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May 29, 2009
Some advice for the "new" Telstra
Bleeding Edge wasn't invited to the farewell party for Sol Trujillo, if indeed there was a farewell party for Telstra's departing chief executive, as he slipped out the back door six weeks ahead of schedule.
Former chairman, Donald McGaughie also left without a peep, which seemed fitting, given that he and Trujillo seemed to have been cloned from the same combative, boastful, take-no-prisoners material. That was scarcely surprising. Four years ago McGaughie had popped a little clause into Trujillo's employment contract which declared that a critical element in the CEO's performance review would be “a "close and constructive" relationship with his chairman.
We were probably spared a heated confrontation with both, what with our continued criticism of Telstra in general, and its strategies in particular.
What we did miss, however, was the opportunity to talk with the new chairman and CEO, David Thodey, and pass on some advice. We're sure they would have been eager to receive it, as they takes charge of a corporation that has been acting increasingly like an out-of-control gorilla.
The first thing we would have told themwas that they should dump several other members of a board which has failed manifestly in the past five years to do anything to rein in Trujillo's and McGaughie's increasingly arrogant conduct.
They should replace them with some young, alert individuals – people who don't believe that yesterday's ideas will be relevant to tomorrow's, or for that matter today's marketplace.
The board needs some conciliators too. The new CEO, David Thodey, seems to be the right man to repair the shattered relationship with the Federal Government. The failed brinkmanship of his predecessor has led to the prospect of having Telstra's local loop become virtually worthless within a few years; being forced into structural separation and stripped of much of its competitive advantage.
But that's only one area where the Telstra culture has to be re-shaped. Under Trujillo and McGaughie, Telstra seems to have taken on more wars than former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, with similar consequences. It's been fighting with handset manufacturers like Nokia and anyone else it perceives as a threat to its monopoly profits. Those relationships are going to have to be repaired.
It has to stop the blatant exploitation of its customers and the systemic over-pricing and under-performing which has driven its reputation on increasingly influential sites like Whirlpool ever lower.
Trujillo came to the job with much fanfare about being customer-focused, but it quickly emerged that he was not so much interested in pleasing customers as in extracting as much money from them as possible.
The only metric that mattered for Telstra was ARPU (Average Revenue Per User). That is an understandable and sensible focus for any telco, but Trujillo's tactics for driving it higher were completely unrealistic.
With more Australians reporting that their own and their children's technology consumption had become a burden on the household budget and with small to medium enterprises joining smarter corporations in seeking cheaper alternatives like VoIP services on both wired and mobile networks, Trujillo nonetheless kept promoting costly “one-click” services and ever-faster data speeds on the Next G mobile network. The fact that the money – a lot of money – kept rolling into his pocket from a company that had seemingly lost contact with the reality of adequate executive remuneration, was possibly the reason he failed to appreciate that in the real world, practically nobody could afford to use the bandwidth on what we took to calling the bankruptcy network.
While Trujillo and his defenders still point to Next G as the benchmark of the man's success, independent telecoms analyst Paul Budde says it was never likely to generate the increased average revenue per user to justify the significant additional costs to the carrier.
“You have to ask why other national carriers didn't rush in and do what Telstra did?” says Budde. “They did the same numbers as Trujillo, but they couldn't see a business model that would support the investment.”
Like Bleeding Edge, Budde believes Telstra is going to have to demonstrate uncharacteristic humility if it is to start repairing relationships. “None of us wants to write Telstra off the map. They are too important to the country, if they take the right attitude. I'd like to say to them that we would like to help, but they can't be helped if they can't admit that everything wasn't as wonderful over the past four years as they have claimed.”
And he says that Thodey's toughest job might be to change the culture of what has become a vertically-integrated monolith. “Sol Trujillo was the sort of person who bullied and abused people, and that was communicated throughout the company. You won't be able to change that overnight.”
It's been a long time since Bleeding Edge was invited to anything at Telstra. Perhaps, under the new regime, we might get back on the guest list.
Posted by cw at 10:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Digital recorder syndrome
It was roughly about the time we stuck our head out the window and started to record the sound of rain and thunder that we realised we'd come down with something serious.
We'd developed digital recorder syndrome, a condition that is characterised by a heightened appreciation for significant sounds and a desire to capture and replay them.
We first became aware of the symptoms after several months of singing lessons and weekly practice nights with the South of the River Community Gospel Choir. We started using a Zoom H4 digital field recorder from the Japanese-based Zoom Corporation to help learn a considerable repertoire of African, North American gospel and original Australian material, and as the choir began appearing at ever more prestigious gigs, Bleeding Edge took on the job of recording the events.
By the time the choir performed at this year's Port Fairy Folk Music Festival, we'd graduated to the Zoom H4's successor, the H4n, and our symptoms started to develop.
Zoom Corporation shook up the market with both its predecessors, the H4 and less expensive H2 digital recorders, which offered the quality and capabilities of more expensive DAT and MiniDisc recorders at more affordable prices.
With the H4n, they've produced something that approaches the quality of lower-end pro audio devices.
The Australian agents, Dynamic Music haven't been able to keep up with the demand from musicians and other users. Earlier this year it was featured at the Pulima 2009 National Indigenous Language and Information Communication Technology Forum, as a tool for preserving Aboriginal languages.
The dual in-built X/Y stereo condensor microphones of the earlier H4 can now be rotated from a 90 degree pattern for solo artists or small groups, to 120 degrees for orchestras and choirs, or if you're using it to record conferences, for audience response.
You can also plug in two external microphones or line level feeds through the XLR/ 1/8th inch jack inputs, which also provide phrantom power. The H4n records to mono, stereo or four tracks.
The pre-amps have been improved, and lo-cut filters and a range of compressors and limiters prevent distortion and extend the dynamic range, allowing high quality recording
with push-button selection of recording formats from compressed MP3 (48kbps to 320kbps) to better-than-CD-quality 24-bit/96-kHz WAV files.
The recording medium is SD or high-capacity SDHC memory cards of up to 32GB.
The files can be quickly transferred to a PC or Mac via USB, and you can also use it as a USB interface to the PC or Mac.
Playback speed can be adjusted from 50 per cent to 150 percent, at constant pitch, which is useful for learning a language, recording conferences and electronic news-gathering applications. The H4n has a much larger LCD screen than its predecessor, which makes it much easier to navigate the menus for functions like setting recording levels.
The shock-absorbing rubber-edged case has a much lmore solid feel than its predecessors, which somehow helps ease the pain of the $879 price tag.
There are lots of other things you can do with a digital recorder aside from recording thunderstorms, choirs and foreign language lessons etc. You can, for instance, create radio shows with them. Creating radio shows is one of the activities Bleeding Edge has been considering falling back on in the event that newspapers cease to exist, and we find ourselves out of a job.
If you happen to be thinking along similar lines, you are likely to find transom.org, a “showplace and workshop for new public radio”, a wonderful resource. They have a lot of tutorials on pretty much everything to do with the preparation of audio programs.
Of course, if you lose your job, you might find you can't afford $879 even for an essential worktool. In that case, you might have a look at the M-Audio MicroTrack II. It's a diminutive but deceptively powerful package that inspires you to carry it around, and record emotionally significant auditory stimuli, such as, for instance, the sound of Bleeding Edge's second grand-daughter, Misha, crying. The fact that she rarely cries – she spends most of her time sleeping – makes something so small, and easy to set up particularly handy. Pull it out of its soft case, attach the mini-microphone, adjust the levels and you're ready to go.
At 150g it's slightly less than half the weight of the H4n, about 2/3 its length and about half the thickness. You can connect two external mics using 1/4-inch TSR jacks – it provides 48v phantom power and the microphone pre-amps are good quality – and it records WAV and MP3 files. You can even plug in a S/PDIF source.
The controls have been very well thought out. Two rocker switches on the face of the unit control the recording levels and another sets the headphone volume. The LCD display is very readable, and the menu and three-way navigation wheel are easy to navigate.It records to Compact Flash storage. One downside is that the battery is not user replaceable.
The MicroTrack II retails for $595. You can learn how to use it here. You can learn a lot of other things at that site, including some tutorials on Pro Tools, the industry standard audio-editing program. Those of us contemplating new careers can use all the help we can get.
Posted by cw at 10:33 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 12, 2009
Digital denial
One of the common themes that we at the Bleeding Edge Centre for the Study of Digital Addictions have identified, is the denial by victims of their potential for being hooked.
Mobile phone owners pooh-pooh the very idea that they will be caught up in a compulsion to ring people at every opportunity, or to emit streams of text messages. Pretty soon, however, you observe their fingers twitching over the keypads. PC users who consider themselves quite sober individuals can quickly find themselves spending inordinate amounts of time “futzing” with the things, customising applications and desktops. Internet junkies never imagine that they'll find themselves incapable of going five minutes without checking their email, or “tweeting” with Twitter.
Those who innocently enter the area of “time shifting” with hard disk recorders or media centres are equally unaware of the potential for extreme behaviour. They think they're just going to make the occasional click on an electronic program guide to record a few programs and view them at their convenience, rather than at the commercial whim of the networks. Before long their hard disks are full of huge video files. The worst cases are flouting the law like the speed-obsessed Toad of Toad Hall, downloading movies and TV series.
When two members of the Bleeding Edge family recently took delivery of TiVo boxes – we wonder how many of the things the Federal Government has funded through the $900 tax rebate – we smiled quietly to ourselves as they declared the 160GB hard drive, which can store up to 30 hours of HD TV, or 60 hours of standard definition recordings, would be more than they'd ever use, and declined the opportunity to buy a network package.
Our review of the TiVO has been delayed by the fact that the Bleeding Edge TV antenna is currently a tangled mess on the roof, as a result of recent storms, and we're waiting for the antenna man to fix it.
But we knew that it wouldn't be long before they would be looking for the 1TB My DVR Expander which was finally released by Western Digital only last week ($299.99). If they followed the usual trajectory of the obsessive time-and-geography-shifter however, they'd probably exhaust even that apparently huge storage, and regret the absence of that network package, as they juggled their files between the TiVO and their computers.
Hard core addicts aren't content with those arrangements. Their interests have spawned a growing armada of network media players and media-oriented NAS storage servers, which act as a permanent bridge between your digital media storage (usually a PC or Network Attached Storage) and a TV or audio/video player, thus relieving one of the side-effects of this addiction: constant weariness from having to burn files to CDs or DVDs or copy them to portable storage, then trek from desktop to lounge to play the music or video.
Even Western Digital has a variation on the theme with the WD TV Media Player. While it doesn't quite compete with more expensive players, at $199 it's definitely worth considering.
In the UK, The Guardian's Technology Editor named the Neuros OSD “absolutely my favourite device of the year”. Bleeding Edge was less impressed with it. We were more taken with the MediaGate MG-450HD.
The device that has excited our own addiction, however, is the DViCO TVIX HD M-6500A. The combination of its array of connections and range of formats makes it well worth the $500 to $600 we've seen on staticice.com.au. It can stream and transfer multimedia files via a LAN connection, at either 10/100 or 1Gbps. That works even with Windows Vista, through an application called NetShare 2.02 beta .
You can hook it up to a digital camera, flash drive or external hard drive via two USB host ports. You can turn it into a set-top box with an optional HDTV tuner, to record shows in MPEG2 on an internal SATA hard drive.
Then there's the array of output options. Aside from Component, S-Video and Composite, there’s HDMI, and digital (Coax/Toslink) audio connections. It can interpret the most common formats like MP2, WMA, PCM, DTS, WMV9 and WMV-HD, DIVX, DVid, HDV and the new H.264 (MKV) files at 1080p resolution. It can handle a DVD ISO file, amd plays back 1080p video and still images. You can add a Wi-Fi dongle via a USB port if you can't get a cable to it.
For the most part it is easy to setup – although it took quite a bit of fiddling to get Vista to co-operate - and you control operations via a central panel or remote.
If you own any of these devices, you should consider signing up to mpcclub.com, because it's a great source of information and new firmware. We regard it as a public safe-injection room.
Posted by cw at 12:05 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
May 06, 2009
Losing Money, Losing Time
Every day, technology offers us new and exciting ways of losing money, and if last week is any indication, the pace is accelerating.
Our Amex bill alerted us to the fact that Reed Business Information had billed us for the two-year subscription it had been offering as a special package on its web site. It represented a saving of $78 on the regular price, or would have, had it not been for the fact that Reed Business Information had billed us twice.
This can sometimes happen if one becomes impatient and clicks the pay button more than once, but we've been doing a high proportion of our shopping online for years now, and we've never been charged twice previously, and when we rang a customer service agent to have the transaction reversed, she informed us that the company's system seemed to have the occasional bug which duplicated a transaction.
While that looks like a potentially profitable “bug” for a company to have, we're sure an organisation of Reed's standing would be seriously alarmed by the potential for generating customer dissatisfaction. Some relatively simple programming could surely throw up an alert in these case and even automatically generate a letter or email seeking confirmation. That would surely avoid potential loss of customer loyalty in the event of an unexpected surprise in the credit card statement.
Unfortunately consumers can't rely on any such thing – although they might well recommend it to the customer service department - and the best way of avoiding unnecessary loss is to maintain good records and check the credit card statements religiously.
Other companies seem quite deliberately to target unwary internet users. Last week we received a beautifully prepared document from Domain Register Pty Ltd, with a Collins St address, which looked at first glance like an invoice for one of our .com.au internet domains.
It was no such thing. It was a notice of a “Domain Name Available” for the .com version. As it happened, we were interested in registering the domain, but we would have been badly out of pocket had we acted on Domain Register's letter. We would have paid $249 for two years registration, with the incentive of a free iPod shuffle — the recently superseded model — provided we orered by April 9.
At dynadot.com it cost $US9.25 per year, which worked out at $A26.24 for two years. We priced the older version of the iPod shuffle at Streetwise for $65, which made the real value of the $249 offer just $91.
Our third opportunity to lose money arrived with the Telstra bill — the first for our new iPhone. Telstra wanted us to pay them $532.37. Penetrating the debit and credit items was by no means easy, but we discovered Mr Trujillo was trying to get us to pay $399 for an “iPhone UpFront Fee”. According to the plan we were on, the upfront fee should have been $179.
After a 10-minute wait, we were pulled out of the queue by the Credit Management department. They couldn't help. They transferred the call to Mobile Billing, who also decided they couldn't help, and transferred us to the iPhone Inquiries department. The call, instead, was eventually picked up by Mobile Residential, who promised — 17 minutes after we'd stepped on to the merry-go-round — that this time they'd make sure we'd get through to iPhone Inquiries. Instead, seven minutes later, we found ourselves talking - "Why, hello again!" - to Credit Management.
Another two minutes saw us communicating with the iPhone Department, but not, unfortunately, the right iPhone Department. The iPhone Sales Department unfortunately couldn't help us with iPhone Billing. This time, a polite young man called Brett directs us to the iPhone Inquiries Department, and gives us the number in case we want to make direct contact in future.
As it happens, we will want to make direct contact in the very near future, because after 28 minutes and 35 seconds of providing a succession of very polite staff with our mobile phone number, password and address, we are abruptly cut off.
We start all over again with Telstra's ingenious Voice Misinterpretation System, which doesn't recognise anything to do with iPhones. It decides arbitrarily when we mention "iPhone" in a variety of pleading tones that “That would be a general inquiry”, and by now we're too exhausted to fight back.
Another six minutes into the process, we're talking to Mobile Assurance, who seem to be stationed in the Himalayas, and from there find ourselves being put through to Mobile Faults, whose representative kindly adds some notes to our file to ensure that we're not put back to them. Alas, he's no more successful at reaching iPhone Inquiries or iPhone billing or whichever department - our memory is becoming hazy - we're trying to reach.
It's not until 10 minutes and 48 seconds into the second call that we talk to “Victoria in Victoria”. Actually, the specific department in which Victoria is located is Residential Mobile Billing and Sales.
Victoria in Victoria has two qualities that at this stage of the process are a God-send. She has a sense of humour. She is also efficient. She takes the time to read the file, and look up the plans. She discovers that rather than being charged the up-front fee for the new iPhone plan we'd upgraded to, the Telstra billing system had hit us with the upfront fee for the plan we'd upgraded from.
She makes the necessary adjustment, as our time-wastage meter ticks over to 58 minutes.
Every day, technology offers us new and exciting ways of losing money. And - if you're dealing with Telstra - every day, it offers us new and not-particularly-exciting ways of losing time.
Posted by cw at 08:02 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
May 05, 2009
The uncomfortable world of Google economics
It seems only fair that newspapers shouldn't be the only ones threatened by Google and its reinvention of advertising, although the mass media, and particularly newspapers, are at this stage suffering most. As we write this, the Boston Globe has only just lurched away from the precipice, leaving its employees scarred and shaken.
The print media, and for that matter TV and radio, are going to find it increasingly hard to gain revenue when they cannot match the ability of Google Adwords to address the buyer at precisely the moment he is looking to purchase, and the Web is increasingly a medium for stealth advertising. But businesses who relied on them to get their message across, and the PR companies that, according to Jim Macnamara, have influenced or helped manufacture up to 80 per cent of the content of mass media - no wonder they're less relevant - and anyone who survives by selling to, or addressing others, are also going to have to adjust smartly to the new competitive world wrought by Google.
Today, having a bigger advertising and marketing budget than your competitor isn't the competitive advantage it used to be. If you understand the way search engines and Google AdWords work, you can get better results for considerably less than businesses which don't have that intelligence.
Small businesses can do particularly well in that environment, but it is by no means easy. About a week ago we took over the responsibility for Psychology Melbourne/Victoria Avenue Psychology, and the tiny amount of spare time we had has evaporated.
Suddenly we're grappling with the complexities of keywords and trying to write effective ads with a minimum of characters, to say nothing of constantly fine-tuning the Web site, which uses Joomla!, so that it's a part of the advertising dynamic and dabbling in the dark alchemical arts of converting some of those clicks to sessions ... to say nothing of getting a CRM package together to monitor everything.
We've only dipped a toe into the water so far, but already we can appreciate just how clever you have to be in this new age of online advertising. Fortunately, we've had some invaluable advice from Philip Shaw, at search engine marketing experts, CleverClicks, so the learning curve hasn't been quite as steep as it might have been, but even so, it's going to be months before we're at all competent.
It's a far cry from the days when you could write, or pay someone to write, an ad and shove it in the newspaper or have it read on air, and wait for customers to roll in. Today people don't read newspapers. They're more likely to be listening to podcasts or Tweeting or texting or whatever than listing to commercial radio or watching TV.
The small business owner has to devote a lot more time to understanding how to sell on the Internet - not at all the same as selling elsewhere - and mastering the dynamics of Web sites and online advertising and marketing and customer relations management. And if they don't, or they can't afford to pay someone to do it all for them, they're going to be visiting the precipice too.
Posted by cw at 08:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack