Business

Changes to business digitisation brings

Getamac: Apple Launches UK Switch Campaign
The UK equivalent of the Apple US Switch campaign was launched today in the UK. Featuring Mitchell & Webb, well known and highly-respected UK comics, they maintain the signature people-standing-in-front–of-a-white-backgrounds look of other Apple campaigns.
The casting is perfect, with the PC played by David Mitchell and Robert Webb being the Mac – the business/casual roles they played in the genius TV venture, Peep Show.
Apple must be spending large on this as it’s all over the UK MySpace pages, with double ads showing on a lot of the pages.
Clearly riding on the shirt-tails of the world’s obsession with iPods, through this campaign Apple, are attempting to persuade iPod-owners that their computing lives could be just as beautiful as their music lives. By the look of the last Quarter’s figures from Apple, where they sold just over a million Macs and over 21 million iPods, it’s not a bad idea to increase your computer sales.
There’s three campaigns in the wild at the moment, Restart; Virus and Office, are all worth a watch. Luckily someone (just perhaps, just perhaps, the advertising company!) has put the adverts up on YouTube – a pretty neat trick for something that hasn’t been on TV yet.
Restart plays on the fact that PCs freeze and often crash during use, while Macs don’t suffer this to the same degree – although it’s not unknown.
Virus takes great delight in the 140k new viruses that were created for PCs last year, while the number of Mac viruses remains minimal – something that might change if lots more people starts buying Macs.
Office encourages people to detach their home PCs from being associated from the work PC, which is normally a PC – what this will do to people who have Macs at work is yet to be established.
Quite what Mitchell thinks of being cast as the dorky PC is unknown, but we suspect he’ll be mopping up his tears with his bulging appearance fee cheque.
BTW – Our fave Apple advert remains the Home Movie.
Apple also have it all over their site.
29 January, 2007
BT Stays Top Of The UK Broadband League
New figures from research firm Epitiro puts BT as the leading consumer broadband provider for the 4th quarter of 2006 (October-January).
Their research found BT to be providing the best overall service, closely followed by Pipex, Orange and Demon, with Virgin in 5th place. Despite their low placing, Virgin recorded the lowest number of connection failures, suggesting that their customers achieved the highest degree of uptime.
BT notched up the fastest HTTP download speed and fastest FTP downloads from users’ personal webspace, with Pipex recording the fastest FTP upload speed.
Epitiro’s testing procedure monitors “customer experience” for internet access services, analysing over 622,000 real-time data samples from eleven locations around the UK – meaning that each broadband service was tested around 60,000 times.
Like ferrets in a drainpipe factory, Epitiro’s boffins keenly rummaged through these figures to get a breakdown of the speed and reliability of Internet connections, connection times, download and upload speeds, and the performance of both ping and DNS lookups.
The report also shows browsing speeds increasing steadily throughout last year, with the fourth quarter recording an average consumer ADSL connection speed at 5728.3 kilobytes per second.
“ISPs are increasing their speeds, which is good news for bandwidth-hungry users,” commented Epitiro’s Gavin Johns.
“Speeds have increased from 3817.82 kilobytes per second in the third quarter due to new ADSL Max entrants into the ten largest broadband providers. However it’s unlikely that many ADSL Max services will perform at their full capacity of 8Mbps. The speed of broadband service reduces the further the customer’s connection is from their local telephone exchange,” he added.
Overall rankings Q4 2006 (Q3 2006 in brackets)
1 BT (BT)
2 Pipex (Pipex)
3 Demon (Orange)
4 PlusNet (Demon)
5 Virgin (Virgin)
Epitiro
29 January, 2007
YouTube To Share Ad Revenue With Uploaders
Filmmakers who upload their own movies on to the video-sharing website YouTube will soon be able to enjoy some financial rewards for their efforts.
In an interview with the BBC, YouTube founder Chad Hurley announced that the company was working on a revenue-sharing mechanism designed to “reward creativity”.
Set to start rolling out in a couple of months, the deal would raise revenue to reward creative camcorder types via a mixture of adverts and short clips slipped in at the beginning of a clip.

Only folks who own the full copyright of the videos can expect to receive a wedge of the moolah, with YouTube introducing the advertising technology incrementally.
Somerfield Staff Antics on YouTube
Elsewhere, UK supermarket chain Somerfield has launched an inquiry after video clips of their staff mucking about turned up on YouTube.
Various staff members are seen larking about while wearing the store’s uniform, including a break dancing shelf stacker, an “extreme floor cleaner” crashing into a wall and a nutter hurtling down a car park slope on a shopping trolley.

Somerfield has said that they are looking into the incidents, sternly adding that they will, “take any necessary action where appropriate.”
Of course, all they’ve really done is helped publicise the clips for everyone else to enjoy – and reminded us of our equally daft antics in previous crap jobs.
Somerfield YouTube videos
29 January, 2007
Now Is the Time for Blockbuster to Make Its Move
It’s time for Blockbuster to get into the online download business. The market is only now emerging and the pickings are slim, but it’s not too soon for the company to expand its offerings to include web-based movie downloads and rentals. It could be the only company to offer a true “triple-play” of mail, brick-and-mortar, and online access – a combination that (given innovative marketing) could give a second wind to a dying brand and uniquely position the company for long-term success.
Failure to Launch
Blockbuster has a lousy record when it comes to identifying and quantifying emerging trends that may impact its business. Once a leviathan in the consumer video space, Blockbuster has seen its DVD sales migrate to mass retailers such as WalMart and Target; its DVD rentals cannibalized by Internet-based mail order houses (NetFlix); and its movie rental revenue snacked on by PayTV and on-demand providers.
The result? The company enjoys the unique ‘blessing’ of managing hundreds of retail outlets, many of them struggling to stay open, others being shuttered on a weekly basis. The ‘local video store’ may never fade away, but Blockbuster’s version of it is dying a slow death.
What Train?
Of particular embarrassment was Blockbuster’s inability to foresee the emergence of NetFlix. Blockbuster’s senior strategists sat idly by as a no-name upstart gobbled up millions of Blockbuster converts who wanted a better video experience and knew how to take advantage of a basic Internet-connected PC.
Even now Blockbuster continues to play second fiddle to a once-tiny company that had an interesting idea, a decent understanding of technology, and a unique business model. Blockbuster’s leadership simply didn’t see the train coming, and by the time they did realize that NetFlix was for real, the train had pretty much rolled over them.
To give you an idea how much was at stake, simply take a look at NetFlix’s Q4 2006 earning statements revealed on Wednesday, January 24, 2007: NetFlix now has more than 6.3 million subscribers (compared to Blockbuster’s 2 million online subscribers) and enjoyed fourth quarter revenue of $277 million. That’s got to hurt!
Hard to Shake Old Habits
In March 2006, Blockbuster CEO John Antioco stated that the company had a “digital future” that could very well take it to a greater size than it achieved as a primarily store-based business. If judged by Blockbuster’s conduct since that time, he must be the only one who knows that strategy.
Yes, Blockbuster was an early investor in CinemaNow but never was a strong supporter of the concept or the company (it was too busy tending to NetFlix-related wounds). Yes, in June 2006 Blockbuster reportedly tried to buy a majority stake in Movielink for $70 million but the deal was killed. In both these cases, however, the Blockbuster brand was not involved – these strategies involved leveraging an existing online brand (neither of which have to date enjoyed any success).
Today, Blockbuster still has no real presence in an important emerging market while brands such as Amazon and Apple have already started building their own online rental and sell-thru video businesses.
Yet a recent shift in Blockbuster’s strategy may be the first sign that the company is actually aware of what cards it does hold.
Extending the Logic of Blockbuster’s “Total Access”
In November 2006, Blockbuster rolled out its “Total Access” program, an initiative that gives customers the option of returning DVDs through the mail or at their local Blockbuster store where, should they choose, they could pick up movie for free (but with time limit on viewing and return required at the same store). According to CEO Antioco, Total Access is the reason why Blockbuster’s online user base grew to 2 million at year-end 2006, up 500,000 in the fourth quarter alone. This is just speculation on his part (no evidence was cited) but it is interesting nonetheless.
To blend the concept of the direct mail DVD rental service with its local retail stores – and to brand the offering separately – would appear to be an obvious move. For Blockbuster, however, this represents a strategic revolution compared to its usual blind-leading-the-blind strategic thinking. (Again, this is the same company that thought it could bury NetFlix in just a couple years.)
Tactically, blending these two businesses makes a lot of sense. Strategically, however, it’s a better move than first glance might indicate.
New Moves for New Media
What’s the one thing that Blockbuster has that NetFlix, Apple, or CinemaNow don’t have? Hundreds of ‘brick-and-mortar’ retail video stores. None of these competitors has an interest in getting into the brick-and-mortal video distribution business, but this is precisely why Blockbuster has a lock on this notion. Ironically, it may be the local video stores that end up the centerpiece of Blockbuster’s digital future. They provide Blockbuster with a one-of-a-kind local marketing channel through which it can educate its customers about the benefits of online distribution and how to enable it, while still serving the needs of those interested in mail or in-store procurement.
Combining the online mail-order DVD and stand-alone retail businesses should be but the first step in a larger journey that culminates in a Blockbuster “triple-play” that also incorporates a full-blown online movie rental and sell-thru service. Not a CinemaNow or Movielink service, but a Blockbuster-branded offering that, when blended with the retail and mail-order channels, represents a comprehensive but tightly integrated offering that competitors simply can’t match. This comprehensive vision would serve Blockbuster well: it could minimize or recast what cannibalization did occur because of digital distribution by providing a comprehensive yet cohesive market message, one in which Blockbuster is itself recast as the true innovator in consumer video.
As well, Blockbuster has the brand clout to help legitimize online video distribution. Think of how Apple’s entry into the online video business (and its pending introduction of the AppleTV set-top box) has drawn attention to the progress that online video has made, as well as enhanced the awareness of online movie services. Blockbuster’s entry would have a similar impact, but instead of speaking to Apple fans and technology enthusiasts, it would whisper to the mass audience of Internet households that (given the right equipment) a broadband connection is now a legitimate conduit for delivering on-demand movie content to your primary home TV.
Sure, this type of prognostication is best reserved for long-term strategy discussions, but that’s exactly how Blockbuster should be thinking. After all, if you’re going to say you have a “digital future,” it’s to the future you should first look. Then and only then can you identify the steps necessary to enable that future to materialize.
A claim must first be staked out, this one in a virtual world where Blockbuster’s current and future competitors are building fortifications. And guess who’s setting up camp? NetFlix.
Michael Greeson, Founding Partner & Principal Analyst, The Diffusion Group
26 January, 2007
One Fifth Of Windows Are Copies: Microsoft
Microsoft have let it be known that they know that at least 22.3% of the copies of Windows in use in the world are not purchased.
They’ve been compiling stats on this using Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) program since July 2005.
Initially WGA only used to be called upon when users of the Windows OS want to update their software. The most frequent reason for updates is when Microsoft needs to ship software patches to their OS or applications due to them being buggy and hackers having exploited holes in it.
Since June 2006, it’s been clear that a change to the WGA, is that it’s been contacting Microsoft without the users permission or knowledge, passing on information. This news of “phoning home” was met with accusations of Microsoft shipping spyware … and countered by software developers by the creation of removeWGA.
We know where you live
Given Microsoft knows where most of those people are – via their IP address that they were using when they did the downloads – it’s interesting that they haven’t acted on the information. Perhaps they figured that knocking on the door of dead grannies demanding compensation, as others have done, wasn’t good PR.
The real figure of pirated copies is likely to be far higher than the 22.3% figure quoted, as it’s only the innocent/daft who would let their computer tell Microsoft that they are using a piece a software they bought from the bloke at the car boot sale for a fiver.
Why release this news now?
With the arrival of Microsoft Vista on the 30 January, it pays Microsoft well to let people know how hard done by they are, giving them all the more reason to promote the security features that come with Vista.
It’s doubtful many will shed a tear for Microsoft given how outrageously profitable the company is. Perhaps we should run a competition to see just how many people are crying about this one?
24 January, 2007
Samson Blinded: Extreme Jewish Blog Wins Award
Samson Blinded, a blog advocating an ultra-hard-line Israeli approach to Arab nations, received the 2006 People’s Choice Jewish and Israeli Blog Award in the Best Overall Blog category and scored the highest in six other categories including Best Jewish Current Events blog.
It’s written under a pen name, Obadiah Shoher, as Israeli law criminalizes racism and incitation. With this knowledge you have some sort of idea as to the views that are put across.
You’ll not be surprised to heard that it’s not a regular read for us, but we’ve given it a once over and Shoher does appear to have some fairly extreme views. We’re told that …
Shoher denies ethnic-blind democracy and argues for expulsion of Arabs
from Israel. He rejects democratic process dominated, he asserts, by liberal and Arab voters, and calls for violent opposition to police efforts at removing the illegal settlements.
On the even more worrying front, we understand that they call for nearly dismantling Israeli army and fully relying on nuclear response to counter possible Arab aggression. Nice!
Many Americans won’t like the cut of its jib either with excepts like this from the current site …
The US-sponsored civil war left over 1.5 million Afghanis dead. Their corpses cause no concern on the Capitol Hill. The fuss is about 400 detainees who are treated at Guantanamo a bit worse than under the Taliban and considerably better than under the Northern Alliance rule. Had they been killed instead of arrested, human rights activists won’t care.
Shoher isn’t just shooting in the dark. The book, Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict has been downloaded by more than 170,000 people from 78 countries.
What they heck?
Now we all know that these Best-Of awards aren’t always worth the electrons that they’re written on. They’re often too easy to influence by getting readers to vote over-and-over again, and we would suspect that those with extreme views would have the kind of readers, nay followers, that might have the inclination to do this.
Here’s the reality – The Internet and blogs are for anyone who want to write anything – and that includes things that you might not like. `What’s important is peoples right to express themselves – and that should never be removed.
One thing that you can do is not link to it, thus depriving it of search engine ranking.
Find it at www.samsonblinded.org/blog
23 January, 2007
Laptops Outsell Desktop PCs For First Time
Notebooks outsold desktop PCs in Western Europe for the first time, as Acer leapt ahead of Dell to grab second place in PC sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (an area known in da biz as ‘EMEA’).
The figures from research firm IDC show Acer sneaking into second place for the fourth-quarter 2006 sales, with Dell box-shifting activities hit by slow commercial demand and competition from top dog HP.
Michael Larner, IDC senior research analyst, commented that Acer’s growth was fuelled by competitive desktop offerings and surging laptop sales which saw the company retaining its position as the Lord of laptop floggers.
Top overall PC vendor HP enjoyed a successful autumn, with sales expanding by a hefty 62 percent over the quarter.
Laptop sales up
The total PC market in EMEA grew by 10.4 percent during the quarter, although increased laptop sales were countered by desktop sales declining by 5.7 per cent in Western Europe.
Laptop sales totalled 8.4 million during the quarter, against 8 million desktops, but corporate refresh cycles are expected to elbow desktop sales skyward in the second half of 2007 with Windows Vista expected to drive consumer – but not business – sales, as IDC’s Andy Brown explains:
“In general, enterprises are not moving to new operating systems, at least not until the first service pack, so we don’t expect to see a massive impact in the corporate space in 2007. Once issues of application compatibility are sorted, companies will start to consider it.”
Conversely, business desktop sales went up by 10 per cent here in Blighty-land, but IDC reckoned that this was down to the fact that us go-getting Brits tend to go through commercial desktop refresh cycles earlier than our European chums.
IDC
23 January, 2007
Recycle Phones With Jack & Jill Children’s Foundation
The Jack & Jill Children’s Foundation is a charity caring for families with terminally ill babies suffering irreparable brain damage (SDD), and they’ve announced a three week long fundraising campaign in Ireland.
Thankfully, they’ll be no hill climbing or pail fetching involved; instead they want you to hand in your old or unwanted mobile phones.
The Foundation aims to recycle over half a million phones, and hopes to make €500,000 from the project, estimating that it will be able to support one new nurse for every 20,000 phones handed in.
Phones that are still working will be sent to third world countries while knackered phones will be dismantled, with salvageable parts reused and toxic elements disposed of safely.
“For the past seven years we’ve collected empty toner and inkjet cartridges. We saw groups in Britain doing something similar with mobile phones. Last year we did a sort of dry run collecting mobiles and managed to raise around €100,000,” said campaign organiser Stephen Bebbington.
The campaign will see freepost envelopes distributed through the news media in Ireland, letting mobile phone owners send off their old phones for free.
Naturally, there’s a horde of celebrities onboard, including jockey Frankie Dettori, pop star Ronan Keating and hurling star DJ Carey (we’ll have to take their word on his celebrity status as hurling is about as popular as tiddlywinks in the UK).
We dropped the charity a line to see if there’s any way UK folks can hand in their own phones – we’ll update the article when we get a response.
Jack & Jill Children’s foundation
22 January, 2007
Video On Demand Could Grind The Internet To A Crawl
Although the home entertainment industry is more loved up than the Happy Mondays on a bagful of E about Video-on-Demand, a new report suggests there might be a bumpy ride ahead.
The media research bods at Deloitte reckon that video downloads are likely to “encounter some challenges in 2007” with customers expecting to suffer slow broadband downloading times, especially for customers downloading to their computers.
Igal Brightman, global managing partner at Deloitte commented that, “the unrelenting growth in Internet traffic during 2007 may overwhelm some of the Internet’s backbones: the terabit-capable pipes connecting continents.”
“The impact may be most noticeable in the form of falling quality of service,’ he added, warning the industry that it would only take an unexpected upsurge in video usage to turn the inconvenience caused by dropping access speeds into “full-scale consumer dissatisfaction.”
UK market still small
At the moment, the UK film download market in Britain is still relatively small, with media market and research analysis group Screen Digest, anticipating that the big moolah will eventually start rolling in, but not for a few years’ time,
The company estimates that the UK market is set to be worth £2.6 million in 2007 (£400,000 up from last year), soaring up to £8.4 million in 2008, and hitting a badger’s nadger under £30 million by 2009.
The big payola, however, is unlikely to start being raked in until equipment and networks improve.
Slower than a sleepy sloth
Deloitte calculated that on a typical two Mbit/s DSL network, film downloads will crawl down the wire at a yawn-inducing one minute per minute for a film, so a three hour film would take 180 minutes or more to arrive.
When it comes to downloading high-definition video, punters can definitely put the popcorn on hold too, with an average film taking the best part of a day to slide down a one Mbit/s DSL connection.
Matters aren’t helped by the rise of other bandwidth-hogging applications like VoIP, e-mail and online gaming, and in high demand areas it may prove quicker to pop down to Blockbuster than wait for the film to download.
22 January, 2007
Apple Gets Legal On iPhone Skins
Once again Apple’s legal team have rolled into action, this time over mobile phone ‘skins’ based on their new iPhone interface.
Straight after Apple’s iPhone announcement last week, fanboys set about developing a similar interface that would work on devices running Palm and Windows Mobile operating systems.
The skins don’t actually add any new functions to the phones, but once installed offer a pretty new iPhone-like interface, with the icons linking to comparable applications on the phones.
Although the skins were offered for free – and probably served as a great advert for Apple’s as yet unreleased phone – as soon as Apple’s head honchos caught wind of them, they reached for the speed dial and unleashed their ever-busy lawyers.
Letters were fired off to both the creators of the skins and to bulletin board admins where screenshots of the interface had been posted
Both Brighthand and Xda-developers.com forums were on the receiving end of an Apple legal missile, with MoDaCo website owner Paul O’Brien, receiving this stern warning:
“It has come to our attention that you have posted a screenshot of Apple’s new iPhone and links that facilitate the installation of that screenshot on a PocketPC device.”
“While we appreciate your interest in the iPhone, the icons and screenshot displayed on your website are copyrighted by Apple.
“Apple therefore demands that you remove this screenshot from your website and refrain from facilitating the further dissemination of Apple’s copyrighted material by removing the link to http://forum.xda-developers.com, where said icons and screenshot are being distributed.”
Michael Arrington, of tech blog TechCrunch was suitably unimpressed, “I think this is all complete nonsense. If Apple wants to go after the guy that made the Windows Mobile skin that looks like the iPhone, fine. But to bully bloggers who are simply reporting on this is another matter.”
Palm iPhoney interface
Windows Mobile iPhone interface
[Via theage.com.au]
15 January, 2007