Bob Browning's blog

You may not have noticed, but the stores are starting to get shipments of webbooks.  These are notebook computers that are small, light, and above all cheap.  e.g. £170 each.  They run Unix or Windows XP but have built in wi-fi  and a web browser.  So you can whip one out in Starbucks and surf the net, get your emails and so on with a real computer with a real keyboard and screen – albeit a small one. You can’t run Vista on most of these, but Windows 7 will apparently run on one of these devices. 

What with cloud computing coming into its own, people are going to be using this sort of device to write documents, keep their diary and so on.  Clearly a GOOD IDEA.

They are such a good idea, that I can see them becoming pretty unbiquitous.  So ???

So – remember when you had to size your web pages for 600×480 screens.  Well these little blighters are not much better. Maybe 800×480.  These won’t count as mobile devices so a separate style sheet will not do the job.   Most web pages are sized for much higher resolutions that this. 

We have a  problem Houston.

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Question. What is my position on Google for some keyword? 
Response: Who are you and what have you been doing on the web lately

Check out the fascinating interview with Bruce Clay.  The future of search engine optimisation looks different – very different.  Google will change the results based on your history, your location, and even what other sites you have been visiting. So two people searching for the same keyword will get different results.  If that is the case what does search engine position mean? 

Bruce predicts this for Q1 next year. 

He also predicts a return to the google dance, which has been moribund for some time, as Google starts experimenting.  He thinks that will start including new factors in its search related to how interesting your site is, measured by things like video on the site, Flash and so on.  So some Flash may even help your positioning in the future – if there were some way of giving meaning to the word position.

Watch the interview – 10 minutes well spent.

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If you get David Pogue’s email newsletter you will have laughed out loud at his description of the Blackberry Storm.  Stephen Fry follows up with a storm warning of his own (no prizes for the most puns on Storm you can find).  A Blackberryphile client of mine bought one and sent it straight back. 

In other words it is a dud (allegedly).

The interesting question though is: what happened?  Vodaphone have been hyping this like mad, and in the process must be damaging both their own brand and the Blackberry brand as they dissapoint customers. 

Some engineer in Vodaphone must have told his boss not to touch this one.  Did he/she get ignored? Was there a groupthink process that intimidated the engineer?  Were they so desperate for an iphone competitor that they decided to over-rule our hero?  

We shall never know.

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Lexus marketing has taken off in a terrific new direction with a website containing a library of original  short films. This includes a series with Lisa Kudrow (Web Therapy) which is a hoot.   Check out Puppy Love when you have 7 minutes to spare, it is incredibly well made. If you are a Doors fan (some of us are that old) check out the piece with Ray Manzarek.

Everything about this site is high quality.  The scripts, the acting, the production and the flash player. 

The only thing is – does it sell cars?  There is not a car in sight.

Maybe it sells something.  One of the shorts is about the Lexus Hybrid – Hotel suite.  This is an enviroment-friendly hotel room sponsored by Lexus. It is in a luxury hotel in San Fancisco.  You couldn’t make it up. 

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The new version of IE8 will have three modes of operation.  Quirks, standard, and super-standard. These roughly correspond to compatibility with IE4/5/6; IE7 and W3C standards.  They are making super-standards the default.   

The good news (for some) is that you can add a meta-teg to tell IE8 to revert to IE7 standards.  So it is fairly simple to get by if you are having problems with IE8.  This gives you a let-out if you had to go non-standard to make your design work with IE7.

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Last Year some time, someone in the National Audit Office asked for some data about child benefit claimants from HMRC.   The HMRC person asked someone in the IT department who, instead of just running of an SQL statement, passed on the request to their outsource company.   The Any IT person will tell you that running an SQL statement on even a large database such as this would normally be hours of work, maybe a day if the database is complex.  However the HMRC person says she was given a quote of £15,000. 

HOW MUCH!! 

(more…)

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Jakob Nielsen (Useability alert box June 30th) argues that we should ditch Unique Visitors as a metric.  In fact bouncers who visit only one page should be counted as a negative because the site failed to engage them even enough to entice a second pageview.

Unique visitors is considered the primary metric by marketeers who are concerned about eyeballs, and are not so worried about whether the visitor engages with the site, as much as they see their ad.  And the same person seeing the same ad over and over again is to them a negative. 

However someone who hits the back button as soon as they see the page is less likely to look at an ad, but how do you measure that?    

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We live just off kew bridge road, which turns into a long thin car park every morning and evening as commuters struggle to cross the Thames.  So a massive opportunity for billboard advertisers, and lo and behold they spent a good part of last year putting up a large, very permanent, billboard with one of those rotating thingys that changes the ad every  few seconds. This year they took all the rotating thingy stuff out and replaced it with a massive electronic billboard.  Now the adverts are in motion.

We see the same thing happening on the underground and in supermarkets.  The new digital signs look good and attract attention because they have motion.  They are also a lot cheaper to change ads.

But where is all this going?  The big news here is gesture control.  (more…)

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Back in 1999 we decided to set up bobsguide.com on a commercial basis.  It is an industry portal in the finance technology market.  We had ambitions to do other sites, but finance was limited.  We always wondered what we could do if we could get some real big finance but somehow or other it didn’t happen. 

So bobsguide has been self-financing and is now doing good business with a six figure profit.  A Nice Little Company.

At the same time another company, Verticalnet Inc, with an identical ambition to set up multiple industry portals was having its IPO for $738 meg.   If only we had access to that sort of funding. 

I sort of post touch with what happened to them, but had occasion to look them up today.   It seems that three years later they reported a deficit of $1.2 billion and losing around $5 million a month.  So I guess if they started with around $700 meg they must have burned around $2 billion in three years.  One heck of a burn rate I think you will agree.   Eventually they were bought for peanuts. 

The sad thing is that our experience with bobsguide.com shows that the concept was sound.  They could, with some average management, have made Verticalnet into a really great company.

I missed their demise at the time.  In retrospect there must have been properties / markets that were opened up because of their demise, which we could have moved in to.  If only we had enough finance…

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Firefox 3.0 is here. Awesome speed. 

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