http://boboshady.tumblr.com/post/13156694331/second-layer-insight

It seems to be that there would have been a much better solution to all of this.

For clarity, I need to point out that these figures are approximate – I researched them, but only quickly and only using Google.

There’s 12.58 million people in the Greater London area, approximately 66% of whom are of working age (15 – 64). Let’s assume 100% employment, and we have a smidge of 8.3 million employed people.

Given an average London wage of £26,000, that gives a take home wage of approximately £20,042, or about £385.42 a week.

If we asked everyone who falls into the above employment bracket to just stay at home for two weeks, we’d have to pay them £770.84 (385.42 x 2).

That comes up to a total of around £6.4 billion – some £100 million cheaper than the current amount of cash being thrown at the London transport network, and an obvious saving. But of course it’s far more than that, because currently the estimated £6.5 billion spend will merely lessen the chaos and gridlock – my plan would remove 8million people from the streets of London for 2 weeks, keeping it nice and clear for tourists, olympians and journos alike.

And let’s not forget my numbers are also grossly understated – I’m assuming that every person aged between 15-65 in the Greater London area is employed here, which is quite frankly laughable. You could likely cut my budgeted cost in half (unless I’ve done my sums wrong somewhere!).

So there it is – how the transport worries for the 2012 Olympics could have been solved in an instance, and with no annoying roadworks, gridlock or exclusive lanes. I await my appointment to the Government.

Yes – the worst had happened. the Kindle had been stood on and now is was deaded.

Despite purchasing the Kindle at Currys Digital, I decided to see if Amazon did any sort of easy repair or replacement scheme. once logged into amazon.co.uk, and after a few minutes hunting around for the relevant help page, I scheduled a call (yes, for them to call me – no waiting around in queues) which came through almost immediately.

I spoke with a guy called Pat for all of 5 minutes. During that time, we established that my Kindle was indeed broken and that such foot-related breakary wasn’t covered under their normal warranty (which is fair enough!).

Then he broke the good news – much like Apple do with their iPhone, no quibble replacement scheme, Amazon offer a replacement for 30% of the purchase price, assuming you send in your broken Kindle within 30 days.

About 3 minutes into the 5 minute call, we’d confirmed that I was happy to do that, my card was charged and a delivery was arranged for Tuesday coming. We spent the final 2 minutes going through the returns procedure for the old Kindle and generally being nice to each other.

Basically, a flawless customer service experience and a no quibble replacement at a reasonable cost, all within minutes of my initiating contact. I can’t imagine receiving such service anywhere else (although I’ve always rated Apple’s CS for their similar, no quibble approach to such things).

In this instance, I’m talking about a Kindle that was broken – by accident – but broken all the same. I do know of many people who have had random problems with their Kindles…screen freezes, software problems etc. Most of the people I and other people know who are Kindle owners have had some kind of issue before now. So why isn’t it constantly in the news? The Kindle is one of the most popular devices in the world (where available, at least)…so why aren’t people screaming about it?

Simply because of Amazon’s customer service approach. They speak to you very quickly and offer replacement after replacement. If it’s your fault, they replace at a very reasonable cost. If it’s their fault, they don’t argue…they just replace. And they send you a new one immediately and then give you 30 days to return the busted on at their cost.

it may sound like a very expensive way to keep people happy, but in doing so they are creating an army of dedicated followers who love their Kindles and know that the company who provides them will keep supporting them. They’re also mitigating any negative publicity about software and hardware problems and, in a world where customer service is always in the news, scoring major brownie points.

And this is why people love their Kindles and love Amazon, and why it really doesn’t matter that the product they’re selling is actually a bit crap.

It’s been widely reported that HP wiped 100million off their value simply by doing this, which certainly indicates a company licking it’s wounds and walking away from things as quickly as possible…but what if, in the middle of a long meeting to decide how to put the best possible spin on the disaster that was WebOS and the Touchpad, some brave executive put forward the following idea:

Let’s sell the Touchpads at a loss now but create massive interest in the device and WebOS.

Sound crazy? Maybe. But let’s look at the facts – HP have long desired to license WebOS out to partners, the problem being that no one is going to pay to put WebOS onto their hardware if there is no developer or consumer interest in the platform. If you create a market of millions of WebOS users, you do two things – create an instant audience, and get your product into the hands of people who will potentially love it and rave about it; people who you would otherwise not have engaged.

This makes perfect sense – As an original Pre owner I’ve always maintained that WebOS would be perfect on a tablet – if you can get it into the hands of the general public, they will love it and they will talk about it.

Let’s look at something else that could really demonstrate the strategic approach HP took here – total cost. Sure, they may have wiped 100million off their value by selling all their Touchpad stock at a loss…but they’re currently riding high in the tablet market place, with only the formidable iPad above them – to buy such a position within just two weeks of launch, globally, would have cost tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. 100million? That seems like an increasingly good deal.

I’m increasingly convinced that HP have cleverly turned what looked like a product launch disaster into something that could well place them as a major contender in the tablet and mobile market. WebOS had all the hallmarks of a fantastic platform, and now there’s the ready made audience of millions of owners who are there to spend money on apps, which will in turn attract developers, which will in turn attract licensing interest. All of that for a mere 100 million? Bargain.

Well, I say I live more on those services…I’m actually using them less than I used to, also…but I feel like I like them more that a full-on blog. Twitter especially has become my primary online conversational tool.

To put some context around my current problem, here’s what I have that I use on a semi-regular basis:

1. 5 email accounts, excluding my professional ones – I actually decided to move to one, managed address a while ago but I still have a handful of legacy accounts which I’ve not gotten around to updating my 15 years of digital subscriptions and accounts to.
2. Lots – LOTS – of online presence – tumblr (3 accounts), facebook, Google+, twitter (3 accounts), linkedin.

I really can’t decide the best approach to bringing together all my email, nor the best solution to present myself online. I was hoping it would just work itself out when I accepted that it needed doing, but nothing’s concluded thus far. Dammit!

20 mins or so of googling later, it seemed that there was nothing but a trip to an Apple store for it. And then I saw a post from a very embarrassed person who had suffered a similar problem only to discover the cause was his magic mouse, tucked in his bag and still connected to his computer, with something prodding the left mouse button down.

The thing is…I have a magic pad upstairs which was still connected to the laptop even though I was downstairs, on the other side of the house.

Needless to say, once I’d removed the keyboard that was resting on top of it, my touchpad was working just fine again. *cough*.

A good advertisement for the range of bluetooth though, it has to be said.

And another thing – I have caught myself doing something I think I hate quite a lot recently – using the term ‘app’ to describe desktop applications. Grrrrr. It’s inevitable that everything will become an app, but still. Grrrrr.

And don’t get me started on laptops in general – I am highly miffed about people buying laptops nowadays – the manufacturers have cottoned on to what consumers are looking for – a big, 15.6inch screen, lots of RAM and HD space and see if you can’t stick ‘dual core’ or ‘latest Intel processor’ in the advert too. Then wrap it all up in the heaviest, most plasticky case in the world and couple it with a screen resolution that looked outdated on much smaller screens 3 years ago (1366 x 768 on a near 16″ screen? come on….).

And that’s before I even start talking about laptop battery life….

Continue reading on my company blog…

Exciting times lie ahead, most likely with a fair amount of stress and gin. And Greggs.

Basically,  the system being put in place here has two audiences – vendors who will list information, and users who will search and consume it. The advice, and the right way to look at such systems, is to identify where the value lies for you, and make sure that’s working correctly.

Obviously, the users who are going to search and consume the information are vital – without them, there is no reason for th vendors to list on your system at all. BUT…the users are never going to actually give you any money – we live in a world were service is free and if you charge, your users will just go somewhere else that does not. The monetisation for such a system revolves around the services you can sell into the vendors.

To clarify, all you need to be doing is making sure that your user-facing website works simply and quickly, and then worry about actually making money by bringing true innovation and value to the vendors who will ultimately populate your system. If you spend too long concentrating on the user-side, you’ll throw a lot of money at it and never see anything back, because they’ll never give you a penny.