I don’t recall when I first saw a Le Creuset Screwpull corkscrew in action, but I do remember being impressed by its mechanical ingenuity. It was many years later when I saw one in a shop at a price that I felt I could afford (and it was still an awful lot for a corkscrew).
So… I was quite upset when my faithful Screwpull fell apart whilst trying to uncork a bottle of white last Saturday. I stopped swearing when I discovered that it was covered by a ten year guarantee, though I worried about the receipt – had I put it in the original box, and where the heck was that?
I called the helpline on Tuesday. They where helpful – giving me a Freepost address to send it back to, and advising that I should get a proof of posting slip from the Post Office. Some bubble wrap, sticky tape and scootering followed and it was on it’s way.
A couple of days later I got a voicemail from customer services saying that my broken corkscrew had arrived, and that they would be shipping out a new one. And indeed a shiny new boxed Screwpull 200 (complete with foil cutter) just came in the post, with a nice note from Laura in customer services stuck to the box.
Well done Le Creuset for honouring your 10 year guarantee with minimal inconvenience and polite friendly communications from customer services. If only more companies could be like that.
Filed under: did_do_better | Leave a Comment
Tags: corkscrew, customer service, Le Creuset, screwpull
Tied down
There’s recently been much fuss in the geek community about tethering of mobile devices such as iPhones, Palm Pres, Android G1 etc. I totally get it – when you’ve paid $$$ for an ‘unlimited’ data contract for a mobile device why would you want to pay again for some connectivity on something with a bigger screen? I can see the other side too – the telcos have surely figured out that there’s a practical limit to how much a small format device really needs to download, and fear that tethering will either melt their networks or rob them of dongle based WWAN revenue or both.
What I really don’t get is why the telcos are doing such a poor job of cross selling products here. I read today that AT&T want an extra $55 per month for iPhone tethering, which is frankly ridiculous compared to the £15 per month I pay for a 15GB WWAN contract. O2 here in the UK isn’t quite so bad, they only want £14.68 for 3GB or £29.36 for 10GB; but hang on I can get the same WWAN from O2 for the same price and get a ‘free’ E169 dongle. Wow, they must really value the loyalty of those iPhone customers.
This feels to me like a redux of the trick that the movie studios pulled as we went from VHS to DVD (and again from DVD to HD-DVD [haha] and BlueRay) – sell the same thing multiple times to the same customers mugs.
The exception here seems to be Three, who offer some cross selling discounts between their WWAN and mobile phone contracts, and various bundles of phone and dongle. Their iNQ looks interesting too, but it’s no iPhone, and the position on tethering seems ambiguous at best.
I realise that most of the telcos (especially in UK/Europe) are still struggling to crawl out of the huge crater of debt created by the 3G spectrum auctions, and that the rising popularity of WWAN and dongles finally gives them something useful (if not innovative) to do with that bandwidth. I also realise that mobile telcos have become a ‘confusopoly‘ – where nobody is supposed to understand how badly their being screwed for their calling plan; but come on guys – give the geeks what they want. Tethering should look good compared to dongles, as it doesn’t involve the capital cost of another device (no matter how cheaply they can be sourced from China they still cost something). And for those netbook fans out there don’t drive us into the arms of your competitors by artificially carving a line between two products that are really exactly the same thing – sell us the package. And when you sell us the package it doesn’t have to come with a dongle. Why is it that I can get a SIM only phone package, but not a SIM only data package? This is surely holding back the progress towards ubiquitous embedded WWAN on netbooks (and I don’t want to buy my netbook from a telco with some ridiculously long and overpriced data contract).
One contract for voice and data, and enough SIMs for the devices that I wish to use – is that too simple? Am I asking for too little?
If I want to tether – why do the telcos want to tie me down?
Filed under: technology | Leave a Comment
Tags: android, dongle, iphone, mobile, pre, telco, tether, WWAN
I think I’d heard of OpenDNS before today, but it was the announcement of their latest funding round that got me looking more closely.
There are many things to like in terms of the reliability and security aspects of the offering; though I have concerns that the filtering angle quickly runs into the censorship territory that I suffered from over the past few years stuck behind corporate net filters.
I’m working at my club today, so I was intrigued to see that they had an OpenDNS server at the top of their search list from DHCP – cool. What’s a lot less cool is that there’s nothing to stop me from signing up an account using the club IP, self certify ‘ownership’ and then turn the filters up to the max as self appointed arbiter of club decency and web surfing habits.
This probably hasn’t been much of an issue for OpenDNS yet, as I imagine that few WiFi providers are choosing to use their service; but something needs to be figured out so that users can’t pwn censorship rights over networks where the admins have been smart enough to choose a ‘better’ DNS service, but not smart enough to take active control over its management (something that will become a much bigger issue as smaller ISPs choose to give up on running their own DNS sloping shoulders in OpenDNS’s direction).
Filed under: security | 2 Comments
Tags: censorship, OpenDNS, pwnage
Uniqueness modifiers
One of my pet peevs over the last few years when I was doing lots of product evaluations was the abuse of the word ‘unique’ by some of the sales droids I encountered. If you’re reading this now you know who you are, and well done for persevering with this blog, I know that I use some big words sometimes.
Unique is like the Highlander, there can be only one.
A product that is ‘very unique’ isn’t somehow better than being the only product of its type, which it would be if it was simply ‘unique’. In my view ‘very’ is a negative uniqueness modifier – like all the others.
‘Fairly unique’ isn’t good either. If a service is described as ‘fairly unique’ then that’s code for “we like to think that we’re differentiated, but in truth there are many like us”.
I notice that the US based Websters dictionary allows for degrees of uniqueness like ‘fairly’, which I take as an acceptance of common abuse rather than the correct English meaning of the word.
Filed under: grumble, marketing | 2 Comments
Tags: marketing, sales, unique
I was recently having breakfast with a Venture Capitalist who said that he wouldn’t invest in any web2.0 company that had an advertising based business model. I can’t blame him. It frankly amazes me that so much of the web is run on advertising right now.
My personal sense is that advertising has become part of the background noise of my life – cut out when it can be, and ignored when it can’t be cut out. I watch TV, but almost never live, so I don’t watch TV adverts. Google splashes stuff on my Gmail screen, I never click on it – not rarely – NEVER. The tube I get to work in the morning has ads all over the place, I wish they had more maps, but I don’t buy what they’re selling. I sometimes listen to commercial radio, they mostly seem to have ads about buying ads – recursively funny, but I’m not buying that either.
Is this a generational thing? Are the digital natives (and early settlers like me) just screening this stuff out of their lives? Who are the suckers that are responding to this stuff, and providing the data to show that those advertising $s are working?
I’d like to make it clear that I’m not saying that people don’t respond to brands. I’m just as much of a brand sucker as the next guy. It’s just that I don’t see advertising as being as much of a factor in building a brand and extolling its values as the industry would like to have us believe.
Filed under: marketing | Leave a Comment
Tags: advertising, brand, DVR, google, marketing, PVR
In a TFhelL minute
Owwweeooo things ain’t gonna change.
Minutes – exactly sixty seconds long except in New York (where they are reputably shorter, or at least busier) and on the London tube. The Jubilee Line has particularly long minutes. If you’re unlucky enough to use it regularly (which isn’t me any more since I escaped Canary Wharf at the end of last month – yeah) then you may have noticed this already. It goes something like this… arrive on platform at 1725 to see train pulling out, information board says next train in 2mins. Train doesn’t actually arrive until something like 1728, and pulls out at 1730, so 2mins just turned into 5. And that’s when it’s a ‘good’ service (service is never just average, or a bit poor – it’s either ‘good’, bad ‘minor delays’ or properly broken ‘major delays’).
Somebody showed me the other day that there’s a much more reliable aspect to the passenger information system on the iPhone, which says where the next trains actually are rather than punting a hopelessly optimistic guess at arrival time. But I don’t expect that this works too well underground.
With apologies to Don Henley, Danny Kortchmar and Jai WinDing
Filed under: grumble | 2 Comments
I recently got myself a shiney new BA Amex card, as I’ve been told by a few people that the companion vouchers you can get from these are a great perk.
I try to be responsible with my money, and so I like to pay off each card in full by direct debit each month. I just went onto the Amex web site to set this up, and got asked a bunch of stuff that they already know – typical security validation questions. I also had to check a box accepting some terms and conditions. What I expected to see next was a web form where I could enter my bank account details and that would be that – job done. What I got next was a link to download a PDF. They didn’t even customise the PDF with any of the data that they already know about me.
It really looks like somebody started building an application to do this properly on the web, and then thought it was too much trouble – let’s just give them a link to the paper form. A waste of my time, and presumably theirs – it can’t be cheap having a FREEPOST address, people to open envelopes and rekey data etc.
At no stage was I asked whether I want to pay the minimum or whole balance each month, so I expect there’s a call to customer services waiting to happen in the next week or so.
PS I never have seen direct debit done properly on the web. Maybe there’s something more fundamentally broken about the whole system. But if the best that can be done is a link to a PDF then please don’t mess about with Ts&Cs and security questions.
Filed under: could_do_better | 2 Comments
Google – getting it right :)
Yesterday I had a whine about localisation overriding personalisation, which is probably a bad idea.
Today I have happier news. After moving my Capital SCF mailbox over to Google I was expecting some nasty identity collisions if I tried to use my personal Gmail and company Gmail in the same browser (in my case Chrome, which I like a lot). In fact I’m sure that bad things used to happen, as I’ve tried this before. But… I’m happy to report that there are in fact no issues whatsoever. I’ve had to apply a different coloured theme to my personal Gmail so that I don’t get too confused, but that’s a small price to pay.
I’m also very happy to get sync between my BlackBerry and Google Calendar – something that our previous service provider didn’t do (and that I was missing a lot from the transition from BES to BIS).
Fingers crossed that I can get personal and company Gmails working side by side in offline mode…
Filed under: identity | 1 Comment
Google – trying to be too clever
It’s one of those features that user experience engineers get very excited about – Google’s ability to figure out where in the world a browser is coming from and offer content up in the likely language of the reader. But this should not take precedence over personalisation. I don’t want my Google Reader in Hebrew or French just because I happen to be in Tel Aviv or Paris. When I sign in it’s me alright! I still speak (and read in) English. Google must know this – I usually use English, I usually browse from England, all of my search queries are in English, the emails that I send are in English, and the blogs I read are written in English. User experience #FAIL.
I realise that there’s a vanishingly small number of really smart people out there that speak many languages, and get their head into the local language when they’re abroad. They might like this ‘feature’, as it allows them to stay in role. For the rest of us though I think we need a better default behaviour – only try to guess language before signing in, once signed in use what I normally use.
Filed under: identity | 3 Comments
Geek travel
First day in the new job, and I’m back on the road again after a quiet 18 months from a travel perspective. I’ve spent some time over the last few years trying to optimise things so that I’m carrying the least weight but the most functionality (particularly important when trying to avoid checking stuff in).
In the bag today:
- Lenovo s10e (with a Novatel Merlin XU870 3G datacard)
- 320G HDD so that I can have all my music and plenty of videos
- Atheros WiFi NIC so that I can do packet injection
- BlackBerry Curve 8900
- iPod Touch 16G – for when the battery on the netbook isn’t going to last
- Koss ‘Spark Plugs’ – comfortable for long flights, and excellent sound quality even in noisy environments
- Fuji FinePix F-45fd – great little camera with excellent low light performance
- iGo Juice 70 multi adaptor (works on wall sockets, in the car, and on planes [at least the ones with power outlets]). I keep lot of bits in the bag:
- iGo Peripheral Power System – to charge the smaller devices
- iGo DualPower – so that I can charge two small things at once
- iGo tips for everything I’m likely to have with me (or need to help out a friend)
- Swiss adaptor – to plug into UK/US/EU sockets
- D-Link DWL-G730AP portable WiFi router – handy for turning a fixed connection into a hotspot (which helps a lot when you want multiple connections pretending to come from one MAC)
- The ethernet cable that came with the mini router
- Retractable sync’n’charge cables for BlackBerry and iPod
- A Microsoft USB GPS
- Various USB flash drives, at least one with BackTrack on
- A 2.5″ SATA drive enclosure, with a 160G drive in it and the USB cables it needs for power/data
- Audio cables
- 3.5mm-3.5mm
- 3.5mm-phono
- 3.5mm Y splitter (so that I can share my music or videos)
- An airline adaptor (just in case they have a movie I want to watch and use those weird old 2×3.5mm mono things)
- MS Bluetooth Presenter Mouse
- Plantronics Voyager 510 Bluetooth Headset – comes with a USB device that makes it appear as a sound device
I’m pretty sure I’m not missing much, but could I do better?
Filed under: Uncategorized | 7 Comments
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