Nobody has ever given me a nickname, so you may as well call me Chris Waters. I am co-founder, copywriter and part-time accountant at Condiment, a fabulous creative agency in Ipswich.
Perhaps you’ve heard of Wolfram Alpha (or WolframAlpha or Wolfram|Alpha or however it’s bloody written.) Perhaps you haven’t.
Early hype suggested it would make Google look as relevant as a Soda Stream. I don’t know if that’s going to be the case.
You see, it’s not really a search engine; more an engine that’s on the web. Indeed, the boffs at Wolfram Alpha call it a “computational knowledge engine”. It’s not about returning the most relevant page in relation to your search, more about giving you answers to questions.
I used it to work out that I’m 10,000 days old on 30 August, 2009. Which is cool and petrifying all at the same time.
Six months ago I was unemployed – I’d been made redundant by a company that made every decision by committee (except my redundancy). To be honest, it was a relief when it happened. I still hate them for their cowardice, though.
But that’s not the point. The point is that I didn’t have a job. So I spent all day on the internet, looking for jobs, writing blog posts to get noticed, and generally having a good think about where my poxy excuse for a career was heading.
One day, I stumbled upon Flamingo International. According to their website, they do research, thinking, and strategy. I was sitting around all day thinking, so getting paid to do it seemed like a good idea. Fortunately, they were taking applications.
To be considered for a job at Flamingo, you had to write a few words about The Next Big Thing.
This is what I came up with:
Imagine a London Underground map that showed passengers by time of day. Planning your journey becomes a whole lot easier.
Imagine the map of a department store that mapped customer journeys. What’s the busiest point in a store? What time of day? Planning promotions becomes a whole lot easier.
Imagine you could view a map of your town based on traffic. How would that affect where you wanted to live?
Maps. They’re the next big thing.
Not traditional maps. Traditional maps show an area. New maps show traffic in that area.
By tracking movements of people, maps become more useful.
Mobile phones, they’re the key. Nearly everybody has one.
Using mobile phones, track the movement of people around houses, shops, towns, airports. Whatever you want.
Privacy? Well, the signal doesn’t necessarily need to tell anyone what number the phone is. Anonymous tracking is fine, we’d still be measuring traffic.
And when people choose NOT to be anonymous, things get interesting.
“Where’s Mum?”
“Oh, she’s in town. With Grandma.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“He’s on the golf course. Playing with three other people by the looks of things. Oh, one of those people is Uncle Dave.”
“Are you going to the party tonight, cos I’ve no idea how to get there?”
“Yeah, leaving about seven - track my movements”
“Will do, cheers mate.”
“What time’s Bill getting here?”
“Just a sec… oh, he’s on Wallace Road, so two minutes away.”
Track people. Track people in cars. People on trains, planes, and boats.
I live in Ipswich, and let’s assume that I’m going to drive to Manchester tomorrow. Imagine if I could track people who had travelled from Ipswich to Manchester in the last few days and find out what routes they took.
Imagine if I could get stats on people who drove to Manchester versus people who took the train. What were the cost implications? What are the environmental implications?
Miles per hour. Pounds per hour. CO2 per mile.
Whether you’re making personal decisions or business decisions, interactive maps with traffic flows become incredibly useful.
Follow the route of your average customer around your shop. What do you see that they see? How can you change and improve things? How long does your average customer stay for? What areas do they visit more than once? Are they static for a long time in certain areas?
Tracking movements online has long been possible. Tracking people offline is getting easier.
Maps are about to get clever.
Flamingo International never did contact me. Perhaps I wasn’t radical enough. After all, this technology was always bound to surface at some point. But they did say Next Big Thing
I think I’ve decided (hardly a victory for my decisiveness) to get an iPhone. Not only am I a recent Apple convert, but how can you watch those TV ads without looking at your current phone and feeling inadequate? You can’t. You feel like the boy in the corner of the pub with the ugly girl.
So I phoned Vodafone for my PAC or PUK or FUKU code. And, of course, they asked me why I wanted to leave for networks new. “I want an iPhone,” I said. No longer would I sit in pub corners.
And, of course, they told me not to leave. “Stay with us,” they said. “We’ll save you £15 a month.” Which is sort of true, but mostly bollocks because I wouldn’t be saving any money by staying. I’d just be on the same tariff, instead of the iPhone’s more expensive one. Vodafone hasn’t saved me a sausage.
They also offered me The Brand New Award Winning Blackberry Storm. It’s better than the iPhone, so they helpfully tell me. I know it isn’t. They do too. It’s all a bit embarrassing when people have to pretend something is better than it actually is. Like sending your ugly girlfriend for an expensive haircut before you to take her to the pub to sit in the corner.
Vodafone is due to phone me again tomorrow, with my PAC or PUK or CNUT code. I’m looking forward to the same tedious conversation. The customer retaining bit of the call centre is obviously the coolest area. You can tell. They’re steaming with confidence when they call – like they are The Cellgods, and us mere mortals just tap numbers and reduce ourselves to winky faces.
Which is fine, but ultimately these Cellgods have no power. “Send me a Playstation 3 and I’ll stay,” I said. “Erm … no,” they replied. “We couldn’t possibly do that.”
Look at the maths, though, and it’s barmy – surely? Thirty quid a month contract for the next ten years is £3,600. A Playstation 3 is less than a tenth of that. Makes sense to send me one, I think. And it’d mean I could play Little Big Planet instead of despairing about the ugliness of my new non-iPhone.
A good copywriting reminder dropped through my letterbox today.
It reminded me to use examples when writing about technical stuff. Because as clever as we all think we are, we don’t really understand a lot of the waffle that’s thrown at us.
But that’s not our fault; just a copywriter’s problem.
The item that arrived through my postbox was a leaflet about Virgin Media broadband. Apparently, it’s the mother of all broadband.
The sell is its speed. We all want faster broadband, whether it be for Second Life, BBC iPlayer, or grotty porn. Virgin Media supply it (the faster broadband that is, not the… oh, never mind).
But how fast is 20Mb?
(Your Dad will tell you that “it’s ten times faster than 2Mb”. That’s just the way Dads are.)
To most normal folk, 20Mb means diddly-squat. Sure, they know it means twenty megabytes. But that’s just a number and a unit. And, to be pedantic, it’s not even a unit of speed.
Virgin Media’s promotion uses the example of time it takes to download a music track. For 20Mb, the time is two seconds.
Two seconds to download a music track isn’t a feature of the broadband, it’s a joyous benefit. One that means something to the reader.
It’s one that the reader can easily pass on too. My mother isn’t going to tell someone that she’s just had 20Mb broadband installed and it’s fast because of those brilliant fibre optic cables. She might, however, tell someone that her Virgin Media broadband is so fast that she downloaded the whole Mamma Mia soundtrack in less than a minute.
Customers will talk about you, but only if you talk your customers’ language.
The ability to blockquote is only the touch of a button away in Wordpress, so it’s easy to add visual emphasis when I’m quoting someone.
It’s a town for losers, but I’m pulling outta here to win.
But when using my better-half’s laptop - that’s still making use of the wonderfully archaic Internet Explorer 6 (or IE6 if you’re up with web slang) - I noticed that text underneath a blockquote was shifting to the left slightly. And then after the next blockquote it would shift even further to the left. And so on. Not good.
Oddly, I’ve managed to solve the problem by adding a simple border to the offending blockquotes. I’ve no idea why this works, but it does.
Usually, I’d never take this approach. I need to the exact cause of the problem in order to understand why the solution works.
But I’m getting older. IE6 is getting older too. Hopefully it will be extinct before me.
Anybody who has used Wordpress and tried to embed a Youtube video will have suffered the frustration of code getting stripped whenever you edit a post. Enter EasyTube - a wonderful YouTube plugin for Wordpress.
Now, without any hassle whatsoever, I can post YouTube videos into Wordpress.
Here’s a video by Theresa Andersson. The song makes you feel ill halfway through the second listen, but it’s a clever live performance. Quite why she set up all her equipment in her kitchen baffles me. It’s probably because that’s where her muse was or something (she does, after all, play barefoot, like any respectably self-indulgent singer songwriter).
I’m no idiot when it comes to computers, but I’d ignore that little orange box with the pulse-wave-type-design at every opportunity.
But like Sky+ (well, probably - I don’t have it, but I’m told it’s great), once you get it, you can’t really live without it.
Well, okay, you could live without it. It’s not like vitamins or Bruce Springsteen.
Google - unsurprisingly - is the source of my new found love for RSS. Their Google Reader (good name) allows you to read all your favourite blogs from your iGoogle homepage. To be fair, that’s probably what most RSS Readers do - but Google’s was dead-simple to set-up.
So in love I now am with RSS (and technologically fearless), I’ve set up my own feed. So now, you can easily add this wonderful blog to popular feed readers by clicking that icon at the top of the left-hand menu.
If you’re scared, don’t be. Look that little orange box straight in the eye and tell yourself “if I can put up with Rhianna’s godawful music, I can do anything.”
