Tomorrow marks ten years since the founding of the World Wide Web Consortium. And just as a ten-year-old child will tend not to keep silent about its wishes for a party and its particular desires for presents, so the W3C has put some early effort into ensuring it gets a decent pile of birthday wishes. It has kindly provided an interactive message board for the purpose. And of course the messages have come in from all over the web. One says, "Boldog Születésnapot!", which may sound like the kind of rebuke you might hurl at a misbehaving hound, but is actually Hungarian for Happy Birthday. Sneak was slightly disappointed by one aspect of the online birthday card, however. Sneak knows about all the problems with spammers and pornographers, but really... The fact that the W3C, of all organisations, won't allow messages with web-links says all anyone needs to know about the current state of the web.

November 30, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak has been sent a press release entitled "How To Make Your Promiscuous Customer Faithful Through Symbiotic Loyalty". This arresting item was issued by Forrester Research and comes to the startling conclusion that customers don't tend to remain loyal to suppliers that try to squeeze too much money out of them. According to Forrester's Hellen Omwando, "Consumers have become less loyal because they believe that most competing products offer the same value and that price is more important than brand." Or, to put it another way, customers have found that changing supplier typically brings little improvement in the third-rate service on offer, but can save a bit of cash. So what can suppliers do to break out of this cynical circle? According to Forrester, vendors should seek to win truly loyal customers: "Those who stick with particular firms or brands because of their emotional connections."
And how are companies supposed to make this emotional connection with their customers? "Firms need to start measuring the return on loyalty (ROL), which quantifies the value that loyal customers generate and will tell them when to invest in these loyalists - or when it's time to break up," Forrester concludes.
Sneak would suggest that offering value for money and good old-fashioned customer service might be a better start, but perhaps that would sound a bit too bleeding obvious. After all, Forrester doesn't want its loyal customers to conclude that they could come up with this kind of stuff themselves, for nothing.

November 25, 2004 Business intelligence | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak was surprised to receive a text message today via the BT Text service, which uses a computer-generated female voice to read SMS messages aloud over phones that would otherwise be incapable of receiving the message. It's a pretty impressive service, particularly given that it must cope with all the abbreviations, absent grammar and misspellings commonly seen in such missives. But users should beware. As with AOL's over-eager Instant Messenger service, sometimes an element of Chinese whispering can creep in when a computerised system starts guessing at human intent. Sneak checked, and the sender of this morning's message signed off "see you anon". As anyone with a dictionary can easily verify, anon means "soon". BT's sultry voice, however, purred: "See you. Anonymous." While Sneak is happy to have anonymous female admirers, Sneak can't help wondering if there are other examples of embarrassing misinterpretations made by BT's system, with more calamitous consequences.

November 24, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a similar vein to the previous post, Sneak has to take his hat off to the supreme spin doctors employed by Dixons. Take one bad-news story: customers will no longer be able to buy a new VHS video recorder from Dixons, because it doesn't make enough profit selling them. So if your old machine is on the blink and you still want to watch your wedding, little Timmy's first steps, or your painstakingly-collected back-catalogue of Star Trek: The Next Generation, then tough luck: it's eBay or the highway. (Or, to be less dramatic, you could try Amazon or Argos or John Lewis or almost any other electrical retailer). But put the cold facts into the PR blender and spin for 30 seconds and Dixons can serve its callous decision piping-hot as a plus point. It can secure prime-time free advertising for its line of DVD machines at high-profile news outlets like The Guardian, BBC, The Independent and Reuters. A PR job well and truly done, Sneak feels.

November 23, 2004 Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (1)

What an interesting revelation: Bill Gates gets four million emails a day. As pondered on by all manner of news providers with nothing better to say.

Fascinating. But - unless spammers have only just woken up to the fact that bill.gates@microsoft.com might lead somewhere - presumably this is the kind of news story that could have appeared at any time during the last few years. So how convenient for it to be made public just now - when Microsoft is in court defending its policy of deleting potentially awkward emails. Poor Microsoft, it certainly does have a big problem dealing with all that mail. Funny how these coincidences just crop up.

November 19, 2004 Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (1)

Although Sneak prides himself on being up to speed with the IT industry's ever-evolving jargon, there is always room for a baffling new term. The chief marketing officer of a large US software firm recently dropped a prize example. When the subject of a newly-announced partnership between two rival companies was brought up, the official dismissed it as the two firms 'doing a Barney'. Seeing the blanker-than-usual expression on Sneak's face, the executive was forced to explain about Barney the nauseating purple dinosaur and his trademark song - I Love You, You Love Me. "They're not announcing anything concrete, other than the fact that they've suddenly decided they need each other," the executive explained. Hence the phrase.
Sneak is a little too old to feel any fondness for Barney, so would like to suggest some further terms based on children's TV favourites of an earlier era. Doing a Barpapapa, for example, could describe those firms that change their priorities (and their roadmaps) as often as Barbapapa changed his shape. The many IT vendors that make an awful lot of noise to very little effect could be called Clangers. And then there could be doing a Pugwash, which could... err... on second thoughts, maybe this whole kids TV thing isn't such a good idea.

November 18, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak receives an inordinate number of press releases, and it's fair to say that most make rather sweeping claims. But occasionally one arrives that is truly exceptional. Like this one, proclaiming that enterprise software is now "obsolete".
"A European software start-up [today] reveals a new enterprise software solution that offers massive savings and previously unheard of business model flexibility, allowing any company to move to ever-greater profitability in a secure fashion," it begins.
"The enterprise software market - currently dominated by giants such as Oracle, SAP and Siebel - is a market where 40 percent of all IT costs go towards simply 'making the stuff work together'," it goes on. "Of course, the largest players in the enterprise software market are not oblivious to this issue. Being aware of the current situation, they have launched a series of 'visions', pointing to a shift of focus from operational efficiency to business model innovation and asking for simpler, holistic and horizontal systems. But such promising and radical systems have remained elusive when it comes to the point of actually delivering them. [We] will change all that. [Our] enterprise software solution can fulfil all those visions with immediate effect."
Well, it sounds great guys. But if you truly want people to believe that you have consigned Oracle, SAP and Siebel to the recycle-bin of software history, it might be worth thinking up a more boardroom-friendly name. After all, Sneak wouldn't fancy being the IT director charged with saying, "I know we've ploughed $80m into our SAP infrastructure, but I honestly think we should dump it and replace it with Thingamy."

November 17, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak is a big fan of smartphones and connected PDAs and is, therefore, concerned to see that Sir Peter Gershon has made the leap from steering the Office of Government Commerce to chairing the board of handset software maker Symbian. While the ex-government man clearly has plenty of gravitas and no doubt has a contacts file capable of making even a PDA bulge, Sneak does worry about whether the public-sector mindset and mobile technology will make a good mix. Sneak for one does not want to have to fill out every diary entry in triplicate, never mind having to hold a year-long pilot-programme, followed by an audited competitive tendering process, whenever it comes time to buy a new pre-pay top-up card.

November 16, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak would not have believed it if Sneak had not seen the thing with his own eyes. Microsoft has somehow managed to patent the wheel. A wheel on a keyboard, it has to be said, but even so...

November 15, 2004 Science | Permalink | Comments (0)

The weirdest factoid to emerge in all the hoo-ha about Vodafone's new 3G voice services are the 60-second-long programmes promised from the makers of 24, the TV series in which Keifer Sutherland plays tough US government agent Jack Bauer. As fans of the series will know, Bauer is only marginally less indestructible than Captain Scarlet: a deep, penetrating knife-wound to Bauer's thigh, for example, will bleed for about ten seconds, cause minor hobbling for around ten minutes, and then be healed enough to allow vigorous jumping, sprinting, kick-boxing and playing the spoons within an hour or so. With only 24 of the 60-second "mobisodes" to play with, Sneak predicts that the new 3G-compatible Bauer will have to spring back into action with even less delay. Presumably he will be capable of re-growing an arm or sprouting a new head faster than you can say "crap".

November 12, 2004 Television | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak is delighted to see that the Firefox browser has made its way out of beta and into the tinder-dry chicken-coop that is the Internet-Explorer-dominated web. One thing did occur to Sneak, however. What is it with the logo? Nice flaming fox, but exactly which world is it that Foxy is encircling? The British Isles seem to be there, kind of, and the Iberian peninsula as well. But what's with Africa? Why does the continent look like it's been squashed and stretched, like some huge tectonic clown's balloon, into the shape of a sausage-dog's head? Given this geographically questionable imagery, Sneak for one will not be using Firefox to arrange any travel plans.

November 10, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

The upcoming Freedom of Information Act is likely to cause problems for civil servants, due to a lack of extra resources for coping with a feared deluge of queries. And not from respected academics, either. No, according to this article in The Telegraph, it seems that X-Files fans are likely to lead the initial charge, demanding to see seekrit documents relating to the little green men that the government has known about ever since Roswell, if not before. Gill Bennett, chief historian at the Foreign Office, is worried. "Unless we take them round our shelves and show them, which we obviously can't do, it is not easy to prove the non-existence of secrets," she told the paper. But then, given the extent of the cover-up, that's exactly what you'd expect her to say.

November 9, 2004 Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's safety in numbers, according to the TV and print advertisements designed to encourage us all to embrace Chip-and-PIN charging systems. But Sneak has discovered that there is also considerable confusion in the system as well. Picture the scene: it's time to pay after a large and now rather drunk party has enjoyed a lengthy meal. As often happens, ten cards are proffered, for the bill to be split. The waiter pokes the first card into a handheld chip-reading machine and keys in the amount to be paid. It then demands the customer's PIN. Only then does the waiter realise that, because the metal chip-contacts are positioned at the same, right-hand end of the card as the customer's name and the bank's logo - all of which are now inside the slot of the machine - he has no idea whose PIN is needed. "Err, whose is the blue MasterCard?" he asks. "Mine," answer three people, not very helpfully. The waiter is forced to cancel the transaction, whip the card out, note the name, and start again. Fine, of course, except that he is a slow learner and repeats the mistake on the next three cards as well. Hilarious at the time, but in hindsight an interesting object lesson in the dangers of blindly adding functions to existing systems, without considering the new user-interaction requirements. Perhaps the banks might consider moving the cardholder name to the opposite end of the card?

November 8, 2004 Top tips | Permalink | Comments (4)

Sneak was impressed to learn of efforts to bring a WiMax network to the UK, but surprised by one of the technologies involved. Apparently a system called SkyPilot will be used to make the link between the WiMax back-haul network and the end-user's site. Now, Sneak knows that SkyPilot is an American firm, but surely even in the US - where they are happy to have a president incapable of correctly pronouncifying difficultacious words of more than three letters - they still have access to dictionaries. From which they might learn that "sky pilot" is a slang term for a military chaplain - the person responsible for administering last rites to dying soldiers and steering them onto the big taxiway in the sky. So not a great omen for an untried and unfamiliar new offering, then.

November 4, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

"What do we have under the hood?" asks Microsoft, rhetorically, on the home page of its experimental Google-rival, the revamped MSN Search. It's a good question. Particularly given some peculiarities of the tech-preview version of the service. For example, Sneak is quite surprised that Google should think an entry in this very blog deserves to be result number two when a user enters "pick axe" into Google.co.uk. Sneak is happy to get the traffic, but can only assume that pick-axe fans or prospective buyers are highly likely to be disappointed if they choose to visit. But doubly oddly, the same search string at the new MSN service brings up Sneak's item in exactly the same position. By contrast both AltaVista and Ask.co.uk understandably leave Sneak off their lists of hot pick-axe picks. So Sneak does wonder, what exactly is under the hood? Does MSN in fact do exactly what the rest of us do when we want to find something? Does it simply zip off to ask Google?

November 3, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sneak was impressed to learn that with appropriate fibre-optic technology it is now possible to extend the keyboard, video and mouse (KVM) cables of a PC so that they are up to 10km long. This allows a user to sit at a safe distance from a PC that may, for example, be connected to an old soviet-era uninterruptible power supply (the kind with the boron control-rods that tend to get a bit sticky with age). There may be other reasons for adopting the layout, but Sneak can't for the moment think what they might be. One drawback does spring readily to mind, however. If the keyboard, monitor and mouse are 10,000 metres away from the system unit, what happens when - as does happen, particularly in the Windows world - the system locks up and needs to be restarted by a judicious prod of the restart button? Even an Olympic athlete would need an hour or more for the round trip. Unless, of course, such KVM kits come with a really, really long stick.

November 2, 2004 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tomorrow is decision day for the US presidency, and Sneak for one hopes that Bush will be given a message even he can understand. In the meantime, Sneak has put two and two together and come up with a new theory. First, there's the widely publicised bulge in the president's jacket. Then there is the scientific research that showed a marked boost in verbal reasoning skills among volunteers who had an electrical current piped through their brains. So it seems entirely logical that the mysterious bulge was in fact a simple battery pack. A few wires concealed in the president's hair and bingo - instant cerebrum upgrade. As far as Sneak could tell, however, the tactic hasn't been working. Perhaps they need to turn the wick up a bit.

November 1, 2004 Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0)