Rogers telephone: what a tale of customer service hell

Tales of customer service woes are daily fodder, but this customer service nightmare about Rogers, a Canadian telco, is enough to strip the stripes off my cat.

The first commenter wasn't surprised: "If anyone asks what I, a high school teacher, did with my summer vacation, the answer is, I spent it on the phone with Rogers customer service."

Sure, it's almost axiomatic that customer service sucks in industries with inelastic demand, but .... sheesh.

Technorati : customer service, dave pollard, rogers
Del.icio.us : customer_service, rogers

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 11:34am in Business | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) | TrackBack (0)

Is Harper's Magazine borrowing money, or is Desirable Roasted Coffee a bank? It won't be both.

WTF is it with the magazine industry these days? Are they that much in trouble? Why does Harper's Magazine -- or any magazine -- need a loan from Desirable Roasted Coffee? Or you?

Do magazines need positive cash flow badly enough to risk losing almost certain future cash flow, on the chance they can borrow it now from current subscribers?

Today, I received an email request for a loan from Harper's Magazine:

Dear ALLAN JENKINS:

Although your subscription doesn't expire for another six months there are several benefits to renewing early:

• You won't receive another annoying renewal notice again this year.
• You can avoid subscription price increases for up to two years.
• You will have the peace of mind of knowing that you won't miss one single issue.

And now renewing is even easier, all you have to do is click on the link below, choose your renewal option, and you're done. It couldn't get any easier.

Remember renewing is just a click away.
Cordially,
Shawn Green
Circulation Director

In other words: "loan us 12 months worth of subscription and I won't send you more junk mail... not yet."

This 12-month loan is on top of the 10-month loan I have already made them. I mean, I have already paid them a 12-month subscription (which is a loan), and have received two issues to date. I find it pretty damned cheeky to come around asking for a loan extension when the "interest" (that is, my evaluation of the product) has not even been assessed.

But let's move on...

Oddly.... coincidentally.... who knows? ... I also received, today, through snail mail, this missive from Roger D. Hodge, Editor of Harper's.

Dear Subscriber,

Although I know it isn't customary for the editor of Harper's Magazine to write to you about renewing your subscription, I'd like to think that with someone who already subscribes to the magazine, I'm talking if not to a friend then at least to an acquaintance.

Even if your subscription doesn't expire for another five or six months, most readers need several letters from the magazine before taking the trouble to renew, which is very expensive for us and annoying to you. Having read quite a few of your complaints on the subject, I'm not unmindful of the notion that the magazine might be running some sort of scam. The suspicion is unfounded. Any money earned as interest on early payments dwindles to a pittance by comparison with the money spent (for paper and postage) on the mailing of the additional renewal notices. If the magazine can reduce its cost, it doesn't have to raise its subscription price, and we both share in the triumph of thrift.

As to the continued worth of the magazine [Here, Roger helpfully notes all the advantages I noted when I subscribed in the first place]... and if you can take a moment now to send us your renewal, I won't have to write another letter.

Hodge's plea is even more... icky. While Green's was a bald grab for money, Hodge's is a baffling confession topped with a lie. "I know you think we are running a scam, but you're wrong. We make only a little profit badgering you into subscribing early. If we can get your money early, we don't have to ask for more later. We both profit, and I know that sounds real silly, but water can, actually, run uphill." (OK, I made the last part up).

Well, in any financial transaction, someone profits. It's not Desirable Roasted Coffee, in this case. So we ain't biting down here.

But why do they sign their names to it? Both admit their mails are annoying. I don't know about you, but if I know a mail is going to annoy a customer... especially when asking for business.. I don't send that mail. Why on earth would Hodge and Green? And I sure as hell don't ask clients for loans ("I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a cheeseburger today!")

How could Harper's have done it different?

I'd like to hear your ideas, either here or on your blog. But here are mine:

• Subscription = Archives. I've only just found out that my subscription to Harper's gives me access to their archives. Never mentioned & I had to dig for it. When I was a student, I had to travel 20 miles to get "some" access to "some" of Harper's archives....
• We assume you are a fan! Harper's fans are dedicated. I have subscribed, bought, borrowed Harper's since 1980. Like The Atlantic. The Economist. Jebus, we will renew. And, if we forget to, we will remember.
• We assume you can do financial math! Jebus, if you want to attract smart people to your magazine, don't fudge numbers. Payment today for a magazine showing up in 18 months is a loan... pure and simple.

Or what?

Technorati : direct response, harper's, harper's magazine, loans, magazines, periodicals, roger hodge, shawn green, subscription renewal

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 11:20pm in Business, Desirable Roasted Coffee, Journalism | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

John Naisbitt: "Don't get so far ahead of the parade that they don't know you are in it."

Crossposted from Fremtidens Relationer.

I first "met" John Naisbitt at about 0200 on a Sunday morning in 1983, in the bowels of the US Naval Intelligence Processing Systems Support Activity (NIPSSA) in Suitland, Maryland, USA. Looking for something to read on a slow mid-watch, I borrowed Megatrends from the senior watch officer.

What an awakening! 24 years ago, few spoke of globalization or the deindustrialization of the US, EU and Japan. Few contemplated how hierarchies would be affected by the rise of networking. Nobody said stuff like "the new source of power is not money in the hands of the few, but information in the hands of many." Yet, these concepts and more are the running themes in Megatrends. More to the point, they are the running themes today, in 2007, in The Economist, Fortune, Wired, the Financial Times, and the Hindustan Times.

I wish I could say reading Megatrends was an "A-Ha!" moment for me. If I had been perceptive enough to give the book far more thought, I might have made some very different choices at an age where even small choices have great effect. But I was 21, a Cold War was on, and while I helping run a communication network most civilians wouldn't see the likes of until the late 1990s, I hadn't the imagination to mull over what would happen when it did go mainstream.

(An aside: roll forward to 1995, IABC's International Conference in Boston. Jeff Hallett gives a speech on networked communication that prompts more than one communicator present to think seriously about how networks, the Internet, will affect business. I realize, now, it's no coincidence Hallet is the first person Naisbitt acknowledges in Megatrends.)

So Naisbitt's keynote at CIFS' Don't Stop 02 conference was a must-hear for me. Naisbitt, who speaks without slides, notes, lectern or podium, sketched out several trends or "mindsets" from his new book Mind Set.

Visual on the rise, text receding

Globalization is a big driver here. Globalization means almost any ordinary good can be produced so cheaply that almost no one can compete on price. Quality, too, is no longer the preserve, and thus the competitive advantage, of the few. So design, an entirely visual attribute, and one inherently unique, is now far more important.

• Naisbitt pointed to the trend of "upscale designs for common goods." That's certainly true enough; the Moleskine is nothing but a notebook on design steroids.
• He pointed to the rise of "photography as fine art," noting that while many of us carry cameras around all the time (on our phones), photographs made the old-fashioned way are fetching USD 1.7 million at Sotheby's.
• Architecture: "the most important of the visual arts", taking on new significance
• Graphic narrative: fastest growing publishing area. 9/11 Commission report issued in comic book form

Sequence is the enemy of making connections

4..14..23..34..42.... what comes next in this sequence of numbers? I'll get to it, but first....

Naisbitt explained that, at the end of the 1800s, Queen Victoria was told that London would stop growing at population of 4 million, as it would simply be impossible to remove the droppings of the horses required to service a larger city. Already then,100 tons of dung were carted away daily. London's population today is 8 million -- Victoria's advisors failed to foresee the automobile, even though it had been invented.

Naisbitt: "look at things as a picture puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle. Nothing sequential here. If you look sequentially, you won't make connections."

If you are looking for a mathematical solution to the problem Naisbitt posed, you may as well give up. 50 is the correct answer, and the sequence is the stops on the 8th Avenue Express of the New York subway. "Sequence is the enemy of making connections."

You don't get results by solving problems. You get results by exploiting opportunities

Naisbitt: "people can be divided into opportunity seekers and problem solvers." The Indian IT industry is an example of opportunity seeking. When Y2K loomed, IT labor capacity in the West was tight. So the Indians, seeing opportunity, offered Western companies an enormous pool of IT skills. When the dot-com bubble broke, Western countries slashed their IT budgets -- and the Indians, seeing opportunity, offered to provide the same services as Western providers, but at much lower cost.

Naisbitt calls Hillary Clinton an example of a problem solver. When President Clinton was elected, Hillary Clinton used enormous political capital trying to "solve" the US health-care problem, a problem that simply cannot be solved. He calls Arnold Schwarzenegger an example of an opportunity seeker. Usually, it would have been impossible for him to climb the ranks of the California Republican party to become governor. But by seizing the chance offered by the recall referendum on Gray Davis, he leaped past the Republican organization and was elected after a 76-day campaign.

Another opportunity-seeker is Fred Smith, CEO of FedEx. While US policy makers debated how to "solve" the problems of US Postal Service, Smith saw and exploited an opportunity to build a new, private service based on time and reliability.

More Naisbitt Mind Sets to come in a later post!

Technorati : conference blogging, copenhagen institute for futures studies, desirable roasted coffee, don't stop 02, futures studies, futurists, instituttet for fremtidsforskning, jeffrey hallett, john naisbitt, megatrends, mind set, nipssa

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 01:39pm in Books, Business, Conferences, Management, Society, Writers | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (3)

Law.com's do's and don't of corporate blogging. Excellent overview....

Even seasoned communicators should take a look at As Blogging Grows, So Do Its Do's and Dont's, an article by Alysa N. Zeltzer adn John E. Villafranco at Law.Com. These are corporate blogging guidelines from the point of view of the legal department, and they provide rich insight into the legal issues of blogging. At the very least, understanding the points in this article will prepare communicators for possible objections to blogging raised by corporate or client legal departments. Here are a few samples:

• Do be mindful of intellectual property laws and train your blogging employees on such requirements. Employee postings on a corporate blog that include a third-party's intellectual property, such as copyrighted material or trademarks, may expose the company to allegations of infringement. Given that blogs, by their nature, tend to build off the content of other Web sites and materials through linking and copying, it is critical that such use complies with "fair use" principles (i.e., posted for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship or research).

• Do implement a clear policy on employee blogs, especially those in which senior executives contribute. Chances are, a number of your employees already have a blog that prominently features their association with the business, and many are saying plenty of things (and sharing images) relating to the company. Some of that content may be innocuous; other types may be embarrassing or come back to haunt the company in litigation. Implementing and enforcing a clear policy that provides reasonable parameters for such postings can save you headaches down the road.

• Don't employ consumer bloggers to say positive things about your company's products or services without ensuring that they disclose their affiliations with the company. Endorsements and testimonials by word of mouth have always been a popular form of marketing, but the blogging world has made them even more so, thereby making content that crosses the line an attractive target for regulators.

• Don't terminate employees for posting inappropriate content to corporate blogs without considering the risk of wrongful termination claims, especially where the company does not have a consistent practice on how it treats employees who post content online. Employees may claim that the employer authorized the posting, and is now discriminating against them for exercising their right to organize.

What's refreshing here is seeing corporate lawyers saying "By all means... blog!" instead of taking the knee-jerk "better not!" stance.

Technorati : alysa zeltzer, blogging guidelines, corporate blogging, john villafranco, law.com

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:45pm in Business, Communication, Law | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0)

John Wagner nails it: if you don't have a story, don't focus on media relations

John Wagner, PR practitioner in Houston, Texas, USA, nails it: If you don't have a story, media relations is irrelevant. I've snipped:

"The marketing manager wanted media coverage. We explained that there wasn't much news value in chili powder. We suggested he forget about being in the media and focus on marketing activities that would speak directly to people interested in cooking.

This is a perfect opportunity to utilize social media. Can't you just see a breezy blog written by a chef or just some cool cat who loves to cook ... someone with lots of personality and regional flair... promoting the idea of cooking tasty stuff?

The alternative is to charge an arm and a leg to have someone pitch food writers about a commodity product that is no different than the other sauces and mixes on the market."

John's post illustrates the thinking of so many small business owners: "I am unique and, therefore, newsworthy." Well, we are all unique, so you aren't newsworthy. You aren't even on the radar screen. But... you can make yourself different and interesting in the eye of the customer -- and social media is one way to do it. Forget the "homepage" and the little ads in the local paper... just tell your story. Blog it. Podcast it. V-log it. Will using social media guarantee success? Of course not. All the other business rules apply. But by telling your story, without the gloss of ads, PR, and a dandy (but static) website, you will be streets ahead of the competition.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:43pm in Business | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (2)

Buy your own Web 2.0 startup!

It might not make sense, but who said this bubble had to make more sense than the last one? You can buy your own Web 2.0 start-up -- Yoosi (pronounced You See because, you see, that's what you do when you look at it, apparently) whose founders and developers are letting it go to pursue other interests.

David Utter at Internet Financial News covers the sale.

Just head on over to eBay and put in a bid. But hurry... bidding closes August 11, 2006.

I won't be bidding, because I am hard at work on my own Web 2.0 start-up, by the way. It's called Udidden (beta) (pronounced You Didn't). It'll be an open source, Ajaxy thing + Drupl, that lets you see stock prices, check your RSS feeds , check the weather at any US zip code (and major foreign cities) and -- and this is the new thing -- lets you construct an alibi for the night before that your partner can subscribe to (RSS, of course!).

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 08:20am in Business, Humor | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1)

Geography lessons... don't we need them?

Here in Denmark, we pretty much shut down for most of July. The Government decamps, the Royals go away (not that they are ever entirely present,  but that's another thing), many factories close entirely and, even if you are an office worker, you can enjoy a glass of wine at a sidewalk café without worrying about being a slacker.

Reporters and editors also leave town. And that is why Danish newspapers are so entertaining during the dog days: the editors and reporters leave journalism students and junior editors in charge of the shop.

Now, don't for a moment think I don't fully approve: young tyros punch a resumé ticket, readers can comfortably assume nothing in their morning paper will disturb them (though the obligatory Heatwave! story accompanied by an interview with a topless girl at the beach may excite a "Hmmm...." here and there... as it has, yearly, since 1968), and the senior journalists and editors get a much needed rest so they can start gunning for the Government and the Royals in September.

If you are in the PR business, of course, you have spotted the opportunity. Journalism students? Junior editors? Hell, they'll print anything -- Katy, bar the door! (I know.  I once was a college newspaper reporter. I did, indeed, print anything).

Yes, July is the Happy Time for small Danish businesses, because the papers will print just about any press release sent to them. Which is why I came to read this little snippet in Berlingske Tidende the other day:

Advertising on homepages and search engines is becoming more widespread. And now the Danish online advertising agency [in fact, they sell SEO advice, nothing more] Addvisors  has decided to open an office in Las Vegas, USA.

When you are done puzzling over how that lead connects, let me direct you to why Addvisors chose Las Vegas:

"It's centrally located in the USA," says owner Kim Frederiksen.

O-kay!

When the Danish Government gets back from Nice and Tuscany and the Maldives, I suppose I should urge them to look at this initiative from the UK. If only so future Danish businessfolks don't grow up thinking Las Vegas is somewhere near Kansas City.

Thousands of people have a real passion for Geography, a subject that has never been more relevant to the six billion people now living on our planet. In schools across the UK and beyond, teachers who are passionate about the role of Geography use the subject to engage young people in debates about issues that are constantly headlining the media - drought, floods, hazards, globalisation, famine, sustainable energy, transport policy, employment, crime, urban deprivation, global warming. The list is almost endless. Who else, if not the Geographers, will deal with these issues in our schools and colleges so that young people can learn, understand and give a reasoned opinion on things which will impact on all their lives in the 21st Century.

Sadly, the media, in spite of pumping these topics into our homes 24/7 seem to have forgotten that much of what they ask people to think about is actually Geography. We are, therefore, asking - where is the label? Art, history, literature, technology all get their recognition in the media but Geography has yet to be recognised in this important way. If you spent a whole year reading or listening carefully to a wide range of media in the UK, you would probably still have fingers to spare as you sat and counted the number of times that the word 'Geography' was actually mentioned....... at long last Geographers are voicing their frustration at this situation.

Amen to that! Katy, bar the door!

Technorati Tags: addvisors, amateur journalism, denmark, summer dog days, las vegas

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 08:57pm in Business, Cartography, Denmark, Education, Journalism | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1)

Web 2.0 bubble illustrated

Via Bubble 2.0 (Oh, God, just one more bubble!) comes this lovely illustration of why Web 2.0 may indeed be another bubble. (Bubble 2.0 picked it up from Loic LeMeur.)

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:41pm in Business, Humor | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (2)

Welcome to the world of Karl Marx

"Welcome to the world of Karl Marx" is Arie de Geus' greeting to corporate leaders. "Capital is a commodity. Human talent is not."

Here are my notes from the Don'tStop01 Business Innovation Conference we are holding here in Copenhagen. Arie de Geus was head of Shell Oil's Planning Unit for 38 years.

People have little loyalty to companies:

New MBAs stay in their jobs less than 5 years
CEOs stay about 2-3 years.
Shareholders hold their shares about a year

This isn't loyalty.

Why is this? What does it mean.

It's certainly very contrary to the view that I have of what constitutes a successful company. My view is very different... my view is based on some interesting things we learned at Shell.

In the 70s, we asked ourselves "who should be our example?" What companies should we look up to?

We made a study. We asked a team to go out into the world, and find companies that were older than Shell, more than 100 years old, who were leaders in their industry, and who still had their corporate identies intact.

27 companies met the definition.

Siemens, more than 150 years old
Dupont, more than 200 years old
Mitui, 300
Sumitomo, 400
Stora, 700 years old

What characterizes these old companies? What let's them survive. It's clearly not "cultural" because we have American, Swedish, German, and Japanese companies on the list.

We found they shared these traits:

1) Financially conservative. This is bad news for investment bankers. These companies want to keep their own money in their own pockets, and don't want someone else's money. Surviving for centuries means never having a banker pull the rug out from under you.

2) The leaders of these companies are sensitve to the world around them. Leaders were outward looking people, and are often highly active in the society around the company. Dupont has produced generations of US senators. If your leaders are out there in the world, active, they will note changes in society and keep asking "what will this mean for the company?"

3) Strong sense of cohesion and company idenity. Leaders and staff know what the company stands for, and are happy to identify with those values.

4) Management style of tolerance. Lots of space on the margins for new or different activities.

That led me to my definition of a corporation: a good firm is financially conservative, has staff that identifies with the company values, and has management that is tolerant and sensitive to the world in which they live.

That's not what they taught me in the economics department when I was in university in Rotterdam. There we were taught that  companies are institutions that produce goods and services for which other people are prepared to pay a price. The successful company combines labor, capital and land in an optimal way: Minimize cost, maximize price, maximize profit.

This is still taught.

Three definitions. Three different implications.

1. Where there is no loyal relationship to the company, it's every man for himself. It becomes the tragedy of the commons. The measure of success is maximation of  shareholder value.

2. If we accept the classic definition, the one still taught, we must accept the company as an economic machine. The measure? Efficiency and maximization of profit at short notice.

3. And my definition: human work community aimed at continuity from generation to generation. Goal is survival and self-development in a changing world. Measurement is life expectancy.

Which is the right definition? Which company would you want to work for? If you lead a company, which would you want to create?

Let's think about three things.

1) A study done at Stanford in the early 1990s showed that long-living companies produced, on average, 15 times more profits over 60 years than the stock market average. Human work community meets the goals of life expectancy, profits, and shareholder value.

2) When we look at the oldest companies, we must remember the hundreds of thousands of companies that died. The average life expectancy of a company is less than 17 years -- as low as 4 years according to a recent UK study. If you have to choose what sort of comapny you want to create, your choice is quite stark. Choose wrongly, and your company will be dead before you are.

And let's not say "oh, that's just survival of the fittest, that's the market at work." The death of a company is not gratuitous. People suffer. And if we accept that companies are like people -- they get wiser and better as they grow older -- then the death of a company is a tragic loss of knowledge and wisdom.

You may say "survival of the fittes, free markets". But I cannot believe the death of a company is gratuitous. People suffer. And don't companies get better as they get older, much as we do in life.

3) Finally, we are in an age of fundamental change. Capital is now a commodity; it is no longer a scarce production input. This is enormously significant: in the last 50 years, we have had near constant GNP growth, and we have saved 20% to 30% of this a year. Our world is simply awash with capital. Capital is no longer dominant.

In fact, capital is a commodity -- the capital market is a buyer's market, not a seller's market. So if you are choosing what business to create, why on earth would you structure it to maximize the return to the supplier of capital, the shareholders? That is very short sighted.

No, today, labor -- human talent -- is the scarce production factor. And if you would succeed you must have a management style that makes the most of that human talent. 

Corporate leaders: you live in the world of Karl Marx. Your core asset, the asset that is the value of your company, goes out the door every day. I really wonder how you sleep at night, because you have no idea if they will come back. So you better create the conditions so that they do.

Technorati: business innovation, dontstop01, Arie de Geus

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 11:35am in Business, Conferences, Copenhagen, Corporate Governance, Corporate Management, Management | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (5)

Social media & PR education

I've signed on again to be a contributor to the Marcom blog, the blog of Robert French, his PR students at Auburn University and a handful of lucky contributors. It's a terrific initiative that must be getting Robert some serious credit at the Bank of Karma.

Earlier this week, Robert threw out a few questions to the contributor team, asking us to consider them. Like many pretty good questions, they are simple to ask, harder to answer. Like trying to hold down a drop of mercury.

Here's my take. I hope readers -- professional communicators or no -- will comment with their angle.

(a) Do you believe college PR students reading and blogging about PR practices is a viable and valuable endeavor?

Two parts to this question: 1) reading about PR practices and 2) blogging about them.

On the first part: I'd call it required. Not only for students, but for every communicator. And not only blogs -- podcasts, books, seminars, conferences. Can anyone ever know enough about his or her profession or craft?

Blogs are a valuable new source of new thinking. I used to have to go to conferences, at great expense, to hear what my international colleagues were thinking. Now, many of them blog. My advice to every communicator: take advantage of that.

The second part of the question: do students need to blog about PR practices? It's not essential, but how can it hurt?

New PR practitioners need to master, and I mean master, many skills to succeed. Skillful writing. Succinct, moving storytelling. Intelligent pitching.  Having a "nose for news".

Those skills are not widely doled out,  I am sorry to say, judging from the pitches I get. Running a blog demands them all.  Running a blog can only make you better.

(b) What are the key concepts/lessons that should be included in such an exercise?

By following the leading PR/communication blogs, all communicators are exposed to fairly interesting debate about the future of the communication profession or, more correctly, how technology, media consumption habits, politics, shop-floor attitudes, and street attitudes will affect the future of our profession.

Now, some of the ideas flying around -- "the press release is dead" -- seem silly to me. But it's an idea floated by some serious people, and blogs are where it's being discussed.

And, best practices in corporate blogging are, surprise, talked about most on blogs.

(c) How might a future employer react to a student's PR blogging efforts?

In 2006? Positively for the lucky few. Indifferently for the rest. In 2008?  "You don't have a blog? You got nothing to say, or what? We'll get back to you, don't call us."

(d) What tactics by the students will best exhibit PR knowledge through their blogging efforts?

It loops back to (a).  No one will fault students for not yet being masters of PR. But now's a good time to demonstrate mastery of the underlying skills. Tell me a good story, a relevant story. And tell it well.

That's the take from Copenhagen.

Technorati Tags: PRedu, Auburn University, marcomblog, marcom blog

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 01:46am in Blogging, Business, Career management, Communication, Communication Skills, MarComBlog | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (3) | TrackBack (0)

Useful information from Kayak Buzz

A couple of days ago, I gave the Kayak Buzz Flight Search site a once-over and found it sorely lacking.

Kayak's chief architect, Bill O'Donnell, has since responded: first in a comment to my original post, and later in email. While Kayak Buzz Flight Search may still be in the "more fun than useful" stage, you have to give them points for taking up the conversation:

You're absolutely right, the location of the Oslo airport was wrong: as any good student of geography knows, "off the coast of west africa" is zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude. Any geographical feature in our database that is missing it's latitude and longitude ends up there. We found the problem yesterday and fixed it.

We think Kayak Buzz is a fun toy, even if it's utility is, um, open to debate. But, we feel it does present an accurate view of what people are finding for low fares, and where they are traveling. More importantly, it demonstrates the real bargains that real people find using our search tool.

We released a new version of Buzz today, by the way. It lets you be much more specific about where you want to search. Come back and give us another chance!

Well, I'll do just that over the next few weeks and, if the kinks are worked out, be happy to re-review!

Bill later wrote me that non-North American coverage is not as deep as they want it to be, which probably accounts for the results I've been getting. True enough, when I plug in queries from US cities I'm familiar with, the results are better.

Let's keep an eye on Kayak Buzz Flight Search.

Technorati Tags: Kayak Buzz Flight Search, Kayak Buzz, Google Maps, cheap flights

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 11:05pm in Business, Cartography, Communication, Gadgets & Toys, Travel | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0)

Sony faces another class action

While still clueless, Sony has enough money to fend off lots of lawsuits.  Still, it's nice to see lawyers lining up to do what they do best. Here's a snippet from Brian Krebs' post from WaPo:

Sony Faces Another Class-Action Suit

Sony BMG is facing yet another class-action lawsuit stemming from the controversy over its anti-piracy software, this time from a New York attorney who filed a federal case that could potentially include consumers in all 50 states.

Krebs links to filings for both the California and the New York suits (PDFs).

Technorati tags:
Sony
Sony Music
Sony boycott
Sony virus
Sony lawsuits

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:56am in Business, Intellectual Property, Is Tedious in the House?, Marketing, Music | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (2) | TrackBack (0)

Kayak Buzz is a useless toy: wrong fares, bad geography

Sometimes an idea comes along that looks so good at first glance that even the mighty Scoble posts about it. So much the worse when the idea falls to pieces at the first poke. Kayak Buzz Flight Searches is one of these.

The idea is simple enough: let people buzz about cheap fares they are finding, then mashup the findings on a Google map. Excellent idea? Sure... and living proof that even garbage can be made to look good if you pretty it up.

Let's have a look, shall we?

I looked for fares from my home city, Copenhagen, in the under $200 range.  Here's what Kayak Buzz found:

Now, right away we have problems. I'll pass on commenting about the uselessness of a program that doesn't recognize domestic flights, and go right to the burning question: Where's Oslo?

Well, in fact, it's where it always is, at the end of Oslo Fjord -- but you wouldn't know it from this map.

So where does Kayak Buzz think Oslo is?

Why, just off the Nigerian coast (and here I'll just note that I am sure there's no connection between Kayak Buzz and Norwegian Nigerian scam letters).

Now, bad geography is a surmountable fault. After all, anyone aiming for Oslo presumably knows where it is, and will not be misled.

But the prices are as bogus as the geography.

Below I reproduce a chart from the Scandinavian Airlines website, showing current fares out of Copenhagen. They are in Danish kroner, but DKK 650 = US$100, DKK 1300 = US$ 200, etc. The astute reader (have I any other kind?) will immediately note there's no earthly relationship between Kayak Buzz's findings and SAS prices.

Bad toy! Baaaaad toy!

Via Rubel (who should know better!)

Technorati tags:
Kayak Buzz
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Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:15am in Business, Cartography, Gadgets & Toys, Travel | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) | TrackBack (0)

Doctorow rips into Sony's EULA; Symantec finds Sony worm vulnerability...

Update 13 November 2005: Eric Eggertson is following this outrage pretty closely... I'd quote some of his stuff, but I would swear violently, and I don't like to do that on Sundays. Just go read.

Is Sony Music winning this week's Bacon's Information Cluelessness Award?

It would appear so.

Cory Doctorow uses his bully BoingBoing pulpit to tear apart Sony Music's EULA.
 

Sony's EULA is worse than their rootkit
If you're unfortunate enough to buy music from Sony, you may think that the worst thing they'll do to you is screw you by infecting your computer with malicious rootkit software. Not so! Rootkits are only the beginning. If you want to see how Sony really gives its customers the shaft, have a look at these conditions in the license you have to agree to when you put a Sony music CD in your computer:

1. If your house gets burgled, you have to delete all your music from your laptop when you get home. That's because the EULA says that your rights to any copies terminate as soon as you no longer possess the original CD.

2. You can't keep your music on any computers at work. The EULA only gives you the right to put copies on a "personal home computer system owned by you."

3. If you move out of the country, you have to delete all your music. The EULA specifically forbids "export" outside the country where you reside....

There's plenty more.

Still  considering buying Sony CDs. Then ponder this from today's Boston Globe:

Computer Worm Exploits Software on Sony's CDs

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff  |  November 11, 2005

People who bought music CDs from Sony BMG Music Entertainment may have exposed themselves to a dangerous new computer worm.

Symantec Corp., the leading maker of antivirus software, said the worm has infected computers that played Sony BMG recordings. Two other antivirus firms, BitDefender Labs and Sophos PLC, also issued warnings yesterday.

The Sony BMG disks install software that is supposed to prevent the user from making illicit copies of the music and distributing them over the Internet. But the anticopying software conceals itself so that the computer user can't easily remove it.

Now someone has written a ''Trojan horse" program that exploits this feature of the Sony BMG software. The program, which is spread through spam e-mails, uses the Sony BMG code to hide itself. Then the Trojan horse uses the Internet to contact its creators for further instructions.

Eggertson calls for a Sony boycott: It will be a cold day in hell before I buy anything from Sony. I don't actually care if they are being scapegoated by bloggers and others. They deserve every bit of damage to their brand that they suffer.

Parmet asks: Why do companies act this way? And what makes them think that in the long run they can get away with it?

To which I can add only: Any company promoting Shakira, Ricky Martin, and Destiny's Child deserves an exclusive circle of hell.

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Posted by Allan Jenkins at 10:15am in Business, Intellectual Property, Is Tedious in the House?, Management, Marketing, Music | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) | TrackBack (1)

Will internal corporate blogs outnumber external ones? It's a no brainer.

Fredrik Wackå, the thinkingest blogger in Sweden, writes that he's convinced internal blogs will outnumber external ones 10 or even 20 to 1.

Reffing a study by the Economist Intelligence Unit, he notes what anyone who's ever been in a large (or scattered) company can attest to: it's just impossible to exploit the information that's "out there" in the company.  He goes on to write:

"It's obvious to me that blogging should play a role in that exploitation. I see them as the "middle way". They're not the structured systems with elaborate meta data that we find in large KM solutions. They're not email either, but they're almost as easy as email -- which can't be said of the system approach... -- and that's the key to success."

Absolutely. I can't think of an organization of more than a few people that cannot benefit from internal blogs and wikis. But, and here's the catch, corporate communicators are just as reluctant to let go of the communication reins as any "mainstream media". The conversations I've had with internal communicators indicate  blogs make them very nervous.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:03pm in Business, Communication, Corporate Communication, Knowledge Management, Social Tools | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (3) | TrackBack (0)