I viewed this piece of hardware’s role in life as rendering documents from one of the Macs we have in the house, in full colour or black and while, onto sheets of A4 paper.

The DeskJet had other ideas.

It viewed its role in life as a source of revenue for HP to get me to keep buying ever more expensive replacement inkjet refills, by the cunning ruse of reporting the cartridge was empty when it was brand new, by refusing to print colour or black and white consistently and in the end, by just refusing to print, unless it was using invisible ink that it secreted somewhere in that grey shoe box.

The scanner was OK though but the photocopier functionality was somewhat hampered by the lack of being actually able to print what had just been scanned. The printer continued to not endear itself by refusing to be installed on my faithful and ageing PowerPC based iBook G4 running Leopard. Intel MacBook Pros running Leopard and Snow Leopard seemed to be fine but the iBook insisted the printer was actually another model entirely and just sulked.

So based on the premise that we wanted to print far more often than we wanted to scan, the HP DeskJet F-whatever-the-model-number-is has been retired and replaced with a gleaming, black, colour laser printer from Samsung. It’s a CLP-315W for those of you who like model numbers.

Once again, this is not the post I set out to write. The one I set out to write was called “In Search of Location’s Sweet Spot” and it’s sitting in draft and not yet posted. That’s because before I can submit that post I need to write this one as a warm up act.

On the far left hand side we have the stuff bucket. Whilst stuff may sound vague, it’s entirely intentional. Stuff is defined as a collection or set of items, things or matter. Though I was focussing primarily on location data and location based mobile services, this applies equally well to other businesses and markets. It could be stock, inventory, left handed widgets or a plethora of other things.

On the far right hand side we have people bucket. The exact number of people doesn’t matter, for small businesses the number will probably be small and for large businesses the number will be, err, larger. These people are your customers, your audience. Hopefully they have money as well.

And then in the middle we have the secret sauce bucket. Again, it doesn’t matter what this is but it’s very important to look at what the secret sauce actually does.

• The secret sauce is a bidirectional pipe that connects stuff to people.
• It allows you to expose your business’s stuff to the people who are your customers, hopefully adding value along the way.
• It also allows you to extract money from the people in exchange for access to your business’s stuff. In the Internet industry we call this monetizing your audience.

In order for your business to succeed, you need to have all three of these buckets in place. Have people and secret sauce but no stuff? Fail. Have stuff and secret sauce but no people? Fail. You get the idea.

Take a look at every business that is succeeding, especially those that are online and where the stuff bucket contains data, and you’ll see that they have all three buckets in place. Take a look at those businesses which have failed or are failing, especially those that are online, and you either see one bucket missing or there’s just not enough of it.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

iPass is great; it allows me to connect to pretty much every hotspot and hotel internet service there is. I’ve been using it for over 4 years now and can only think of a single time when I haven’t been able to get a connection. I’m using it right now, sitting in the departures lounge at Berlin’s Tegel airport waiting for my flight back to London.

So far, so great, but the current, Snow Leopard supporting, version of the iPassConnect app, v3.1, seems to have been designed by someone with scant regard for anything approaching consistency and usability. Let me count the ways in which this app frustrates.

From the Mac OS X GUI you can’t stop iPass running. The app lives in your menu bar and scans and rescans for wireless networks (which I’m sure reduces battery life) even when it’s connected to a wireless network. If I’m connected to a wireless network why would I want to look for another network, all the time, constantly? There’s a red and white animation going on in the menu bar which I’m sure someone thought was cute but which is incredibly distracting. But let’s overlook that for a moment. To quit an app, you simply select the menu bar and select Quit or press Cmd-Q.

Not that I’ve ever been able to find the mythical Quit command for iPassConnect. The only way to kill the damn thing is from within Activity Monitor or by the killall command from the shell within Terminal.

Simple resolution: Let the user choose when they want to run your app and when they don’t. Add a Quit command.

It’s a simple, plain fact that the more apps you have in your account’s Login Items, the slower your login time will be. Like most people, I keep the number of Login Items down to a bare minimum and then start apps up as I need them. If I don’t use something all day, every day, it’s very unlikely that I want to make it a Login Item. Most apps are well behaved and ask your permission before inserting themselves as a Login Item but not iPassConnect. Run the app and hey presto you get a Login Item. Mildly annoying but at least you can remove it from your list of Login Items. Run the app again though and hey presto you get a Login Item. Each and every single time. It’s frustrating the first time it happens and induces psychosis after the hundredth such occurrence.

This is uncontrollable, un-configurable, totally unacceptable and verging on downright insulting. It’s an app designer’s way of saying to the user “I don’t care what your preferences are, I know better than you”.

Simple resolution: Act in a well behaved manner, ask the user for their preference, act on it and remember it.

Most apps these days have a way of calling home and checking for an update. For those apps that run within a window there’s usually an Updates option in the application’s menu. For those apps that don’t run in a window there’s usually an option in their preferences pane. Note the word usually and let’s have a look at the iPassConnect preference pane.

There’s an Updates tab which is a good start. There’s an Enable automatic updates option which is also a good thing. But it only controls the hotspot dictionary that the app maintains. Want to update the app or know whether there’s an update available? Not with this app (and the iPass website is remarkably update free as well).

Simple resolution: Add an update option and ask the user if they want to check for updates.

Snow Leopard continues Apple’s march towards a pure 64-bit operating system. A cursory glance at Activity Monitor shows that most apps running are Intel (64-bit) and this includes the System Preferences app. So let’s try to set some preferences for iPassConnect.

Ah yes, the iPassConnect preferences pane is 32-bit which means that you have to restart System Preferences in 32-bit mode and there it stays, running in 32-bit mode, until you manually restart System Preferences in the default 64-bit mode.

Simple resolution: If you say your app has Snow Leopard support then fully support Snow Leopard. That means 64-bitness across the board.

iPass is a great service, it deserves a great app; version 3.1 is not that app.

Written and posted from Berlin Tegel Airport (52.5545447, 13.2899969)

Well, obviously not that important, because if it was that important than there’d actually be someone to answer the phone. Add into the mix that it’s way outside of normal peak hours and you realise that “significantly high call volume” really means “we’ve only employed two people, one of them is on holiday and the other is taking their only toilet break of the day“.

So far, so familiar. The curse of the non specific, applies to everyone, on hold experience. But oddly nowhere near as bad as when the non-specific, applies to everyone approach transfers to email and a company threatens to sue you if you don’t renew.

So some background. My domain names are registered through one company, easyspace.com. They’re not the best, they’re not the cheapest, they’re a bit impersonal and corporate but they’re a case of better the devil you know and they’ve never threatened me and over reacted. My web hosting and email hosting are through another company, justhost.com. They’re not the best, they’re pretty cheap, they’ve had a few outages but overall they’ve been … OK. I should probably have shopped around a bit more but when I moved from self hosting to the cloud they fitted the bill.

And then this gem dropped into my Inbox …

Let’s just look at this in detail …

Really? I’ve already paid for last year’s hosting and got the bank statements to prove it. So the only interpretation I have of this is that you’ve automatically created an invoice for next year and your automated system has automatically lumped me in the same bucket as everyone else so you’ve sent me this mail to remind me to renew and to pay up. Funny. I don’t actually recall asking to renew and this is the first I’ve heard of this. But let’s read on …

Losing access to my site? Well fair enough, I’m supposed to be renewing web hosting here so let’s keep reading.

Losing access to my domain? A generous interpretation would be that web hosting and my domain are synonymous. A less generous interpretation would be that I’d lose access to the registration of my domain, which can’t be the case as it’s not registered with Just Host but this is obviously a generic, one-size-fits-all mail so I’ll just mutter “tsk tsk” under my breath and let it pass without further comment.

OK, I can read. Not really any need for the caps lock to be on here. I’m an existing customer, one you want to renew with you, remember?

Now listen, you mentioned the 7 days two lines ago. My short term memory is fine, and like I said, I’m a customer, so lay off on the caps lock and the stars.

Whoah …. now hang on just a second. My account, as you term it, is at zero balance. I paid for a year’s hosting, in advance, last year. I owe you nothing. Not one single penny. So to revisit my earlier wording, a generous interpretation would be that this mail is sent out to anyone whose account is overdue and yet again, this is a generic, one-size-fits-all mail.

But a more realistic interpretation would be in the form of a question. So Just Host, do you really think that threatening a customer who’s up for renewal with legal action and with a debt collection agency is going to make me want to renew with you? Really?

But then comes the finale …

So, after being shouted at in cap lock, not once but twice, after being threatened with legal action for money I can’t possible owe as I haven’t renewed and this was a renewal notice after all, after all of that you want me to refer a friend. Really?

After all of this I still can’t quite work out whether this is breathtaking arrogance or touching naivete on the part of Just Host and of Brooke Bryan, the co founder. Whichever it is, it shows just how little the customer is valued at this certain hosting establishment.

As a British citizen who travels a lot in the US I understand that the “customer service” ethos which is so prevalent in the US doesn’t travel or translate particularly well in the UK. I also understand that it’s almost naive to expect that since Asda was taken over by Wal-Mart in 1999 any type of US values would transfer to the UK arm. I also understand that the UK supermarket business is highly competitive and that through Asda, Wal-Mart is competing head-to-head with Tesco, Morrison’s and Sainsbury’s. I understand and accept all of this.

What I do not understand and what I do not accept is the sheer bloody-mindedness and rudeness of your staff, especially those of your online retailer business.

Let me explain.

As a family we tried out Asda, as their prices are extremely competitive compared to those of their competitors, so on the 19th of October we booked a delivery slot for an online shop; the order wasn’t particularly large or complex but it was still in excess of £100.00. The only delivery slot available was from 8.00 PM to 10.00 PM the following day.

October 20th. 10.05 PM. No shopping. So I look online for some insight.

“We know how important it is that we deliver on time but occasionally we can run into difficulties. In the unlikely event that we will be late, we’ll always try to let you know.“

I liked the answer to the question “My delivery hasn’t arrived yet?” … “If your shopping hasn’t arrived by the end of your delivery slot, please call our Helpline on 0844 8733333 (calls will be charged at a local rate, lines are open 8am-10pm, 7 days a week.)“.

Unless, of course, your shopping is due to arrive at 10.00 PM in which case if there is a problem, anyone at Asda has gone home for the night. But not my delivery driver it would seem, who rings me at 10.20 to tell me “we’re running slightly late” and that “your shopping will be there at 35 past latest“.

October 20th. 10.40 PM. No shopping.

October 20th. 10.45 PM. Shopping arrives with a giggle and a laugh; “We’re running a bit late tonight (hee hee hee)“. No apology, no contrition, no final bill so I know how much we’ve actually spent, it all seems one great big joke. Apart from the point where they knocked on the front door so hard it managed to wake both of my children up. A great joke, hilarious; only I’m the only one who doesn’t seem to find this particularly amusing.

So I look at my confirmation email … “If you have any queries about ASDA Online Shopping you can contact us on 0844 8733333“. Ah yes, this would be the helpline that closed at 10.00 PM.

So the following day at around 9.30 AM, we ring customer service; they’re open now. They promise to ring the store and the store manager would call us.

October 21st. 2.00 PM. No call. So we hold while customer services rings the store; the store manager “isn’t available and will call us back“.

October 21st. 5.00 PM. No call. So we call customer services who have, miraculously, been in touch with the store. They agree that this is appalling customer service, so appalling that as a token of their esteem they offer “Free delivery of your next order“. This assumes there will be a next order and it works out at the grand total of £4.25. Obviously not that appalling so we say that it’s not good enough.

Asda’s second, and final as it turns out, offer? £10.00 in e-vouchers, which again assumes that there will be a next order and which, by the way, needs to be redeemed in 2 months otherwise they’re invalidated. Still not that appalling so we say that it’s not good enough. So we’re put on hold … permanently as the call isn’t picked up again and after another 15 minutes we hang up in sheer frustration.

As an organisation, Asda may have had a consumer spend of almost £3.5B and a market share of 17% as of August 2008 but as of October 2009 my wallet won’t be contributing to that spend and Asda’s market share just dropped by one household’s worth, which has gone back to one of their rivals.

Photo credits: itslefty, juliebee and Tico on Flickr

Scenario One. You go to a conference. It doesn’t matter where or what the topic is but you turn up because you’ve been invited or because you’ve paid to attend. Breakfast is included in the conference package. There’s 400 people attending the conference but when you get to the breakfast table, there’s none left because they’ve run out of food. When you ask the conference venue why there’s no breakfast they throw up their hands and say “The company who provides our food assured us there’d be enough for 400 but only enough for 200 turned up. What can we do?“.

And now Scenario Two. Same conference. Same venue. But this time there’s only 200 chairs in the venue and you’ve got 400 people trying to cram into those chairs. It’s getting pretty cozy and people are ending up standing or going home. You ask the conference venue why there’s no chairs and they throw up their hands and say ”The company who provides our chairs assured us there’d be enough for 400 but only enough for 200 turned up. What can we do?“.

For both of these scenarios you’d assume that the conference venue and their outsourced provider would have a very quick, very harsh, very frank exchange of views and that it wouldn’t happen again because the conference venue would quickly become a laughing stock.

So now Scenario Three. Same conference and same venue again but this time it’s internet connectivity we’re talking about and internet connectivity of the wifi flavour. Or to be more precise, lack of internet connectivity of the wifi flavour. You ask the conference venue why the wifi keeps crashing and they throw up their hands and say ”The company who provides our connectivity assured us there’d be enough for 400 connections but there’s only enough for 200 connections. What can we do?“.

But with this scenario the conference venues are still in business, the outsourced internet providers apologise and do nothing about it, the delegates complain and nothing changes.

The last three conferences I’ve attended have had this problem to varying degrees. Conference number one had workable wifi for the first 30 minutes before connectivity crashed or the access point ran out of DHCP leases. Conference number two only managed 10 minutes after registration opened before crashing. Conference number three had no problems at all but that’s only because they didn’t offer any wifi at all and left everyone reliant on their own 3G dongles or mifi’s.

People in the tech community with far more reach and standing than me have written about this; TechCrunch wrote about the problems at Le Web and Joel Spolsky wrote about it as part of Joel on Software.

When are conference organisers going to get the message? Internet connectivity, it doesn’t have to be wifi, indeed it’s probably better if it isn’t wifi, is essential at conferences these days, tech conferences or otherwise. And if it’s a tech conference you need at least two IP addresses per delegate, minimum to cope with their laptops, iPhones, BlackBerrys and so on.

Until conference organisers make conference venues understand this and start voting with their wallets, this sorry tale will keep on replaying itself.

Photo credit: Leia on Flickr.

I travel quite a lot for work and so it’s fair to say I rent a reasonable amount of cars; all of them through Avis who are the company’s preferred rental supplier. After getting off a plane, the last thing you really want is to queue to get your car so I’m a member of Avis’ Preferred service; this allows me to skip the queues, pick my car up and drive out of the rental garage with a wave of my driving license. It’s quick, really quick; you see your name on a board which shows you which bay you need to go to, find the car, fling your suitcase in the boot and off you go.

It typically takes around 3 minutes to get my car; and Avis in the UK makes a selling point of this, proudly proclaiming “Your keys in under 3 minutes or £20“.

And it works too; I’ve used the service in the US, in Ireland and in mainland Europe and have been impressed in how well the system works across different countries. Apart from the UK …

I turn up at Heathrow, catch the courtesy bus to the Avis garage and look for my name on the board. Hmm, it’s not there. So into the building I go and straight to the Avis Preferred desk, where a chap sits, doing something paperwork related. I wait. I wait a bit more. I clear my throat and finally get some attention, so I explain that my name’s not on the Preferred board. I give him my booking reference number and he finds the problem …

“Your card’s expired Sir“, ”Really? What number do you have?”

He quotes a number for a card that expired 2 years ago. “That’s odd” I say, “I’ve used Avis at least 5 times since that card expired and have had no problems”.

“It’s your fault, you need to keep your profile up to date“, “Profile? What profile?”

“The one your travel agent uses, it’s obviously out of date, take it up with them“.

Nice. So I give him my credit card and off he vanishes to do …. something. So far, we’ve been at this 10 minutes. Another 10 minutes pass, the occasional Avis person from the other counter wanders over to see if I’m being looked after and I have to reply, “I think so, but I’ve no idea where this chap’s gone to with my card”.

He finally reappears and gives me the paperwork for my car.

“So if you knew my card had expired, why didn’t you contact me or my travel agent?”, “We don’t do that“

“Why not?”, “We just don’t“

The manager wanders over, I ask her the same question.

• Last week, Snow Leopard, AKA Mac OS X 10.6 was released though some places seem to now be selling an even more advanced version, Mac OS X 15.6.
• I like chilli sauce, I have a fine and wide range of the stuff in the larder at home; but some people must really really like the stuff to buy it a gallon at a time.
• In my day job I do geo stuff but I wasn’t aware that a globe, an inflatable one come to that, has sharp corners and isn’t suitable for children.
• While we’re on the subject of geo, Virgin Media found out the hard way that place names aren’t unique and sometimes there’s more than one place sharing a name; Whitchurch in this particular case.