TechWire

Goodbuy.ie -- great idea, needs a firm hand

The idea behind Goodbuy.ie is that people tell each other about bargains they find around the place or online. It covers the main consumer categories. Right now, though, too many of the notices (a majority, I'd even say) are simply companies trying to advertise what they consider their inherent 'great value'. The site needs decent moderation or it won't work.

Why Apple should licence its OS

Appearing on Today FM the other day, my co-guest told me that he'd just taken delivery of a Psystar iMac clone, with OSX and a full specification, for $550 (plus $60 delivery). As many readers of this blog will know, Apple wants to shut Psystar down -- it has filed a lawsuit claiming huge damages for cloning its operating system. But instead, Apple should licence its OSX system to whoever will pay the licence fee. Here are three reasons why.

Reason 1: Steve Jobs has left Apple. Yes, it's only for six months -- officially -- but there's a decent chance he's not coming back. That means limited potential for hardware innovation over the coming months and years. Just look at MacWorld earlier this month -- virtually nothing on offer, arguably the result of Jobs's lack of ability to concentrate on Apple because of his health. A falling off of product development means eventual dwindling sales -- Apple depends on being the latest and greatest to make money.

Reason 2: It has a great chance to gain huge market share in the OS market at this moment, thanks to the vulnerability and poor market perception of Windows. Vista has been a flop. But sorry, the chances of Ubuntu -- or another Linux platform -- taking up the slack are slim. OSX is the best operating system out there: why not licence it and lock Dell, HP and the rest in for 10 years? It's a guaranteed money earner. Yes, it does mean losing some of Apple's own hardware sales, because Macs are way more expensive. But there will still be plenty of people who will pony up the extra cash for an Apple-configured machine.

Reason 3: To avoid making the same mistake it made in the early 1980s. 25 years ago, Apple was in a position of great market potential -- until it refused to licence its OS to PC manufacturers. The result is history: dominance by Windows ever since. With 90 per cent market share comes a virtual lock on productivity software, save for graphic design: it's not that general business types don't like using Macs, it's just that it's too awkward, if not impossible, to get the software applications they need -- or that their staff are already trained in -- for anything other than Windows. So release the OS into the market now, watch it pick up steam and watch every developer start making applications for it.

Superquinn.ie fail to deliver

Maybe I shouldn't be cribbing, but...
We tried out Superquinn's online shopping for the first time today. The reason was because it's offering free delivery (it's normally €9).
Anyway, our €115 shopping haul was all set for delivery today. But they rang up and said no, they couldn't deliver today, but what about tomorrow?
Er, no -- today was arranged around that and there was a meal to be cooked tonight on the basis of it. "Oh well, sorry," was the reply. There then followed wrangling over whether we were entitled to have money refunded to the credit card. Pretty unbelievable.
I then sent off a mail about it to help@superquinn.ie and CCd the company's head of online shopping, John Smith. No reply so far, no acknowledgement, no nothing.
Maybe moaning about this on a blog is a bit cheap. But do these guys expect repeat service? No wonder people think twice about online shopping with them...

E63: a post-script

I'm sending back Nokia's E63 this morning and, despite the positive comments I made below, a part of me is not sad to see it go. Despite its good productivity software and its (relatively) bargain price (€253 sim-free on Expansys), the lack of HSDPA started to really irritate me at times. And it frequently dropped in and out of 3G coverage in the middle of Dublin, which slowed things up an awful lot when I was online. So if online activity is important to you, this is probably not the phone for you.

List of Grrr: part 1

1. Putting a timestamp on an e-mail that ensures it stays at the top of my list for a full day. This, presumably, is meant to be ‘clever’ marketing.

2. Hiding what turns out to be an interesting service offering in a dense collage of jargon, hyperbole and clichés.

3. Leaving a voice message with little information other than a request to be rung back. One’s immediate family or close friends are entitled to do that: a work associate or business acquaintance is not.

 4. Irish websites with no information about who is behind the business. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to see enough confidence in the product or service to put a name and contact address up.

 5. E-mails with pictures and graphics embedded into them. They tip the e-mail into negative appreciation territory.

6. People who print off large reports and then just leave them in the printer. In our office, they go in the bin when I come across this, no matter what's on them.

7. People who send e-mails around -- at least twice a week -- asking for things (such as painkillers, chocolate) that they could easily, easily organise themselves (such as by walking across the road to the local newsagents)

8. PDF files. Full stop.

Feel free to add/contribute...

Spam doesn't include politics

There's a fair old amount of huffing going on at the moment about what is or isn't spam, especially e-mails from political parties.

While some e-mails are clearly spam, others are harder to categorise. Contact about political issues, or from political parties, is one such dilemma.

If someone sends me an e-mail about a missing person, I feel a little churlish complaining to them (and the world) that it's spam. If someone sends me a mail about a vote (or something) that's happening in the Dail -- such on the cervical vaccine -- again, I feel a little uncomfortable about shouting them down because I didn't consent to their sending me an e-mail. Yet this is a political issue: and I did not give my consent receiving the mail.

So is a political party sending me an e-mail about an issue regarded as unacceptable spam, where the aforementioned incidents aren't? On balance, probably not.

If I don't want to be contacted again -- if I want to be side-stepped in the political canvassing process -- by a political party, I can tell them so. I can 'unsubscribe', if you will. "But that's not the way spam is regulated, you shouldn't have to unsubscribe from companies' spam -- why should political parties be any different?"

Well, political parties are different.

People have a right to stand on a soapbox with a megaphone and shout or complain about an issue they feel strongly about. They have the same right -- as irritating as it sometimes is -- to send us letters doing the same thing, based on the electoral register

For this reason, we recognise that political parties have a (limited) right to pitch ideas and concepts to citizens. They're given direct access to the airwaves at election time. They're allowed stick posters up on lamposts. Are ordinary companies given this public access? Are they allowed stick posters up all over the place? No. So why do we let political parties do this? Because we differentiate them from commercial companies.

So how is sending an e-mail different?

There is a second issue, too. If I write a blog where I comment, analyse, criticise and praise all sorts of issues, including political ones, how outraged should I be if a political party decides to send me an (unsolicited) e-mail on something? Not very much, I would have thought.

Make no mistake, getting an e-mail from a party can be bloody irritating. But it has to be a different class of thing to spam from a company. (Unless you're ultra cynical and believe that political parties are simply in it to make money ie keeping themselves and their cronies in a job.)

Chris Horn rips into Michael Dell

Chris Horn, Iona co-founder, has a thoughtful post on Dell's demise in Ireland. He also criticises Michael Dell ("unprofessional") for not turning up to tell the staff first-hand. There's also criticism for the Tanaiste, Mary Coughlan.

Create a wi-fi area from a 3G broadband dongle

There didn't seem to be much much going from a product point of view at CES, but this caught my eye. For all those who have signed up to a 3G broadband service, this lets you share the signal within wi-fi range. It's out next month and will cost about €120.

Virgin's 50Mbs broadband -- not coming to a city near you

And here we go with another round of catchup in Ireland. While we're patting ourselves on the back for getting above 1Mbs, Virgin will be selling (up to) 50Mbs in British cities (but not the North) this summer.

Why retailers should follow Michele's lead

Michele Neylon runs a web-hosting and domains company called Blacknight. For one day only (today), he's registering domains for €12.15 (€10 excluding Vat), about half the price of a normal .ie registration. He'll make a bit of a loss on this. But he's onto a winner. Because loads of people now know about it. And those who have registered (me included) will, if they get a decent service, see no reason to move registrars in future, when the 'normal' profitable rates come due. So it's a smart long-term move. And it's exactly what Irish retailers should be doing right now: slash your prices, take a short-term loss, and build big customer loyalty.

Retailers' "price promises": beware the small print

In today's Independent, both Currys (which now incorporate Dixons) and DID Electrical have sale prices on electronics and tech stuff. Both stores promise to match any cheaper price found elsewhere, in a "price promise" marketing routine. But check the terms and conditions, and you'll find that it amounts to very little. Does it cover online shops, for instance? At least those with physical bases in Ireland (eg Elara.ie and, now, Komplett.ie)?
Sorry, says Currys. The price promise doesn't apply to any "internet... special offers or limited offers (ie first 10 days only)".
What's a "special offer"? Is it a sale price, by any chance? Apparently it is -- so if you see the same product for less somewhere else, but it's "on sale", Currys doesn't have to honour its "price promise".
And its "limited offers" exception is just as bad. If a product is cheaper elsewhere, but only during a "limited" time, such as a weekend sale, or a"first 10 days only" basis, then Currys doesn't have to honour the price promise either.
Doesn't that get it out of any "price promise" obligation?
The chain has incorporated the slogan: "We Won't Be Beaten On Price" into its headline branding. But this is a bit of a con, surely. Perhaps a case of the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland?

New MacBook Air for less than €1,000

Gotta love Ebay. Where some Apple resellers quietly dispose of their unsold stock. Like this MacBook Air, which is last generation, so 1.6Ghz instead of 1.8Ghz. It's €999 here ('buy-it-now' price), from Senap, a British Ebay store.

Full-specced laptops for €380

How can Irish retailers compete with laptopsdirect.ie? A Lenovo N500 laptop, 2GB Ram, 2Ghz dual core Intel chip, 250GB hard drive, Bluetooth, webcam, DVD-write. €380 (€400 including delivery)...

Wow

Gorgeous stuff from Lenovo. (And not a little like the iMac.) Full HD, too.

A modest proposal to the next Yes campaign: try a bit of social networking

For the yoof vote, I mean. Note to Peter Sutherland and other over-50s preparing the ground. Here are two suggestions.

..

1. Use Bebo and Facebook effectively

Instead of creating a website, a campaign on a social networking website (Bebo, Facebook, Nimble) would be preferable. And it should be subtle, with a feel-good tone to it.

The main reasons are:

-- Bebo and Facebook have well over 1.5 million Irish subscribers between them, far more than any website could hope to achieve.

-- Internet users spend way more time on Bebo pages than on websites, interacting with the content and leaving comments and messages

-- Bebo users in Ireland are mostly between 18-25, and Facebook users are mostly between 18-35.

-- It’s probably far cheaper (and easier) to reach a lot more people on Bebo and Facebook than it is on a website

Irish companies are starting to mount campaigns on Bebo, in particular, to try to capture attention. They’re getting big feedback in commonly-used metrics (‘friends’ created etc).

What companies do is to create a Bebo member’s page (which they can do for free anyway) and then engage (ie pay) Bebo to promote that page among its 1 million Irish subscribers.

One recent corporate campaign (for Pat The Baker) cost about €9,000 (as reported in the The Sunday Business Post). For that, they got a variety of promotions on the website.Once up, the Bebo page would need content. To get people to come on and engage with the site, this content could include stuff like:

-- Competition for the best European picture from anywhere in the European Union outside Ireland

-- A poll on who is the favourite/most attractive European celebrity

-- A poll on who is the best non Irish (and maybe non-British) European rock or pop group?

-- A section for Europeans living in Ireland to post their videos and/or pictures

And plenty of other stuff.

2. A Euro version of Sofia's Diary

Sofia’s Diary is a multi-million viewership video diary on Bebo posted by a girl (Sofia) about her everyday life, her ups and down. The brainchild of an Irish company, it is filmed on a simple digital video camera, is scripted, and has modestly editing and post-production.

With a bit of imagination and organisation, there's no reason the Yes campaign couldn't create something similar. My suggestion would be a Polish, Latvian or Lithuanian girl living in an Irish city or large town, maybe about 18 years old.

Something along these lines could draw thousands (or tens of thousands) of people to ‘subscribe’ to updates (in the form of new episodes) of the diary. (

Sofia’s Diary attracts hundreds of thousands of viewers.)

As to the subject of the video -- call it ‘Anna’s Diary’ -- it could be simple everyday things that relate to younger people. What her ups and downs are. What she does. Who her friends are. What she likes. What she doesn’t like. Whether she had a boyfriend.

One of the benefits of doing this is that, once made, it can be uploaded (free) to a number of heavily-visited websites -- Bebo, Facebook, YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion and others.

It would need a general (scripted) story outline, an actress and some production resources.

If successful, it would also attract considerable media attention.