Firetop

This week we’ve begun an interesting experiment in my house; the television has been sold, replaced with an LCD HD monitor and a PC laptop. Everything that we watch is now downloaded via 8mb broadband using the BBC iPlayer or commercial offerings such as Channel 4’s on Demand service. Without any means of watching ‘live TV programmes’ from the BBC we no longer need a TV license… so we’re cancelling it. From what I’ve read this won’t go down too well with TV licensing but is perfectly legal, it seems they may wish to inspect our home but I’m quite open to that eventuality if and when it occurs. The BBC are not apparently expecting to see droves of people cancelling their TV licenses, in most cases they’re probably correct, but in an age where mass media is replaced with personalised services we’re definitely jumping on the cheaper, advertising free, optimimal viewing experience. (more…)

This time last year I was advocating that Flash 7.0 be the most up-to-date version that should be quoted for online advertising creatives in 2007, with Flash 8.0 penetration only at 70/80%. This year, having looked at the latest statistics from Millward Brown’s research (available on Adobe) and read the blog of the Product Manager for Adobe Flash Player (Emmy Huang), Flash 9.0 is already at 93.3% in mature markets. Clearly this is a marked improvement on the situation one year ago, and I think it means we can say Flash 9.0 exports will be quite acceptable for ad servers in 2008 without impacting too much on campaign delivery / forecasts. (more…)

Facebook is a great platform, not only can you find long lost friends (or enemies), you can share all your personal information with them. However, with such a powerful tool comes a few concerns about identity theft or even personal safety – much of the information we use for banking security such as home address and data of birth is readily available on our profiles. The good news is that the privacy settings within Facebook allow you to restrict the levels of information that are available to your network, friends or even specific individuals. The alternative default makes almost everything available to everybody via member search – friend or not - so it’s worth reviewing in my opinion. (more…)

This evening I attended my first British Interactive Media Association event at the BT Centre in Central London. I finally became a member of BIMA last month so that I could attend this event entitled ‘The Great Facebook Debate’. Facebook has seen phenomenal growth in the UK in the past twelve months - now at ten million users according to one of the evening’s slides. However, it’s not really clear to me how anybody is going to monetise this social networking tool without impacting on the user experience; yesterday whilst logged into Facebook I was delivered a leaderboard ad for ‘Phoenix University, Arizona’ – you would have thought that my detailed profile would more than adequately provide a better optimised advertising experience for my demographic! Where’s Google Adsense or Amazon ‘related products’ generating referral commission? (more…)

When I joined Facebook in February it wasn’t really with any expectation of what I might do with the account, I joined everything ‘Web 2.0′ to see what different web developers were up to. In the UK Facebook wasn’t all that popular and it seemed to be filled with students and people a decade younger than my good self. With that in mind I think Facebook’s extremely rapid growth in all age ranges of the UK population is quite phenomenal. Unlike Friends Reunited which, let’s face it, was good for a week or two but few people ever went back to it regularly, Facebook has become a vital ingredient in communications among friends. For the most part the ease with which one can message friends informally, load photographs and engage in pointless ‘poking’ and ‘vampire bashing’ FREE has made the service incredibly useful and fun. I’ve had very little choice about connecting this blog to my Facebook profile (and vice versa) if I am to avoid duplicating my efforts. (more…)

Today is the first birthday of the new look Firetop website complete with blog entries, one year ago I was at Wimbledon spotting celebrities like ‘Nana Moon’ and Rob Brydon, this year it’s far too wet to enjoy the queuing. Furthermore Suzie_Q seems to be displaying early labour symptoms this morning, which could make June 28th a birthday of a different kind next year! So what exactly has the blog achieved in the past year? Surprisingly a few unexpected interactions from those at the centre of a article topics - a celebrity chef, Virgin’s commercial director, the Marketing Manager of Internet World, a developer at Eyewonder, not to mention many unknown people who have solved their Microsoft credit card bill mystery. (more…)

Thanks to MyBlogLog you can now connect with fellow blog readers from Firetop and across the blogoshere. On the right hand side of this site you will see a new Firetop community box showing the most recent MyBlogLog readers of Firetop and, if loaded, their avatar (photo). With Firetop coming up to its one year birthday and having exceeded 10,000 unique visitors each month, I thought I’d install the MyBlogLog widget and see if we can get a Firetop reader community going. All you need to do is register and join the community - then we can start putting faces to names and engage in more regular conversations with each other - give it a try now! (more…)

Discounts as purchase incentives are as old as the Earth, if properly tracked they tell marketers a great deal about the best sources of customer - enabling the optimisation of marketing budgets accordingly. Then along comes the Internet and a website which lists hundreds and thousands of current promotional codes from across the marketing landscape - from print magazines and ‘junk mail’ to online. Now consumers only have to visit ‘Hot UK Deals’ to choose from a number of current retailer offers if they are about to make a purchase; yesterday Suzie_Q saved £20 on a John Lewis web purchase courtesy of an offer from a magazine she never even bought or read. (more…)

Whilst searching for an SVGA cable supplier today, I saw my first live ‘Google Checkout’ button below a Google Adwords advertiser message. This new service, launched in the UK in April, is Google’s attempt to rival Paypal as a common secure payment processing facility. Google Checkout is being given away free to web merchants until 2007, and then from January 1st 2008, for every £1 spent on AdWords, the merchant can process £10 in sales for free through Google Checkout. Google claim that the service improves conversions and generates more leads too. Even for merchants who are not regular Adwords spenders, it’s very tempting to switch e-commerce suppliers immediately; commission charges are by no means small for high volume sellers using Paypal or Worldpay etc. But why would Google be interested in taking on this new service offering? (more…)

This week I finally managed to find a moment to explore Linden Labs’ ‘Second Life‘ - a virtual world in which you create and clothe an animated character (avatar) before interracting with everybody else and the environment of this virtual world. With $1.5 million spent in ‘real’ money in this economy each day I had high hopes for its appeal. Unfortunately, having created ‘Flash Rehula’ a punk rocker with green hair, I managed to get about 1/4 of the way through the tutorial before I became frustrated at the clunkiness of the movement and slow graphics. Then it got worse; the tutorial kept undoing itself as I completed required tasks, now I’ve given up as the tutorial guide has vanished without trace. (more…)