G1 vs Jesus-phone

Ah, the mighty battle between T-Mobile’s G1 and Apple’s jesus-phone.

Yesterday morning (having finally made a decision between them) I took delivery of the G1. Tomorrow they’re coming to take it away again.

Now don’t get me wrong: there’s a lot to love about the G1 - but it’s all about the Android platform. The problem is the hardware: there are just too many niggles there to let me feel I’ll be able to stand 18 months of this phone.

Matters came to a head when I had to call T-Mobile’s (excellent) customer service centre… and met with the typical “press 1 for…” numeric menu.

To do this on the G1, you have to take the phone away from your ear, open the keyboard and then hit the appropriate key. Madness!!!

I think Android will win through in the end: it’s early stage, but the interface is intuitive, adaptable, amazingly flexible, powerful and very fast. But it’s a genie trapped in a cracked bottle.

The App Store (Android Market) is a delight to use - even better than the iTunes App Store - and will (I firmly believe) win out when the depth of apps swells to fill it, as it has over at Apple.

Meanwhile, as Martina King, then MD of Yahoo! UK & Ireland, once said to me: “A phone needs just one killer app: it needs to make calls.” Both the G1 and the vast range of windows mobile phones appear not to have picked up on that yet.

Tags: android, android market, app store, apple, G1, google, htc dream, iphone, iTunes, jesus phone, martina king, T-Mobile, windows mobile

So today is the day - have you got your mouse and your online credit card handy? Apparently every other Brit has.

James Roper - the big cheese over at IMRG - has been garnering masses of (print, broadcast and online) column inches about how, despite the downturn, online retail continues to grow at a pace that will leave other channels (i.e. bricks and mortar) green with envy.

Last week, Monday broke the record for online sales in the UK in a single day. But today will (we’re told) be even bigger.

It seems that online retail is expected to grow 20% this year, compared to 40% or so in previous years. Not bad given the flat to downright messy expectations in the High Street.

Happy shopping - I look forward to the figures!

Tags: e-commerce, ecommerce, imrg, James Roper, Mega Monday, onilne retail

Who moved my nuts?

Many, many moons ago I helped start Associated Newspapers online efforts. Back in those days (mid-90s) there was much debate about how traditional publishers could embrace online media - but essentially two models were emerging: replicate the content online (the most common model) or develop extensions to the core titles that maybe used some content but were likely to originate their own approach ‘in harmony’ with the parent publisher.

Oh, and then there were the others, such as Time Out, who were famously terrified about what online was going to do to the bottom line.

So a decade and a bit slips by, and online is now a major medium. Could overtake TV spend shortly. Over in the US it seems to be getting the blame for ‘killing’ newspapers.

And still we find the print publishers trying to work out how to make their digital strategies pay for the demise of traditional income sources.

The most recent example of this hit me this morning - Asda (!) are launching the wonderfully named ‘Asda Digital Newsagent‘. Yes really.

Asda Digital Newsagent

Seems to me to be a very similar model to Zinio, who I believe do pretty well in the US. And who have a pretty decent (free to air over Safari) version online for the iPhone.

But come on - from a consumer point of view, do I really want to ‘read’ a magazine on my computer? Books, well yes of course - on a handheld, for portability. And I can see some value in the iPhone pages at Zinio… though the ‘free’ price tag about the content suggests no-one expects you to replace buying the magazine that way.

Magazines are typically consumed as a treat. I remember when, at Associated, we were launching the ill-fated Charlotte Street site for femails (sic). My wife, perceptively, pointed out that you couldn’t take a website into the bath and flick through the pages. It’s a different type of experience entirely.

Meanwhile, iGizmo has set up a decent online magazine, which looks at first glance like some of the Asda Digital Newsagent titles, but adds considerable extra functionality to the flat magazine style.

So Asda’s version simply sells you an image of each magazine spread, wrapped in a bit of navigation to dress it up. And then charges you exactly what you’d pay for it in print.

I may well be proved wrong on this, but I really don’t see how this can possibly produce a worthwhile business model. For readers OR for advertisers (the ads (especially the double page spreads) are even easier to skim past than in print.

I, for one, will not be buying.

Tags: asda digital newsagent, associated newspapers, charlottestreet.com, iGIZMO, iphone, magazine, time out, zinio

Sandlines, you will not be surprised to hear, likes his gadgets. Always has.

So although I can probably muster a nominal link to a marketing discussion in here somewhere, you’ll know me well enough by now to realise I just wanted to post this link. This is one seriously cool looking development: a folding screen to expand the viewing area in a handy sized mobile.

Those guys over at Samsung are on some wicked coffee overdose.

Tags: flexible OLED, folding screen, gadget, mobile, samsung

… or at least that was the overriding message, it seemed to me, at the excellent Entrepreneurs in London event where I spent the day yesterday.

Huge thanks to Fresh Business Thinking who kindly invited me to join them - and several hundred others - at the Methodist Central Hall opposite Westminster Abbey.

I struck by how so many entrepreneurs were prepared to stump up not just £400 but a full day of their most precious resource (time) to attend this event. I don’t know whether that signifies that all those ex-bankers are now in start-up mode or just that the entrepreneurial culture is as alive and kicking in this recession as ever it was.

Ben Way and equally entrepreneurial sister Hermione

And one of the key messages is that the businesses that start now - and are well enough thought out and run to survive the current economic conditions - will be brilliantly placed for the post-recession world. Which WILL come, just no-one knows when.

So, apparently, entrepreneurs will save the world. And some of them will produce ideas that help save the planet too - like Ben Way with his Go Green Plumbing company (and 26 others).

Tags: Ben Way, entrepreneur, entrepreneurs in london, fresh business thinking, hermione way, recession

Breaking up?

I’ve borrowed the Ya-Who bit from AdViking… as mentioned over there (and a few other places!) the collapse of the Google/Yahoo! partnership bodes ill for the latter’s long term survival. I wonder if they’ll still be there in 5 years time.

Sandlines can’t help but wonder if Google entered the discussions in similar tone to how they entered the bidding for a wireless spectrum licence earlier this year. In Planet Google, Stross notes that a Google manager described his team’s anxiety that they might win, after placing the $4.71 billion bid: “We kept hitting the ‘refresh’ button on the browser to see if other companies had bid higher…”

Might Google have entered the deal feeling - “If it goes through, great, if it doesn’t: even better”. It certainly broke up the Microsoft / Yahoo! party and leaves Yahoo! needing a white knight. It will be interesting to see if Steve Ballmer still wants to play. If he does, it would speak to Microsoft’s despair in the battle against Google.

Tags: google, Microsoft, planet google, Yahoo!

yesterday's news? BE MORE DEMANDING!

So it turns out I was right.

Somewhere between 8 and 9pm, Ocado kindly delivered, without direct prior warning, a copy of that day’s Times.

Thanks.

There are at least two things wrong with this:

• What value do you put on the day’s morning paper at 8pm?
• What if I’d already bought it?

In the days of concern about the amount of printed paper we get through, I’d estimate the capacity for dissapointment from this marketing gesture is about 85%. Seriously Ocado, this is a great way to turn something that *should* be a positive into a reason for a customer to feel let down instead.

Tags: ecommerce, gift horse, internet shopping, Ocado, Times

It’s a personal bugbear of mine: the emphasis on getting a good measurement versus the actual delivery of results. It manifests in many ways - I recall a conversation with a digital media sales guy who was determined to tell me that the best thing about the web was that you could measure everything. Never mind how WELL it worked, the measurement was the best part.

And yes, measurement has value (usually to help improve results), but there is a point at which the actual value of what you are doing gets lost.

This is very apparent in customer service situations.

My wife took her car to the local dealership for its annual service a few months back. The customer service was, at best, average… actually, we had cause to feel it was not even that good. But the Service Manager was determined we should, nevertheless, give them a 10/10 in the customer satisfaction survey we were about to be invited to complete. Anything less than that, he told us, and his operation would get a black mark.

We were then told several more times that a survey was coming up. Despite having nothing to do with the service, I was telephoned and asked what I thought of the service - and to make sure we’d give a good mark in the service. When I indicated dissatisfaction, I was pressed to put this aside for the forthcoming service and still give a good mark.

By the time the survey came around… well, I’m sure you can guess my mood.

All this came flooding back to me with a piece in the paper today about a man who, having been told (rudely, it seems) that he could not extend his overdraft with the Abbey, was pressed to give a good mark in the post-call survey. The results make painful reading.

In either case, had a fraction of the effort expended trying to persuade the customer to mark the service well gone into actually providing good service, everyone would have been much happier.

So I will take actual positive experience over survey results every time.

… and that is reflected in the way consumers prefer peer reviews to marketing spiel every time too.

Tags: abbey, customer satisfaction, mercedes, survey

I was checking out the latest from over at Cheeze’s excellent marketing blog and spotted, almost incidentally, a really cool app sitting in the sidebar: ‘Live Visitor Feed‘ by Feedjit.

Apart from a small detail in error (it believes my London suburb is in Kent… it’s not, it’s London and it would more likely be Surrey anyway) it’s pretty interesting.

I’ve noted before that local targeting is challenging in the UK… local IP’s are much more difficult to pin down outside the UK, or at least they were. But Feedjit claim that they “…can determine the geographic locations at the city level of 90% of your website visitors.” That’s pretty impressive.

Now the interesting question is what we are going to DO with this information? I have some ideas… for another post.

Tags: cheeze, feedjit, geode, location

According to Gary Small, a neuroscientist over at UCLA, readers of Sandlines (and other regular internet marauders) are simply smarter than the rest. Well of course!

In his new book, “iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind,” Dr Small is of the view that the more we plough through screeds of irrelevant data trying to find gems of useful information through our Google searching etc, the better our brains become at, to quote Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent ‘Blink’, Thin Slicing… or making snap judgments.

I saw an excellent presentation by David Hawdale of Hawdale Associates a couple of years ago where he discussed the way the brain processes information in a ridiculously quick fashion when faced with an array of affiliate marketing, shopping comparison or other ‘hijack’ results when looking for actual things. Apparantly we make a decision in less than 2 seconds on a typical Google results page.

Now if only the web would smarten up itself and find me relevant listings for when and where I actually am, I could go back to my normal vegetative state and not have to ferret out what I am really after…

Tags: blink, brain, gary small, ibrain, malcolm gladwell, thin slicing