Posts tagged Internet
Several people I talked to on my visit to California predicted an explosion in the number of connected devices we’re going to see over the next few years.
Count ‘em. How many have you got at the moment? A laptop probably. A printer and smartphone perhaps. Your games console(s) and a digital photo frame? Maybe even an iPad?
One prominent interviewee reckons there’s likely to be at least ten connected devices for each of us. So what else is going to be hooked into the ‘net? How about some of these:
- Radio: There’s already a raft of WiFi radios in the market. Check out Amazon’s selection here. One day, all radios will be like this.
- TV: More than a quarter of all TVs sold in the US in January 2010 were connected to the internet, admittedly mostly through either consoles or set-top boxes. I’ll cover the IPTV story in a later post, but in ten years’ time expect all TVs to be connected to the ‘net and offer Boxee-like services
- Plugs: Tenrehte are about to launch the Picowatt, a wifi-enabled smart plug, allowing you to monitor your home energy use from any socket. But AlertMe in the UK have beaten them to it with a home energy monitoring system that’s already available and integrates with Google’s PowerMeter.
- Washine machine: The prototype iBasket from Electrolux is a WiFi enabled washing machine, that knows when to wash your clothes and tells you once they’re done.
- Car: iSuppli reckon that 55m consumers will have access to the internet built into their cars by 2016, up from 860,000 at the end of 2009
- Weighing scales: a friend was recently caught out when his net-connected weighing scales started tweeting his daily readings to his followers. Where Sevitz leads, others follow?
- Fridges: Samsung recently launched the Zipel e-diary in South Korea. You’d never guess it from the name, but it’s a WiFi enabled refrigerator.
- Toys: Mecanno has the Spykee, ToyBots has WooZees. The must have Christmas gift for 2020? It won’t be hip if it ain’t got a (WiFi) chip.
- You and me. Isn’t it time we each had our own personal IP address? Intel reckons there’ll be chips in our brains by 2020, connecting us to the internet. Welcome to the matrix.
So, whaddya reckon? What else will be connected? And what will the connections add to these devices? How will we cope with all the extra data that’s produced? And how will it change how we live our lives. As ever, let me know in the comments below.
Why Raising Money is More Important Than Saving Costs
vs. 
One of my highlights of 2009 was running in the inaugural TrailTrekker, a 100km jaunt through the Yorkshire Dales, starting and ending in my home town of Skipton to raise money for Oxfam.
I recently signed up to run the 2010 event, and was intrigued to see Oxfam recommending an alternative to the ubiquitous JustGiving.com to help participants raise funds, namely Virgin’s new Virgin Money Giving site, saying it offers “the best service to charities and fundraisers alike”.
Intrigued, I decided to take a look. It began to make sense: Virgin are the new sponsors of the London Marathon. Likely feeling that JustGiving.com (a for-profit business) were benefiting from all the fundraising done at that event, they’ve set up their service as a not-for-profit, reminiscent of their pitch to run the UK National Lottery. That it also benefits the Virgin brand is of course, a nice boost.
Eager to do my bit, and believing Oxfam when they said Virgin Money Giving was the best, I set about creating my fundraising page, feeling slightly guilty as a former member of my team at eBay is a JustGiving employee.
The first thing I noticed was a check-box asking if I wanted to opt-out of being contacted by Virgin Money and other Virgin companies. As an online marketer, I understand how much companies will pay for these kind of contact details. I opted-out, but was already feeling a little less generous towards Virgin.
I was then asked to provide a password. I happily entered a simple easy-to-remember password but was told this wasn’t good enough: it had to be at least nine characters long, including at least three different character types. I started to guess at this point that they’re reusing the Virgin Money technology to run Virgin Money Giving - understandable, but not necessarily appropriate. But my 9-character password, with three different character types wouldn’t be accepted, no matter how many times I tried. When I checked with customer support, they suggested it might be because upper and lower-case characters weren’t considered different types, and yet the site clearly says they are.
On confirming my registration I then tried to log-in. It became clearer that Virgin are just re-using the Virgin Money technology. I was initially asked for my email and date of birth. On the next page I was asked to enter specific characters from my password, and had to manually switch between the different text-entry boxes. Why can’t I just enter my username (or email) and (a simple) password, as on most sites I use every day? I’m sure the reason is that they’re reusing the code for Virgin Money, which obviously needs higher security levels, but does a donation site?
Next, I set about creating my page. I select the most appropriate page (http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/team/skiptonites), see that it’s available and go about adding content. I write a quick title; compose some nice copy, then go on the hunt for some good photos from last year to stick up. I go back to the site and click on “Upload Photo” to finish things off.
Wait. What’s this? I’ve been timed out? WTF? Why? Why time me out so quickly from a fundraising site? Unless it’s not really a fundraising site. Unless it’s a personal finance site masquerading as a fundraising site.
I’m annoyed now. But I persevere. I’m praying that my work has been autosaved. Suspecting that it’s been autosaved, after all that’s pretty much the norm these days for anything like this (he says as Blogger autosaves his finely-crafted angry words). But beginning to fear that perhaps it hasn’t.
It hasn’t. Worse than that, I don’t even seem to be able to access the page at all. All I get is a 404 not found message. The page doesn’t even exist.
Oh well. Here we go again. I log in (email address, date of birth, third character, [new box], fifth character). Create a page. Well, yes, I guess I need to. I enter /skiptonites again and see that it’s already been taken. Erm … yes. By me. My hopes are raised. Perhaps it did save after all? I scour the site, going through all the options in my account hoping to be able to access it, but can’t. Stuck, I give up and contact customer support.
A nice person called Sam emails me back and tells me that the URL /skiptonites is taken. They can reset it, but it will take a few days, or he suggests coming up with an alternative name. I decide I really like /skiptonites so will wait. A couple of days later, it’s ready for me again, and Sam suggests that I go through the page creation process without entering any text to avoid the time out problem again: I can go back and edit the text later.
So here we go. You know the process by now. eMail address. Date of Birth. [New Page]. Tenth character. [New Box]. Eighth character. Pick /skiptonites. Keep hitting the “Next” buttons, not entering any text. Then I get an error message: “Your page does not have a title”. “Well, er, yes,” I think “that’s because I’m actually trying to get the page published before it times out”. I figure perhaps I can get away with just entering a title though, so hit back to correct this.
Hang on.
What’s this?
I’ve been logged out? Again!?
No idea why this time, but yes, it’s true. I’ve been logged out. My second failure to create the /skiptonites page. You can guess what happened next of course. eMail, DOB, 1st character, blah blah. 404 not found. That URL is already taken. Grrrr. Grrr. GRRR. I think briefly about contacting Ben again and asking him to reset it … again, but decide to just take his initial suggestion and create /theskiptonites instead. I set up the page without entering any text EXCEPT the title and think perhaps I’m finally getting somewhere.
I prepare my photos ready to upload (just in case the site times out) and go back to edit the page. I start with the main photo. There’s an obvious place to do this in the top left, although the button seems to have been misplaced, so just reads “oose File”. The place to keep big Canadian animals with antlers perhaps? OK, so now I’m being picky, but it’s indicative of the general sloppiness. I choose the file, upload the photo.
I start writing the text. Mostly OK, except for some reason the box where I have to enter it seems to have been sized strangely, so I have to horizontal scroll to see what I’ve written. Annoying, but not the end of the world.
Lastly I decide to upload some more photos of the team members. There’s a separate box for this on the bottom right of the page, so I click that. It tells me that they’ve partnered with Picasa (Google’s picture-hosting service) for this, so I have to upload the photos to Picasa first, then select the relevant photos from Picasa. Why? I uploaded the first team picture directly to the site. Why do additional ones have to be done via Picasa? Luckily I have a Picasa account, but if I didn’t I’d also have to create an account there before adding the photos there before linking to the photos here. Hey ho. I’ve gone through enough pain by now that I’m almost willing to put up with anything. I click on the link to go to Picasa. It doesn’t work. I don’t know why it doesn’t work. I don’t care why it doesn’t work. I know that I will never ever again attempt to use Virgin Money Giving when I want to fundraise.
I fire up JustGiving.com. I create my fundraising page (http://www.justgiving.com/skiptonites), write the text and upload three photos simply, easily, efficiently. All done. No hassles - not one. My blood pressure starts to fall. Until.
Ping.
An email.
From Oxfam.
“It’s fantastic that you’ve started your fundraising, and set up an
e-fundraising site; getting started early really is the key to successfully reaching your pledge.
Have you heard about the new ‘Virgin Money Giving’ website?
www.virginmoneygiving.com. This is the new online fundraising tool from Virgin, and we think it offers the best deal for fundraisers & charities. So even though you’ve already set up your site, we recommend you create a new one using the above link …”
To their credit, they noticed pretty much straight away that I had in fact already created a Virgin Money Giving page, but I was sure to let them know what I thought of the site.
I’m a big boy. I can deal with a few annoyances when dealing with web pages, especially when it’s for chairty. But I’m very worried about the affect those annoyances will have on fundraising for Trailtrekker and the London Marathon and other good causes. “Conversion rates” are something that good web managers obsess about: how to get people who visit your site to complete the process you’re wanting them to get through, whether it’s buying a product, booking a ticket or setting up a fundraising page. I worry that for the sake of a few percentage points of commission (JustGiving charge 5%, taken out of the gift aid tax they claim back from the government and explained here), Oxfam and other charities are going to lose out on many valuable donations as people either find it too hard to set up fundraising pages, or produce poor pages because it’s too hard to create good ones (or, perhaps because donors find it hard to give: I haven’t had the opportunity to test this, but my experience as a fundraiser doesn’t bode well).
Again to Oxfam’s credit, they’ve reached out to me to listen to my comments and complaints, and fed them back to Virgin. Apparently I’m an isolated case, but I can’t believe that others won’t have had similar issues. I only vented my frustrations because of the email they sent me just after I’d set up the JustGiving page. I would otherwise have just quietly given up.
Anyway, if you’d like to donate to the Skiptonites, I’d recommend going here:
http://justgiving.com/skiptonites
If you’re feeling brave, you could try here:
(*spends several minutes trying to find the page URL on the Virgin Money Giving site*)
http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/team/theskiptonites
(I would actually be interested in hearing people’s views on the relative merits of each site from a donor’s perspective. Perhaps some of you can split your donations in two and donate half on each site: let me know your thoughts in the comments. )
