Skip to content

Monthly Archives: November 2007

Asus eee – open source support

Last week I bought an Asus eee laptop. It’s a tiny machine, weighing less than 2 pounds with a 7 inch screen, and it runs Linux as its operating system.
The experience so far has been really good. The machine works well, the software’s great, and for £250 I’ve got a machine that’s faster and more [...]

Some extremely targetted advertising

Facebook is doing something very interesting in allowing advertisers to buy specific networks. This ad was (I presume) created for members of the Agency.com network. It’s extremely targetted: it mentions Agency.com by name, and it’s advertising a service people at our company could very well be interested in.
This kind of thing is valuable, makes minimal [...]

Google print ads are using QR codes

Google have started selling print ads in the US, which is an interesting venture in its own right, but the most interesting thing in this example is the extent to which they’re using the ads to drive potential customers online.

Aside from the URLs in the ad, we’re also encouraged to search Google for specific search [...]

Amazon – have they lost their touch?

Amazon used to be one of the text book examples of usability in e-commerce. Famously, “Don’t Make Me Think”, an excellent introduction to user centred design by Steve Krug, includes a chapter called “If you love Amazon so much, why don’t you marry it?”
Recently, I was given an Amazon gift voucher, and I’ve been using [...]

$50 billion dollars shrinking fast

http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/11/ad-zappers-for-facebook.html lists a variety of plug-ins for Firefox that will remove contextual ads from your Facebook experience.

It might get a bit tricky charging for ads that are being removed at the browser. Whether they’re counted as valid ad impressions before they’re removed isn’t made clear in the article.

Space Shuttles, Innovation and the Survival of the Internet

I heard a terrific story at last night’s Roger Needham lecture, organised by the British Computer Society.
Mark Handley, who gave the lecture, asked his audience why the rockets on the side of the Space Shuttle are the size they are. It turns out they’re that size so they will fit through a train tunnel on [...]

Go the Fleet!

A few months ago I put myself on the mailing list for something called myfootballclub, a group that was going to attempt to raise enough support and money to buy a football club. The subscribers would then be involved in setting the direction of the team, player selection and such like.
A couple of months ago [...]

Christmas is ever so early this year

From the Snow Valley blog it seems that Amazon are going to offer same day delivery on Christmas Eve, if you order certain products, and your delivery is to London or Birmingham. Good news for those of us who leave Christmas shopping to the last minute. It got me thinking about how early Christmas seemed [...]

QR codes – a worthwhile implementation

We’ve been keen to do something with QR codes for some time, and have run up against practical obstacles to their effectiveness each time, so it’s good to see an example that does make sense. Thanks to Blognation for the details.
QR codes are 2 dimensional bar codes. They look a bit like this normally.

This one [...]

The trials of UK start-up funding

This article in Director (the monthly magazine of the Institute of Directors) contrasts the start-up options of the US with those of the UK. The US situation sounds extremely favourable:

Rents are low
Investors are very open to investing in start-ups
Bright people want to work in start-ups, rather than big established businesses
The market is huge compared to [...]