This'll make it better

From the department of the very obvious but why haven't they done it already.

Why don't they attach medicine spoons to medicine bottles (e.g. Calpol, Nurofen for children etc) via some sort of line so the two are permanently connected.

That way when your children wake up at 3am needing medicine you won't have to search every nook and cranny in the house for those small but ever so essential spoons ever again.

Craig

Independence March. Edinburgh 31st March

Independence First March. A chance to remind the Labour party about the UN Charter and the right of a people to have self-determination. Why are they not allowing the Scots to exercise that right and express their opinion on Independence in a single issue referendum?

It's also a chance to hear the great singer songwriter Dick Gaughan.

Craig

Microsoft Flight Simulator

I came across an article documenting problems with installing Microsoft Flight Simulator. Under the new "universal" CD format, Microsoft is saying the work around is to uninstall legitimate 3rd party software. Wow! If only they had thought about that for Internet Explorer versus Netscape just think of the market share they would have now. "In order to install IE, please uninstall all other browsers first". The department of justice would have a field day.

CrowdSpirit (Web 2.0.crowdsourcing startup) is hiring

If you are looking for a Web2.0 position that you can do based from anywhere in the world, then follow the link and look for a job within CrowdSpirit.

Craig (Information lead, CrowdSpirit)

Freebase to organise world's information

This is cool, unless it achieves consciousness and kills us all. Freebase is the product of Metaweb and intends to actually organise information on the web, as opposed to Google which doesn't really organise very much but just allows us to search it.

Is this the first step towards Web 3.0?

(disclosure: I know some of the people behind it)

Sue the spammer

Scotch Spam: Make the spammers pay!. Another successful legal action against a UK spammer. Please visit the site above (I know the person who won the legal action) and use it to sue anyone else in Europe who spams you.

The same law can also be used to sue people who send text messages, especially those offering to upgrade your phone contract and give you a "free" phone if you pay an absurd line rental for several months, and I'm keen to see one of those spammers sued and made an example of.

Craig

Short software licence that people actually read

Bored with excessively long software licences that just get in the way when you want to install something in a hurry? Not got a lawyer handy when presented with War And Peace when installing an application? Here's a software licence agreement that is actually short enough that people will read it and are more likely to follow the terms therein.

1. You have purchased 1 one licence for the ABC software from xyz Co. XYZ Co retains all intellectual ownership of the software and you aren't allowed to copy the software in any way or to resell it. Reverse engineering is not permitted

2. We have tested ABC software and if it causes problems on your computer after you install it, XYZ Co isn't liable for any damages or loss that may arise as a consequence of using ABC software.

3. If you want support please mail us at <support@example.com> or call <insert a number here that actually works for people outside the US>. Call/Support charges may apply.

p.s. If you speak American English, it's license.

Agile Scotland event

Another worthwhile event especially for those interested in Agile Software development, please see ScotlandIS Events for details of the event in Glasgow on 8th of March with speakers from Amazon.com

Craig

Bar Camp Scotland

Definitely an event work promoting - BarCampScotland. Hopefully will meet up with a few people there, now that I'm back in Scotland following my work as Project Manager with Tesco.com Grocery, one of Europe's top e-commerce sites.

Craig

Campaign for fair WiFi

Following the news story Hotel guests revolting over wi-fi, I would encourage readers here to sign the petition for fair WiFi.

Having stayed in hotels which have free, open WiFi and other (cheap) hotels which have free, restricted WiFi, I see no justification at all for the £17 a day rip off charged by places mentioned in the silicon.com survey and as charged by the Holiday Inn, Luton, M1 J9 where I stayed recently.

Free WiFi is readily available in the US and the costs of providing it are nothing like £17 a day. The business benefits to the hotel of additional guests attracted to free WiFi as a facility outweigh the cost of the hotel of providing it.

Please support the petition

thanks

Craig

(the author first did something like this in 1992 to promote cheap Internet access in the UK, the first such list to reveal cheap and low cost Internet providers).

Revolution in UK hotels

As a contractor living away from home Mon-Thu in hotels, I am now experiencing the joys and delights of living in hotel rooms for up to 200 nights a year and gaining a completely different perspective of what does and doesn't work from a business traveller point of view. This experience also relates to using Wi-Fi on trains and at airports.

In much the same spirit of when I launched Britain's first guide to getting online with a view to publicising how different services work and driving down price I thought it would be useful to do a wish list for hotels to improve quality and mean that I don't have to negotiate special terms whenever I turn up somewhere and use the "I'd like to stay in your hotel for 200 nights what can you do for me" card.

First off Internet access. For me this is a #1. Yet, can someone find me an accommodation search engine that mentions it? It needs to be available in the bedroom so that I can make free VOIP calls, as there is no privacy in the public areas if Wi-Fi is public areas only. Secondly it absolutely must be free from logins, this means that it is either free or included in the room price. The cost is not the issue here, the login screens are the issue. I would quite happily pay £5 a day for a service that was free of login screens because frankly I waste about 30 minutes a day logging in to do stuff between the PDA, the laptop, getting login details, typing them in over and over again.

The other important point is that PDAs with Wi-Fi just don't work the same way as login screens on a laptop. On a laptop, if you want to surf the web, you connect to the wireless network, open the browser and then some magic happens that instead of going to your homepage there's a redirect to a page for the WiFi network you are using so that you can log in and use it. Great. On a Symbian PDA that doesn't happen. You open your browser, connect to the WiFi network and then all you get is a timeout because you haven't been authorised. Hotels, trains, and airports take note! If I want to set up a connection string to allow the WiFi to work on the PDA, I actually need you to publish the web page I have to go to in order to get authorisation.

Without that info, I can't use the service. Doh! You should maybe try it on a PDA sometime just to experience the irritation factor of the login screen.

What happens when it is set up simply:

1. Open email client on PDA

2. Connect

3. Smile, that's it.

What happens when you have a login to the Wi-Fi set up on a PDA:

1. Open email client on PDA

2. Attempt to connect

3. Experience timeout

4. Read instructions on how to use connection. Note point about the login screen hasn't been published.

5. Borrow someone's laptop and get them to try it.

6. Note down the web address.

7. Park your email client and open your web browser

8. Manually enter the web address making sure it is 100% correct. Book mark it.

9. Wait for browser to display web page

10. Navigate to the username box, click in it and type the username in manually (no facility to save usernames). Some extreme panning and scrolling may be required to locate it because the developers won't have developed it for a PDA browser.

11. Navigate to the password box, click in it and type the password in manually

12. Navigate to the "accept terms and conditions" box, click it.

13. Navigate to the "submit" button, pray that the version of JavaScript is compatible with your browser and click submit

14. I have been thrown out at this point by sites that didn't support Symbian browsers, so if you reach this far then well done. You may need to close your browser down at this point if the connection offered is only single channel.

15. Go back to the mail client, possibly restarting it and try again.

Pain in the neck compared to the simple solution. Repeat steps 9-15 ad nauseum several times a day whenever you want to collect email. Get thoroughly fed up with the whole affair, noting point above that Internet access is #1 priority. Annoy guests even more if you decide to change their password unannounced every day (yes, some places actually do this).

Providing free Wi-Fi access probably costs less than the cost of the two free biscuits I find beside the kettle in my room each night. Now I know the pain that hotels must be feeling as the techno savvy traveller using Skype no longer has to pay the glorious rip off telephone rates that have been the mainstay of hotel income for decades (at least 5 times the cost of a domestic phone rate is not unusual) but Wi-Fi should not be viewed as a telephony income replacement. It is dirt cheap to provide and free Wi-Fi that is simple to use will actually bring in business rather than cost the hotel money.

Indeed if you're in the city centre, you might get free Wi-Fi through the hotel window, which certainly puts paid to any plans the hotel might have to make life difficult.

Next, let me talk about breakfast, my total cholesterol level hasn't changed for over 10 years and is still around 2.5mmol/l, well under the 4.0mmol/l recommended under European guidelines. However, despite this I feel no particular need to over indulge on the heart attack on a plate which commonly passes for the typical fry up British breakfast. Continental breakfast is fine for me. When I have a coffee I choose not to put sugar in it. The hotel very thoughtfully leaves the sugar separate such that those who want sugar in their early morning hot beverage can choose to add as much or as little as they like. Why then don't they do the same for supposedly healthy breakfast cereal? The standard options that all hotels seem to have bought into generally have sugar as one of the top 5 ingredients, even on so called healthy options such as muesli. Rather than spend most of the year in a hotel and end up putting on the pounds, why not just buy sugar free varieties of muesli etc and then leave out the sugar for the tea/coffee such that guests can have sugar on their cereal if the want and as much or as little as they like. Besides the obvious weight gain factors, there is also a clear advantage in catering for diabetics etc.

Moving onto showers. If you are lucky enough to have chosen one of the minority of UK establishments that actually has a decent water pressure rather than the pathetic dribble that sometimes passes for a shower you need to look out for the attack of the dirty shower curtain. Yes indeed, many 3-4 star hotels think that a plastic shower curtain is good enough. However the problem with this is that if the water pressure is anything above a pathetic dribble you find the draught from the water pressure makes the shower curtain flap inwards and you end up having a fight with it for anything more than 2 square inches of foot space. In this case, I find hanging the shower curtain outside the bath is the best way to guarantee being free from curtain attack, however the ensuing flood on the floor is something I am still trying to resolve. A rigid shower partition in sections would be a major improvement. Another major improvement would be a mixer tap with separate volume and temperature controls so that I can set the temperature and not have to fiddle around with it every morning. While I am on the subject of bathrooms, it may be a legal requirement to have an extractor fan if there is no external window but I wasn't aware that it was a legal requirement for the fan in the adjacent room to sound like a noisy hoover being on while the person in the next room takes a 30 minute bath and I'm try to watch TV.

And so to room rates. You can tell how much money a hotel is making by looking up the town's biggest employer (let's call them Acme Big corp) and turning up to a hotel in the same town and saying "What's the corporate rate for employees of Acme Big Corp then?). Typically discounts of 30% off the rack rate will be offered and you can bet that the hotel is still making money on that, not to mention the additionals such as the evening meal. If I’m staying more than a week there’s also the additional cost of laundry which at £2 per pair of socks or £6 for a pair of shorts after a trip to the gym is not a cost to be taken lightly for a week’s washing. £30 a week for washing – it’s almost cheaper to parcel it up an post it home and have a clean set ready to post back.

The evening meal. Back in the 80s you often struggled to find vegetarian options in hotels and had to specifically ask for them and get a separate menu. These days, such options are included on the menu and marked as such. How helpful for vegetarians. However anyone wanting a healthy, dare I say it, low fat menu option in 2007 is in much the same position as the vegetarians were 20-30 years ago. Menus typically dominated by steak might have a potentially healthy fish dish but the opportunity is lost when it comes pre-drowned in cream sauce or similar. Trying to discover the healthy option involves some careful choosing and if you have stayed in the hotel for a week without eating the same healthy dish twice then you've discovered a place that is very much in the minority.

For a slight digression, let us look at Tesco.com, the world's most successful online grocer with over 60% of the UK online food market. For a charge as low as £3.99 they will shop for me, pack the goods into a van, drive the van to my address to arrive within a 2 hour delivery window and carry the shopping into my kitchen. So why is it that the hotel charges me pretty much the same room service fee to bring a sandwich the 5 minutes’ walk from the kitchen to my room? I don't indulge in room service personally but if I did, the option of having Tesco supply my "room service" is one that isn't that far fetched. Whether they could deliver an entire box of cereal plus milk, cutlery and a dish for less than the price of a room service breakfast from the hotel for a fraction the amount of food is well an exercise in arithmetic for the bored. I could also order a brand new 5 pack of socks by post each week and it would be cheaper than having the hotel wash the ones I've had on (£2 a pair!) - what sort of message does that send out for Green Tourism?

Let us now consider the ideal hotel, for it is not as far fetched as it seems. The pub group JD Wetherspoon has been a huge success has a turnover of approx £400 million, profits approx 10% of that, is listed on the FTSE250 and was only founded in 1979. Their basis has been cheap, high quality beer and food. With a no-music policy and aiming for entirely smoke free they are not far from being something that most hotels should aspire to. At a JD Wetherspoon on steak night I can get a 10oz steak and a pint of real ale for £6.99. On curry night it's a good sized curry with rice, nan bread and poppadums and a pint of real ale for £5.49. Similar deal in a hotel round the corner is £12.50 or so for the steak and £3 or so for keg beer and the hotel bill can easily be three times the Wetherspoon's bill and it isn't even as good.

UK accommodation hasn't had much of a shake up since TravelInn and TravelLodge came and introduced basic hotel accommodation priced by the room, a real bargain price for couples and families. However in the slightly more upmarket mainstream hotel line nothing much seems to have changed price wise for decades. So let me propose the following as the ideal hotel:

1. Free Wi-Fi (costs the hotel pennies, subsidised by doing away with the free biscuits in my room). Result, more high spending business travellers. More members of the general public.

2. Flexible breakfast. Costs the hotel the price of a bowl of sugar. Result, more people who find the breakfast appealing. More people staying who need special diets.

3. Decent showers. Costs less than the price of a one night stay per room as a one off fee. Result: Less mess in the bathroom, happier guests.

4. Competitively priced meals. Result: More non-guests eat in the hotel. Sales rise. Long stay guests less tempted to try alternative eateries in the evening.

5. More healthy options. Result: as 4.

6. With increased volume of food and customers from the above then cask ale may become more practical, result: Even more customers.

Easyjet shook up the airline business. Wetherspoons shook up the pub business. Who will shake up the hotel business? Could Wetherspoons move into the bed market and revolutionise serviced accommodation?

Background info: The author worked for VisitScotland/visitscotland.com between 2000 and 2006. These are his personal opinions however.

The hot 100 beta products

Nice to be involved with CrowdSpirit who are 18th on this list, ahead of Google and the second highest new entry.

CrowdSpirit also got a mention by Businessweek recently. Why not read the CrowdSpirit blog for the latest news?

New Year, New Job

I'm pleased to say that on the first working day of the year in Scotland, I received a job offer which I've accepted and I start work there next week. It was less than three weeks between seeing the job advert and starting work, which is pretty good going considering the Christmas/New Year break.

It's a project management position for a major "dot com" and I'm looking forward to it.

Best wishes to all the other job seekers out there and I hope that the New Year for you brings similar success, it's a frustrating market when you are dealing with companies that take months to make a decision one way or the other.

Craig

Auld Lang Syne

Anyone looking for the lyrics and the original tune to which Burns set the lyrics for tonight can find them at this minimalist page on auld lang syne I put together many years ago.

Happy new year. Bliadhna mhath ùr!

Good Honest Coffee

I was out for a coffee in Edinburgh last week and as usual was presented with the now mandatory bewildering range on offer. It's gone from being a "would you like milk or sugar" to "please take a look at the menu that resembles something from a Chinese restaurant".

I like cold milk in my coffee otherwise it's far too hot to drink and takes too long.
Like my wine and whisky, I don't feel much of a need to add froth or other flavourings such as chocolate, vanilla etc.

So all I want is a bog standard black filter coffee with cold milk in it. I'm sure that in amongst the range of fancy names of coffee on offer, that there must be a name for this particular brew. Traditional coffee? Regular coffee? But how do you make sure that it doesn't get warm frothy milk in it (warm milk is what I feed a baby and is nice to send them to sleep rather than wake you up!)

How about an Honest Coffee (tm) anyone?

The person I was meeting to discuss jobs had the same preference in coffee. Maybe I'm not the only one that needs more Honest Coffee?

Craig

London Underground overheating

This will be my first blog post from the PDA and as I type this I am on a very warm London underground in the middle of December. I can well believe the horror stories of overheating in the summer, especially during rush hour and three trainloads of people queuing ahead of you before you can get on a train,

The problem is caused by hotter air in the Tube failing to rise (as hot air does) quickly enough, coupled with insufficient cooler air from outside replacing it, and insufficient air circulation generally, especially within the trains when the doors are closed. I offer the following as a possible solution and welcome comments on it.

1. Have a system which derives at least part of its power from solar energy.

2. Pump cooler air from outside (possibly augmented by air conditioning) into the gaps between stations such that it flows along the lines, pushed by the trains, into stations. Said air could be sucked in from the street level drainage system.

3. Complete the air cycle by using fans to suck the air out of stations by installing such vans in escalator shafts.

4. Dramatically improve the circulation in trains by having air scoops at the front of the train (where there is high pressure) and feeding this into each carraige separately via units in the carriage ceiling - there is currently a fair bit of spare headroom there that could be put to better use.

5. Install ceiling fans with mesh guards in carriages.

My 2p worth anyway, Ken Livingston are you listening?

Search for accommodation in London?

When attempting to use the Internet to search for accommodation in London, it seems that despite 10+ years of e-commerce no-one appears to have a usable website to do this basic activity adequately. Perhaps I'm missing something here but I tried the popular sites, I tried various terms on Google, I tried various types of searches but nothing was adequate.

What I was looking for:

1. An en-suite double room in Greater London, ideally within about 5 miles of the City of London.

2. Less than £60 a night, including breakfast. This appears to be too complicated for some sites since some quote you without breakfast and then add it on as a surcharge.

3. Available on the night I want to stay. This is again a problem for some sites that do a cursory search then only check availability when you actually go to book the room only to find there isn't a room available to book. Other sites tell you they will get back to you by email in one business day, which is no use at short notice.

4. Wi-fi access would be a bonus but no-one seems to have invented a way of searching for it yet.

5. A place which has been favourably reviewed would obviously be good as many of the cheaper hotels are reviewed as dirty and substandard. Being able to filter for positively reviewed places rather than getting Fawlty Towers would be great. It would be even better if I could filter out the comments that were in languages I don't speak.

6. Searching by star grading would be a bonus, but isn't essential

7. A check in time of 1pm or earlier is a bonus, but isn't essential

8. Clearly the capability of quoting you an entire price, including any applicable credit card booking fee, is beyond the capability of any website in the year 2006 so I gave up on that one.

9. Being able to look at the matching results and see where they all were on a map is a very big usability bonus.

10. Being able to search for somewhere that has a shower. Saying there are en-suite facilities is not enough as some places are bath only.


Having spent ages wasting my time searching the various sites, the only one that even came remotely close to doing 1-3 and actually had available accommodation within my price range (and it has feature 9 too) was priceline. So there you go. Maybe there is a better search out there that can look for cheap availability but I couldn't find it. If anyone knows of one, please let me know.

I eventually found somewhere that was £40 for a double room including breakfast but some of the reviews are rather mixed so we'll see how it goes. I would have paid a bit more if I could have actually found somewhere suitable.

One positive thing from all of this is it's given me a really great idea for a Web2.0 start-up and no, it isn't an accommodation search.

Craig

Crowdsourcing for consumer products - Web 2.0 hits manufacturing?

Crowdspirit launch on Techcrunch. Using Web 2.0 collaboration for inventing and improving consumer electronic products.

read more | digg story

CrowdSpirit - crowdsourcing for consumer products

CrowdSpirit: Using Web 2.0 to transform product creation and distribution

Today sees the launch of the first public beta of the CrowdSpirit site, an international venture based in Scotland (Edinburgh) and France (Paris and Grenoble), which couples the power of crowds and the collaboration of Web 2.0 to reinvent the supply chain and product development cycle.

CrowdSpirit has been created to resolve the problem of popular consumer products taking too long to reach the market place, not always being in tune with the public's needs and being unduly held up trying to find a route to market. Even The Beatles, JK Rowling and the inventor of the wind up radio all had significant problems setting up a supply chain to get their market leading products in front of an adoring public. It is not in the inventor's or the public's interest for it to be so difficult.

CrowdSpirit believes that the general public and not commercial interests are the best advisers on novel product creation and are targeting the field of electronic products to turn their revolutionary manufacturing vision into reality.

A joint venture between veterans of the IT and electronics business in the UK and France and Grenoble EM, CrowdSpirit is harnessing the "power of crowds" to allow inventors and adapters of technology to take their products to market via a collaborative distribution channel which overcomes many of the difficulties that inventors have faced in the past. Furthermore this distribution channel provides opportunities for inventors, developers, distributors and manufacturers to contribute at different stages to enable the supply chain.

This is Crowdsourcing taken to the marketplace and has been hailed by Marc Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com, as "The next wave". Analysts believe the concept of product creation by companies that dynamically build the supply chain could be set to change the world of business. Sometimes labelled as 'prosumerism', Web 2.0 allows it to happen.

Web 2.0 has seen a massive generation of on-line content from blogs and video challenging traditional media companies. With the recent YouTube sale and the rapid movement of TV companies putting content on-line, Web 2.0 has only just begun. The media is, however, just one consumer space. CrowdSpirit is targeting the electronics sector initially and other sectors could follow as the Web 2.0 revolution extends outwards from on-line content through one consumer market after another.

Further Details

Business Model and the
team profile

Contact: the team by email on team@crowdspirit.org, or
Tel+[33] 6 86 87 25 49

Lost

I am fed up with complaining about Multimap having incorrect data and failing to do anything about it. Five years of complaining about street names being wrong and no action. A public name and shame would seem to be in order and details of their SLA would be appreciated so that I can set a recurring reminder at the appropriate interval to kick their collective butts again.

Is it beyond the capabilities of an industry leading site to at least check the street names against the post office database?

Craig