I have decided to move to the Wordpress system. So find my blog now at
http://bobbrowning.wordpress.com/
Bob
Friday, June 13, 2008
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
The e-conveyancing juggernaut continues towards the cliff edge
The story so far.
The land registry has decided to get into the 21st century. Which is a good thing, except they have gone the extra mile by replacing signed deeds with electronic documents containing a digital signature. In my belief this will not work - see my August 2003 newsletter for reasons why. The main one being that any punter can use a pen to sign their name but in future your Solicitor will be signing (electronically) on your behalf. So instead of simply pushing some paper around, your solicitor now becomes a signatory in very large transactions.
Final completion of the project has in the last year been put back by four years and the current completion date is 2014-15 a staggering 16-17 years into the project (it all started in 1998). Who knows how many millions will have been spent, and the absurd decision to go for digital signatures may well bring the whole project to its knees.
The most recent project was to introduce a system to create what is called a 'chain matrix'. This would provide buys and sellers with a web page that tracked the progress of the buying chain typical in house purchase transations. This has been quietly shelved after a £4.6m pilot showed little interest in it.
This summer the digital signature (Private Key Encryption or PKI) part will start to come on-stream. This means lawyers will be signing everything on behalf of their customers. A recent isssue of the Law Gazette quotes David Parton, a very senior conveyancing professional: "‘I also think lawyers will be reluctant to sign on behalf of their clients". Duh!
This is a disaster waiting to happen.
Bob
The land registry has decided to get into the 21st century. Which is a good thing, except they have gone the extra mile by replacing signed deeds with electronic documents containing a digital signature. In my belief this will not work - see my August 2003 newsletter for reasons why. The main one being that any punter can use a pen to sign their name but in future your Solicitor will be signing (electronically) on your behalf. So instead of simply pushing some paper around, your solicitor now becomes a signatory in very large transactions.
Final completion of the project has in the last year been put back by four years and the current completion date is 2014-15 a staggering 16-17 years into the project (it all started in 1998). Who knows how many millions will have been spent, and the absurd decision to go for digital signatures may well bring the whole project to its knees.
The most recent project was to introduce a system to create what is called a 'chain matrix'. This would provide buys and sellers with a web page that tracked the progress of the buying chain typical in house purchase transations. This has been quietly shelved after a £4.6m pilot showed little interest in it.
This summer the digital signature (Private Key Encryption or PKI) part will start to come on-stream. This means lawyers will be signing everything on behalf of their customers. A recent isssue of the Law Gazette quotes David Parton, a very senior conveyancing professional: "‘I also think lawyers will be reluctant to sign on behalf of their clients". Duh!
This is a disaster waiting to happen.
Bob
Monday, June 02, 2008
Keyword Insertion - not as painful as it sounds.
When you write an ad for Google adwords, it is important to include the keywords in the text of the ad. So if a user types in 'Motorola V8' you want to ad to say 'Motorola V8' not 'Mobile Phone'. This significantly improves your click-through rate.
- Google will put the keywords in bold making them stand out
- Having searched for 'Motorola V8' the user will scan the page for the phrase 'Motorola V8' and tend to ignore ads that do not have that phrase.
- It makes you look like you are more focused on the users needs
So does this means that if you have 100 keywords you need 100 ads? Not any more. Using keyword insertion you can place the keywords right there in the ad. If the keywords are too large to fit, you can specify a default to be placed in the ad instead.
If your default is 'Mobile Phones', just use this format {KeyWord:Mobile Phones}. If someone searches for 'Motorola V8' that is what they will see. If their phrase is too long (e.g. 'I want a motorola V8 now now now!') then they will get the default (Mobile Phones)
Check out the help file for this for more details. You would be surprised how few Google advertisers use this really valuable feature.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Sales Force Automation and CRM - new approach needed
I have had a pretty good look at the main serious Web-based hosted SFA and CRM solutions. Salesforce.com, Netsuite, SugarCRM, EBSuite CRM. They are all very similar and probably very appropriate in many situations.
However my opinion is that none of them are intuitive and in a sales situation none of them are fast enough. There are too many clicks for the bread and butter task which is
However my opinion is that none of them are intuitive and in a sales situation none of them are fast enough. There are too many clicks for the bread and butter task which is
- get the customer history on-screen
- identify the contact - or record a new one
- record the call,
- send a mail
- schedule the next call.
The user is buried in a sea of leads, opportunities, tasks, timetables, cases, quotes and projects. Each with its own list and its own update form. Of course most of this doesn't get used, but it does clutter up the screen something rotten.
In the end I wrote a system for my own use and have rolled it out to a couple of clients where we could integrate it with the web site functions so that transactional data is included on the customer screen.
The objective was to be as simple and intuitive as possible. You won't recognise it as the same animal as the market leaders I listed above, but for me at least and my telesales person it seems to work very well at the core task.
There is a demo at http://sales.textor.com
Obviously it needs development and probably money to take it any further. Here is my question. Is there an opportunity here? Should I think about taking it further?
Bob
Monday, April 28, 2008
An own-goal for IBM
I may have mentioned before that once a concept becomes 'hot' everyone wants to get on the bandwagon and spin their products. So IBM has announced a new rack-mounted server "designed for heavy traffic web 2.0 social networking sites".
In marketing terms an own goal because the product almost certainly is good for any heavy-duty computer cluster application where fault tolerance for individual systems is not a huge issue (that is the trade-off). By marketing it in this way they are limiting their market to a very small number of specialised web sites. Admittedly these guys buy servers by the thousand, but the market must be much bigger.
In marketing terms an own goal because the product almost certainly is good for any heavy-duty computer cluster application where fault tolerance for individual systems is not a huge issue (that is the trade-off). By marketing it in this way they are limiting their market to a very small number of specialised web sites. Admittedly these guys buy servers by the thousand, but the market must be much bigger.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Eye tracking - not counterintuitive at all
I love eye tracking studies. This study tracked men and women separately on the Marks and Spencer home page.
http://www.etre.com/blog/2006/05/five_days_bonus_ms_revisited/
Quote "As you can see, these findings are somewhat counterintuitive. The women were extremely focused on the navigation menus and rarely looked at the main body of the page. However, while the men were also predominantly navigation-focused, they were a lot more willing to venture into the main body of the page - even though the majority of the feature located therein targeted women!"
People! Think!. The centre of the page is a picture of Twiggy with a big smile on her face and below her a couple of other very beautiful women. The men take a sneaky look at some attractive females? Big surprise!
http://www.etre.com/blog/2006/05/five_days_bonus_ms_revisited/
Quote "As you can see, these findings are somewhat counterintuitive. The women were extremely focused on the navigation menus and rarely looked at the main body of the page. However, while the men were also predominantly navigation-focused, they were a lot more willing to venture into the main body of the page - even though the majority of the feature located therein targeted women!"
People! Think!. The centre of the page is a picture of Twiggy with a big smile on her face and below her a couple of other very beautiful women. The men take a sneaky look at some attractive females? Big surprise!
The small print
A designer who we had done work for just sent me a contract their client had sent them to sign. It was headed 'Assignment of Intellectual Property(IP) Rights'. It would assign all IP rights in the software to the client.
I had to check the date on the email but it was April 3rd not the 1st. We use the identical software on all our client's sites, so the whole idea of giving the IP rights to one of them is a total non-starter. We would be out of business.
We include on all our quotations a para that summarises our terms and conditions which includes a link to our standard licence on our web site. The licence is pretty standard, in fact rather less restrictive than an open source licence. The client has the right to use, copy and modify the software as they see fit. The only real restriction is that they can't go into business selling my software.
So why would they want the IP transferred?
I suspect some lawyer saw a chance to earn some fees. Or some manager somewhere, who didn't bother to ask some basic questions, had the idea that a really serious content management system had been written for them from scratch (in a month and a half - some chance!) and as they had paid for it they should own it. Now the Designer is going to have some difficult conversations with the client.
This could all have been avoided if designers who resell our CMS had terms and conditions which mirrored our own. All I have to is figure out how to persuade them to do it.
I had to check the date on the email but it was April 3rd not the 1st. We use the identical software on all our client's sites, so the whole idea of giving the IP rights to one of them is a total non-starter. We would be out of business.
We include on all our quotations a para that summarises our terms and conditions which includes a link to our standard licence on our web site. The licence is pretty standard, in fact rather less restrictive than an open source licence. The client has the right to use, copy and modify the software as they see fit. The only real restriction is that they can't go into business selling my software.
So why would they want the IP transferred?
I suspect some lawyer saw a chance to earn some fees. Or some manager somewhere, who didn't bother to ask some basic questions, had the idea that a really serious content management system had been written for them from scratch (in a month and a half - some chance!) and as they had paid for it they should own it. Now the Designer is going to have some difficult conversations with the client.
This could all have been avoided if designers who resell our CMS had terms and conditions which mirrored our own. All I have to is figure out how to persuade them to do it.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
SP1 has arrived
I have just downloaded Vista SP1. The wretched program warns you that it will take an hour. I watched it for a while and got bored, so I took the hint and went out for a cup of coffee. When I got back there was a 'click here to proceed' thing! It then took about an hour while I twiddled my thumbs.
Why????
In any event I would say it was worth the wait. The machine is noticably slicker. Listing directories and copying files in particular much faster. Or should I say much less slug-like.
Why????
In any event I would say it was worth the wait. The machine is noticably slicker. Listing directories and copying files in particular much faster. Or should I say much less slug-like.
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