A trip to Providence in August

I’m taking a trip to Providence between August 25th and August 29th.

Twitter doing a Facebook

In the last few days I’ve suddenly noticed a sudden increase in the number of celebs around the world getting on the twitter bandwagon. As soon as you start to follow one you realise there are others and quite a few of them are now using the service. Obviously there are sceptics who don’t know whether to believe if it really is them or someone impersonating them or even if it’s someone hired by the celeb to tweet for them. Some, in order to prove they are the real deal, end up having to post up pics of themselves at home, in a studio etc which is funny.

Just like Facebook very quickly became known to everyone I think Twitter with the help of the celebs is going the same way. The celebs are even talking about Twitter on their TV and radio shows so this is the start of the snowball effect. Soon everyone is going to be tweeting!

Why does it take an economic recession to get good customer service?

I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon which I put down to the current downturn in the economic client.  We’ve all heard about people just not spending much money and I’m sure you’ve seen shopping centres more empty than normal despite all the sales promising up to 70% off.  So in these times where businesses are really trying to attract customers to spend money I’ve noticed that shop assistants and salespeople seem to be working a lot harder and providing some good customer service the likes of which we don’t see very often in the UK. 

I went to visit a car showroom the other day and normally when I have done this in the past the sales people are quite arrogant and full of themselves and spend more effort on those people who are there to buy the really expensive cars.  However, since there just isn’t many people buying cars at the moment anyone who expresses an interest seems to get the level of service usually reserved for the rich.  Even in shops, where usually shop assistants don’t even acknowledge your existence until you are actually parting with you money they now seem to eager to help you out to ensure you spend some money in their stores.

I’m used to this kind of service when I visit other countries  like the US or India but this kind of customer service is not something we experience very often in the UK.  I really like it and it makes my shopping experience so much nicer but why has it taken such a downturn in the economic climate for this to happen?  Surely this is what should have been happening all along but everyone just accepts things the way they are and this is quite a sad state of affairs if you think about it.  Many years ago I used to work in a shop of a large national chain and I used to love the interaction with customers which made my job more fun but also enabled the customers to go away feeling good.  In fact since I lived in a small town I would often bump into these same people when I was out and about in the evenings and weekends and it was like we had become friends.

My only hope is that as and when the economy improves again we don’t lose what we’re seeing right now and it remains as it is.  I know I am certainly very influenced by the way I am treated when I am in a shop and vote with my feet and my wallet if I don’t get the kind of service that I should receive a customer.

What about you – have you noticed this?  If not, keep an eye out on this and see if you feel there is a difference.   Is this the same in your countries/cities too…I’d love to hear from you.

Is Apple the new Microsoft?

We have a strange phenomenon within the IT industry where companies are at first admired for the innovation they being to the world. But if they start to be become too successful and popular it seems everyone is then out to ‘get’ them. Take for example IBM – there used to be a saying in the old days which was something like “nobody gets fired for choosing IBM”. In that era if you could afford to buy an IBM mainframe this was the de facto choice. Fast forward a few years and the same company which went on to bring PCs to the worlds desktops falls victim to it’s own success. Yes they probably got too big and too arrogant and nobody likes that so everyone turns against them.

History almost repeats itself when we look at Microsoft – a company people love to hate. In the days when Lotus ruled the roost with desktop applications with products like Lotus 123 and even desktop email products like Cc Mail not to mention the groundbreaking Lotus Notes in came Microsoft. They had rival products which were so much more intuitive and easy to use. They had a common user interface so learning another product from the Microsoft Office suite was simple because you knew a lot already from the app you used so far. They blew Lotus away big time which considering the marketshare Lotus had at the time was nothing short of amazing.

Even in the Operating System and Browser worlds there have been very worthy challengers to Microsoft’s crown yet they still outweigh their competition. We’ve had years and years of Microsoft-bashing – some of it justified because like IBM they probably became too big and too arrogant and again nobody likes that.

Is the same now happening to Apple? For years they have been a good niche product maker with loyal following never quite hitting the masses. But a few years ago the tide started to turn and they started to bring out products that started to appeal to the masses. Personally I think their breakthrough came with the iPod and iTunes. This was groundbreaking because it even spawned the birth of the podcasts that really changed things. Next came the iPhone and as luck would have it Microsoft released Vista. The iPhone took the world by storm but maybe not as much as Apple may have liked since as usual with Apple their products are great but often beyond the reach of the masses. That has changed with the iPhone 3G with the cost now half price and since so many don’t like Vista people are starting to move over to Apple Mac machines in the various flavours they come in. More and more people I know are making the switch but at the same time criticism of Apple and Steve Jobs is increasing all the time. Why is this? Like IBM and Microsoft before them have they become too big or maybe too arrogant and people are turning on them?

Or is it really that any company that becomes very successful gets the worlds attention. Since we’re all very fickle we quickly forget the innovation these compaies have brought to our lives and we start focussing on the things that the products don’t do and nobody likes that!

I hope we don’t see another repeat if history but instead I would like to see more collaboration and cooperation between companies which give us, the consumers, the benefit. Let’s be fair to companies that bring us innovation and feedback constructively on what we would like to see improved or in future products.

Here’s to the future!

More iPhone

More time has passed with my iphone so I figured it was time to write another post.

I still have not got bored of the iPhone and in fact it’s become something that I can’t do without. Yes I am aware how sad this sounds buy it’s true. The convenience of having quick access to my gmail and my social networking connections is great. In fact we had a fire alarm go off at recently and so o was doing some personal emails whilst outside which to me now is nothing unusual but to the recipients was funny. I’ve got so used to the always-on Internet connectivity be it it wifi, 3G, edge etc that when I went abroad recently I missed it because roaming costs too much so had to turn it off.

The various apps continue to impress me. The iPint is a fun party trick, the PhoneSabre allows me to pretend I am Luke Skywalker and the Facebook app allows me to take a picture and automatically upload it as soon as the shot is taken. I attended a family wedding recently so I tried this out by taking some pics for the benefit of those people who hadn’t made it. It was like live photo blogging.

I still think the GPS is poor and it can’t even find where I am most of the time so for me this is useless. However I hear rumours that Tom Tom are developing software for the iPhone which if true may restore my faith in this aspect of the phone.

One of the biggest topics for non-iPhone users is that they think that onscreen keyboard would be a problem for them. I was surprised how quickly I got used it but it’s because of the predictive text that the phone uses. So 99% of the time it guesses the word I am trying to type meaning I can type very quickly and it corrects my spelling and typing mistakes. I say 99% because if I type a word and don’t pay attention it sometimes puts in a word that I didn’t mean. I’ve had a few howlers because of these typos which has been very amusing for by friends. I have nicknamed this iPhone dyslexia.

Speaking of apps and the touch keyboard – I downloaded the free WordPress for iPhone app and this whole post has been typed using it. So how did I do – any typos?

iPhone 3G Part II

I decided not to blog about my iPhone as soon as I got it so that I could bring to you a few days of my experience with it.  Considering all the widely publicised issues that were reported about the problems on launch day I have to say that my purchase on Monday of this week was very smooth indeed.  The Carphone Warehouse called me – strangely on my home number rather than my mobile number of Monday to let me know my iPhone had arrived and I could come and collect it.  I popped over at lunch time and about 5 minutes later I was out with no problems at all.

Let me give you my first impressions.  Well the box that the phone comes in impressed me because of it’s attention to detail.  It looks like a cologne box and is very cool.  The picture of the phone has raised edges and the button you press on the phone is displayed inset.  I know this is minor but I applaud Apple for this attention to detail. 

 Next the phone itself.  My initial thoughts when I held the phone in my hand is that it has a really nice solid feel it to.  Nothing feels cheap or plastic and whilst it’s nice and light it still has a reassuring weight to it that smacks of a quality product.  I have a black phone but all the other accessories that come with it are in the obligatory white which is a shame really because I would have liked everything to have been the same colour personally. 

But I can’t complain about the accessories themselves as the charger consists of a USB cable which can either be connected to your computer or you can attach the plug attachment to it and charge through the mains electricity – very clever.  The stereo headphones have a small tag which when you’re listening to tracks on the phone allow you to press once to pause and twice to move to the next track.  The sound quality is good and louder than previous iPod variants that I have tried.

Then on to phone itself.  The screen is beautiful and such a joy to use the touch screen.  Of course typing on this touch screen gets a lot of bad press but again I’ve not had any issues with it as it seems fairly easy to me to type quite quickly and combined with the predictive words it does a good job of working out the words I may have mis-typed.  I’m not going to go into each and every aspect of the phone in this post – I may focus on some specific areas in future posts.  However, what I think is great about the phone is that if it doesn’t have a feature that you might like or that you may have had in another phone you can just download it using the App Store.  For example, on my Nokia E61 I used the To List quite a lot and initially was disappointed that the iPhone didn’t have one.  A few minutes using the App Store I came across a highly recommended free To Do list application and downloaded it directly to the phone and within minutes I had a much better To Do list than I ever had on the Nokia.  I’ve since downloaded a number of apps and find this aspect of the phone very very powerful.

The camera considering it’s only 2 mega pixels is absolutely fine and it’s hard to think that it’s only that resolution as the quality of the pictures suggests it is higher.  There are of course several phones which have oodles of mega pixels and have things like flash etc which the iPhone doesn’t have because I didn’t buy the iPhone for it’s camera capabilities and what it can do is adequate for my needs.

I can’t say I was particularly impressed with the GPS application but then it could be because I am looking for it to be more of a Sat Nav which it’s not meant to be.  It will be useful to me if I am using whilst not driving or if someone is using it to help me navigate whilst I drive but at the moment it’s not much use to me.  I heard a rumour that Tom Tom are planning to release an iPhone app – if they do and they make use of the GPS that’s there then this will be a killer app and would make me very happy.

The battery life has been something that has been talked about with the v1 iPhones and it was one of the reasons mooted as being the reason why that version didn’t have 3G.  Well with the usefulness of all the features of the iPhone 3G you tend to use it a lot and as a result you do end up draining the battery by the end of the day.  However I do tend to find that it charges up very quickly too so I’m going to get myself a car charger and some spare external batteries so that way I always have the ability to use the phone wherever I am.

Today I started to notice that my phone also seems to get quite warm which was a little worrying.  Having done some digging around it seems this is a problem that has existed with the previous version and with the iTouch and people notice it more especially when using Edge network rather than WiFi or 3G.  I haven’t had much experience with this to notice any correlation but I will keep an eye on this to see if this is the case.

So overall I have to say that I am very happy with my iPhone 3G.  It delivers and having so many functions and features all in one slim & sleek unit is a joy.  I haven’t been able to put it down since I got it and I think I am getting addicted to it.

I’ll write more on some of the things I haven’t mentioned and as I experience more with the phone I will be sure to share these too.

iPhone 3G Part I

Today was the launch day of the iPhone 3G.  I’m not usually someone who gets whipped up by the hype and desperate to get my hands on things on launch day so I wasn’t going to join the queues of people this morning when the stores opened up at 8:02am (still need to find out what the deal is with this strange opening time – will post something when I find out).

Instead I chose to take a leisurely stroll to the Carphone Warehouse at lunchtime to try my luck and see if they had any left.  My colleagues told me I had no chance but I thought ‘hey what the heck they might just have lots of stock this time’.  As I got to the store I thought my hunch was right because in front of me I could see iPhone 3G paperwork being completed and I thought my luck was in!!.  As it turned out they were just taking orders from people since they had sold out of the stock they had so my colleagues were spot on.

I began the process of ordering mine – they told me that I would get my hands on one on Monday or Tuesday the latest.  Since I am already on O2  I figured the process would be very quick and painless because I didn’t need to transfer my number or anything so it would be the easy.  Sadly this was not the case as the sales assistant struggled on his computer to process things.  After much pressing of buttons he even resorted to RTFM  which we all know mean desperate times .  Still no luck so he drafted in his mate who was sporting a nice iPhone 3G black t-shirt but even this dude couldn’t figure out what the problem is.  I was quite happily sending Tweets as this was all unfolding so wasn’t too bothered by it all in all honesty.  Eventually he got through to someone at Sales Support and he worked out that he was supposed to scan the bar code on my new SIM card during the process which he had not done and as soon as he did this we were on our way.  I’ve now paid for my lovely iPhone 16 GB model and I have my new SIM card all ready as soon as I get it.

Interestingly I asked the guy what it was like in the morning and he said it was manic and that they had only 40 phones – all which were pre-ordered.  I would have been pissed off if I had queued for hours in the early morning and then walk out with an iPhone ordered and not the device itself because of this pre-ordering malarkey.  What I don’t understand is why with all the hype that Apple, O2 and Carphone Warehouse have been doing they choose to disappoint people on launch day with only having limited stock.  I’ve read it’s so that they can have sound bites that all stores were sold out on launch day but there are a lot of bitter people who are disappointed.  Surely it would have been better to get these devices to as many people as possible and let them wax lyrical about how good it is and how much they are enjoying it?  But then who I am to judge – I’m not marketing guru but as a consumer if I had been able to get my hands on one by now I would be blogging about the device rather than just the process of trying to get my hands on one. I expect better from Apple because they make fantastic products and my feeling is that they should make the ‘getting an iPhone’ as easy and enjoyable as using their products. 

So now I am waiting eagerly for my new toy *ahem* iPhone and seeing how it changes my life (or not).  I will of course be blogging about my journey into iPhone land so please come back and if you have one yourself already let me know how you’re finding the experience.

 

 

 

 

 

Internet everywhere

Now I don’t have an iPhone (yet) but my current Nokia Smartphone has given me the ability to keep in contact with people through email and various social networking sites (Twitter, Facebook etc).  The only problem is that I want to use it wherever I am and I get used to having WiFi access at home and at work that I expect one everwhere I go.  What suprises me though is why so many places that have a large gathering of people don’t offer free wifi – it really doesn’t cost much these days and surely if you want to attract people to come and stay longer this would be a good way to do so?

Take for example when you’re in the shopping mall – the ladies love to browse so why can’t the guys browse the internet for free whilst their partners are looking at merchandise?  I sure would find the shopping experience a bit more bearable if I was able to do this.  Then there is the gym.  Now I don’t necessarily think it’s a good idea to surf the net whilst exercising having wifi in the restaraunt/bar area would encourage people to stay longer and eat/drink after their workout so they will spend more money.

Airports already have wifi but you have to be stupid money to use it – why?  Surely you want to attract people to the airport to spend more time there and maybe then you might buy stuff from the shops whilst you are there and when you’re stood in the queues for security or check-in you can keep yourself occupied.

With all the mobile devices out there capable of connecting up I don’t think we’re getting the connectivity we need when in my opinion it could be provided.  Sure, whoever provides it has to find a way of making some money from the investment but I’m sure the internet marketers would have a clever way of doing this.

As I get ready to swap my Nokia phone for an Apple iPhone I’m glad I will as part of my package be getting free wifi so it will cater for my needs in many places but I think it’s time businesses woke up and provided internet access everywhere.

An nice surprise.

Recently, I was on business trip in Leicester (UK) and I found an Indian restaurant whose Birmingham branch I had been too many years ago.  Having been impressed with the Birmingham restaurant I figured that the one in Leicester would also be good and a quick look at their website and the menu it seemed like I had figured right.  The restaurant was Shimla Pinks.

Indeed the restaurant, the food, and service was of very good quality so we were not disappointed.  One of my team had placed his hotel key card on top of the table and one of the waiters noticed this and said “Ohhhh, you’re staying at the Hilton!”.  We didn’t think anything of it and thought it was just the waiter making small talk and being friendly.  However at the end of the meal another waiter brought our bill over to me and just as he was handing this over he too noticed this keycard on the table too and said “Ohhhh, you’re staying at the Hilton?”.  At this point we started to wonder what the fascination was about the Hilton – it was a nice hotel but this attention seemed to be a little over the top.  I answered that we were all staying there at which point he said “Well you get a discount off your bill if you’re staying at the Hilton” and off he went to adjust the bill.

Amazingly we were given a whopping 15% off the bill!  Now since then I’ve checked both the Hilton’s website and Shimla Pink’s website and neither of them mention this discount which is a shame as they could help each other out if more people knew about it with this kind of business partnership and maybe they could have reciprocal arrangements.  I’m going to write to the manager of both places to recommend they publicise this more for their customers benefit.

So the moral of the story is that you should always ask in hotels if they have any partnerships like this with restaraunts and you should also carry your hotel keycard with you and ask at the restaraunt if they have any discount offers.  If you don’t ask you don’t get!

I would thoroughly recommend both places if you are ever visiting and staying in Leicester.

What are you doing?

So initially I was curious about Twitter and admittedly when I first registered and looked at it I just didn’t get it. I’m not the only one and reading through some of the FAQs they offer ways to try and describe what Twitter is to your friends as it’s not as easy as you might think.

Essentially to me it’s a way of keeping upto date with what others are doing and keeping them upto date with you are doing. Using status updates – known as Tweets – in 140 characters you can let people know what you are doing and even include URLs to things. People choose to ‘follow’ others which essentially means they want to know the status updates of these people and you can also allow others to ‘follow’ you so they get your status updates.

The nice thing is that you can update your tweets using the web, IM, or even SMS. So you could be out and about and you could send an SMS and this would update your twitter page. You can also choose how you want the updates from people you are following to be received – so you could receive them as SMS message or have them on the web. You can make this choice for each person you are following.

It’s an interesting technology and since I know people from all over the world it has the potential of letting me stay in touch with people no matter where they are and feel like I am close to them even though I may be thousands of miles away in reality.

Check it out and see what you think: www.twitter.com