Bob Browning's blog

Last night I went to an evening hosted by those lovely people at Rackspace at the Kensington Roof Gardens. It all came back to me. This was BIBA.

You can tell how old you are when you are the only person in a group to remember BIBA. In the 60’s it was the epitomy of cool. A department store like no other. High fashion sold in the exotic art deco surroundings of the old Derry and Tom’s store. A massive place, set like a stage with mood lighting and notoriously snooty sloan ranger assistants. An at the top of it all the 30’s roof garden where you could have a coffee and watch the beautiful people.

Why did it fail? A combination of things:

• The mood lighting made it rather too easy for shoplifters and ‘shinkage’ was crippling.
• It was a great tourist atraction and people came to look not to shop
• Accountants took over and drove it down-market, looting this fabulous brand until it died.

A lesson for us all. No matter how great it is, it has to work.

Someone (at http://www.ampsl.com/) sent out a spam email with the addresses of the recipeints in the mail. This meant that everyone saw who it was going to. One of many – so I deleted it as usual.

However it started to get replies. Someone decided to mail everyone with their offer. Then spam filters started relying to the list with bounce messages. Then we got angry ‘please remove me’ messages.

All of these got sent to everyone, and we seemed to reach some sort of critical mass where I must have got about 50 emails.

This used to be quite a regular occurance before people understood how to spam, but it has been years.

The last mail said this. I like it.

“After receiving numerous emails from Ampsl Intl ltd with kind offers to buy their products I felt their sales staff would not mind considering products we offer to sell so I sent our marketing info to sales@ampsl.com.

I am sure their sales team sales@ampsl.com would like to hear from all their email friends as to what we as “the ampsl email database” have to offer them “

So lets all send them something…

Another site released… things are getting busy around here..

Should an ecommerce site cost £1,000, £10,000 or £50,000? There is a big disconnect between our development costs for an ecommerce site and many prospect’s expectations.

• With a designer, we developed an ecommerce brand and web site (www.dotcomstore.co.uk) and used Pay Per Click (PPC) to get clients. I think it is a great site, and it seemed like a pretty good wheeze at the time. We spent a couple of grand on PPC before we gave up. Why? We got lots of leads but every one of them expected to spend £2,000 or less on their web site.
• www.firstratedirectory.co.uk is a pretty smart lead generation web site. They publish requests for information (RFI) aimed at people in our businesss. I don’t believe I have seen an ecommerce RFI on the site ever with a budget of more than £5k. Mostly budgets are in the low four figures. I recall someone who wanted an ecommerce site for an auto parts business with a full bill of materials breakdown and a budget of £2k.

There is no way we can produce a web site for this sort of number. A good design by a competent designer is in the £3-6k range and even a very vanilla site will take us a week to set up. So our starting budget is around £6k and we go up to £50k for the bigger more custom sites.

Are we doing something wrong? One of our clients decided for very good reasons to use a (very) serious hosted US-based service called Netsuite. Sadly there was some confusion about who was going to skin the various functions and we ended up doing it. My programmer was on this for about four days with the HTML already cut. This stuff can be complicated.

The only way these expectations can be met as far as I can see is:

• Use a pre-existing template married to a vanilla ecommerce system. Literally plug and go.
• Off-shore the work.

There is obviously a market for the first approach. I have had a few leads myself from people with low level operations and a vanilla requirement who I have pointed at a templated system. However the leads I am discussing above are for people who’s business model justifies something better than this, indeed won’t get anywhere without a substantial marketing budget.

The other issue is that project management time is often disproportionately high for low-budget projects, simply because small clients don’t have the internal disciplines of larger companies. A £2k budget could easily be eaten up in client relations.

The £64,000 question is what happens to these guys? Do they get a serious site built in India for £2,000 and then go on to make their first million or do all these enterprises disappear?
Should I be developing a templated £2k solution or stick to my knitting? If I do, how do I control project management costs?

Did you know that if you search for racing grannies on YouTube, there are over 200 clips. Very cool. At last the web site is live. Punters can now buy their Racing Grannies and Fighting Grandads from the source.

About eight years ago the banks looked at the new world of e-commerce and were horrified at the possibilities for fraud. Visa and MasterCard came up with SET (Secure Electronic Transactions). The idea was that our banks would all issue us with certificates and we would digitally sign every credit card transaction that we made on-line. Huge amounts of money were poured into this and a whole industry created.

• Certificates were going to be put on the chip on our bank card.
• All computers would be made with built-in smart card readers.
• All the e-commerce software was going to be enhanced to support SET.
• Venture capitalists funded software companies by the dozen.
• A web site was set up (it is gone now http://www.setco.org)
• Bankers would tell me that it was ‘definitely going to happen’.

At that time cards didn’t have chips in them and PCs didn’t have card readers. So it was all completely impractical of course. I said so at the time.

Have things changed?

I think they have. In the first place cards do have chips in them. And although PCs don’t have card readers, they all have a USB port now. So why not include a wireless proximity gizmo in the credit card (like your Oyster card) and distribute a USB receiver to customers. The receiver would be pretty cheap to make an so the customer would just have to wave the card at the PC to transfer information to it.

Chip and Pin security for ecommerce transactions. It would save banks and merchants lost of dough.

Bob

Salesforce.com pretty much has the market for Sales Force Automation services sewn up. (it used to be called ‘Contact Management’) They offer a hosted application accessibile via the web and it is a great product. They deserve their place at the top.

So why have we just release a new Sales Force Automation system?

I don’t want to sound too patronising here, but most sales people I know have a relatively short attention span and zero interest in details. They want their tools to be simple, intuitive and fast. So the number of screens and menu options in salesforce.com tend to lead to confusion. I have designed a system based around just two screens.

1. A list of your accounts and a list of current actionss outstanding.
2. A screen about one customer or prospect that you can do anything with by revealing various forms.

The important thing is that neither screen shows all the options up front. But when you click on a link to (say) record a conversation, a form is revealed. Even this form is fairly simple, but as you click on options different bits of the form are revealed. For example if you want to send an email you select from a list of potted emails and a pre-filled email form is presented.

Because our system is integrated with our other software we can customise it. For a client who has an online directory, the sales person can switch directory options on and off and give temporary features from the customer page.

Take a look and let me know what you think. http://www.textor.com/sales-force-automation.html . There is a link to a demo.

Bob

Is Perl old hat. Shouldwe all be retraining in the latest shiny thing to pass by (Ruby on Rails I think)?

I have been programming for more years than I can mention and every few years a new language comes along that absolutely everyone has to get into because the old languages are dead.

The fact is that since PL/1, which was the first 3GL to combine the requirements of commercial and scientific users, the world has only needed at most one more language. Sadly not one that has been created: PL/2 the object-oriented version of PL/1.

I use Perl from day to day because it is there. It is no better or worse overall than all the others. I can deliver solutions with it, and frankly that is all I care about.

Bob

I don’t use my mobile much. What I need is a phone that also stores my calendar and frequently-used phone numbers. That is about it.

All phones synchronise with your PC don’t they? That is what the nice man in Carphone Warehouse told me anyway.

Nonsense of course. All phones synchronise all the entries in your outlook address book. In my case around one thousand. Very few phones allow you to tag entries in your address book for synchronisation. My Moto does.

Very few phones sync your calendar. My Moto doesn’t any more. Not since I installed Outlook 2007. The support forum for the software tells me that a new version is with Moto for testing and that this normally takes two months.

They only ship a few million phones, what is so hard about shipping software that works.

So it seems that my Dell Optiplex 745 (a fairly recent model) comes equipped with a network card that does not support ‘TCP Window Scaling’ – whatever this is. The effect of this is that Outlook, Skype, and Windows live messenger all fail to work.

You have to type this at the prompt

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

which disables it until windows encounters a problem and decides to heal itself when the process starts over again.

Aaaaarrrrhhhh…!