Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Wednesday 31 October 2007, 2:52 PM
Orange does the business
Orange is to open up a business-customers-only store on Oxford Street, in the centre of London, tomorrow. Sadly there won't be a fanfare-laden cutting of ribbon, so there's not much point in us wandering over there with a camera, but there you go. If you're a business customer, and you fancy signing up with Orange's dedicated sales team, you know where to head.
If, for some inexplicable reason, you aren't based in London, you can hold thumbs for the other two such stores due to open (somewhere else, we assume, but heaven knows where) later this year.
But why is Orange kicking off its dedicated business store scheme smackdab in the consumer hell of Oxford Street? Apparently, "the City of Westminster had more VAT registered small businesses (0-9 employees) than anywhere else in the UK".
Wednesday 31 October 2007, 9:56 AM
BT's Wi-Fi voucher strangeness
BT has announced a new roaming voucher for its business traveller customers, based largely on a tie-in with the soon-to-go-live iBahn network of hotel hotspots.
It may offer relatively cheap surfing minutes (especially when compared with data roaming charges over the 3G networks) but I have to confess I find it roughly as straightforward as a John Prescott speech. You pay a fixed voucher price, although that differs based on whether you're travelling to the US (£28) or Europe (£40). Both vouchers give you 500 minutes, but the US one has to be used up within 7 days of first log-in, while the European one gives you 2 weeks to play around.
If you don't use up all your minutes, you get to use them back in the UK or on another trip - although there's no indication of whether you could use minutes bought for your recent trip to Berlin if you're subsequently jetting off to Dallas.
And all this is the result of a deal with one Wi-Fi aggregator, covering international hotel chains that span both Europe and the US. According to BT Openzone general manager Chris Bruce, "the international travel voucher makes business travel simple, convenient and hassle-free". I'm not quite sure all of that rings true.
Monday 29 October 2007, 2:23 PM
Growing pains for the business establishment
The guns were out for the head of the British Chambers of Commerce today. At the launch of Small Business Week 2007, David Frost (not that one, obviously) was taken to task over his insistence that all small businesses want to grow.
Well, obviously they do, you might say. But Frost and his co-panellist Steve Pateman (head of the Royal Bank of Scotland) came up against an extremely vocal lobby at the event who pointed out that many home workers and other small businesspeople - particularly women - were taking that route precisely because they want a sustainable income with flexibility and without wanting to take over the universe.
His opponents poured scorn on his claim that most small businesses want to hire more people - too much hassle, they said - and (obviously on a winning streak) he then went on to incur the wrath of another panellist, Everywoman co-founder Maxine Benson, for dismissing those who opted for a "lifestyle business". Oddly, she found the term patronising.
"Do we want fifty million individual businesses or do we want growth businesses?" whimpered Frost, before claiming that every single business had to grow because of increasing competition from overseas.
An alternative view on that last point came from BT Business chief Bill Murphy, who told me later that, "if you're starting up a business at home today, you are not going to be competing against India and China".
Of course, Murphy was there to punt Tradespace, a free BT service geared towards exactly that sort of cottage industry (28k registered users and counting). But I still think he's right.
Thursday 25 October 2007, 2:30 PM
Filesharing - your questions for FAST please!
Further to our story about Lord Triesman and his threat of legislation against ISPs if they don't crack down on filesharing of copyrighted material, we've been contacted by the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST).
FAST are offering a chat with their director general, John Lovelock, about Triesman's comments - perhaps unsurprisingly, he's a fan ("one giant step in the right direction..."). Anyway, we thought we'd throw this one over to you good folks.
Go on, what would you like to ask FAST? Any views to share on the concept of ISPs monitoring all their traffic to see if dodgy MP3s and programs are being disseminated? Anything else, while we're at it?
Questions below please, and we shall endeavour to put them to Mr Lovelock ASAP!
Thursday 25 October 2007, 10:30 AM
The extent of the Google-Mozilla link
Well, we already knew that Google was a big funder of Mozilla and its various offshoots (some Mozilla press events have taken place at Google's London offices), but 85 percent?
That seems to be the conclusion to draw after Mozilla released its 2006 financial statement, including this note: "Mozilla has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties. The contract originally expired in November 2006 but was renewed for two years and expires in November 2008. Approximately 85 percent of Mozilla’s revenue for 2006 was derived from this contract."
Over to the blog of Mozilla chief Mitchell Baker, and "the vast majority of [our] revenue is associated with the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox, and the majority of that is from Google."
So there you go - almost all of Firefox etc's money comes straight from Google.
Credit to the Register for adding up this particular pair of twos.
Previous
