We’ve just finished a redesign of our company website, something which we’ve been wanting to do for ages. I suppose it’s the same old story for many companies -finding time to undertake a complete refresh of your company’s website is difficult. The single biggest investment for us has been internal time. Especially with the copy, and the case studies, which took several days to prepare.
Perhaps the best aspect of the new site is to be able to showcase some of the work we have done this year. Like many company’s we can’t talk about everything we do, for confidentiality reasons. However, we’ve been fortunate to have been involved with some amazing projects in 2010 and these case studies hopefully give a sense of the kinds of things we do at Voxygen. After all that’s why we come to work. We’ll be adding more case studies over the next 12 months, where we’re able to do so.
The site design was put together with Will Smith at Authentic Style who has been fantastic to work with. We are also grateful to Chris Moyse for the photographs. And yes the shoot was as fun as it looked.
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Skype over 3G on the iPhone
Those of a certain age who were living the UK in the early 1990′s will remember a mobile company formed by a consortium including Mercury and C&W and called “one-2-one“.
Their consumer proposition was this:-
“The service features a unique pricing plan that allows subscribers to make free local calls in off-peak hours, 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. Free local calls are an anomaly in the United Kingdom because even fixed wire and mobile telephone users are charged for all airtime used, even local calls.”
What was particularly interesting at the time was the definition of “local call” which in One-2-One speak included “on-net” calling. So you could call another user on the One-To-One network, for free (and hence the company name).
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This weekend on a trip to Paris I was reminded once again that useful access (connectivity) is the neglected hero of the IP user experience. During my stay I was unable to make a single successful call or share photos via Skype from my hotel WiFi connection. User experience discussion and analysis often focuses on the software or hardware design. Rightly, but the fact is most of the clever applications, lovely user interfaces, indeed the wider promise of mobile computing, are reduced to frustrating or useless experiences without a decent connection and network access.
Sure access has been commoditised, but useful access, especially on the move or abroad can still be a lottery. Simply put, more and more of what we do takes place in the cloud, and on the move. Our expectations of being connected all the time and the number of people using devices whose capabilities seem to expand daily are increasing. All the trends suggest that useful access, rather than merely access, is set to become even more important to us.
Yet will the infrastructure be in place to deal with increasing demands and expectations of consumers and also be able to help realise the potential of ever more sophisticated devices and services? In practical terms, will all this great stuff be actually usable? How will service providers such as hotels or mobile operators make decent connectivity available? There are some real challenges ahead.
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Posted in Industry
Confession. I was in New York last Saturday (03-04-2010) when the iPad was launched in America, but in truth I’d completely forgotten all about it. Benefits of a break I suppose. As luck would have it, my girlfriend wanted to pick up an new armband for her iPod. This was the only reason we swung by the Apple Store on Broadway around 3.45. This was literally the last stop before heading off to catch a plane.
As we approached the store for the aforementioned item it was unduly packed. What’s all the fuss about? Suddenly it dawned on me. Dooh! I took a few pictures with my camera phone before catching the plane home.
First observation, is just how many staff Apple had laid on. Look at all those Blue T-Shirts! Plenty of Apple people to answer customer questions. In fact I was proactively approached twice by staff who asked if I needed any help. Apple again thinking things through and executing brilliantly on a sometimes neglected customer experience basic. No sense in undermining the launch of a brilliant product with a home goal on customer service.
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An extract written for the Cloud Communications Book 2010
It’s important to remember when we speak of the “cloud” that what we are referring to is, in reality, hundreds of thousands of servers residing in data-centers across the globe, all consuming electricity and generating heat. So with that in mind let me start with a highly pertinent and often cited statistic from McKinsey:-
“The combined carbon footprint of the data center industry globally is now estimated to exceed that of the airline industry”
This highlights a real concern. However I know of at least one way that communications providers can actually reduce their carbon footprint by utilizing the Cloud more effectively. But let’s first examine the benefits that make solving this problem worthwhile.
You would be hard-pressed to find a word in the telco/tech space more overused in the past couple of years than “cloud.”. There are probably as many variations in the ingredients of those references to “cloud” as there are variations in the individual clouds above our heads. And, like the real world phenomenon itself, definitions of “cloud” offered up by industry are all too often nebulous, amorphous, insubstantial and lacking in comparability from one to the next. So let’s be as clear as we can be about what we offer, what it consists of, and what the benefits could be – where possible, through real world examples.
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