I’ve just written a post about PCI compliance for the Pod1 blog. You can read it here.
sylleptic
mark hopwood’s blog
Graze.com - fantastic new snack delivery service
Graze's first delivery
I just received my first delivery from graze.com, a service that delivers healthy (and not healthy) snacks to your home or office regularly. The website’s a great experience (lots of control, rating opportunities, personalised product and some lovely Ajax coding), and the product looks good too. This is the sort of smart innovative new service I really like.
To get a free trial go to graze.com and enter the code G9LMPCM.
Banana bag, anyone?
Yesterday I was looking at Lakeland’s website and browsed to a particular product by searching for “banana”. Lakeland sell several products that will help you to care for and transport bananas, and their search tool made these very easy to find.
Later, I went to Cineworld’s website, to look up when the new Terminator film is on. Cineworld’s site displays advertising for other companies, and I was surprised to see an ad for Lakeland, which included the very product I’d been browsing for earlier. The surprise effect was strong.
Lakeland banner driven by Criteo
I realised what had happened was that I’d been served a banner ad by a company called Criteo. Basically, they track what you do on their clients’ websites, and then run ads across the Internet which become very personalised if you’ve looked at a product on a client site. So the fact that I’d looked at a banana bag at Lakeland made me the lucky recipient of an add for said product when I went to Cineworld.
Some people might be uncomfortable with the intrusive aspects of this advertising, but I was impressed that it’s working, and the results would be very interesting to see. Showing people ads that we know are relevant to them has to increase effectiveness, and when the average banner gets a click through less than 1 time in 100, these must surely be star performers.
Useful guide to DIY PR
Devon Dudgeon, a former colleague of mine at Agency.com, has written a helpful guide for small business and the self-employed to do it yourself online PR. It’s available here. It drew a few things to my attention that look useful to anyone, including the ability to create a Google public profile for yourself.
Well worth a read.
Google establishes dominance in web tracking
According to this research Google now has an enormously dominant position in the tracking of which websites we visit every day. They have their Google Analytics tags on millions of websites, including 92 of the top 100. This is important, because it positions them to do extremely targetted advertising when their ad products are used. Consider this journey:
- I visit Google.com and search for “cheap flight”
- I get directed to cheapflights.co.uk, which uses Google Analytics
- Later I visit experiencewa.com (which uses Google Analytics) to look at some of the interesting things I could do in Washington State
- I return to Google and search for something new, say “groceries”
Because Google knows I’ve searched for cheap flights, I’ve visited cheapflights.co.uk, and I’ve visited a site about Washington State, it could infer that I’m planning a trip to Washington, and serve a really targeted ad alongside my groceries search results.
The more websites use Google Analytics, the more complete picture Google will have of where I go online, and the more targeted its advertising could be, assuming they take the opportunity.
But it gets better, because most of the time Google knows who is doing the surfing, at least it does if you use Gmail or a personalised Google home page. So not only does it know about activity on a particular computer, it knows about your activity across multiple computers.
The more people use Google Analytics (a free product, I guess we know why now) the more complete their picture, and the greater their advantage over their advertising competitors.
Anxiety about online tracking is generally overdone, and I’m not particularly concerned that Google knows so much about my surfing habits, but it makes all the concern about Phorm look quite disproportionate, at least it does to me.
Making a billion online
I’ve been wanting to write something about the value Facebook has as a business for some time, but it was this story at econsultancy’s blog that finally provoked me into action. Since Facebook sold a stake recently to a Russian investor, there’s been wild speculation and stacks of comment about how the company could possibly be worth $10 billion. The answer lies in the difference between how normal companies are valued and how Internet companies are.
Normal companies
The idea behind the valuation of a normal company is that it will be around for a long time, and will mostly make a profit most years. The sum of all those future profits turns into a value for the company. The value gets influenced by short term factors, but it’s essentially that long term profit stream that determines the value of a company. That makes tremendous sense if the company is going to be around for a long time.
Internet companies
Internet companies almost never make profits. Facebook has never made a profit, and nobody can really be confident they every will. Yet they’re worth billions, apparently. Why is that? The answer lies in who’s buying at those wild valuations. To them, the investment is great value for money, but not because of anything intrinsically valuable about the companies. Microsoft bought a stake in Facebook to underpin its own share price. Faced with criticism of their Internet strategy, their online advertising revenues, whether they really got the web, an investment of $240 million to protect their own market valuation of $50 billion plus is a very good deal. It headed off some of their biggest critics. For a while. The Russians have bought their shares because they’re portfolio risk-takers. This will be a relatively big investment for them, but one of many, and they will not expect every one of their investments to be a success. So Facebook is a bet for them, and one of many. Their plan, I assume, will be to sell their stake on to someone else at some point in the future, for a profit. If Facebook turns out to be one of those rare profitable Internet businesses, that will be easier.
The critical things about making lots of money selling your Internet business would therefore seem to be telling a good story that makes you one of the bets worth taking, or finding someone who will get some synergy from buying a stake, like Microsoft and Facebook. That’s quite a contrast from the traditional approach of growing a normal business.
Do offers always work?
Yesterday I received an email from a car hire company containing an offer that must end soon. I didn’t book any car hire because of it though, because I don’t need to hire a car. Had the offer been for, say, a cheap flight to Paris, I might have taken it up, but very few people (I imagine) thought to themselves “hiring a car, I hadn’t thought of that, but now I’m going to take up this excellent offer I’ve just been emailed”.
For an offer to succeed, it doesn’t just have to be good, it has to be relevant to the recipient, either because they generally buy the product or service being offered, or because they are looking for it at that time. I’m very unlikely to go out and hire a car I didn’t need just because someone is promoting them.
I wonder what the offer’s conversion rate was?
It turns out they were right (sort of)
I remember in 2007 there were a few people getting very excited about QR codes, which are special bar codes that can be read by mobile phones and such like. They were predicting they’d be in magazines, on posters, t-shirts… all over the place. We were all meant to be scanning these codes to link to offers on the Internet, read details about new products and all sorts of things.
Well, the other day, I noticed the enthusiasts had got one of their predictions right. QR codes are appearing on posters, but perhaps not in the way they expected.
a qr code on a poster
Open source is better
I’ve been leading technical projects and teams for getting on for 20 years, but my current role is the first where open source has been a point of principle. I’ve used open source software many times, but I’ve reached a point where it’s become important to explicitly support and advocate its use. Why?
The first, and most obvious, reason is the breadth of great software that’s now available for free. I can point to Firefox or Ubuntu, a web browser and a desktop server operating system, but there is so much more out there. Whether you need a mail server, word processor, a database, or even an e-commerce engine, the chances are there is something open source that will do the job.
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Conspiracy theory
This is a link to Google’s Street View of the SIS HQ at Vauxhall.
How did they get the bus to follow Google’s car all the way alongside the building? Was it waiting all morning for the Google car to come past?
Cunning.
