Month: February 2008

Categories
Data Policy Ordnance Survey

OS report hits all the right buttons..

A little from left field as most people have been thinking about the upcoming Location Strategy publication, The Communities and Local Government Select Committee published their report on the Ordnance Survey on Saturday.

OS Report

Despite the dry nature of a select committee report, it is worth reading because there are some key findings nobody other than the members of Southampton’s littoral head burying club (joke for geomorphologists there..) could disagree with..

“We are concerned that organisations charged with carrying out vital public services sometimes find OS’s licensing conditions too complex and inflexible” – Amen !!

btw the report can be downloaded from here

Written and submitted from the BA Lounge, using the BT Openzone 802.11 network.

Categories
virgin media are crap

Virgin Media – Diluting the brand and the board

Virgin, the brand what does that mean to you..

Are you looking to fly the Atlantic, or become a space tourist, or are you a concerned saver of the Northern Rock bank, in such cases virgin is probably a positive association, innovative products, good customer service etc., indeed these are the aspects of customer service that has made the virgin brand so valuable to Sir Richard Branson… however the problem with allowing others to exploit you brand is that they may not value your principles to the same degree.

virgin mediaA case in point, Virgin Media…

Virgin Media until yesterday when I finally snapped was my ISP and cable TV supplier.

For the past year or so since the combined Telewest/NTL companies have been known as Virgin Media, the quality of their customer service and more importantly the quality of their actual service has plummeted.

Through under-investment and poor technology choices their cable TV PVR system has become a running joke, rarely running for more than 24 hours without crashing, poor quality images (Dumb choice to use MPEG2 as a broadcast standard), and only a single HD channel due to bandwidth constraints.

The final straw for me has been the appalling quality of the virgin media broadband offering, I have been paying £37 per month of their top of the range product “XL” which should offer 20Mbs download delivered via their dedicated fibre network, sounds a good if expensive proposition does it not… well for the past couple of months this is the network performance I have been consistently achieving with virgin media..

Speed test

Yes that’s £37 per month, for just over 1 Mbs .. well no longer.. I’m off to O2 broadband who can also offer 20 Mb/s over DSL, so I say farewell to Virgin media and join the last UK based director of the company who left the company today.

BTW Richard, if you don’t want mud all over you nice logo be careful with who you let use it !!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
iphone Thoughts

The cult of iPhone

For many years as a user of Apple computers since the Macintosh LC I was quite happy to be a member of the minority of computer users at odds with the majority of other computers users, happy to stand out as a member of “the cult of mac“. Now of course things are different pop into any Starbucks anywhere is the world and you will see Macbooks everywhere, Macs are slowly becoming more mainstream.

iPhoneThis week I was in California and it seemed that almost every other person was using an iPhone, in the Google office it was more extreme almost everybody had one. Yet back home in the UK, I think I have seen maybe two or three other iPhone users in London, and one user on a train from Manchester, the contrast with San Francisco is enormous !

Although there are well known limitations with todays iPhone, no 3G, poor camera, no MMS, the iPhone is by a very long way the best mobile phone I have owned, I actually don’t think it is the spec of the iPhone that is the problem is Europe.

So what has gone wrong, clearly Apple hoped that the iPhone would in Europe follow the success of the phone in the US market, but of course the markets are very different.

Despite the widespread (compared to the US) availability of SIM free phones in Europe, most people still expect to be given a free phone when opening a new contract or renewing an expired contract.

These operator provided “free” phones are not low end models either, the number of people on the train I see with Nokia N95’s is staggering – many I’m sure not even aware of the capability of their “mobile computers”, against this few people outside the geek minority are willing to spend nearly three hundred pounds on a iPhone.

Never mind, I enjoy my smugness as a member of the “cult of iPhone”, knowing that I have spent a large sum of money to have a technically superior device, others think is an extravagant waste of money… ah yes back to the good old days !!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.