Here at Rochester & Associates Ltd, we take time to review our purchasing procedures to make sure it is a simple matter to buy from us. Clients simply make a phone call and we’ll do the rest.

Sadly this seems to be not the normal procedure with some companies. 

I have been dealing with a company, who’s main product is fantastic; unfortunately our experience is that it’s very difficult to actually get any information or quotes from them.

As an example, it’s just taken them 7 days to get my request for a new sale to the correct person to deal with it. That’s before we’ve even got anywhere near delivering a quote. 6 people were in the chain before I got to someone who took ownership and provided some information.

If that sounds bad, I would point out that we are a reseller, and are going through the official channels!

Experiences like this make me look to our own internal procedures to make sure we’ve got a much more streamlined approach, and that there is appropriate technology in place to deal with messages, tasks and follow-ups.

This means that we are usually in a place to make sure things get dealt with in an appropriate manner.

Rocket Science perhaps?

Nope!

Just a good eye to the details of what needs to happen in the sales pipeline.
The needs of the clients.
An overview of the customer experience, and the application of technology to hold and deliver the information upon need.

CRM & Voicemail anyone?

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  Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear.
Mahatma Gandhi

The Advertising Standards Authority – those custodians of our delicate sensibilities in the UK – are “currently assessing these complaints and will consider whether or not there are grounds for an investigation.” over Apple’s claims of the capabilities of the iPad 4.

This after Apple offers refunds to ‘misled Australian iPad customers’ – read “Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission took Apple to the Federal Court for false advertising over its “iPad with Wi-Fi + 4G” promotion, because the popular tablet device does not work on the local 4G frequency.”

Won’t work on the UKs 4G network either as the 4G ‘LTE’ bit is only supported on some networks in the USA and Canada.

For those who don’t know (or care! ) 4G is the next ‘Super Fast’ broadband on the mobile network – Internet from the same people bringing you mobile phone calls.

It amuses me how the simple changing of a couple of words softens the impact of a sentence: Apple ‘misled’ customers. Read ‘Lied to’.

Apple said it would not comment on its discussions with the regulator, but a source at the company insisted that no undertaking was given to remove all references to 4G from its site. Funny how it’s decided to refund customers complaining though…

In the sad aftermath of Steve Jobs leaving us there have been many questions over the future of Apple ~ and many pundits pointing to the dramatic fall of the company when he left the company.

One of the tenets of the Apple company was ‘Lighter, Thinner’ referring to the characteristics of new iterations of the products, but this was not the case with the iPad4 ~ something else that the pundits are pointing to.

Read more about this at the BBC website here - iPad ’4G’ claims face scrutiny from UK regulator

Personally? I guess it’s not the first time a company has lied to the public and I guess it’s not the last, but it’s going to be an interesting spectacle to watch what happens to Apple in the next few years. Microsoft survived the leaving of Bill Gates ~ can Apple survive the departure of Steve Jobs? 

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Today Google have launched a free service allowing you to have up to 5Gb of online storage.

Named Google Drive, this is in direct competition to the ‘Dropbox‘ service already out there.

This will allow you to upload files and share them with friends, in the examples provided they site collaborative projects such as planning a wedding, or tracking budgets with room mates. Obviously no mention of allowing illegal movies to be shared à la Megaupload.

They are also incorporating their search technology in to the service allowing you to upload pictures of your holiday and then seeing them come up as search results the next time you search for a keyword. Again, the example illustrated says you can upload pictures of your trip to the Grand Canyon and then see them displayed as results if you search for ‘Grand Canyon’.

This goes a step further though; if you upload a scan of a newspaper clipping about something, the Google technology will have used OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to allow you to search for the contents of that article as if it were an electronic document.

I wonder how long before we start seeing the first legal challenges over the nature of the content uploaded – I’ll give it 6 months at most; Call my cynical… 

Here’s the official Google Blog post on the whole thing…

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Security experts at Alien Vault have unearthed a couple of Trojans targeting Macs.

It looks like the old security flaw of pretending to be a legitimate Word or Excel document, then activating once the document is opened. This in turn opens up a ‘back door’ to allow all sorts of nastiness in and all sorts of loveliness out.

There goes all those juicy credit card details then…

In this case the trojans were programmed to open up communications with a server in China, and were discovered on Macs belonging to Tibetan NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations), prompting some discussion over the authors political motivations.

What is interesting here (probably only to geeks like me!) is that these Trojans were revealed to carry a multi platform delivery method aimed at both Mac and PCs, identifying the target machine and delivering the appropriate payload. This is interesting because it means that all the great virus stories of the last few years may well be relived in the Mac world.

Remember the “I Love You” virus and the Sasser worm? 
Maybe you are not quite as sad as I am to remember!

I am firmly in the camp that PCs are much more secure than Macs ~ years of constant attacking has hardened most PCs. On the Mac front, they have been left untested in battle for years and are now seen as a soft target.

Mark my words – this is only going to get worse!

SHAMELESS SELL – The security software we resell covers Macs and PCs, call us for a quote! 

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 The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.
Plato

As you may or may not know, Royal Mail have announced a massive increase in the price of stamps. A first-class stamp is going from 46p to 60p and a second-class stamp will go up from 36p to 50p on the 30^th April.

This comes after Ofcom (www.ofcom.org.uk The independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries.) lifted some of the price restrictions on Royal Mail.

Everyone I have spoken to are shocked by the amount that the prices have raised; most saying that they will make changes to the way that they send things out. Bear in mind that these people are the business leaders in Leeds, Bradford and the wider arena of Yorkshire ~ a worrying sentiment.

Again it will be the poor consumer that bears the brunt of this price hike.

I find myself thinking that this wont produce the results they envisage, but will strengthen resolve amongst businesses to use a different carrier. Something we at R&A did quite some time back.

For us it was the constant strikes that pushed us (and quite a large % of our clients) to using alternative options for delivery of mail – we simply implemented a paperless office approach and now use the email systems and the Internet to fulfil most of our needs. PDF invoiced mailed to clients ~ “Simples!”

Is the writing on the wall for the Royal Mail?
Only time will tell…

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