A blog written by Kris Collins, father of twins and general technology fan! This blog will cover all aspects of project management, digital marketing and current online developments that I find interesting...
A rumour seems to be going round that Facebook is about to launch their long awaited location service. Initially slated for earlier in the year and delayed due to the on-going saga of privacy settings it now looks as though we may be ready to try out this new service.
Details are pretty shady at the moment about what exactly Facebook's new location service will be like, but it's likely the main way you'd share your location would be through your mobile device. This would obviously put it in direct (if not commercially competitive) competition with Google Latitude, Foursquare and Gowalla.
The real question people will be asking is how the service will be used to display advertising? Will the location service allow us to deliver adverts in a more targeted way by geo-location? Could be rather interesting if it can...
So, Google Wave is being withdrawn... not a huge surprise to people who have used it!
Announced in May 2009 Google Wave was expected to revolutionise the way we communication online, allowing for sharing of content and collaboration on projects it was described as "how e-mail would look if it were invented today" the closure has been blamed on poor take up.
I had an early invitation to Google Wave and quickly worked out that the new tool was not for me and apparently others have felt the same way... one to mark down for experience at Google!
We currently have 24 live digital signage screens across our five campuses at the University and they are a very valuable resources for us to push information out to all students very quickly. However, with another 12 coming online within the next few months what we don't know is, does anyone actually ever look at them?
So, we have now invested in some digital signage monitoring software that will allow us to measure if people are looking at the screens and for how long. A quick glance or a longer stare! The software works by using facial recognition to judge when a person is looking directly at the screen and tracks how long they look for. It also includes metrics on the gender of the person which is worked out with some clever judgement on face shape, hair style, height, etc and proves to be around 90% acurate.
In order to have the software running it needs to be installed on a small stand alone PC such as an EeePC and requires a webcam to be attached to the top of the screen you want to monitor. This then sends the information it gathers back to a hosted server that then displays the results via a dashboard display.
We looked at a couple of different solutions, Quividi, Wututu and CognoVision appeared to be the three leading companies and we eventually chose Wututu as our preferred supplier. As they all do very similar things it did become a costing exercise and Wututu was significantly cheaper!
It'll be an easy installation for us and when we start to receive some stats i'll make sure I post up the initial findings!
A video of how the software tracking looks can be seen below.
The rather nice bolt-on for Google Alerts is sadly no more, I had a short email message in my inbox this morning stating:
"Our investors have decided that Alertrank has not generated enough of a following to justify maintaining it as a free site. As a result, we will be terminating the site on July 15th."
We've been using the service as an addition to the paid for monitoring that we use on a daily basis as it can sometimes pick things that get overlooked.
Just a quick posting to say that the awards season is in full swing and that i'll be spending countless hours writing submissions and hopefully having my suit dry cleaned! Great visitor stats, increases in sign-ups and internal recognition is brilliant however, a nod from your peers at an awards ceremony can really help boost moral!
Good luck to anyone else entering, we might see you at the awards!
So, a quick update to the washing machine story... @gebu, who looks to be part of the french marketing arm of Hotpoint/Indesit, posted the instructions and manual on how to reset the machine within 3 hours, via Twitter! Brilliant!
The UK email service got back to me the following day... with the wrong information.
Time for me to have a mini moan about poor customer service, an annoyance for many people!
I had to move my Hotpoint washing machine this weekend and when I plugged it back in again the display language had changed to French! Although my knowledge of French washing terms will go through the roof i'd still like my language set back to English.
So, being keen I started to look online for the manual which I found pretty quickly, a 16 page PDF with no useful information in it at all.
So I checked online in the forums, plenty of people with the same issue but not a single response on how to fix the problem. Nothing from other users and more importantly, nothing from Hotpoint themselves...
Next, I thought i'd phone them (this is at 6pm on Saturday night) so I find the number for the information line but it's only open Mon - Fri 8.30am - 5.00pm!
My last resort... i'll email them. So, I sent off an email asking for help and I get the following reply:
"We will respond to your enquiry as soon as possible. However please allow a maximum of 5 working days before pursuing a reply if you have not heard from us."
Please don't chase us up for an answer until we've ignored you for at least five days?!
Now, I would class this as a pretty poor customer experience for me and i'm reasonably patient. What about the damage done to the Hotpoint brand by the unanswered questions on the forums, the lack of available documentation & FAQ's and the slow response to email enquiries? Poor online customer service is not really excusable in the times of automated monitoring systems and virtual advisors, especially from a company as large as Hotpoint.
Time to do things better Hotpoint... and will I get a reply to this posting?
