Category: Internet


What a difference good customer service makes

Filed Under: Internet, iPhone, Life, Technology by — 2 Comments
9 October 2009

This is a quick note to tell the world how much I appreciate good customer service and especially that offered by O2 broadband. Having previously suffered at the hands of Tiscali who have fittingly joined the evil that is Carphone Warehouse, I was presently surprised to be treated like a human by the O2 team.

Little things like receiving texts when you order is going through and being able to check the status online made all the difference. They checked that I was on the right package and genuinely seemed to care. This is a commodity that is becoming all too scarce in this country. People just simply don’t take pride in their jobs any more and don’t care about customer service.

Sure, everybody wants cheap, but at what cost? Having being conned into a terrible deal with Tiscali where by my 10 days cancellation period expired before my service was even connected (it took 2 weeks) I can safely say that I will never get involved in another year long contract with a company that doesn’t take customers seriously.

Which brings me ironically back to O2. Has anyone else noticed that at around 9am and 5pm, despite having great signal strength in the London Bridge area, it is simply impossible to use the 3G network? I mean yesterday it took me over half an hour to send a text. Checking train timetables on my iPhone just didn’t work. I’m not alone here and it is definitely not a handset issue as everywhere else is no problem.

Clearly O2 have overstretched their network. I’m n0t sure if they can do anything about it because of the limit in spectrum available, but I would seriously consider changing networks (when Orange and Vodafone become available) based on this. There’s no point in having a phone that you can’t use. Have emailed them and will await the reply. I look forward to posting it here.

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Google Checkout no longer accepting Meastro cards

Filed Under: Internet by — Leave a comment
24 July 2009

This morning I got an extremely annoying email telling me that Google Checkout has stopped accepting Maestro cards and that I should register another type of card to carry on using its services. Actually I was quite angry. Maestro is one of the most common cards in use in the UK and certain banks do not offer an alternative unless you change your account. How many people will change their whole bank account just to use another website?

It was also quite annoying that there was no explanation. After digging around a bit, I did find answers. Apparently Maestro is now insisting that all transactions use SecureCode. This is the system that asks you to use the predefined password when making a purchase. Unfortunately it is really not very secure as you can quite easily reset your password using a date of birth which can be acquired from a whole host of social networking sites, but that is another story.

Verified by Visa, which is the Visa equivalent is still optional. The SecureCode system takes away a lot of the responsibility of the card company covering the cost of fraud as it is much harder to claim that your card was stolen when they also know your password. Google didn’t want to put users through this extra step and probably didn’t want to pay the higher fees and so, to avoid loosing revenue and potentially putting themselves at greater risk of liability in the case of fraud, decided that they could just stop accepting the Maestro and stick with Visa. In the long run, perhaps it is unlikely they will lose much business and have probably calculated they stand to lose less than if they had taken on the more arduous terms MasterCard were imposing. It seems unlikely that they would have inconvenienced so many users without carefully considering it.

It has also been suggested that SecureCode is not compatible with a number of services such as WAP and as such would limit the channels payment could be accepted by. I don’t really accept this as a good reason for dumping the service though as you could just restrict maestro users on that channel and allow everything else, while still allowing us to use the standard web based system as normal.

HSBC are rumoured to be moving over to Visa too. It seems Maestro is not so popular as it used to be. Perhaps the charges have become proportionally uncompetitive. RBS / Natwest will still offer it as standard though. I think it very unlikely anyone will want to move banks. If a significant number of people have to stop using the service, competitors such as PayPal could well take some of Google’s business. In PayPal’s case, you can fund transactions using direct debit, thus avoiding the card issue. IT remains to be seen whether Google too will start offering this service. Personally, I would like this as you could incorporate the correspondence logging system of Google with the convenience of PayPal. In my opinion and through experience, Google checkout offers better customer service.

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The internet needs a video standard. OGG should be it!

Filed Under: Internet, Technology, Websites by — Leave a comment
20 July 2009

Something that has always annoyed me is that there are so many video standards out there and that they are nearly all proprietary systems owned and pushed by one company or another and inevitably restricted in one way or another. Or worse, expensively licenced.

Another thing I hate is that because of this lack of any real standard, it has become necessary for a while to either have a number of different players installed or as the case usually is now, for them to be packaged up inside a flash interface, each with a different UI, none with the easy ability to access the underlying file to download or manipulate and all relying on having flash installed.

I love Flash when it’s doing its Flash thing, but I hate not being allowed it on my iPhone and I really think that Flash is not what videos should be. There is a reason why all websites are not just large Flash files. There is a reason why all website images are not Flash files. Flash has been used to get round the inconvenience of not having a decent standard for video, but really is second best to an ideal solution where all browsers have the inbuilt capacity to play, download, even edit, tag and scan a universal video format.

So along comes HTML 5. Everyone’s happy, we are on the verge of reaching a consensus about OGG Theora and Vorbis for our standards. And Apple and Nokia ruin it. They moan about the fact that the company who created OGG Xiph.org being able to patent it. Yeah, but it is still an open standard. It is still open for people to implement in the way they want. It is still free to adapt and use in every possible device without licensing issues. It is pretty good as far as quality is concerned. What else currently offers such greatness?

I’m convinced the companies who are blocking it’s adoption are doing so merely to srve their own self interest. Apple wants you to use quicktime, they control quicktime. You have to pay them to use it and download their software with their annoying ‘lets install Safari’ crap. But why should I use quicktime on my settopbox, on my Linux desktop. Why should I pay to use restricted software when a perfectly good open and free standard is available? Sure it might be organised by one organisation but it’s a hell of a lot better than what I’d have to live under were I to try and use MP3 or Windows media format.

I think it’s really sad that we’ve lost a great opportunity to move the internet forward to a universal standard that would mean people don’t have to install a whole load of crapware applications designed to peddle other paid services. An opportunity to have all internet videos to work on the iPhone instead of proprietary YouTube only. An opportunity for a thousand developers to make a thousand embedded devices that would all play the same videos. There are people who are simply not skilled enough to deal with the mess that internet video gives us right now. How many grannies understand that you need to download RealPlayer to play real videos and that won’t work in Windows Media Player which they need to play Windows Media files which won’t play on their DVD player. This is unnecessary!

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Chinese iPhones to have no Wi-Fi

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12 July 2009

According to TechRadar, iPhones for official release in China are to have their WiFi facilities disabled. Apparently it is because the authorities would rather that people’s internet access is monitored and controlled through one centralised source. I think this is a shame.

Aside from my view on the monitoring and controlling, I really don’t think this makes technical sense. First because people already have access to iPhones that have been imported from other countries and there is no sign that these will become illegal. Secondly, access will still remain from other devices to the the WiFi hotspots that iPhone users will be denied. These hotspots will be connected to the internet through a normal Chinese ISP which will surely be running the same great firewall software that the authorities will want to run on the mobile network’s servers.

If you are the kind of person who needs to avoid this or don’t want to be tracked, surely you will opt for an imported iPhone without the WiFi disabled, or some of the numerous other mobiles that do have it and you can buy in China. Also, what extra do they really get from restricting people to the 3G internet? Will there be extra monitoring or restricted access? If so, won’t people just wait to go home or pop into a web cafe to post or access the data they cannot on their iPhone. Surely in this kind of restricted regime, you have to block all access or none. The people who need it, will always know of the easiest method to get access and use that anyway. In the mean time, the majority of normal users will suffer significant loss of functionality just to try and prevent what is ultimately impossible to restrict.

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Google launching new OS

Filed Under: Internet, Linux by — Leave a comment
8 July 2009

Wow. Just read over at the google blog that google are set to launch a new OS. It’s planned to be an ultra fast linux kernel based web browser delivery system. Sounds similar to gOS. All the applications will be online and the windows rendering system will be all new. I’m a bit suspicious about this. Is it not a google attempt to do exactly what Microsoft have been criticised for in defaulting users to their services by tying them to the OS. Also what kind of offline facilities will we see? Are we really happy to run all our software though Java, Flash and the like?

Well it’s quite an exciting development anyway. The backing of a major player like Google can only help develop the linux based platform further. They claim they will need help from the open source community. This sounds great, but only if they give back to us what we put in. Question marks still remain as to how this will tie into Android. Supposedly, “Chrome OS” as it will be known is something completely different. I expect to begin with we will see this installed alongside windows on netbooks for people who need fast boots directly into the browser.

You never know, this could be the ground braking first step in a new era that sees Microsoft’s grip on the OS monopoly slip and herald a new age of more balanced OS competition. We shall see. I wait in anticipation.

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London stock exchange to ditch Windows!

Filed Under: Internet, Linux by — 1 Comment
3 July 2009

OK, why am I really not surprised? ComputerWorld is reporting that the LSE have finally decided to ditch a crappy windows based TradElect system in light of serious failures culminating in nearly a day’s out time. When are people going to understand that the fundamental philosophy that windows is built on does not suit an enterprise mission critical server environment like this.

For example how can security through obscurity and locked down closed source systems still be in place in such important infrastructure. All the evidence points towards the fact that these systems suffer a massively greater number of security breaches than their opensource counterparts.

Then there’s the issue of performance. How can the LSE sit back and accept that their targets for latency have been no where near met whilst rivals enjoy far superior products? It’s about time people woke up. I really hope many onlookers will learn something here.

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Twitter heart monitor

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3 July 2009

This is a great bit of fun. Apparently, according to Pingdom.com, this device will monitor your heart rate and upload it on Twitter. As per the previous post, there are still stupid things that haven’t exploited Twitter yet. This is proof.

twitter heart monitor

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Flickr can now Twitter!

Filed Under: Internet by — Leave a comment
3 July 2009

Venturebeat has a great story about how Flickr now has the ability to tweet your images directly to Twitter. This is going to be in direct competition to the likes of Twitpic, but would allow you to keep all your photos in one place which might be a lot more convenient for most. What will be interesting is if this functionality will start appearing directly in Twitter clients. Twitpic’s popularity is arguably built on its client integration.

“You can upload directly to Flickr and Twitter simultaneously, or tweet a photo already on Flickr, using a special short Flic.kr URL,”

But the question is, how many URL shortening services do we need, how long will Twitter last once Facebook ramp up their status update service and what else can we possibly build Twitter feeds into? Toasters tweeting every time they pop up? Twitter alarm clocks….. the choice is endless but do we really have time to read all these tweets?

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Delicious, Digg or StumbleUpon?

Filed Under: Internet, Websites by — 1 Comment
1 July 2009

As a long time user of google bookmarks to store my bookmarks online, I resisted the urge to join one of what I considered pointless social bookmarking services. Finally the limitations of google became too much, as did the popularity of these sites I was avoiding.

I’ve tried a few out and have settled for Delicious. It seems to be the most in tune with what I need. I’ve written a summary of the top three though.

Delicious

In my opinion this is the best site. It allows you to bookmark your site using tags instead of folders (folders were so last century). The great thing about Delicious is that when you have multiple tags on an item, you can filter your results by multiple tags too, so for example, I may have a large number of items tagged with iphone and also application, but I can select iphone, then application to get down to exactly what I am looking for. Application and download will bring me a different selection etc.

Another great reason for using Delicious is its really good Firefox plugin. It makes tagging (adding) a breeze and has a nice advanced search facility. There are a nice selection of shortcut keys and it integrates well with the bookmarks menu.

Pros include a really well designed interface and clean website. Cons include the limited ability to make comments that others can read about sites in a way that say Digg does. Delicious is run by Yahoo and I suspect it’s size will allow future development to continue well.

Digg

Digg is the second most popular social bookmarking site on the net at the moment. Instead of a well organised selection of tagged pages, Digg concentrates on other user’s comments. There is a nice javascript toolbar that can be used on any site by attaching the http://digg.com/yoursitehere style URL usage. Digg will nicely create a short style URL for you to which is good for sending to people. Digg is just great if you want to find out what other people thought about a site you are visiting.

But the cons include very limited tags that are pre-set. There’s no multiple tagging. There’s no slick lookup facility in firefox like Delicious. In my opinion, Digg is limited to just a system for comments on sites. I need something more.

StumbleUpon

Stumble is based around a thoery that you will want to find quality websites based on what you already like but that you don’t know exactly what you want. You program in your keyword likes and hit the ‘Stumble’ button and it will take you to a suggested site. On all sited you can rate them with a yes/no good/bad style judgement. This goes back in the system and helps rank sites for others to stumble upon.

I like the design and I like the idea. The quality of sites is generally gquite good, but I simply am not sure about the idea of being given stuff at random, even if it is based on my taste. Again the bookmarking faccilities seem quite limited.

Conclusion

If you want to find something cool and random in your spare  time, stumble upon is quite cool. Digg also offers a similar random service. Both sites are quite good for commenting too. They have javascript toolbars that don’t need to be installed and can run through the url only which is handy. No installation needed. But the real pro will want Delicious. It has a far more advanced system for managing your bookmarks and is supported by a superior interface that can be added to Firefox. All three offer RSS feeds, the ability to add friends links and a personal profile. If only Delicious offered better commenting tools, it would be ultimate.

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