With Google’s announcement of their Grand Central aquisition I see another slice of the mobile operators’ pie being taken away… and yet another push for the network providers to become nothing more than bit-pipes.
Google take another piece of the pie
Today Grand Central…
Grand Central offer terminating telecoms services such as ‘visual voicemail’, call screening and ListenIn™. These (what I would perceive to be) rich services are not widely – if at all – yet offered by the majority of mobile operators.
These services are facilitated by the offering a new single telephone number which I presume you offer out as your main contact number. There is no sign (that I’ve seen) of number portability yet but I would think it would not be too long till you’ll be able to move your mobile number over to Google’s service.
And these services are just the things that could start to replace the mobile operators very own value added services and systems such as their IN and Voicemail.
This latest move follows Google’s launch of location based services for mobile users back in November 2007 which nabbed one of the most sacred (yet amazingly under-used) pieces of information which the mobile network providers held… Location.
Tomorrow the World?
What is different about this latest move from Google though is it’s not just the mobile operators who are having their toes troden on… this time the impact appears to have a much greater reach and it is infact the fixed-line providers who are under threat as well. With terminating services being taken care of the whole telecoms network and service provider industry has a new competitor.
And with rumours of a Skype purchase by Google floating around we could really see one big VoIP service provider to rule them all. In such a world your traditional fixed line and mobile telephone numbers could be used by no one else other than the providers themselves for billing you for your bit-pipe usage.
So what are the traditional networks to do? I suppose they need to look at what ‘value’ they still hold and can uniqely provide to their customers. To be honest I’ve not yet thought about this in any kind of depth but whatever they do they need to move quick and strong to even stand a chance in the long term. These “bit-pipes-to-be” used to be able to say “We know our customers… we know who they are and where they are” but what Google may soon be able to say is “We know OUR customers… we know who they are and where they are… and not just when they’re using their mobile phones”.
I can see an Orange pay-as-you-go customer making a call on their Android powered handset to one of their Gmail contacts (to their global Grand Central number) over Skype (all transparent to the user of course) which calls the destination’s very own Android phone (over VoIP) as well as their Skype client on the netbook and their fixed line phone (over VoIP too)… and all the originating user pays is their “all you can eat” data bill.
I’m not sure if I’m the only one who’s had trouble with this or not but I’ve found that since the new iGoogle layout launch (I think I’ve winged about this before) I’ve been unable to delete gadgets. Quite simply when I clicked the “delete” link in the gadget menu nothing happened.
A solution (or rather a work around) was stumbled upon when I changed the iGoogle address to use a .co.uk domain suffix rather than the .com I normally use. Bt doing this I was able to see the old iGoogle layout and once again delete gadgets without a hitch.
That is all.
Saw this lovely spider’s web on the way to the bustop this morning.
A lovely winter's spiderweb
Photo was taken with my G1 which explains why it’s not the best.
For some time I’ve been reading the St Albans Blog and have loved the way it’s brought me new information about the city I live in. I appreciated the honest posts and so, following a visit to one of the local pubs, I sent a review to the blog admin. The rest, as they say, is history… and now my review is posted up there too.
The St Albans blog does not just publish reviews on pubs and eateries but also covers local events, has some wonderful photos and even has an extremely useful guide to establishments which offer free wifi.
Please, follow the link and have a poke around 
So today Google announced that their browser Chrome was out of beta… sadly they appeared to have missed one of the primary complaints of the earlier versions which was that the installer has to connect back to the internet to download supporting files. This is all fine apart from if you’re behind a proxy that requires authentication… and this is a very real situation for many corporate users.
Google Chrome
A quick search on the net revealled that many users are already complaining about this (and many actually raised this during the beta phase too). There is, at least I don’t think there is, anyway of installing behind a proxy. I hate to say it but this time Google seem to have missed a trick.
Posted in technology
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Tagged technology
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Throughout this series I’ve been looking into starting an online business. This quick post looks into what success means for me in this experiment.
What is success?
Success can mean a variety of things to different people. It could mean being able to survive solely on the business, it could mean being in the top 5 companies for a particular product search on Google… or it could be just surviving the first year of business.
In the case of iLoveShirt (and in the context of this experiment) success will be measured against the following goals:
- Still being in business after 1 year
- Having a positive bank balance (any profit would be seen as a bonus)
- Being personally happy with the past year and wanting to continue trading for another year. This is perhaps the most important goal to me)
- >80% customer satisfaction. This is not to say I won’t strive for 100% but in life there are just some people that are never happy.
Of course, returning to the fact that this is an experiment, I shan’t (hopefully) be too unhinged by any failings that occur in the year’s trading. That is as long as the business learns from these events even if they are not bought on by something in our control. There is always room to mitigate any damages.
With these goals in mind and a lot more thoughts running through my head it’s time to turn my attention to the business plan. Perhaps this should have been completed sooner rather than later… but as long as it’s looked at then better late than never. This business plan should make up the next post in the series and perhaps will be a lengthy one.
Following on an ealier rant I had about the unusable Government Gateway I mailed my local MP (Mrs. Anne Main – Conservative) and various email addresses I could find for the operators of the site stating my frustrations. To be fair to all who I contacted I had quick responses from everyone… none however could supply me with a resolution to my issue.
Houses of_Parliament
Those involved in the site have told me that they hope to have the functionality where a user can un-enrol and then re-enrol sometime next year. Anne replied (be letter… how old SkOol) mentioning that she has “written to the Government” on my behalf and says she’ll get back to me when she has a response.
So, no real progression for me and my VAT return… looks like I’ll be filling it in by hand this year. I will, of course, post any update on this.
So we’re starting a new business as an experiment… what next? Well we need an idea; we need to have at least a basic idea of what the business will provide. Will it be a service or a product?
Starting a Business
Well I’ve always liked comical T-Shirts (at least I think they’re funny) and in the past I’ve scrawled down some ideas for designs of my own in my old beaten moleskine… so this is gonna be my domain. I realise that these online T-Shirt shops are ten-a-penny but at the moment I don’t actually think this’ll be too much of an issue… I’ll go into this in more detail later on.
Oh, once again I should make it clear that when I say “I don’t actually think this’ll be too much of an issue” that this is exactly what I mean… this is only my current thinking and I may be wrong… very wonrg. This, being an experiment, is however not really a bad thing.
What’s in a name?
Ok, so we know now that we’re going to design and sell T-Shirts… what’s next? Well we need a name. And one that will also be our domain name as we’re are talking about an online business (actually this would probably be needed even it wasn’t going to be purely an online business). Ideally this name will contain a useful keyword to aid decent search engine results and also shouldn’t be too long so is easy to type. A .co.uk name should be fine for starters I think.
I have investigated a few names that I liked and to no surprise most of these were taken aleady. I have also decided to drop the “t” from T-shirt as this would reduce scope for confusion with a “hyphen/no hypen” query. In the end I have settled for iloveshirt.co.uk as a play on words from the “Anchoran, The Legend of Ron Burgundy” (one of my fave films ever) quote “I Love Lamp”.
With the domain secured we’re ready to move on. In this instance I’m not registering a company but instead am hoping to use an existing company I have and have a “trading name” (I need to confirm that this’ll be fine… but I’m sure it is). This approach saved a few pennies surrounding the setting up of a business tasks. I imagine that this has saved ~£200/£300 .
Right, that’s it for now… back next time with some info on where I want the business to get to.
So with the launch of the new colour-scheme over on Gingerbread Design main site it was time to get some new business cards printed up. Having read only good things about Moo.com I decided to give them a shot… and boy was I pleased with their service and products!
Following getting the first batch through in the post I was disappointed to see that the ‘front’ had a black background instead of the white I was expecting. I mailed the Moo customer service suggesting that perhaps this was due to my use of transparent png images. They promptly replied stating that ‘yes’ they use a default black background colour. They also offered me a discount code enabling me to get a second order for free (inc P&P) and that once I’d placed it they’d check to make sure that they looked OK.
Once I’d replaced my order I did contact them giving my order number and got a reply back from their CS saying that all was good with my new cards… what great customer service!
Our new business cards
And front…
Our new business cards
I would definitely recommend Moo to anyone who needs this kind of printing to be done… just brilliant!
Oh… there’s a useful page here with a template image that can be used.
For me the Government Gateway is more like a Government Barrier since there is no way at all that I can use the online services that it’s meant to offer… seriously NO WAY. And to boot I’ve been told that this might be the case forever.
No way in
Basically I’d forgotten my password and so went to look for a “reset button”. This actually isn’t on the main page but instead linked to from a deeper page (I infact had to pretend that I was wanting to apply for a new driving license!!!). Once I’d found the link I had to enter some basic personal information and was then prompted for 3 (yes 3) pieces of memorable information… these were a name a place and a date. Now maybe it’s just me (I hope it’s not) but there are a few choices available to me for all these items. I’ve tried all the combinations I can think of but to no avail.
Hope was not lost at first though as there’s a telephone number to call if you’ve forgotten all the information. I called that I got through to a lovely understanding lady who sadly told me that they cannot reset my password either unless I gave them the same information… they have no greater power (i.e. telling me which pieces I might have got right) than the website! I asked what I could do next and was told “nothing”, “there’s no more that you can do”. The lady did mention that there was talk of a “fix” being put in place to fill this ‘gap’ but that proabably won’t be in place until next year at the earliest and that’s if they do anything at all.
I can’t believe I’m the only one in this boat so please please fill in the feedback form on their site asking for this feature to be added.
