Author: Raj

Is now the right time for scan-and-go in supermarkets?

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Sainsbury’s is resurrecting a new concept and trialling a scan and go solution for shoppers. The Next Web reports

Sainsbury’s supermarket is trialing a new service called Mobile Scan & Go that allows users to shop with their iPhone or Android phone and pay at the till without unloading their trolley or bags.

I’m sure it was over 10 years ago that supermarkets started rolling out a “self scan and pack” solution for in-store shopping. In a time before the smartphone however, shoppers used handheld barcode scanners that were held in banks at the entrance to the store. Once placed back into a dock, shoppers received a special receipt that allowed checkout operatives to take payment as normal.

Ultimately, the self-scan system didn’t last long – I’m guessing they were just trials and shopper resistance to technology probably scuppered it.

Self-scanning also launched on the cusp of reliable Internet grocery shopping – Webvan had gone bust, Ocado had just launched – so maybe shoppers that wanted to avoid checkouts simply went online rather than go through the theatre of picking out bananas at their preferred ripeness.

But in recent months, that concept has made a comeback. Last year, Apple launched EasyPay, which allows you to scan your own items at participating Apple stores, pay with your iTunes card details and leave the store.

Unlike Apple, which uses geolocation and in-store wifi to work out which store you’re in, the Sainsbury’s system requires you to scan a QR code to “check in” to the store then take your phone to the till where payment is taken after scanning a code to “check out”. No details yet on whether you’ll be ‘randomly selected’ to have all your shopping re-scanned, as used to happen with the old system. But this would be obvious.

Though on researching this article, I was surprised to read that Waitrose still offers this under the brand “Quick Check”. And even Tesco are rolling this out again as an improvement.

To be honest, I’m not convinced that supermarkets will switch to an entirely self-scan solution. The growing acceptance of self-checkouts is a driver in that direction, though their perceived unreliability and complexity continues to drive a demand for checkout operatives.

Nonetheless, maybe there are areas where scan-and-go will take off. For example, supermarket kiosks where relatively low value items can be purchased off the shelf. Retailers like WH Smith used to operate ‘honesty’ payment for newspapers some years ago, so given the enhanced security now in operation, perhaps scan-and-go could work in a supermarket environment.

The rise of contactless cards, however, puts a bit of a dampener on the argument that low value transactions will be sped up through scan-and-go. If only there was some way of linking these two concepts…

Is the cloud the right fit for owner-managed businesses?

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In 1919, a young man named Conrad bought a 40-room hotel in Cisco, Texas. It was a backup plan; he’d originally wanted to buy the town’s bank. The hotel did surprisingly well and, in 1925, he opened his first high-rise hotel: the Dallas Hilton, and the first hotel to bear his name.

Fast forward almost 90 years, and I’m in the Manchester Hilton: a tall, gleaming edifice that stands testament to Conrad Hilton‘s entrepreneurial spirit despite war and economic depression. It’s a building that often scrapes Manchester’s perma-cloud so perhaps for those reasons, it was an ideal place to take part in a seminar about what ‘the cloud’ can do for entrepreneurs and owner-managed businesses.

For the more cynical amongst us, it may seem surprising that in 2012, we’re still discussing what ‘the cloud’ is. Unfortunately, this is a side-effect of the term ‘cloud’ becoming the biggest buzzword since “social media”!

No more. To be honest, we got involved in this seminar because there’s so much misinformation or inaccurate content that exists about ‘cloud computing’ and saw it as a chance to set the record straight. But, perhaps more importantly, it was also a chance to sit down with some of the region’s leading entrepreneurs and answer their questions about the nature of the cloud and how it could help them grow their businesses.

And it’s not surprising that most people are confused. The cloud has been touted as the answer to everything from managing your accounts to avoiding your mother-in-law! But, as with everything, the real answer is to talk about what you’re trying to achieve and then examine whether cloud technologies can play a part.

But time-starved business owners still want a simple answer. The best I can offer is that, with a reputable cloud provider, using a cloud-based option can offer increased reliability and flexibility over traditional hosting and software delivery methods. It’s also easier to scale up resources allocated to cloud hosting and, importantly, scale down – meaning businesses that are growing rapidly can rapidly expand their technology infrastructure and also respond to seasonal demand.

It’s tempting to start with a technology – be it cloud, or physical – and design a solution around that. The thing is, a cloud solution that’s poorly put-together can end up costing more. That’s why we’d always recommend having an in-depth face-to-face conversation with whomever is hoping to provide your solution and insist it’s benchmarked against other options, as well as considering the potential for growth. This is why we’ve also put together a document: the five dangers of cloud servers. We hope helps you ask your potential providers the right questions when it comes to considering a hosting or service platform based on the cloud.

Finally, here’s a copy of the presentation that Steven delivered at the seminar yesterday morning. To be honest, it’s best done in person… but you can enjoy the hand-drawn slides anyway! You can also read a roundup of the tweets from the event below.


Review of the HP (Hewlett Packard) v165 USB Flash Memory stick

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[amazon-product]B00495WS98[/amazon-product]As published on the product page…

I selected this model on the basis of the fact it’s very small, has no flashing lights and carries a relatively huge capacity.

I wanted to use this in my HP Microserver as a USB boot drive, so that I could have maximum hard drive storage capacity. It worked as expected at the start, being successfully formatted under Ubuntu Linux and acting as a boot drive (no swap file). I was concerned about wear, but as a boot drive, it generally wouldn’t be accessed apart from at boot or to launch media management software (Plex) which generally runs a service. I also took steps to minimise wear by installing Linux without swap and creating my media library and transcoding scratch drive on a real hard drive in my RAID array.

It worked well for a while – but an order of magnitude slower than a hard drive. However, one day my server stopped providing service and, on reboot, wouldn’t respond to ping.

Unfortunately, the worst had happened: somehow the USB boot drive had been corrupted, taking details of my RAID array with it as well as my settings for Plex media manager.

I couldn’t even access data when I plugged the USB drive into another computer – it shows up as a “USB Composite Device” under Mac OS X provided by Integrated Technology Express, Inc. but I don’t even get a prompt to initialise the drive. This suggests to me a microcontroller failure.

Ultimately, this only caused inconvenience as I rebuilt the server with Ubuntu and a new content setup (had been replicated) – but I would strongly reconsider using a USB flash drive as a boot drive of any sort and especially this particular model. Unfortunately, I’m beyond the return date now but if I could, I’d be getting this swapped. It’s fine as general data storage but definitely not something that needs reliability or integrity.

I suppose you pays your money and you takes your choice – but think carefully about where you’re using it.

What’s the value of a testimonial?

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Originally published over at Melbourne.co.uk

We’re lucky that lots of our customers recommend us to other people. And some of them kindly offer or agree to give us a few words for our website to share with you.

You might’ve seen them, at the foot of various pages – links to stories about other companies that use our services and are happy to talk about them. Sometimes we link to them in tweets or share them with prospective customers, if they’d like to check out credentials. To be honest, we probably don’t make as much of them as we could do.

But what’s the real value in a testimonial?

Last Monday, I’d had a busy day back after a non-stop weekend. Loads of emails to respond to, content to create and a spot of troubleshooting to throw in as well. Add to that, a bike ride over glass-covered roads and, by the time I got home, I was ready to collapse with a drink.

As is my (bad) habit, I flopped onto my sofa and got out my iPhone. Amongst other things, I checked my work email and saw an unexpectedly swift reply from a customer.

There are times when you see something and you know it’s all worthwhile. One of the reasons I love working for Melbourne is the honest commitment to customer service from every single person. And it’s not easy to maintain that, when there’s a hell of a lot going on at once.

It was an email from Phil at Netweaver. Reading it put a grin on my face and I forwarded it to my colleagues straight away. It’d been a tough day (and it’s been a busy week since) but knowing we’re appreciated and that someone wants to share it with others is a great feeling. And that, for me, is the real value of a testimonial.

If you want to read Phil’s story in his own words, check out his testimonial here.

Ending over the air TV broadcasts will congest UK broadband even further

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Originally published over at Melbourne.co.uk…

The House of Lords has recommended ending the use of airwaves to broadcast TV and re-allocating this spectrum to mobile data usage.

TV “should be delivered exclusively over the Internet”, reports the Reg. The House of Lords report, titled Broadband for All – an Alternative Vision, presents a series of recommendations that are part of a wider set of suggestions to improving broadband quality in the UK.

The fact is, that if the recommendation contained within the report were to be adopted by the Government, it would put never before imagined pressure on the UK’s Internet infrastructure. This is why the committee’s consideration of a universal service obligation for minimum broadband quality is a good starting point.

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the UK’s domestic and business broadband relies on adapting old copper-wire technology to handle it (i.e. DSL). This means it’s inherently going to be of a lower quality and speed than the fibre-optic broadband Internet access available in some of the biggest growing digital economies in the world, like South Korea and that’s being experimented with by Google in Kansas City, USA.

In Manchester – a major broadband not-spot – tenants of the Manchester Science Park are lucky to get 100 MBps Internet connections provided by our network. If we’re going to stop using the airwaves to receive broadcast content, then this type of connection will become the bare minimum businesses need and consumers will expect to consume content online.

In my opinion, the Government needs to step-in and realise that without significant fresh investment in the UK’s Internet infrastructure, we will continue to languish in the global broadband league tables.

My £0.02 on who owns your Twitter followers

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Yes! this has been utterly discussed to death. But I’ve got to have my say on this.

I first started grinding my teeth about on this topic when Laura Kuenssberg, formerly BBC Chief Political Correspondent defected to ITV overnight, switching her Twitter account from BBCLauraK to ITVLauraK.

Today, Mehdi Hassan of the New Statesmen has announced he’s joining Huffington Post UK as Political Director in July.

There are all sorts of legal opinions on this, but my personal opinion is more simple.

I think that when people follow you on Twitter, it’s usually on the basis of something you’ve tweeted and a combination of reading your name and bio.

If you state where you work and, particularly, if you include it in your Twitter name, you have an obligation to your followers not to hijack what they’re reading when following your tweets. For example, I chose to follow Laura because of her position as BBC Chief Political Correspondent – hence BBCLauraK. If I had chosen to follow her as an individual, I would’ve happily followed an alternative shared feed.

The BBC’s tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones happily operates this approach (@ruskin147 vs @bbcRoryCJ) as does their technologist, Bill Thompson (@billt vs @bbcbillt)

Yes, there is an argument that your Twitter account is yours to do with as you please – but it’s a slap in the face of your followers and your employer by stealing their audience in this fashion. It certainly reflects negatively on you and what you think of your followers.

Funnily enough, I was discussing this with my hairdresser the other day. Poaching clients from salons is a huge no-no for stylists. It’s a form of carpetbagging – and ultimately, as word gets round, that stylist will no longer be able to work in that industry.

It’s telling now that, having unfollowed Laura the moment she moved to ITV, she now makes zero impact on my life. Perhaps it’s because I don’t consume much news outside the BBC or tech publications, but this is the real impact that her move would have had if she’d not taken her Twitter followers to the BBC’s key competitor.

Mehdi now has to think carefully. As @ns_mehdihasan, can he simply change to ‘HuffPoMehdi’ or should he create a new account? If I was the New Statesmen, I’d wonder what audience I’d lose by allowing him to take his followers to HuffPo. Individuals are powerful brands, but these accounts have been grown by their association with their employer’s brands.

Personally, I’ve never stated my employer in my profile and have no plans to. Where work stuff is interesting to my followers, I’ll retweet it. And usually, I’m on the shared work account tweeting enough interesting stuff with personality without the need to create a ‘Corporate Josh’. This doesn’t mean I’m not proud of my current association with Melbourne. I just like to a draw a clear line that won’t leave me in a sticky situation if my employment ever changes (I hope it doesn’t!).

In any case, a light-touch policy for employers is essential. Agree what you’re going to do if or when the time comes for a staff member to move on – will they hand over the keys like a company car used for work and business? Or will you let them take the audience they’ve grown for you to your competitor?

Make Twitter work for you – Digital Skills Workshop at the Cornerhouse

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I recently did some training at the Cornerhouse on Twitter, as part of the Digital Skills Workshops they run. If you don’t know about these, they’re a great series of events where industry professionals come in and share their advice on making the most of digital platforms. The series is marketed towards those who work for an arts organisation, are a freelancer in the creative sector or a student – but all are welcome.

Briefly, my session was aimed at existing Twitter users who wanted to make the most of the platform. I covered a few basic principles and then outlined my top tips for effective tweeting. I also outlined some of my favourite tools for effective management of tweets.

I’m doing another workshop again this Monday – but it’s already sold out! So I thought I’d share my slides from last time. You can also read a write-up of the last session.

Naturally, I’ll be tweaking and updating what I do so if you’re booked, make sure you do still come along ;) The best part of these workshops is the Q&A and last time, we had this throughout which made for a very relaxed and informal approach.

App of the week: Drawing the Cloud with Paper for iPad

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Originally posted at Melbourne.co.uk

There’s so much marketing guff about the cloud, often couched in dense, endless PowerPoints or thick PDF whitepapers. So for my talk at Business North West 2012, I decided to do something a bit different :)

I’m always a fan of brief presentations, where the slides are mostly visual prompts rather than on-screen notes to read off. The weekend before BNW, I was off to Brussels so I didn’t really have time to put together anything too comprehensive anyway. I downloaded Keynote onto my iPad but quickly realised that learning to use it on a smaller form factor was going to be a pain. At the time, I didn’t own a stand for my iPad either, so typing was a bit difficult.

Luckily, a couple of weeks earlier, I’d seen a presentation from Garry Byrne at Manchester’s #smc_mcr talking about the state of mobile (report). He’d used the iPad app Paper by fiftythree to create his very simple, effective slides which acted just as I prefer – non-distracting, visual prompts for his engaging talk.

So before I got on the Eurostar back, I downloaded the app, paid for the extra brushes and by the end of the train journey back to Manchester, had produced my entire deck. If I’d had a video adapter, I could’ve presented directly from the app but, for compatibility, I exported each page as an image and pasted them into PowerPoint.

This was my first attempt at designing a presentation using Paper.app but it went pretty smoothly. However, writing words is a bit odd with your finger, so I’ve recently invested in a Cosmonaut stylus on Twitter-based recommendations. We’ll see if this makes a difference.

Paper is currently a free download so watch the video or get it now. And you can flick through my slides above or on Speaker Deck.

Tip: Download the Speaker Deck Embed plugin for WordPress!

Why SocITM surveys are destroying council websites and how to block them

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If you’ve visited a local council website in the last few years, you’re very likely to have encountered a request to fill out a survey on how useful the site is to you.

It’s great that councils and other public bodies are seeking feedback on their online services, but unfortunately, many of them appear to have been misled into using the most awful and intrusive methods of doing so.

The main offender seems to be SocITM: an obscure and stuffy sounding body that describe themselves as  the “professional association for public sector ICT management”.

SocITM provide some kind of turnkey feedback service that can be slotted straightforwardly into the code of council websites. Presumably, they then manage the reporting and feedback to council staff. Unfortunately, it is the most annoying and ugly method for collecting user feedback that I’ve encountered in recent years.

The problem is, no-one ever visits a local council website simply to browse around it for fun. They visit it to rapidly find out information, like when to put the bins out or complete some kind of task, like paying council tax. To be presented with a screen where the content is completely obliterated and ugly, poorly-styled and composed text demands you provide “feedback” is tedious as hell. No: I am not going to feedback to you on your site right now and you should be lucky, because I’d tell you it’s crap.

Much better, to provide an unobtrusive feedback link on the right, a la UserVoice or at the completion of transaction. SocITM are doing their clients as massive disservice by insisting on the installation of ugly wrapper code to then ask for poor quality feedback.

What’s worse is that, despite repeatedly saying I don’t want to provide feedback, I continually get hassled for it as the code appears to move around different pages on the website.

How to block SocITM surveys from interrupting your browsing

Anyway, I’ve had enough. If you’re using Google Chrome, you can permanently block scripts provided by SocITM (or their partner Govmetric) from running on your computer again.

The offending script (pulled from this page) is here. To block it, you simply need to add an exclusion for the domain from which the script runs – in this case, govmetric.com.

In Chrome, click the wrench menu (top right). Choose ‘Under the Hood’ and scroll down to Javascript settings.

Choose ‘Manage Exceptions…’. Then simply add govmetric.com as an exception. Make sure you set the “Behaviour” to Block.

If you have Google Chrome syncing turned on, this should then reflect across all installations.

Boom! No more SocITM surveys or, in fact, any powered by usability-hating survey house govmetric. Sad smiley faces all round!

UPDATE: Adrian Short has produced a beta Google Chrome extension that will do similar by adding a cookie but it’s a bit buggy at this stage. Feedback on both methods would be welcome.

UPDATE 2: It seems SocITM surveys are now polluting search engine results on Google:

SocITM screen grab from Martin Wright.

What’s the value of a testimonial?

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Originally published over at Melbourne.co.uk

We’re lucky that lots of our customers recommend us to other people. And some of them kindly offer or agree to give us a few words for our website to share with you.

You might’ve seen them, at the foot of various pages – links to stories about other companies that use our services and are happy to talk about them. Sometimes we link to them in tweets or share them with prospective customers, if they’d like to check out credentials. To be honest, we probably don’t make as much of them as we could do.

But what’s the real value in a testimonial?

Last Monday, I’d had a busy day back after a non-stop weekend. Loads of emails to respond to, content to create and a spot of troubleshooting to throw in as well. Add to that, a bike ride over glass-covered roads and, by the time I got home, I was ready to collapse with a drink.

As is my (bad) habit, I flopped onto my sofa and got out my iPhone. Amongst other things, I checked my work email and saw an unexpectedly swift reply from a customer.

There are times when you see something and you know it’s all worthwhile. One of the reasons I love working for Melbourne is the honest commitment to customer service from every single person. And it’s not easy to maintain that, when there’s a hell of a lot going on at once.

It was an email from Phil at Netweaver. Reading it put a grin on my face and I forwarded it to my colleagues straight away. It’d been a tough day (and it’s been a busy week since) but knowing we’re appreciated and that someone wants to share it with others is a great feeling. And that, for me, is the real value of a testimonial.

If you want to read Phil’s story in his own words, check out his testimonial here.