Archive for July, 2006

Too busy driving to ask why we’re going

Posted July 26, 2006 * Comments(0)

Stepping on to the bus in Birmingham, I encounter a scene I had more expected to find whilst travelling than at home: a lady is asking, in quite clear English, how she can contact lost property, as she has lost her bag. The driver stares at her blankly, clearly not understanding a word. It seems there is no hope until eventually the lady realises he is Polish: she starts speaking Czech and the matter is swiftly resolved.

I’m all in favour of a free and open labour market (anybody who thinks that being British gives them the automatic right to a job should be deported to India), but it might be fair to expect a bus driver to have a certain level of basic proficiency in the native language of the country in which he works. And yet he has been given the job. Why? Because the company that employs him does not consider customer service to be an important part of his role.

As anyone familiar with British public transport will testify, this is well-known and deeply engrained in the culture of these organisations. But I think that many hi-tech firms are guilty of the same sin. Just like the bus driver’s job is to drive, the programmer’s job is to program.

Tackling customer problems effectively is a challenging task that should surely be the focus of everyone in the organisation, not just those in customer-facing roles. Some take this idea further by by forcing the hackers out of their cave: employing the programming team to answer technical support queries, thus making the programmers share the users’ pain. I think this is an excellent idea, which promises to make real improvements to the usability of computer systems. Of course, it changes the job specification to have a much heavier emphasis on effective communication - but perhaps that’s not such a bad thing?

Starting up…

Posted July 8, 2006 * Comments(0)

On Monday, I should be the proud owner of Flukebox Ltd. It was actually surprisingly quick and easy, once I had actually read up on what all the legalese means. The Business Link website is generally very helpful, and outlines everything involved in starting a business. I felt that occasionally it didn’t go into enough detail, but a quick Google usually turned up plenty of information.

I registered the company at @UK PLC whose basic package, at £23.49 all-in, is actually cheaper than you can do it yourself, and much quicker - electronic filing can only be done using special software or via an agent, and paper forms take around 8 days to be processed. It seems a bit crazy that I can do something as important as incorporating a company without ever signing anything, but I guess signatures are fairly meaningless anyway. Hopefully we’ll be able to conduct the more mundane government interactions over the Internet soon.

Once the registration has gone through, I’ll be able to open a bank account. Abbey offer free business banking (forever), so long as you don’t pay in more than 100 cheques or £3000 of cash or make more than 100 withdrawals per month. I that’s unlikely to ever be a problem for us. Their charges for exceeding those limits aren’t exorbitant, so it would seem like a good deal for most small businesses.

Once I have a bank account, I can apply for VAT registration, which is just a matter of filling in the right form, which looks fairly straightforward. So that was all reasonably easy, now I just have accounting, tax and employment law to get my head around. Joy.

Another day, another fundamental flaw…

Posted July 2, 2006 * Comments(0)

In my last post, I explained how the key advantage that Flukebox offers is not offered by any of its consitutient technologies, but by their combination. This might be its downfall, because this combination of novel technologies leads to a relatively complex and unfamiliar product: difficult to build and difficult to explain. I have appreciated the former problem for some time and have been taking steps to tackle it, but I’ve yet to really crack the latter - and it is equally crucial.

I’m currently reading “Crossing the chasm: marketing and selling technology products to mainstream customers” by Geoffrey Moore. It’s perhaps jumping the gun slightly, as we don’t have any customers yet, let alone mainstream ones, but that’s where my aspirations lie so I figure it’s as well to keep an eye on the horizon, particularly as one of our closest competitors, Last.fm, seems to be stuck in the geek-phase and has yet to acheive mainstream exposure.

Perhaps this is why: it’s a pain to explain. “Well, it’s like this plugin for your media player that logs everything you play and then you can display that on your website and it will recommend artists you might like, and people who like the same things as you and then you can chat to them and listen to the music they like and…”. You get the picture.

Trouble is, Last.fm is probably quite simple compared to our offering. Essentially, it just recommends bands. The challenge that “Crossing the chasm” presents is to state why the idea is better than what people use already, and why we’re better than our competitors - that is, comparing, not just explaining. Oh, and you’ve got two short sentences to do it in.

This is where I will need some help. What services do you use to find music and gigs? What good about them? What’s bad about them? How do you think Flukebox might be better? Yes, I’ve heard it all before a hundred times, but I want to hear it again. Hit me with it.