earlier tom foolery online. Bearing in mind many employers use social networking as one of their checks before offering a job it could be something that starts to happen.

He talked about being more forgiving of youth but to be honest there might have to be a bit more forgiveness of those slightly longer in the tooth.

A couple of weeks ago a tech PR from the other side of the pond decided to moan about a shop online abusing the owner only for the rest of us to watch as many of her followers hit the unfollow button.

She might well be thinking of distancing herself from that episode but a name change seems a little extreme.

From MicroScope's newest correspondent Sherlock Hubbucket.

One of the main features of social networking is that you share almost everything. You know when someone is having a coffee, catching a flight or their feelings on the football.

But imagine for a second you are sitting in an office running the channel side of things for a major vendor. You want a change in job but you know that the minute you brush up your LinkedIn entry people will talk and you can hardly pop up on Facebook or Twitter chatting away about what potential opportunities are out there.

So for those people perhaps the idea of anonymity is relevant even if it does sound a little bit against the spirit of social networking.

In a recent chat with one of the founders of Executives Place, Joseph Blass, a recruitment site that is launching with well paid channel players in mind, the anonymous approach was explained in a way that made it seem obvious that those looking for a senior move would not want anyone able to directly identify them.

Of course they want people to be able to identify their skills and experience and those things are listed but the name and current employer remain shrouded in mystery until things get to the point where it is a lot more serious and a job interview or offer is on the cards.

It provoked a train of thought about just how much we are prepared to give away online and how some of the social networking tools might actually work against someone wanting to make a job move.

Sometimes there can be good reasons to keep your identity hidden and perhaps a bit more balance is required for all of us. You might be interested to hear I'm enjoying a coffee but my boss might not be too keen to hear I'm gathering references on LinkedIn and brushing up my CV letting it be known I want a move.

This isn't a blog written with a political agenda just one driven by frustration because surely the time for the negative messages has come and gone and now the government should be talking things up?

When you see the Chancellor saying that it is going to be a choppy recovery your head dips that little bit because you know that in October the spending cuts will be detailed, January VAT will rise and the bad news potentially will keep coming in dribs and dabs.

Okay so we all need to be realistic and hear these things but there was so much hard medicine for us all to swallow in the emergency Budget that what we all need now are more positive messages.

Confidence is a strange commodity and if George Osborne and his friends are not careful they will give it one dent too many and the feared double dip that many people are almost obsessed about will come into being.

Come on George and co talk things up a bit.