Nice One Orcon

Why is it that the little things are so hard? Why do I really dislike credit departments? Do you know how yours talks to your customers?

So today I got home after a long but great day at the office. I found a ‘letter’ from Orcon saying that I had 5 days to pay my overdue account or risk getting my phone and Internet disconnected. I previously took up the option to pay by American Express to make sure that it was always paid on time, along with my power bill.

I rang Orcon and their credit department answered way faster than their support help desk ever has, less than a minute! I gave them my details and said I had received the letter and the person on the phone (Philippines accent I think) responded with “and when are you going to pay it?” I was taken aback. As far as I knew, it was always paid on time by Amex.

It transpired that my Amex card expired at the end of July, but I never received the replacement that American Express subsequently told me they had sent. I didn’t receive anything from Amex asking why the card had not been authenticated, nor did I receive anything from Orcon saying the account hadn’t been paid. I spend over a thousand dollars a year with Orcon, so at least a response like “How may I help you?” Rather than “when are you going to pay?” might have been nice.

So Orcon, I paid your account, that I didn’t know was overdue, on my Visa and American Express will no longer get a commission on that monthly transaction.

If you know that’s how your ‘Accounts Receivable’ treat your customers, you should also know that they don’t like it.

The last company that spoke to me like that was GE Money, through which I once bought a Canon SLR camera on 12 months interest free and was about 5 days overdue (because I didn’t get a reminder note from them). That was about 5 years ago and I have never used them again and told lots of people who follow me, my story.

Maybe it’s time to shop around and see what packages your competitors are offering, Orcon….. I’m sure my blog and social media followers would welcome my opinion. For everyone else, if you use 3rd party call centers, it’s a good idea to check them out as a customer once in a while and see how they are representing your business, because they are your front desk, especially if you don’t have a bricks and mortar presence.

The Internet as a battlefield

I’ve been trying to work on this post for ages, but never seem to get it finished. The more I think about it, the more tangents I head in, so here’s a start anyway. Maybe you can add a comment to the thread.

When we, Joe Citizen think of warfare, the common picture is either soldiers, tanks and planes, or more recently terrorist attacks. Information warfare is not a topic that we think of very often.

Of course using media such as radio, print and TV have been used for decades to provide disinformation, but now that we have the Internet, there is potential for a new front that could cripple economies and cause massive disruption to life as we know it.

Last month 14 Virgin Blue flights were cancelled in Melbourne when a broken cable disrupted their computer systems, stranding thousands of passengers. A total of 48 domestic flights were cancelled as a follow on of this problem.

Periodically there are major EFTPOS failures, which can happen at the worst possible times. For example in 2005 the EFTPOS network in New Zealand broke down for 2 hours on 23rd December. The estimate was that around half a million transactions were lost on one of the busiest days for retailers in the year. Millions of dollars in transactions were lost because people don’t really carry cash any more.

In November last year Brazil and some of Venezuela lost their power. Nine of Brazil’s states were out of power, representing millions of people. Whilst many complained they couldn’t watch their favorite soap opera, traffic lights were not working, trains weren’t running and parts of the country pretty much ground to a halt.

If a country or a terrorist organisation wanted to cause chaos or in some way to a country or city in the modern world, it would be incredibly easy. In Holland a guy called Max Cornelisse has created chaos and recorded it on YouTube to show how easy it is to disrupt services we take for granted. Amongst other things he has meddled with electronic signs on freeways, opened and closed bridges over canals from his PDA, sent people running from one platform to another by controlling automated PA messages at railway stations and in this YouTube Video he controlled the autoprompter at a Dutch TV station causing confusion to the newsreaders on live TV. Unfortunately it is in Dutch, but you’ll get the idea.

This is just a guy having a little fun, but what could you do if you seriously wanted to disrupt a country or city. What chaos would you create simply by shutting down the Internet. How would your business function without the Internet? How would your community function without the Internet? Imagine no email, no Voice over IP, no web browsing, no IM, no Facebook or Twitter? No online share trading. No banking, no EFTPOS, no ATM’s and who carries cash?

That’s just for starters. I wonder how long it would take for a major city, like New York, London or Amsterdam to fall into chaos? What would happen after a day, a week, even longer?

Last week there was a story on NPR about cyber terrorism. It quoted USA Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blaire saying that “Every single day, Blair said, sensitive information is “stolen from both government and private sector networks” as criminals become increasingly more sophisticated.”

Interestingly on 16 February 2010 an event will take place in a simulated Whitehouse Situation Room which is scripted to emulate a cyber terrorist attack. Those taking part will include former Director of National Intelligence John Negroponter and former Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend, who will have to work out how to deal with it as it plays out.

This has happened shortly “after the House overwhelmingly passed The Cybersecurity Enhancement Act. Something that gives the Obama administration the power to switch off the Internet,” according to Techeye. For more on the Act, check here.

Just as a final thought for now. If you know how to defend against an attack, you also know how to initiate one. I’m not for a moment suggesting any Western power would do that, but given the right circumstances…….

I am very happy to be living in New Zealand in that respect. Although we have allowed ourselves to become very dependant on our friends and allies, not even able to fully feed ourselves if we bacame isolated.

On Twitter and Business

If you have or know teenagers, you will know that they spend a lot of time on the internet and particularly in the area of social networking. The most popular applications they use are Bebo, Facebook and MySpace. They aren’t just doing it on their PC’s at home, school or work, they are doing it on their mobiles. You might be surprised to know that in most countries in the developed world, including New Zealand, Facebook and Bebo represent close to half of all mobile data traffic. It is big and no one saw it coming.

Now people using social networking are no longer just Generation Y, it goes through all the generations, especially with professional social networking applications such as LinkedIn (go there and look for Luigi Cappel and you’ll find my account) where professional build a network where they can discuss business issues, look for staff or for jobs and generally communicate with like minded people around the world.

In the last few years the term Generation X has once again emerged. Generation X is generally agreed to as being the later group of Baby Boomers who challenged all the beliefs and philosophies of their elders. Instead of ‘we are doing this because it’s the way we always did it, or the way our parents did’ they tried new ways of doing everything.

These people grew up with the advent of the computer and are very comfortable with the Internet and various forms of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Yet when marketers are trying to sell new product, they often focus on the Generation Y who perhaps traditionally were the ones who rushed to the record store to get the new albums and wanted to wear the latest fashions. Now of course fewer of them by CD’s when they can download or copy music, mostly without paying for it. In today’s economy they are also more likely to be tempted by sales and even if they didn’t need something, they might still buy it if the deal sounds good.

Back to Generation X. These people are now in the late 30’s and older. They probably have a home and a mortgage, are settled with a good income and despite the economy still have some spending power. So, here’s a thought from left field. There is a social network , Twitter, which has been quietly growing to a point now where there are an estimated 6 million users and around 55 million messages sent a month. It is said to be growing at a rate of up to 2,000 users a day.

So what is Twitter and why should I care. Twitter is a social network where you make friends, or in the case of Twitter, you ‘Follow’ people. You post messages, called tweets, from your internet connected PC or from your mobile phone’s browser. The messages are restricted to 140 characters including spaces, so you have to be very smart with your choice of words. It started with and its main focus was a social one, and the idea was that you entered what you were doing at the time, for example, ‘Having an ice cream at Milford Beach’. This is still a major use and many people only ‘Tweet’ amongst their real friends. I often see Tweets from friends saying things like “I’m heading down to Ponsonby for a coffee, anyone else in the neighbourhood?’

There are also social gatherings, for example a few weeks ago I attended the ‘Twestival’ in Auckland, raising funds for Charity Water, but that’s another story. Let’s keep it simple. Twitter is free, its easy to use and there are lots of applications you can get for free that allow you organise your Tweets. I use Tweetdeck and Twitbin depending on what I am doing at the time.

Twitter is now being used by lots of different organisations around the world. It is used by companies, manufacturers, news media and even government departments such as the Victoria Police. If you are able to come up with reasons why people would follow you, you have a free medium to make them aware of special deals and offers, events or anything else that you think they would be interested in.

Here are some examples. A bar could promote a Happy Hour Deal by posting a message. A coffee chain could send out electronic coupons as Twitter messages, offering a free muffin with coffee for the next hour. A women’s clothing chain could announce a special deal on end of season fashions, or announce the exciting next season fashions are in store. A bike shop could post special deals around a racing event, or perhaps send brief updates of the Tour de France. The messages are anything that you think your customers or prospects would find of interest and be happy to read.

The thing with Twitter is that it is not intrusive. It’s not like a text message that beeps and wakes you up in the night or embarrasses you in a meeting or at the theatre. You have to open up your browser on your phone, or a website on your PC to receive the ‘Tweets’. You can follow who you like and if you don’t want to see them anymore, you can stop ‘following’ them with ease.

So who is doing this already? Find out for yourself. If you go to http://www.twitter.com you will find an option called Find People. Click on this and then select the option box at the top called Find On Twitter. I had a go and here are some of the results I got. I entered ‘shoes’. I got back 91 results. There were generic shoe stores, golf shoes, wedding shoes, custom soles. But when I entered ‘Shoes NZ’ or Shoes New Zealand there were none. I can think of some iconic shoe retailers who could jump into this spot.

So who can you find promoting product on Twitter. Here are a few names that you can look up and follow to see what they are doing and remember it’s free! Vodafone and Telecom, Adidas, Starbucks, McDonalds Cincinnati are doing a great job of promoting new products and deals, Borders Books, The Car Shop, Pro Guitar Shop, Sisters Gift Shop, Alpine Ski Shop, just entering shop I found over 200 shops who are already using Twitter around the world. Now to be fair, only some of them are actively using Twitter for marketing, but that is normal and it is still a relatively new concept, but Twitter has gained 6 million users in less than 3 years, so you would have to say they are onto something and if you are smart, you could be one of the first to really make something of it.

If you look around, you will find retailers who have got it together. For example http://twitter.com/fluevog is a shoe shop. They offer electronic coupons, they have links to pages where they tell you in Twitter about a new product and provide a link to a web page where you can see them. They have only been using Twitter for a short time, only sent out 17 messages and they already have almost 500 followers!

Just as a footnote, even if you are a bricks and mortar retailer and don’t do much on the Internet, you might want to think again. For example if you have identified your target market, especially if you are a speciality retailer, then Twitter could open up a whole new area of opportunity for international sales. There must be loads of opportunities to export product, especially Kiwiana to individual customers.

Twitter is very viral in its approach and if you find people who like your kind of products, and you offer them information and deals in your Twitter messages, the word will get out and their followers can become yours.

One final, final word. Like anything, Twitter as a social network. Blogging environment requires consistency. People won’t follow you if you only send a couple of messages a week. They also don’t want to receive a hundred a day, you need to find a balance, but the main thing is that you provide something that they are pleased that they read.

So here’s a free service that you can get results from if you are smart, for an investment of 5-10 minutes a day. It can create a loyal following and grow a viral network for your business. One other thing I forgot to mention, there is also Twitpic http://twitpic.com/ , which allows you to post photos with your Tweets, again for free, so now you can even show followers pictures of your store, the friendly faces inside or your new products, oh and I did mention that this is all free didn’t I?

And if you want to follow me, you will find me at http://twitter.com/BluesBro.

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

The Trouble with Orcon

I note that many people are reading my blog about Orcon and the trouble I have had since I signed up, so I feel obliged to give you an update.

Things have improved to some degree, I frequently have days where my connection only drops out 1 or 2 times, but I am still experiencing dropouts, disconnections this week:

• Saturday 16
• Sunday 31
• Monday 27

I also noted that people have found me when searching about the 2 for 1 movie tickets for a year that were promised as part of the connection deal. Well I signed up 4 months ago and still haven’t seen them. If they do arrive, I hope they will still be valid for 12 months and not the remainder of the year. But at this stage I’m not holding my breath on ever seeing them.

I don’t know if it is because of the interleaving, but our Caller ID doesn’t work on the phone about 50% of the time, which is annoying.

My wife wants me to go back to Telecom and thinks I’m an idiot for putting up with Orcon’s poor service. As a footnote, Orcon did come up with a $100 credit for my troubles. Funny thing is that a couple of weeks ago, even though my payment is made automatically by direct credit from my American Express Card, and I had the $100 credit, I got an email saying that my account was overdue and asking me to do something about it urgently. I was tempted to send one back saying that their service was overdue and could they give me a reliable connection urgently.

So, the bottom line? Still having plenty of disconnections, no 2 for 1 movie tickets as promised, intermittent caller id and no satisfaction. Should I be calling Fair Go?

I’m almost off Orcon 696 reconnections since 23 June!

As I am writing this my home has no landline phone, we can’t call and can’t be called.

In April we got a DM in the mail saying that Orcon was now able to offer ADSL2 from our local phone exchange through Orcon and that they had an awesome deal to offer us.

The catchy DM letter was signed by Scott Bartlett, the CEO and was full of promises such as:

“Quite simply, we’re not like other phone companies. The’re more than happy to offer an average service to as many people as possible.”

“At Orcon we’re the opposite. We choose our customers very carefully, then go out of our way to deliver truly ourstanding product performance ………………….”

Not only was I being chosen, but if I signed up before the end of May I would get a free modem / wireless router and a 2 for one pass to the movies for a whole year! This deal looked too good to be true, but I looked at their ownership from Kordia whom I have dealt with for business in the past and so I signed up to the top plan. I am a heavy internet user with my songwriting, poker playing, blogging, photography and so on, basically I am a geek. The Platinum Plan for $120 a month would give me 25GB of data at great speeds, free national toll calls and one country of international calls free for up to an hour per call, sounded like heaven.

If I remember rightly I signed up mid week and got emails to confirm that it would all be up and running in a couple of days and not to worry about anything, they would cancel the old account and everything would be amazingly wonderful.

Thursday afternoon I get a phone call from my wife saying that the phone was dead and that I needed to rush home because there was a major family health crisis and the likelihood that a family member might not make it through the night. I rang the Orcon Help Desk before I left home and the response was like, thankyou for telling us, we will refer this to the technicians and we should have your phone on by Wednesday next week. I just about hit the roof and was in real emotional distress when I rang Orcon again when I got home and asked for a supervisor. The response was sorry but the supervisor isn’t in the room right now, I’ll get them to call you back. So I gave them my mobile and waited for the call. It never came so I rang back again after an hour or so and was told, sorry but the technicians and everyone that could help you have gone home and there is nothing we can do right now. We will get back to you. Brilliant.

In desperation the next morning I emailed Scott, having found his details on the net and got a call from his PA who was awesome, she arraged for redirection of the landline to my mobile so we could at least get through the family crisis. Some of the people who needed to talk to us didn’t know our mobile numbers.

Anyway, eventually it was all connected and life was going to be amazing, the speed was awesome, I was able to upload my songs to my web sites in no time flat. All I needed now was the movie tickets to arrive and my faith in Orcon was restored. On that note it is now almost August and the movie tickets haven’t arrived, but given the rest of the sorry saga, that is just par for the course.

I play poker 2-3 times a week and am doing well, in fact this Saturday I a playing in the regional championships having qualified over a 3 month period of evening tournaments. I noticed that during games and sometimes doing music uploads etc that the connection was dropping. I lost out on a couple of major games including a qualifier for the World Series Of Poker, having beaten more than 2000 people in the first qualifier. In the middle of the qualifying game, when I had bet most of my chips, my net disconnected and my cards were automatically folded taking all my chips. This became a regular exercise.

Since May I have made numerous phone calls to Orcon, had 2 technicians come and check out the phone lines, disconnected all my phones from the jack points, reconnected them again, rebooted the modem, disconnected the modem, pulled the plugs out, replaced line filters and then the same all over again.

Now I must say here also that I am no dummy. I qualified as a Technical Service Officer with Telecom, I have written books’ lectured around the world and represented both Telecom and Vodafone as a wireless computing consultant and am a Past President (elect) of the NZ Wireless Data Forum. I owned and ran the NZ SmartPhone and PDA Academy and have been considered an expert in mobile data communications.

In desperation I emailed the CEO again and someone called me and started the process again and got a 3rd technician to come in.They found some corrosion at the local cable box and we started again. Fortunately on the last visit the problem happened while the tech was here so he could see what was happening. Eventually towards the middle of this month they replaced the port at the exchange and things improved.

They never called me back or told me what was going on, each time they wanted to start the process over again and I had to tell them to go and read the notes on their CRM, once they couldn’t even do that because their servers had crashed. Hey I’ve been in ITC most of my career so I know shit happens.

Just on this issue, here’s a quote from their website:

Reliability
Orcon has always believed in developing good systems and excellent people. Over the years we have focused on building one of the most stable and reliable systems in New Zealand, and the more we grow, the more control we have over key services. We constantly examine the current setup, looking to see how we can improve our reliability.

Is it that bad or am I being a whinger and anyway your playing games, I mean really it’s not like its that important (If you were playing a game for $1,000 and you lost the game because your internet connection dropped repeatedly, how would you feel), well you decide.

From June 23 (6 weeks or so after I first complained of this problem) to today according to Orcon’s reports, my internet connection has had to reconnect 696 times!

Now read this from their web site if you are still with me.

Monitoring reliability
Reliability and excellent system practices are only as good as your monitoring. We have three dedicated servers, whose sole job is to ensure that connection speeds between machines and response times from our network meet strict guidelines that we have mapped out. If these aren’t met – say for example, a server response time is not quick enough, all our technicians’ cell phones are instantly contacted by the monitoring computer, supplying details of what might contribute to possible faults.

We have developed systems to monitor helpdesk calls. If more than a certain percentage of calls are of one particular nature, technicians are notified and the event is thoroughly investigated.

My wife wants me to give up and go back to Telecom, she doesn’t care about the movie tickets, she feels very uncomfortable without the phone working, especially as we are expecting to become grandparents in the next 2 weeks. Not everyone has our landline number and of course to call our landline if it works is free.

Everyone has problems from time to time and I judge a company generally by how they resolve the problem. Orcon has had nearly 3 months. The disconnections have reduced, we even had one day a few days ago without disconnections, but we hardly used it that day either. This to me is a systemic failure of all their systems and If I don’t get satisfaction soon, I might be tempted to take them to task on failing to honor their commitments and failing to deliver on their promises.

Are you thinking about moving to Orcon? I’m wishing I hadn’t.

P.S. If you want to ring me, don’t bother with the landline, they still haven’t fixed it.

The future of Personal Computing Part Two

This is a follow on from my blog last week about a day in my life of personal computing in 2013.

So I’ve had breakfast and I go to my PC to check email and messages. My wireless network at home now consists of a variety of devices and networks linked together. These include my Entertainment Server which links to various TV’s around the house, the Sky Dish, cable TV, media audio players and recorders, HD radio tuner as well as the Toshiba Fenininity Server which allows us to control and monitor the stove, dishwasher, washing machine and dryer, climate control, breadmaker and a host of other appliances not to mention the HVS climate control.

I also have the latest Kindle which lets all of us read our personalised news. It aggregates the top stories from mother Herald as well as other papers and magazines of interest so we all get the version we want. Scared the hell out of me the other day when I opened my wife’s logon by accident and all I saw was stories about TV and filmstars and their failed marriages and getting their 23rd adopted child out of Afghanistan which is the new Darfur. But then that is the beauty of it that we all get MeNews and not what someone else wants us to read.

I’m still into social networking in a big way, but have a number of portals that manage and aggregate each of my networks. I check my Music Portal which manages all the sites where I showcase my music. Now I can load my new songs, video’s, blogs and gig calendar onto one site and it updates the 127 sites I feature on in one hit, according to each sites unique specification.

So it’s time to go. I leave the house and activate the alarm which sends a signal to my iPhone to say the system is now armed and hop in the car. I drop the iPhone onto the little tray beside my seat and as I put the key into the ignition and my seat and steering wheel adjust itself to my preferred positions, my phone announces itself to the Wireless CANBUS so that it has access to the entertainment system.

I tell my integrated GPS navigation unit to take me to ‘the office’ select the podcast I want to listen to from those that are just audio as I don’t want to get pinged by the distraction laws and get on the road. As I near the top of Chartwell Drive, my podcast pauses (I used to hate missing stuff when the old system just muted the sound) and the nav tells me that there is a serious traffic incident on High Rd that it has picked up on TMC and would I like to route around it. I say yes, and it seemlessly takes me on down Diana drive and I arrive at work right on time.

As I wait at a set of lights I check the Buddy feature on my GPS and see an image of my wife’s car crawling along Bush Rd on her way to work. Her unit beeps to alert her that I have checked her location and she sends me a smart message back by tapping on the SMS keyboard on her nav unit which uses Bluetooth to send the message via her phone. Her car and system is a bit older than mine. 2009.

When I get to work my phone opens the carpark grill and after I have parked the car, it unlocks the door into the building and then into my office. I fire up my  Touchbook which has just been upgraded to Vista (“WE” like to be cautious about our computer network and go to the machine in the kitchen for a perfectly fluffy flat white.

As I have done forever, I start my day with email. My touchscreen notebook is now running Windows Vista Touch and although Microsoft has announced their new OS I will be using this one for another couple of years until our IT Department is comfortable that it is reasonably robust, especially given that it took 3 years to get most of the kinks out of Vista and for a while they went back to offering Windows XP again as an option in the 2nd half of 2009.

One thing that we have now universally adopted is Unified Communications. All my voicemail whether it comes from my landline, mobile or email is now waiting for me in my Inbox and with my iPhone or my notebook.

My days haven’t changed much. Probably the only major difference is that I do now use video on a lot of my phone calls so I can see the person I am talking to. This has saved me a lot of wasted travel time given the disaster that is Auckland’s roads today. They have started building the Auckland Harbour Tunnel, but it will be a couple more years before it opens for buses and T3 (cars with at least 3 peple in them) let alone ordinary traffic. So many meetings have been replaced by necessity with vidphone calls. Of course I can also do this on my iPhone 6, but unless I’m doing it over the Wireless LAN (and we still don’t have one in the office) the costs are prohibitive.

At lunch time I quite often walk to the Subway for some exercise and of course their food has the Heart Tick. On my way, I check out their menu on my iPhone and wonder if the food will look as good as the picture. I specify exactly what time I will get there. On the way back I get the phone to play me some Utterz messages from friends while I’m walking.

On the way home I drive past a bar and get a Speights Mates message saying there is a Happy Hour Running and sending me an eCoupon to get 2 for one in the next half hour and prompting me to hit the forward button to send the same coupon to any of my personal Speight’s Mates who are within a 2km vicinity to come and join me for an after work beer. I love location based marketing and decide it is only right to support people who have invested in this technology given that I helped to develop it. Isn’t that called the fruits of your labour? Yes. I know hops aren’t strictly fruit.

Before dinner, I go to my home studio and record a lead track on my Gibson LP Guitar onto my 8 track TASCAM for my latest song, nothing has changed there really, call me old fashioned. I still have my music on loads of web sites and while I’ve sold some songs, I haven’t scored a number one hit yet.

I bought the new Internet TV Aggregation Server last year and replaced my MySky. Now that I have cable for internet as well as TV, I can cherry pick and watch exactly what I want when I want and am no longer subject to the whims of SKy TV. Yes, I still subscribe to Sky Sports Channel because they have exclusive rights for many events that NZ teams compete in such as All Blacks Rugby and do support NZ sport better than anything else, especially the biased commentators, although I wuldn’t have a problem if Murray Mexted got some new material, but the rest is pretty much free. I don’t have to watch ads although many programs have very overt displays of product i the story.

I finally got an 80″ TV, the largest my wife would let me buy, and that wasn’t easy. Sometimes we have multple screens running so that we can watch different things at once and have adapted to that. We tried the VR glasses from the new Nintendo, but they are very antisocial. Awesome for 3D movies tough! Home entertainment is now awesome. No more channels full of reruns of programs we have already seen umpteen times, I never have to sit through another show of Friends again! Now I can see exactly what I want when I want, subject to agreement in the house of course and we all have to compromise sometimes,

Along with cable came free international calling to anywhere in the world for a modest flat fee, so I don’t use Skype much anymore. Finally a little music from iLike at the end of the day. I kept my CD’s and vinyl as souvenirs, but for a flat fee of $10 a month to our ISP, the house can access and download unlimited music from almost all record companies in MPEG 9 which is great quality at 960kbit/s.

Not a lot has changed in 5 years, but life is certtainly a little easier than it used to be.

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

Zimbabwe Elections

I started off, over the weekend, writing about the use of SMS as a tool and the many uses and of course I barely scratched the surface, but the whole Zimbabwe election issue is a concern, even from a technological perspective. ITC (information technology and communication) has provided new media including the mobile phone and Internet as a means of sharing information despite the efforts of political rulers. I.e. it is getting harder and harder for people in power to censor information anywhere in the world. Many countries have tried and failed to stop information travelling out of their geography.

Despite the intentions of the Mugabe regime, there is a continuous flow of information leaving Zimbabwe that is telling the rest of the world what is going on. I suspect that it will be impossible for Mugabe’s ZANU-PF to hoodwink the world again, telling everyone that he has won the election when it is clearly not true. Reuters has reported that bloggers are sharing the news with the world as it happens.

Whilst technology can be used to blur the truth, I think we are living in the most transparent environment in mankind’s short history. It is certainly possible to edit photos and video to distort the truth, but given that IT and communications technologies are available to the masses and not just to a wealthy minority and of course we are now much more IT literate, the opportunities to even stretch the truth such as Hilary Clinton’s recent ‘mistake’ about coming under sniper fire in Bosnia recently are becoming few and far between.

Back to Zimbabwe, I believe that largely due to communications and IT, Mugabe will no longer be able to get away with his version of democracy and the transparency of news and event information in real time has finally forced leaders from around the world to denounce what is going on there, even if they have turned a relatively blind eye to it until now.

It’s nice and comfortable to sit at home and watch this happening on TV and on the net, thinking it won’t happen to me. But I’ll bet the expat’s from Zimbabwe that I have met, who now live here and in other parts of the world and have lost pretty much everything they have worked for over generations, thought that once upon a time. Coups happen somewhere in the world pretty much every year and are at least in part covered up with attempts at disinformation and if it doesn’t directly hurt the major powers, it is often conveniently ignored. It’s my opinion that it’s going to be harder and harder for the powers of the world to do this. And that’s a good thing.

People used to say, “As an individual, there’s nothing I can do”. Today in Zimbabwe there are plenty of individuals doing something with their mobile phones and laptops and hopefully they will be able to bring about change, because if they don’t, there could be a civil war of proportions that make the disaster that is Zimbabwe today look like a picnic.

What is it about Facebook?

It amazes me how many people have said to me “I don’t get it” and “What is Facebook?”  Next thing I know I am receiving notifications and whether they get it or not, they are using it. In fact people are spending a fair amount of time every day using it. In December and January ‘Active Users’ exceded 8 million and page views were over 18 Billion in one month! No wonder Microsoft want in!

One thing that continually amazes me and many of the people that I talk to is that unlike many other social netowrking applications, people typically use their own names and provide incredibly detailed information about themselves that they wouldn’t dream of doing on other sites. They complete quizes and compare information with their friends such as their personal goals; would you ever, have you ever, personality tests, what music you listen to and much more. In effect giving people the ability to find out perhaps more about you than you know about yourself.

One thing that many people are still doing is collecting loads of friends like they do on sites where they might be a little more cautious. Perhaps as they play games and talk to people they are interested in or find attractive, suddnely they are laying their souls bare to total strangers.

Obviously this becomes hugely popular and various brands are starting to use Facebook as a way of marketing to and interacting with customers, for example when I search for Facebook applications I find a couple for BMW, 1 for Coca Cola, 37 for Microsoft, one for LG, 162 applications around Google, 12 for Nokia and the list goes on. I’m not making any judgements here, I love the idea of genuine personalised marketing. If companies can figure out how to market products and services that I am genuinely interested in, I am all for it and Facebook applications as marketing data acquisition tools make a lot of sense.

Many years ago I visited Arthur Anderson in Chicago and saw a demonstration of a retail system which kept images and vital statistics of customers. The concept was being able to send an email saying “Luigi, our latest summer fashion shirts are in and here are some pictures of what YOU would like like in your colours.” My future vision for that is that they will send that message with the image in a video so I can see a panorama on my mobile phone, only when I am in vicinity of the store and with an electronic coupon. The issues here are more about trust, but I’m getting into mobile marketing again and digressing as I am wont to do.

The thing I love about Facebook is that they have created an evolutionary product that keeps changing as more and more people add content and concept. You can look in the search area almost as you would in Google. Thinking about things I am interested in, I entered ‘song competition’ and found 19 events. I entered Texas Holdem and found 8 applications, more than 500 events and much more. If you are more of a golfing person, there are 47 facebook applicatins and countless events, the list goes on: politics – 95 applications, religion 25 applications, philosophy 25 applications, 14 applications for theatre and well I can go on indefinitely because while I write this blog, more applications are  being posted.

Then of course there are interest groups, discussion groups, activity groups, fan groups and being silly I even got more then 700 results doing a search under groupies!

I’m starting to get a picture of how much time this amazing environment can take up, but just as interesting how much, used wisely, Facebook could empower and entertain you. It can open doors and lead to all sorts of opportunities. Most of all, it is different. Most social networks are focussed around an activity or group, like photography, music, dating. Facebook is multi faceted and multi dimensional mirroring most people and having an endless array of new things to experience.

I’m still not sure that I can give an elevator pitch of what Facebook is.  I guess it can be whatever you want it to be and more. The question is what is it to you and what are other sites going to do to compete?

While this blog is starting to get a good following, I would love to get more readers and encouraging me to keep writing. If you feel that my blog is interesting I would be very grateful if you would vote for me in the category of best blog at the NetGuide Web Awards. Note that the form starts each site with www whereas my blog doesn’t and is of course https://luigicappel.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for your support:)

Life without Internet Part 3

While it is still clear in my mind, a couple of days ago, after losing my net connectivity for a few days, I said I would look at a typical day on the net to see how reliant I am on it. Here’s a synopsis of my connected day yesterday.

After having breakfast I went to my PC at home and posted a new photo on my Buzznet page and read the 11 comments people had left on my photos from the previous day. I checked out a few photos from my friends and left comments where appropriate.

I then posted Songwriting Tip 89 on my Twitter page after reading and replying to a few ‘tweets’ from my friends.

I checked a few emails on my GMail account which is once again up over 100 emails that I haven’t read yet. Most of them related to the Music Submission service I subscribed to last month. Several traditional radio stations as well as streaming stations have picked up my songs, so lots of follow up to do there.

Listened to a couple of songs and made a few comments in a forum at Music Forte.

I had a quick look at my MySpace messages and shared emails with a great singer in the UK who is looking for some bookings for a NZ Tour. Gave her some contacts to follow up.

Last but by far not least, I updated my podcasts on iTunes and downloaded them to my iPod so I can listen to them in my car with my Belkin FM Transmitter.

So off to work listening to my latest podcasts, including one from Podcast Tools which was debating whether you should use WordPress as your podcast host. It was fairly compelling, but for now, given that all the podcatchers including iTunes know where to find me, I’ll maintain the status quo. Great that WordPress now offers 3GB and I am pondering how to take advantage of that.

So into the office and fighting through around 50 unread emails (not spam) including lots of CV’s as I am about to employ a new sales and marketing assistant and into the day. Email is a major part of my day and I could not be efficient without it. Problem is I have to much, but once my Assistant has been employed we will be able to share the burden. My email folders are also over the corporate email limit which is a pain because I don’t have time to really cull it. I don’t think my limit is appropriate to my position, but anyway, that’s another debate.

My browser is permanently open with 5 tabs being our corporate Intranet, our website, my iGoogle page, Grab a Seat which is Air New Zealand’s page of daily specials, nothing special for me today but occassionally they have some amazing deals. I also have WordPress open to remind me to keep an eye out.

I posted a help forum on my Geekzone page after looking up the Philips Helpdesk details for my Skype phones, which started playing up after I replaced my modem. Couldn’t find out how to reset them.

Got together with the developers who are working on our Facebook application which we hope to launch in the next few weeks, which also included getting a new GeoCoder built to help with the maps that will be on the page.

Downloaded a Reference Checking Form from our Intranet which was surprisingly good.

Followed through a few stories from my iGoogle aggregator about GPS, location based news etc, including a couple of DIGGS.

Gave a recommendation to one of the pioneer leaders in the car navigation industry on my LinkedIn page.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few items because I found keeping a log too slow. But you get the idea. I am very connected.

When I got home, I once again checked MySpace messages, friend requests etc, caught up with Facebook, sent out another couple of Tweets on Twitter, caught up with some more email, put some photos onto a CD for printing that a friend emailed to me and finished with a couple of poker tournaments, one on Facebook to stay ahead of my friends in points and the other in PokerStars where I am getting my funny money up to the 7 figures so I can cash it in for some free real money. I like the idea of building up a stake of real money without ever having to have invested my own hard earned cash.

So turn off the monitor and off to bed. There was more to my day, I’m not that shallow, but this story was just about the connected parts of my day. The reality is that whether it is on my Blackberry, my home PC or my work PC, I am almost constantly active on the web. My life would be very weird if I wasn’t wired.

Life without the Internet 2

So in this day and age you would think that diagnosis and repairing problems with computers and connectivity would be a breaze.

The Xtra Advanced Broadband Helpdesk couldn’t work out what the problem was with my connection. I said that I thought it was my DLink modem which after all was 2 years old. He said that he didn’t think it was and even though my current modem wouldn’t be compatible with the next generation of broadband, I should wait until after the technician came round. Of course if it was proven that the problem was with the modem and not their cabling, I would have to pay $85 for the technician. I agreed, but said don’t send anyone before 3:30 p.m. Friday because there would be noone home. That was duly added as I anticipated yet another evening and morning without Interet, without Podcasts to download to my iPod etc.

Now, here’s a surprise. The technician turned up on Thursday and like I told the Helpdesk, there was noone home and they left a card saying they had tried to come to look at my cabling. Meanwhile, I stop off at PB Technologies and buy a new generation modem, take it home and install it, get the password changed back from their test login to mine and hey presto, stable connection, everything is working. Next step them to cancel the technician coming back on Friday and re-set up my Phillips Skype phones which had gone nuts through the process. So now I had Internet, but no phone.

After trying to reset the phones unsuccessfully I went to my gig at Bar Africa were I was performing my new songs and not able to use the net at all. Tonight I will get to go home and try to figure out what the problem is with the phones and hope that I can get them to work. I am hoping it isn’t a channel conflict between the WiFi router and the phone router because the phone doesn’t appear to have the ability to change channel.

So this process has taken 4 days, my diagnosis of a faulty modem was correct and if I had taken my own councel instead of the Advanced Specialists, I would have been out of action for a couple of hours. Just as well I no longer operate a business from home!

Anyway, my next step is to  run a diary for a day to see how much I rely on the Internet and how much I interface with it on a normal day. I will do that on Tuesday as Monday is Auckland Anniversary Day, a public holiday. Should be very interesting as I recognise how connected I am.