Posts by David Evans292 posts • joined Friday 3rd August 2007 09:17 GMT
@Ralph 5. I was being slighlty flippant (I work in e-commerce for a bricks and mortar retailer, so buildings are quite important to me), but the bottom line is that individuals like yourself who want to browse before buying, don't cover the overheads of running a store chain. Waterstones HAVE to come up with a plan for migrating the bulk of their customers to online, with a much reduced store chain, probably for "distressed" purchases (e.g. in airports etc.) This plan simply drops their customers into the Amazon universe, with all the attendant enticement from Amazon to keep them there.
I imagine Waterstones are getting a cut of revenue; either as a customer bounty or a "lifetime value" type deal where they get a ongoing rev share. Problem with those types of deal is that customers routinely find ways to break pretty crm models (mainly by accident) and Waterstones will gradually find its customers just leached away by Amazon.
I'm a classic example; I LOVE browsing bookstores, but since I started using the Kindle app, I have to make time to go to a bookstore, time I simply don't have, and time that is becoming increasingly pointless anyway; I currently have nine books pre-ordered on my Kindle that will drop in right across the summer; I just don't need a bookshop; and even if the bookshop came up with some cool browse-in-store/deliver-to-ebook machanic, its still a convulated step that the majority of customers won't use.
My thoughts exactly. Waterstones have previous form in this area though; they white labeled Amazon for a while before launching their own website, but this is orders of magnitude worse; all this nonsense about "curation" - I don't need a building to give me advice on which books to read; I already have the internet for that. At least a B&N deal would have given them a credible alternative to the 800lb gorilla of UK bookselling.
I thought that as well, right up until the time my youthful eyes were opened by the sight of John Noakes and Peter Purves staggering out of a pub in Beaumaris (where they were filming something about the RNLI I seem to remember), three sheets to the wind in the middle of the afternoon. Always watched BP in a different light after that, as it turned out they were human after all.
If you can afford six grand for a telly, you can afford two tellies. I can see the use of the two pictures/one screen concept in places like cars (I believe Jaguar do it so the driver can use the satnav and the passenger use the same screen for video), but in the home? It'll get used even less than 3D.
A Bruce Sterling one actually - Islands in the Net (although Neal Stephenson has touched on the idea a couple of times as well as have others like John Courtenay Grimwood).
Frankly the biggest issue with this whole idea is the country they've chosen to anchor off. Access to Silicon Valley is all very nice, but American security paranoia and the IRS make the whole thing untenable. They'd be better off getting the Canadians to lease an island off BC or something.
I'm one of those people who still browses in bookstores (despite 99% of my book purchases being ebooks), mainly because there happen to be a couple of book stores on my route to work; but despite being (I suppose) and ideal target customer for this idea, I just can't see the benefit, either for myself, or, to be honest, the bookseller. Yes they may get a few incremental sales, but unless this became a default purchasing path for most of their customers (which strikes me as extremely unlikely), it isn't going to save them from the inherent cost inefficiencies of their retail business. It smacks of the typical flawed thinking of bricks and mortar media retailers who refuse to accept they are in the "selling IP" business not the "selling stuff from a building with a counter and a nice coffee shop" business.
It will also be interesting to see if B&N plan to use their Microsoft relationship to expand internationally (presumably not by doing anything so foolish as opening shops).
"The only downside is I can only read books that have been released for Kindle..."
No so. I have a 7" Galaxy Tab (perfect size for an ebook) and I have Kindle on it but I also have the Kobo app and the default Samsung one (epub as well). All work fine, so I'd be extremely surprised if you can't get an epub app on your Note.
Richer Sounds made a profit certainly, but mainly off the back of cost cutting and their pre-tax profit was actually down (from 2.7m to 2.1m - which isn't much for a 50 store chain). Like everyone else, their gross revenues declined and have actually been in decline for a while. I like Richer Sounds and I think they do what they do very well, but they're still subject to the same pressures as everyone else; declining revenues and generalist rivals happy to work on single digit margins. I don't think Richer Sounds are going to escape the inevitable.
Ro-Jaws and Hammer-Stein, your time has come.
I'm pretty sure its NOT "all countries" and is just "selected countries", so long as media owners sell rights by territory, Amazon will have to tailor content to suit. For example I very much doubt Amazon will offer the Kindle Fire here in Ireland at all; it takes just as long to do all the deals with rights holders and collection agencies in a country of 4m people as it does in a country of 60m, so where are they likely to concentrate their efforts?
I only have to look at my PS3 or my SmartTV (Netflix, and....that's it) to see that small countries are destined to become digital backwaters unless something is done to make the rights process simpler (maybe at EU level?)
Fire only makes sense as an Amazon content play. Since Amazon's digital content strategy in Europe is way behind their US offering, there's no point in selling the Kindle Fire. No great mystery.
We explored this years ago when I worked there because their Spanish arm ran game cafes just like you're describing. Its almost impossible to get the model to work with UK rents, and even with the much cheaper rents in Spain it was still pretty marginal and I think they even closed most of them down in the end (after my time).
Microsoft probably doesn't care about downloads; it'll be eyeing OnLive and wondering when the time is right to move to a streaming service. Get that right and a whole bunch of issues (piracy, retail, hardware costs) start to go away. Possibly even the console itself, except maybe as a platform peripheral/control device. Next gen may be download because consistent bandwidth isn't there for enough people yet, but the generation after that...
Better for reading (its the size of a paperback), better for video (16:9 format), big enough for basic productivity. I'm thinking of swapping my 7" Galaxy Tab for the equivalent Galaxy Note. I've been using a 7" tab for about 18 months now and I can honestly its the most used bit of personal tech I own (hence my amusement at Apple given Jobs' stated disdain for smaller tabs - I knew they'd do a smaller one eventually and said so at the time on these very forums).
Leonard Nimoy has an upcoming cameo. So far only his DNA has been in it...
"Android was just as much better at recognising spoken instructions in English as it is in Japanese."
Not just better than Siri, better than you as well by the looks of things.
“That’s not sufficient for great tablet apps, in our opinion."
“It would be meaningless unless they included sandpaper to sand down your fingers to quarter their size. We’ve been testing interfaces and understand this stuff. There are limits before users can reliably tab, pinch or flick on a screen. Ten inches is the minimal space you need to create great tablet apps"
Steve Jobs 18.10.2010
...to allow services to remain "free" for UK licence payers. If the beeb charged the same as Netflix for iPlayer, they'd get a lot of traction outside the UK, especially if its a sub-tenner "all you can eat" flat fee. Just like Netflix however, it needs to ubiquitous across PC, mobile and TV; none of this Apple-only crap they're currently pedalling. I was very very negative about Netflix when it launched over here, but despite a lack of content relative the US version, the sheer convienience and usability of the service has won me over.
The other win for the beeb would be to wholesale iPlayer internationally to allow bundling deals with ISPs and service providers (except in net neutral America of course) to pass on iPlayer "for free" to their customers.
On the Bentley - its wilfully ugly but the interior is superb. Will be a huge hit with Arabs, Russians and rappers.
The Citroen, I've liked the look of this since I first saw it last year, but I've heard discouraging stories about the ride and the gearbox quality, which is a real shame because its quite the looker inside and out.
Ford B-Max, innovative but ugly. When the S-Max is so right, why can't Ford seem to replicate that with its smaller MPVs? There's also a new Kuga at Geneva that shows they've still got some design chops.
The Jaguar. I've reached the time in my life when I can get away with driving a Jaaaag, and I have a young family, so do want. Premium estates are the new black dontcha know, and this is much prettier than the Audi Avant or the 5-Series touring (even if they both probably objectively better cars - I don't care).
Ah, seems to me the only species this seed-carrying activity is negatively affecting is pompous biologists, or magnificis biologus if you prefer.
That's all well and good, but Antarctica wasn't actually put there for the benefit of scientists. Its not a lab, its part of the world.
...if birds carried seeds to Antarctica, it would be considered a natural phenomenon (and if climate change goes the way we expect such a thing is likely), but if humans do it, its bad news? If Antarctica is now warm enough for "foreign" plants to grow there, what exactly is the problem? How is the Antarctic being "wrecked"? (Let's not forget that the continent has been covered in vegetation in the past...)
This whole debacle says far more about the prevailing American culture of corporate spin control (particularly techie companies with a Northern Californian bent) than it does about the merits of electric cars. In the US and most of the European media, Tesla could have huffed and puffed and bullied their way to a retraction, because ultimately, advertising dollars are at stake. However, "due to the unique way the BBC is funded", Top Gear is under far less pressure to toe the commercial line. A good example of that is the way Clarkson slagged off a certain overblown Italian supercar on this week's episode; you won't find that level of candour in any of the commercial media because it get's jumped on by the PRs pretty damn quick (look up a journalist called Chris Harris for the inside, er...spin on this).
Clarkson and co can't be controlled, and long may it continue frankly.
Since Sterling devalued, there's been a pretty susbstantial lag in price adjustments for imported goods that's only really started to kick in over the last six-nine months. Relative to the Euro zone, and relative to the dollar (before sales tax/VAT), MS software (and lots of others - take a look at prices on Steam) has been cheap in Sterling. An adjustment is inevitable.
This is the price the UK has to pay for "quantitive easing". Its all very well crowing about the basket cases in the Euro zone, but higher prices is the inevitable outcome of the UK not becoming Ireland or Italy.
well done for not actually bothering to read what I said. I never once said it was fine for Apple to do it because everyone else does, because without showing what everyone else does, you have no context. For all you or I know, they could be paying better than the norm. And yes you could still argue that Apple are wrong to source in China on general principles (and I wouldn't necessarily disagree - as I ALSO said), but what we have right now is only part of an article, not all of the facts.
I'm no Apple apologist (far from it as many comments on this very site will confirm), but this article does strike me as trying to make some kind of Apple-bashing point without any sense of context. Criticise the general principle of low-cost outsourcing to cheap labour countries by all means, but unless a Chinese employee's "cut" of an iPad is significantly less than for other foreign owned products (something this article singularly fails to address), then you really do have to cut Apple some slack on this one.
Yes they look cute, they also have a seriously scary set of mouth furniture, and unlike Seals, they can move surprisingly quickly on land; as I found when I was chased up a beach in New Zealand by a male I disturbed when he was trying to cop off with some females out of sight of the Alpha Bull. He was (understandably) not a happy camper.
Even if Trip Advisor introduced some mechanism to confirm reviewers actually went to a particular establishment (and the getting the hotel to confirm idea sounds massively flawed), there's still no guarantee the review is actually true. Also, hotels already have a right to reply, so if they think a review is fake, say so.
Anyone with half a brain using TA or similar not only reads the reviews, but also "reviews the reviewer". I've discounted plenty of reviews on the grounds of serial pickiness, obviously written by the PR department, or foaming-at-the-mouth lunacy.
Didn't have time to plough through 200 odd posts, so I don't know if this has been covered, but if the tweets took place weeks before their flight, why weren't their ESTAs rejected? How were "potential terrorists" allowed on a plane to the US? Makes no sense.
NB, The story says the pair are British. One is from Cork and "destroy" in the context he used is a fairly obvious drinking reference.
I think the "Irish Channels" have been gutted; which isn't surprising as far more UK rights holders (particularly in sport, but other content as well) are concerned about UK users seeing Irish channels than the other way around.
...it does show the problem of user preferences. I've got Netflix working on a few devices around the house (PC, PS3 in the living room and a Wii upstairs where the missus gives our new baby his night feeds). Actually a decent user experience setting it up, but Netflix relies heavily on your viewing behaviour to present recommended content; my behaviour (catching up on old action movies mainly) and the missus' (Downton bloody Abbey and documentaries) are rather different. Even if Netflix allows different logins on the same account (not sure it does), its hardly "frictionless" to keep switching passwords. As my kids get older and start using this type of service, its only going to get worse.
My other frustration is that all the UK catch up services aren't available on TV in Ireland, even where they ARE available on PC (e.g. 4OD), and only Netflix and Acetrax are available in the VOD category. I have a suspicion the rights landscape is going to create a big digital divide for TV content in smaller countries.
I think we all know why the online selections for the services are crap, and you're absolutely correct about the publishers. Unfortunately that doesn't help Netflix get access to my hard-earned. And I have to say, the titles on Netflix are particularly bad, (Acetrax and Lovefilm have better selections, and Blinkbox is almost decent).
I see its available in Ireland as well. Unfortunately the selection is terrible! Even worse than Acetrax, which I didn't think was possible.
When these services finally get around to offering a decent catalogue, I'll bite, until then, what's the point in wasting a free trial on crap?
...and I really do hate myself for my attraction to tat sometimes.
I think you hit the nail on the head about the quality of advertising; none of the Samsung or Sony ads (I can't even remember any from LG) do a great job of explaining what a smart TV actually is.
The first time I mentioned on Facebook that I was accessing from my TV (a Samsung), I got lots of people asking about it; completely unaware the option existed, so the ads look like they're not resonating (for the record Facebook on a smart TV isn't a great usability experience - and Samsung are incredibly poor at upselling tools and services they actually have for making the experience better, like their smartphone remote control apps etc.)
I think positive word-of-mouth may be their best marketing tool at the moment, I absolutely love my Smart TV.
For a supposedly non-techie easy-to-use service, it fails massively at the first hurdle. You can't see what you're really going to get until you cough up the cash. There's not even a demo walkthrough (and no, a shitty 360p YouTube video doesn't count). They are trying to use the FAQ as a sales tool and a support tool so it fails at both.
All they need to do is offer a small sample of free demo tracks on sign-up and the ability to browse the site without playing and they probably wouldn't even have to have the substantial 3-month discount they're currently offering. At the moment it doesn't really matter if its €99c or €2.99; its the same act of getting your credit card out that's the biggest barrier to sign-up. People can decide if they like the Spotify UI by using the ad-funded version; if you can't or won't go down the ad route, then you need an alternative way to sample the site. Its not rocket science.
If you're going to pitch simplicity as your USP, that means everything, not just a shiny media player.
I had a Pakuma and the damn thing fell apart after six months (all the stitching on the straps unraveled).
Started buying Crumpler bags and haven't bought another brand since; my laptop bag and my photo bag will probably outlast me!
You just don't get it do you? No, nor do I (which is why Last.fm passed me by as well), but apparently "the young people" do, so why not make some money out of it?
I'm sure the new 1-series is a wonderful car...from the inside. From the outside its taken one hell of a beating with the ugly stick.
Isn't LoveFilm part of Amazon? Amazon Prime is still Flash for PC & Mac so why has LoveFIlm had to switch? Unless this is a testing ground in a smaller market for something they're going to do stateside later?
NB. Assuming Amazon ever want to sell the Kindle Fire in the UK/Europe, they'll have to have an Android version of LoveFilm anyway.
All seems a bit odd overall (having said that, if you're a PC user, Silverlight is a nicer experience than Flash, I use it for SkyGo and the quality is excellent).
Skype is bundled with a lot of these sets, but in the case of Samsung (which I've just bought) the proprietary webcam you have to use is 130 quid! I bought the damn thing anyway, and it IS good quality (and integrates with the set aesthetically very well) but its still a bit of a ripoff.
I'd also give another vote for using phone/tab apps as the remote control; the standard Samsung remote is hideous (such as shame with such a beautiful looking TV) and text input is painful; I now do all that through my Galaxy Tab or the missus' S2 and its a much nicer experience.
NB. In Ireland we don't get iPlayer or LoveFilm, so the content offering is pretty lightweight (AceTrax and Muzu are about your lot), and a downside of the YouTube player is its pretty much impossible to control content that comes up while you're searching for the content you DO want, which has led to my toddler seeing one or two rather alarming Elmo videos (she wasn't impressed when the little guy was shot from a cannon).
I agree entirely about the F-35 choices that need to be made, but forget the F-18, its rubbish anyway and UK Gov are in too deep with Typhoon to back out now. There's still time to make sensible choices about the carriers and the F-35, but the Typhoon debate is done, move on.
I use the Kindle App on a Galaxy Tab every day and have none of the page turning lagginess referred to here. Seems odd that Amazon's own Tablet would have these issues.
The plane is a Canberra from the RAAF's Research and development centre (The assymetrical dome is for a camera). That and the other plane (a Gloster Meteor of some description) are the only ones I know; I remember some of the names of the missiles (Blue Streak would be one, and Black Knight another), but don't have a clue which is which.
I think there was one called rip.ie as well. Biggest shock to my system when moving to Ireland was the whole death thing; not only do you have the funeral, but also the "removal" the day before (both excuses for a drink), and its routine to go to the funerals of people you've never met; I was dragged along to the funeral of a friend of my partner's father within weeks of moving here (never met the guy in my life, and certainly not in his...) and the church was mobbed. And yet I wasn't expected to put on a black suit and tie as I wasn't a family member. Its all very confusing for a poor (non-practising) protestant English boy.
I didn't see him as arrogant and angry, I thought he was pretty funny, but I suppose if he's not getting that across to everyone, then you have a point.
Re: web designer CV's; that was kind of my point, I've seen loads with no portfolio links at all, and others where they've tried to use their leet design skillz on the CV itself; neither approach impresses.
...I've just gone back and read it now. As someone who's had to look at hundreds of abomnible CVs over the years, there's very little that's wrong in the original article; and the pedantry and bloody-mindedness of the responses confirms my experience that techie CVs are usually amongst the worst (web designers are THE worst, but IT CVs run them close), because the people writing them fail to understand what they're actually for, and who's actually reading them.
The author was honest, self-deprecating and most importantly, right.
To be honest, if it wasn't for regular installments of Battlefield games, I wouldn't own a desktop at all. My media consumption is generally via tablet (Galaxy), I have a work laptop and a netbook I rarely even switch on any more, (and neither will need an upgrade for anything I do workwise) and a smart TV is on the way which will become the the focus of iPlayer, Skype and Youtube (Elmo vids for the baby you understand). I don't even store much on the desktop as there's a NAS whirring away under the stairs. Its only because I can't bring myself to play FPS games on a console that I have my own PC at all.
Tottenham Court Road is going to be horrible when its just coffee shops and M&S.
