Tag: Cloud

Hypothetical no longer

A few posts ago I spoke about the opportunity that Twitter presented in the case of recent problems with WebCentral email hosting. Well it seems that someone else was also thinking along the same lines:

 

Cheeky Twitter campaign takes advantage of WebCentral email outage

 

It does demonstrate that Twitter can be used effectively within a business. Also, don’t overlook the fact that just because you might not understand Twitter or use it yourself, it doesn’t mean your competitors and customers don’t. At the very least you should be monitoring the ‘twitter-verse’ for topic of interest to you and that is very easy to do, so there should be no excuses now should there?

 

If you want more information about the WebCentral outage and its ramifications take a look at:

 

WebCentral resellers staggered by lack of service

 

Interesting how the article leads with:

 

“web hoster’s Exchange email server outage was a pain,”

 

which implies that it was all Microsoft’s fault doesn’t it? Rightly or wrongly, interesting how they like to always stick the boot into the big M, eh? Guilty by association unfortunately.

Hypothetically speaking

If you aren’t aware, probably the biggest hosting company in Australia, WebCentral, is still having a major email outage (been over 30 fours for some people now). Now I don’t want to speculate why this has happened or how people need to understand that email is not a guaranteed method of delivery. What I do want to focus on is a business opportunity for a smart operator.

 

If you visit the Whirlpool forums you find this outage is costing people real money. Here’s but a few examples:

 

i’m the poor IT admin for my company who uses webcentral for over 5 years now, my CEO is sending me txt every hr to check whether it’s back online, i’m still working on an instant backup plan now, tried to forward them to my other host, but looks like the webcentral email forwarding isn’t working as well, can someone help pls….!!

 

We are talking about several hotels who’s main booking engines had relied on WC for over 3 years. There is a significant loss of business from unconfirmed bookings. One stats showing 52% occupancy from the daily average of 80%+.. in dollars thats about aprox $9,000+/day per hotel. What a nightmare. The pointing began at us then we pin pointed at WC. We are red faced for ever suggesting WC. So much for the 99.5% server uptime guarantee claim.

Now, I spoke about how to use http://search.twitter.com in a recent post as a method of monitoring, in almost real time, what is happening with customers. Now let’s say, hypothetically speaking of course, you have a competing business. What would stop you also monitoring the same Twitter feed and then approaching each affected customer with an offer to change over to your business? Chances are pretty good that if can offer a solution a lot of people are going to jump ship right now since they are currently experiencing real pain and loss. With something like Twitter you can do just that!

 

If you step back and have a think about that and apply it to other areas then Twitter may be a great way to leverage some opportunities for very little cost. So while some may look at Twitter as a total waste of time, it is far more intelligent to learn how it can be added to your marketing toolkit to bring in more business. A good craftsperson knows it is not about the tool, it is how that tool is used. In this circumstance, I can really see how Twitter can be very effective if used correctly.

Human digitizer

When you do a lot of research like I do on the Internet sooner or later you end up at Google Books. The idea is that Google wants to digitize every book ever printed and place it on the Internet so it can be searchable. Now this has lead to some controversy around copyright but generally seems to be proceeding.

The question is how can you actually go about digitizing every book. You have to scan in every  page and then convert that page to text so it can be searched. As anyone who has ever used a scanner (or a fax for that matter) knows scanning something into a computer can sometimes mean illegible results. Generally, the only way to overcome this is for a real live human being to decide what the scanned text actually says. That could take years I hear you say, ah ha but you didn’t figure on the power of the Internet did you?

A huge issue on the Internet are programs (known as bots) that scan through web sites looking for emails. The bots report these emails back to spammers who add them to their list so they can send you more junk. Bots can also be used to automate the creation of web based emails and reply to forms – ah what a pain! To overcome this many sites use something called Captcha. This means that prior to any confirmation you are presented with some text that is difficult for a machine to recognize but hopefully not for a human. In this way the web page knows that the entry most probably came from a real human (assuming it was entered in correctly).

So what has bots got to do with Google Books and text recognition? You can imagine that there are many pieces of scanned text from books that needs to be viewed by a human being to determine what they are. So now it’s time for the Internet and Captcha to come to the rescue.

As you can see, a site I recently visited needed to verify I was a real person so it threw up this Captcha. However, note that down the bottom it says the words come from scanned books. So by typing in the text you are help to digitize scanned books.

So how does the Captcha know the correct word when the scanned word can’t be read you may ask? On the reCaptcha site you’ll find the answer:

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

If you a more in depth explanation then check out the reCaptcha site where you’ll the answers in much more detail.

A good example of how the power of the Internet is being put to good use. Pretty clever eh?

When Twitter helps

Ok, so most people believe Twitter is a total waste of time, well here’s an example to the contrary. At the moment Australia’s largest ISP, WebCentral, is having a major outage affecting hosting, emails, databases, etc. Their phone lines are flooded, they have failed to update the issue statues on their web site in a timely manner so where can you turn for information? Twitter of course.

The bets place to start is http://search.twitter.com and type in webcentral to search for. Here’s the current results:

There are a whole swag of postings from people who have been affected so you know that it isn’t just you. I can also see from the results that 36 minutes ago someone actually managed to logon to their email, so maybe the problem’s fixed? In short, you get a better idea of what’s going on from a group of affected users rather than trying to ring Webcentral. Even better you can subscribe to this search in your RSS reader so you can keep tabs on the situation without having to constantly run a search. Now that’s gotta save time!

Whether it is or whether it isn’t I think that the above situation can give you a good example of where Twitter can be used beneficially.

Microsoft Online Services

I’m beginning to get up to speed what will be offered via Microsoft Online Services here in Australia.

 

Microsoft has created a site www.discoveronlineservices.com which has a huge amount of information and resources about the offerings. If you are a Microsoft partner and you are considering offering online services then you should take a look. Even if you aren’t then I still recommend you take a look to understand the huge investment that Microsoft is making in this area.

 

Microsoft Online Services will be offered here through Telstra (Why? Not a good idea I reckon but that’s the way it is) and you can find more information of this via the Telstra T-Suite site. Interestingly, I can’t find any links to actual pricing here (early days perhaps?) Given that T-Suite has been around for a while you will find the pricing elsewhere in the T-Suite store site.

 

Microsoft Online Services is still in its infancy here but can only be expected to grow once the dual marketing monoliths of Telstra and Microsoft get going. A recent webinar I attended certainly indicated that Microsoft expected the greatest uptake of the service to be in the 5-50 user seat arena, in other words prime SBS territory. We are also starting to see documents like “Integrating Windows Small Business Server 2008 with Exchange Online”, which confirm the push for online services in the SMB space.

 

As I have said before (almost 12 months ago now), SBS 2008, I believe, will be the very last version of Small Business Server. Why? I simply believe that online services in some shape or form is going to gobble up the SMB market and the primary reason doesn’t have anything to do with technology or security. In fact it is all about price. Mainly around the ability to pay per month, per user.

 

Like it or lump it online services are going to have an impact on the SMB market and I reckon now is the time to get in early and be ahead of the pack.

Traffic on Twitter

Here’s something that I think is of benefit on Twitter – road traffic reports. Someone has taken the reports from the local government web site (in Sydney’s case the RTA) and automatically posted them to the Twitter account sydneytraffic.

I had a poke around and there seems to be plenty of other traffic reports from places all over the world on Twitter.

Now when you are out and about traffic information like this, regularly updated, could be very handy. It would be a little hard to read on a PDA as you are driving along but none the less I think this is a great demonstration of where Twitter information does have benefits.

Interestingly, this sydneytraffic account is put together by someone not affiliated with the local authorities. I hope they at least take notice of things like this that could be of real benefit to people on the go.

Digital footprints

I am utterly amazed at how ignorant most people are of the fact that all their wonderful technology can provide excellent information of exactly who you are and what you are doing at any time.

 

In this story “Digital dabs: how Einfeld was tracked with a mobile, credit card and e-tag” it shows how the police used digital evidence like that from electronic tolls, mobile phone and credit cards to prove the guilt of Marcus Einfeld. It goes to show that convenience has a price and that price is usually reduced privacy.

 

In many respects the lust for technology has made the job of tracking individuals much easier than it ever used to be. Stop and think about every email you send, every internet search you do, every login to Facebook, and so on – they’re all trackable. The more you use technology the more ‘digital evidence’ begins to stack up against you. The unfortunate thing about this is that digital evidence is firstly much easier to store and secondly much easier to search.

 

As I have lamented here before, so many people have no concept of the value of their privacy and are surrendering it without a second thought. We happily proclaim the wonders of technology but we seem to remain oblivious to dangers it also brings. Read the story and then stop and think how much information are you giving away about yourself without even thinking?

 

We perhaps wrongly believe that technology has given us greater freedom, mobility and convenience and yet the reality may be that it has enslaved us as never before.

Smartphone money pit

Back in July 2008 I wrote an article here about the costs of the new IPhone, especially when used to access the Internet. I warned that the costs of using your smartphone like your PC were going to rack up significant costs if you were not extremely careful.

 

“The shocking cost of smartphones” in the Sydney Morning Herald today, illustrates how the unwary are being slugged big time. One user mentioned in the article posted to a technology forum seeking advice.

 

In his post entitled:”Virgin shocker bill $2458.67″ he said he had accessed the internet while on holiday in Cairns, and hadn’t realised his $450 cap plan applied only to voice calls.

Therein lies the trap for the unwary. Telcos treat voice and data as two separate things. Even though you may have a “cap” of $450 per month chances are it only applied to voice not to data. Chances are also that unless you have specified your data requirements up front you are likely to be paying  data charges at the highest rate, as this guy found out with his $2458.67 bill!

 

Wireless Internet is great and there are so many applications that take advantage of it but if you are going to be using your smartphone this way make sure you have setup and understand a data plan. Make sure you know exactly how much you can download each month and what any additional charges are. Also make sure you keep an eye on what applications you load onto your smartphone as they may access the Internet without your direct knowledge. The article also has some handy tips for “avoiding bill shock”.

 

Remember that convenience costs, especially when it comes to wireless Internet.