Results tagged “value”

Just saw Tim's piece on the Glasshouse blog on Orange Rockcorps and understanding the value of the social capital.

From there I had a quick look around and wow, quite a lot of negative opinion out there and a surprisingly downbeat response to the Orange rockcorps thing over at brandrepublic:

This is incredibly lame. The Orange 'I Am' campaign just limps from bad to worse. Busta Rhymes? What year are we in? 1999? I can't remember the last campaign from Fallon that was any good.

I guess there's a gap between the original and the Orange "I am" branded version? This is how the rc site describes the initiative:

RockCorps harnesses the power of music to inspire volunteering. We produce concerts for which the only way in is to volunteer 4 hours at a project we organize with non-profit partners. You can't win a ticket; you can't buy a ticket; you have to earn a ticket to a concert that becomes a celebration of giving back.

Tim reckons

If the company makes it work, it's the energy and community productivity generated that will constitute the value of the initiative; not the SMS bundles sold. The number of hours donated, or playgrounds renovated is a wholly inadequate proxy for the social capital generated by a campaign like this...

read Tim's whole post over at Glasshouse Partnership

Wow, I thought I'd be playing with RC5 for a while before getting the final release but no, the real thing is here. Go grab yourself a copy

With the long list of recent launch disappointments (with iPhone 3G by far the smelliest) I gotta say, Six Apart have not only delivered a hugely improved product (faster, more features) but a whole new license structure.

The new licenses are very much value co-creation engines. In a nutshell, let the mass of small businesses and bloggers use all the variations and toys for free, let them build on them, change them, and if they manage to scrape some revenue out of their enterprise, then ask them to buy services (primarily the excellent support) and pay for a commercial license.

I am very, very impressed and will be upgrading all my installations immediately. Great work 6A:-)

You know it doesn't get more cutting edge than this. First, after much stress and waiting, I jailbreak my iPhone and go in search of hot software. Great, open, free liberating productivity apps here I come and lo, I end up with the iFart, which pretty much does what it says on the can...

So yeah, post Jailbreak briccups (handset would cycle instead of turning off--made reseting impossible), have replaced iPhone and wait patiently for the 2.0 firmware to be delivered via proper channels and sync away with itunes and visit the app store and yes! I know have the iPhone light-saber app installed.

Surely our parents could never of conceived of such a wondrous world;-)

I think the nice man who went in search of my Identity theft woes last week would have liked me to update my previous post.

So here goes: according to his findings there is nothing wrong with either his payment-processing software or hardware and a review of staff at the branch revealed nothing untoward.

So just to confirm: all is well at Eat. You can pick up your soup and sandwiches safe in the knowledge that these guys pay attention to detail, act fast when required and are just generally a bunch of excellent people!

eat.co.uk

Wow, when was the last time you thought you'd get a response as a result of filling in a form on the web (never mind a rapid response)?

Well, I had a little grief from the fraud protection mob at Firstdirect this afternoon and as a result posted this note in the feedback form on the Eat website (and I won't go into the domain name resolution issue on the site which means if you load the flash movie by entering the domain without the 'www' the links to the feedback form are broken--I wonder how much more feedback they'd get if that was fixed...)

At 14:31:55 on 27 June 2008 (roughly an hour ago) I purchased a soup and sandwich from your 15 Basinghall Street shop.

When I returned to my desk to eat my lunch I received a call from my bank (first direct) informing me that there had been fraudulent behaviour on my switch card.

According to their records, the transaction I had just made in the City of London was routed through a supplier in Equador.

The security guys at the bank where I work reckon this is a man-in-the-middle attack and that someone has tampered with the keypad in the store (similar to attaching card readers to ATM tellers, to harvest card details).

Please review this situation asap.

All the best,
Dug Falby

To be honest, I really didn't think I'd get an answer (strangely, the Flash front-end is what gave me this impression: If it's not a real html form, how can it yield real results?) but I did.

A nice man called Martin (I think he said he was head of business communications?) rung up to explain what was going on as a result of my note. From his description, I pictured a black helicopter appearing over Basinghall street and special forces whisking the card-reader off to a controlled explosion. It was very impressive, he said he'd frozen all card transactions at the store, notified the card processing supplier who are going to come in and refit the store tonight and would double-check records for staff access to card processing stuff.

He also made a point of checking that I had notified my bank and assured me he would get back to with with any progress relevant to my situation. Prompt, courteous and thorough, just the way it oughta be.

Which of course means I'll be all the more likely to go buy delicious soups and salads from Eat:-)

OK so it's now Stevenote - 7 and my iPhone is stuck in an imap loop and when I turn it off it reboots instantly. Of course plugging it in and clicking "restore" (which theoretically wipes your iPhone and restores it to OEM condition) doesn't fix the problem so I'm sort of hoping the 2.0 firmware will sort this...

...but I keep trying to decide if I should continue to put up with the phone. So many aspects of it drive me crazy. Take the battery for instance. On my N95, when Symbian thinks it's the best mobile OS on the planet but gets it wrong, the phone lets me take the battery out. This is kinda like the handset saying "sorry" like a grumpy two-year-old, a good thing. When it turns out iPhone needs to be disciplined, Steve just repeats "no, mine!" like another kind of two-year-old, a very bad thing indeed:-(

Well, on balance I think my iPhone sucks, but it sucks less than the other twenty smartphones I've lived with over the last couple of years.

It's not all handset woes, take for example O2's brilliant Apple-approved billing structure. Unlimited data (unless you instal a demon in which case the fair-use policy kicks in) and a set number of calls for a set monthly price. That is (almost) exactly what I want except that when I call my bank, or the power company, or I want book a movie ticket or call a helpline I have to pay extra for the 0870 local-call number. Never mind that I haven't got the choice. Powergen hasn't got a local extension I can call so the word from O2 is "tough" :-(

Not a big deal you might say but my £45/month all-in contract quickly becomes an £80/month which is way way more that I want to pay for the service.

I thought O2's iPhone contracts might have jogged the other operators into finding some sense so I checked my fave, Orange (France Telecom) to see what unlimited data contracts they had for new users.

Well, surprisingly, as of 2 June 2008 not a sausage

Sigh... crap really.

The DVD format is a fiasco born out of a desire to control the way customers consume the products they buy.

I can't imagine any parent out there who would be happy to fork out fifteen quid for a DVD full of extra features they will never have the free time to watch knowing that after a couple of weeks worth of little fingers it will become a worthless piece of unplayable plastic.

The value is the experience of your child watching the movie NOT the stone-age tech used to play it (and don't get me started on a format that lets the media owner disable the customer's menu features).

The smarter we consumers become (and the more we share our experiences), the more the techpants will struggle with their pointless offerings and hopefully, new value-creation networks will take over:-)

So anyway, I was just going to write about wi-fi before going off on one...

I just got a couple of tweets from a guy who was trying to get on the net from the brand-new Heathrow terminal 5. Unbeleivably, he was being asked to jump through hoops, fill in forms, and worst of all, pay! Now let me make this completely clear:

Charging for wi-fi is like charging for tap-water in a restaurant.

Hell, it's like charging for air conditioning, or light, or cleanliness... These are all infrastructure items that are factored into the cost of the main event.

So look, you pay for your airline ticket, you pay for your state and city taxes, you pay your airport taxes, you pay for your extra luggage, you paid for the cab to the airport. You paid a king's ransome for the latte the kid at the next table keeps threatening to spill on your keyboard so YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE TO PAY FOR CONNECTIVITY!

Ok?!?

And just so we're completely clear on this one, not only should you not have to pay with currency or credit, you shouldn't have to pay with attention or privacy. No landing pages, portals or branded content, just unfettered, universal access for all.

The worst part is we're all buying into this nonsense, the average Londoner can see five wi-fi networks from his sitting room. In a five-flat Victorian conversion counting neighbours on both sides that's 15 broadband contracts. If you just got together with your neighbours you could share a low-contention business connection for a fraction of the cost (think about it, you're collectively forking out £300 a month for a highly contended connection with no service contract or decent support while £50 split between you would secure a bandwidth-assured connection contract).

So if you don't mind, cancel your broadband and talk to your neighbours and in the meantime, disable your password and open up your wireless connection :-)

A nice man called David tweeted me yesterday with a link to a video of Russell Davies talking about interestingness, size and creativity. In the video, Russell refers to a project I did a couple of years ago for Birdseye. I just wanted to thank David as it's always nice to know there are people out there who share the passions I get out of bed for:-)

I've been thinking about advertising agencies big and small, partly because of the LGFE reunion this thursday and partly because I'm pretty much always stuck in the thick of one or other user-centred design process debate.

I sent the following question to a recruiter this morning as we're talking about maybe working together. I don't know the answer, but I'm pretty sure it's tough for a passionate user experience person to work without discovery...

Here was the question I had in mind:

80% of the magic of user-centered design happens in the discovery phase, prior to the IA proposing the information model for an interface. As most pitches involve going to the client with a ready-made proposal, agencies tend to find it difficult to produce user-centered design. Does your agency have a strategy in place to overcome this challenge?

I suppose the answer is "win the business then shove the IA through the door" but I can't imagine this guy or this guy playing it like that...

Are you a senior agency bod? How do you handle ideas of value, resonance, co-creation and needs assessment? I'm still working on the question :-)

Hey, we've just had a long and very informative post from Matt, a Luton-based Openreach engineer. I hope this really is an engineer speaking and not some perverse item from a 'guerilla marketing' agency subverting from within. He describes some real horror stories, if you're interested in the BT thing it's well worth a read:

I was on a fault last week and the customer drop-wire from the pole to the house was rubbing through trees so I replaced it only to get a phone call the next day from my manager asking why I hadn't charged the customer as the trees were on his property--this is the level that they are stooping to.

Do they care? This thing has been simmering for a while now, I wonder at what point a BT pr person is going to chime in?

Is BT still shit? (A Donkey on the Edge)

Alex over at artflutter just posted a link to an mp3 of the Banksy Paris Hilton Danger Mouse Remix I mentioned in an earlier post which is great because the link I posted to the pics no longer has em but Alex has posted a full set of liner mods.

Thanks Alex :-)

I wrote a little brain-dump on decommodification this morning and have just now come across tom at interesting (different tom) a video from Russell Davies Interesting 2007 conference.

Tom talks about pipes (or tubes) and starts off his presentation with the example of the tobacco infrastructure, the incredible world of resources and infrastructure required for you to smoke a cigarette...

Which kinda ties-in with the aforementioned telecoms operator's pipes and their relationship to value co-creation...

No conclusions as of yet, but the video is nice, so go watch it:-)

What's that Dug? A new-year's prediction in September? Shurly shome mistake... Well, this one just popped into my brain so I thought I'd put it down on paper. I think 2008 will be the year of decommodification. The word exists already and has a few definitions. I'd like to propose a new one.

Decommodification The process by which value is re-infused into what those in the know in the telecoms industry call "pipes" as in "Vodafone is just a leaser of pipes".

The executives you'll hear using this phrase will be using it in the context of trying to find ways for the business to add value. If pipes are 'just' a commodity and the money is in what travels through those pipes then the telecoms operation needs to invest in building tools and services it can sell (like webmail applications or photo-sharing apps).

I think 2008 will see telco operators realise that the kids are creating the apps they need themselves, but what Ben Trott, Chris Messina, Katerina Fake, Rasmus Lerdorf or even today's darling Mark Zuckerberg can't do is provide ubiquitous, pervasive, reliable, cheap and universal connectivity to planet earth.

I know it's a lot less glamourous than making groovy stuff but there is one seriously big place in heaven for the operator who becomes the world's Good Connectivity Partner.

Well, that's what I was thinking anyway...

Phil asks an interesting question: open source experience design?

After DVD John's first iPhone hack the elusive SIM unlock comes one step closer:-) Neowin.net - Hackers saw through iPhone AT&T shackles

Wey hey, a sim unlock for iPhone is on it's way... DVD John has already made an activation server so network-free landscape iPods might be just around the corner...

It'll be interesting to see how mobile operators react to this. As consumers try and create increased value with the iPhone by making it work the way they want it to the trad operators could feel a little threatened. Most of them are still focusing their business on 'offers' rather than building value creation networks with their customers.

I'm still waiting for the operator that lets me build my own billing plan. Any takers?

(Photo: Clementine Falby by David Hockney)

So I've just finished a user experience consultancy gig with a major mobile network operator based in France. It's an interesting project which I'll be picking up again in the new year. I've been working alongside product owners (ie individuals who are assigned with owning the business of a part of a website or service) and have been factoring their business objectives into the objectives versus needs process. Having just spent ten months working through the objectives of a UK network operator it was interesting to see the different approaches to the business. I can't really go into any details, but one of the key differences is that the French team have managed to build a business treating their products as containing inherent value. For example, the French customers are apparently happy to pay extra to add services to their account which the English would have added to the service for free in the interest of building a better experience, getting closer to the consumer and starting to build the bonds of trust that are a key component of the d.a.r.t approach.

I was reminded of all this when I rediscovered the fd's Flickr toys page. The tools (and many, many, other wonderful ones elsewhere) are built thanks to the public Flickr api. The tools let users discover value in their photographs beyond what the camera or the storage/sharing/hosting service can offer. The fd page is such a great example of what happens when openness and collaboration build on an already great service.

Note to mobile network operators everywhere: I get so much value out of my interaction with Flickr I would gladly pay triple what I pay today for my account.

Just saw this item on Slashdot. A classic example of a big corporation not getting the new consumer.

In a nutshell, in the guise of protecting its intellectual property (IP) against illegal merchandisers, Universal is throwing out a lot of babies with the bath-water. The whole Joss Weedon, Firefly etc. type-thing is the foundation for huge amounts of high-quality fan-art and the fans that create, buy and wear it want a stake in the outcome. They promote the TV show and want nothing more than to be a small part of the magic.

Except that nowadays, the fanart IS the magic. Without this degree of customer participation, films like Serenity and shows like Firefly just wouldn't have the same reach, nor the same staying power (the stuff that sells season X DVDs long after the closing titles have rolled).

The core of the problem is simple. Traditional IP owners think of the IP as being the primary source of value for them. In essence, they pay guards to surround the mine and miners to extract the value. The whole idea that the consumer could be adding equivalent value is alien to them and their infrastructure doesn't allow for flexibility or evolution (they are frozen in time by legal agreements and the lawyers that protect them).

The punch-line of this particular piece is that the fans are sending Universal an invoice for their services (more details here). You go girl:-)

Got this a couple of weeks ago from Chris, a man I trust.

Hi Dug,

The running place both we got our kicks from is called Runners Need (http://www.runnersneed.co.uk), unfortunately as north as their branches are is Camden (with other shops in Holborn and Liverpool street). All the shops specialise in one thing and one thing only--running kit. All the people working there are seasoned runners and serious about ensuring you get the right stuff for your foot (I promise they haven't paid me to say any of this...)

They either put you on a treadmill or take you outside and watch you run, how your foot hits the pavement, the pressure exerted, pronation, etc. and then get you to run in a few different types of shoes that cater to how you run.

Good luck.

Now, I'll be the first to admit I don't know what pronation is but Nicki really needed some running shoes that fit her properly so I sorted out a fitting for her birthday.

Her feedback is that the shoes are not only a perfect fit but just right for what she wants to do with them.

Each customer works with the in-store experts to create unique value. Where do you run? How far, how fast, in what weather? Whether the customer is training for a marathon or simply wants to get better mileage out of her kneecaps, the in-store experts help build an experience with the customer that ultimately adds value for both the store and the runner.

Now so far so good, I only wish the website offered the same value co-creation potential...