Online Recruitment - the bigger picture (Tim's blog)

The rise and rise of netbooks

Netbook sales continue to defy the economic downturn as reported in PCPRO and the Guardian, with predicted global sales of 30 million units in 2009.

Why is this interesting? Well, when we talked about mobile internet use in the past, I always imagined that phones would get bigger and cleverer, but actually PCs are getting smaller and cleverer and that (along with mobile broadband via dongles) is what's driving internet use on the move. I wonder when the boundary between smartphone and netbook will blur, who will produce the killer netbook/smartphone hybrid? As the Guardian observes, it's interesting to note the Apple aren't in the netbook market. Yet.

Samsung best netbook; HTC Touch best smartphone

If, like me, you've made a poor technology decision in the past, then it pays to read reviews before spending your hard earned money. With this in mind, I took a step into sheer geekdom and bought PC PRO magazine the other day on the promise of the UK's biggest review of netbooks and smartphones.

Unlike a lot of reviews that you'd read in the Sunday papers and stuff, PC PRO conduct their reviews using proper criteria and tests like battery life, processor speed and other serious things. The results are interesting, top of the netbook heap (the 'Lab winner') is the Samsung NC10 which will run for seven and a half hours, includes SD and MMC card readers and a 160 GB hard disk. PC PRO say the Samsung NC10 is "a pleasure to use...a superb netbook for the right price" (about £300).

The best value netbook is the Acer Aspire One which at £215 comes in significantly cheaper than the Samsung, the only downside from my point of view though is that is uses Linux rather than Windows as an operating system (which I'm sure most techies will say is fine, but the familiarity of Windows scores big for me).  PC PRO also recommend the Dell Inspiron Mini 9 through Vodafone which for £25 per month for two years comes with an embedded 3G connection meaning that you can go online where ever you are, even if there isn't a wireless network.

Interestingly, Web User magazine also rates the Samsung NC10 as the best netbook and highlights that the next generation of netbooks will include tablet style functionality that allows you to write notes on the screen with a pointer type thing and save these as text documents - maybe it's worth waiting for these?

The smartphone results are just as interesting with the HTC Touch HD coming out on top and the Apple iPhone not coming in the top three.

PC PRO gives the 18 month cost of an HTC at £685 and say that although it's "not as easy to use as the iPhone it's far more powerful" - for example it has double the iPhone's screen resolution and has a 5mp, rather than a 2mp, camera. For me though it almost looks too clever and could be one of those devices that I only ever use to 10% of it's capability, the result being that you carry something really expensive and clever around for no particular reason.

Other smartphones recommended are the Nokia E71 at £450 for 18 months and the Blackberry Bold 9000 at £630 for 18 months. One phone not recommended is the T-Mobile G1 which despite the Google operating system scores only two out of a possible six stars and is described as "old-fashioned" and having "creaky build quality".

With internet use becoming more and more mobile there's a real boom in handheld browsing devices, both in the form of smartphones and netbooks and although the iPhone is regarded as a killer device by some (including a lot of those that have one) it's interesting to note that when put to the test by some proper IT types, it's not one of the top three recommend phones.

So Samsung NC10 and HTC Touch HD it is then, but what do I listen to my tunes on?

IAB conference highlights - everything else

I had hoped to do lots of posts about the IAB conference, but things have rather conspired against me, so here's everything else that was good / worth mentioning.

Matt Mason, author of the Pirates Dilema, talked about 3D printers (that I first encountered in The Long Tail) and about how they were decreasing in size and cost. Currently he thought they were as cheap as £2,500 and getting cheaper. What would a 3D printer that could make trainers mean for Nike? What about a 3D printer that could print 3D printers? He also spoke about Novartis, the drug company that had re-branded as ethical by giving their drugs away (initially to counter piracy) in developing countries.

Jerry Yang from Yahoo! was deeply disappointing, maybe his mind was elsewhere?

There was quite a lot of stuff about web metrics and the value of measurement - someone said that using site centric metrics and not looking beyond your own site to gauge performance was like trying to judge the economy by looking at one company's share price, which I liked. Others discussed ways of evaluating social media and proposed that the number of complaint emails received by a client was a good way of judging levels of engagement in that area.

Sarah Messer from ITV pointed out that the role of the PC had changed from a business tool (used for word processing etc) to an entertainment tool and emphasised how TV and the internet can get along. Interestingly she also said that in 2007 the ITV X-Factor site offered advertisers 1 million ad impressions and this year they estimated it would give advertisers 70 million ad impressions - they're obviously doing something right.

Andy Burnham MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport was conscious of the need to protect children online - the internet needed a virtual equivalent of zebra crossings and a TV watershed - he also quoted a nine year old boy from a research project who said "I'm worried I'll get lost on the internet and end up with a job in the army"! He was concerned about behavioural targeting, the growing number of complaints about online ads and I got the feeling that although he said self regulation was the way forward for the online industry, what he actually meant was 'you better self regulate quickly and well, because if you don't then I'll do it for you and you won't like that'! He was also asked what his favourite ad was and said the Orangutan playing the drums - which not only is bad brand recall, but also bad species recall!

Finally futurologist Ian Pearson predicted that in the future you'd buy Coke and Pepsi in the supermarket to watch the bottles have a virtual fight in your trolley, we'd be able to replicate sensations using implants in skin by 2015, in 5 years time robots would be smarter than humans, in 15 years time watches would be smarter than humans and that the workplace would be feminised as the only things of any value that couldn't be done better by machines would be skills traditionally associated with women, like empathy and other softer people skills.

Right, I'm off to ask my robot what to have for lunch.

IAB conference highlights - Justin Billingsley

I went to the IAB Engage 2008 conference earlier in the week - I'll do a quick summary of the interesting stuff over the next week or so. Interestingly, I think I was the only person from the recruitment industry there (correct me if you were there and I missed you), which I think is a shame as it's a great opportunity to learn from people outside of our immediate space.

The undisputed highlight was a presentation from Justin Billingsley, Brand Director at Orange, he put the case for brands advertising 100% online and shared some great insights. He also presented in socks, having removed his shoes. Orange plays an interesting role in the market - advertiser, media owner and infrastructure provider, an interesting dilemma / opportunity.

He showed a graph that looked like Obama vs McCain voting intentions, but was actually search data on Obama and McCain from Google Trends - highlighting the importance of search as a social barometer. He shared some of his headaches - like when you search for 'Orange Broadband' on Google and O2 are top of the sponsored listings and Orange Problems are 4th in the natural listings - rather than viewing Orange Problems as a problem though, he said they regarded it as a privilege, a unique chance to listen to the bad stuff that was being said about them - an interesting lesson for employers and social media?

He also went through the Spot the Bull and GlastoNav sites / applications - GlastoNav allowed visitors to Glastonbury to let their friends know where they were during the festival and was downloaded by one in nine people that went (and 40% of these weren't from the Orange network).

Justin also included a couple of things that hadn't worked so well, such as Orange's island in second life, which he said didn't adhere to their three rules of web activity - 'answer, entertain or provide utility' - you can't do anything better or faster on the Orange second life island, so it didn't work for them.

He went on to talk about the 'I am' campaign and how search terms could replace URLs on offline media (which apparently is common in Japan and South Korea) and how he expected more brands to adopt this technique - imagine a recruitment ad with 'search for office jobs' instead of a URL?

Finally he shared the Orange marketing department's new blog - the Feed - which is well worth a read. Overall a great presentation, but as Justin said, he does have the best people and the best agencies, he loves Poke, so to some extent his job is easy!

More about the conference later, this post seems long enough already!

Websites getting smaller; TVs thinner

New research from IDC shows that Netbooks now account for 10% of PC sales in Europe. This is significant as Netbooks, such as the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, typically have a screen size of between 7 and 9 inches, about half the size of conventional laptop or desktop screens for which most websites are designed for. I know the whole internet looks dreadful on my pocketsurfer and that site designers are taking into account mobile devices when developing new sites, but I think that Netbook screens might be an even more significant development and that all sites will have be designed with these in mind.

On another note, if the credit crunch has left you with any money then this might be worth saving for - a TV that's 1cm wide - should be in the UK next year from about £3,500.

That joke isn't funny anymore

Things were getting a bit gloomy yesterday, what with all this talk of glue kids and FTSE collapses, so I thought I'd lighten the mood. Here's one of those Microsoft ads that, according to Web User magazine and lots of other people, no one likes. Judge for yourself.

Setanta 1 Sky 0

I made two changes to my satellite subscriptions last night, one was easy, the other a nightmare. I finally succumbed to Setanta, lured by the promise of England games, FA Cup and Fulham vs Arsenal on Saturday. Signing up to Setanta couldn't have been easier, I did it via their site in about 5 minutes and even got the first 3 months for half price. 20 minutes later I was basking in the glory of England U21 vs Slovenia U21 and trying to tell the difference between Setanta Sports News and Sky Sports News.

I also decided to cancel my Sky multiroom (£10 a month to get Sky in a second room) after I worked out that I only ever watched terrestrial channels in that room anyway. If subscribing to Setanta was a dream then cancelling something with Sky was a nightmare. I naturally tried to do it online through 'My Sky', unfortunately the useful bit of the site was down for maintenance, other pages kept timing out, so I gave up.

I then phoned Sky at 8.45pm, held in a queue for 16 minutes and then when I got through to someone at 9.01pm they said that the 'partial cancellations' department closed at 9pm and I'd have to call back tomorrow. At this stage I kicked up a bit of a stink, asked how much the phone call had cost me etc. The lady on the phone then said that actually the 'total cancellations' department might be able to help after all. I held for them for an extra 10 minutes. In fairness, the chap I got through to in the end was very helpful and made the cancellation straight away. In total though I'd spent 34 minutes on the phone - Sky's policy seemed to be to keep those wishing to cancel stuff waiting for as along as possible in order to recoup some of the lost money via phone charges or to make them give up completely (I don't actually know if they make any money via the phone calls, so could be wrong, but it certainly smelled fishy to me).

Don't get me wrong, I love Sky TV, it's a fantastic service, but surely if they can get one part of the business so right, why can't they avoid getting the other part so wrong?

Will I ever learn?

I think I might be addicted to gadgets. I now want one of these. Surely it might be better than the Pocket Surfer? The fastest ever selling electrical item on Amazon.com, all those Americans can't be wrong!

Still, at least I didn't spend my Friday trying to get one of these!

PocketSurfer2 too

I really, really want one of these. I know it's wrong, but I still want one.

On the upside they're as little as £149 online and 20 hours internet use is included every month for the first year, so there's no contract, no bills etc. The device uses an inbuilt SIM and the Orange GPRS network to deliver web pages as they look on a PC / laptop etc. This means that you can go online wherever you can get an Orange signal, you don't need to be in a WiFi zone etc. The clever bit is that it also uses some kind of compression technology to speed up delivery (that also involved caching pages on the company's servers in Canada). You can also use it abroad for £15 per hour / 25p a minute.

On the downside it's another thing to carry around and essentially only does one thing - view the web - you can't upload photos, download attachments etc. You also can't watch video online. There's also an argument to say that with more and more free WiFi springing up that soon it doesn't matter where you are, you'll still be able to go online. Also the mouse is controlled by cursor buttons (like the Nokia N95) which apparently can be a bit fiddly.

Having said all that, I still want one, it would have been the ideal solution to my holiday dilemma over Easter, you can take the internet with you, but don't have to cart your precious laptop around etc. I'll let you know if I buy one, hopefully it will be more successful than my solar powered mobile phone charger - which is frankly rubbish!

Video killed the internet (star)

As Buggles so accurately predicted in 1979, video can cause problems for existing media channels and what was true for the radio star back then is true for the internet now.

This is best explained in this great Guardian article and also here. It seems that the infrastructure that we use to go online (copper wires in most cases) just wasn't built for the levels of data transfer that downloading videos / watching TV online requires. The trend for this type of online content has caused the bandwidth used online to grow exponentially over the last couple of years and as the Guardian reports in 2007 YouTube apparently took up as much bandwidth as the whole internet did in 2000.

The obvious risk of this is that the internet grinds to a halt and that however quick your broadband connection is supposed to be you will only ever achieve dial up speeds, making doing all the stuff we're used to doing online impossible. This could obviously also have a massive impact on government and business as well as individuals. The solution is to replace copper wires with fibre optic cables, but as BT say this could be up to 20 years away in the UK.

I wonder if we'll come to regard bandwidth in the way that we think about energy / green issues now? Don't use any unnecessary bandwidth, do you really need to watch that video again? Does the trend for mobile internet dongles help, after all surely data delivered to these connections is delivered through the air in a kind of magical way, rather than down a copper wire? There are some more articles here and here - I didn't go through the first one in 100% detail, but it uses the word 'Petabytes' which I hadn't heard before and sounds cool.

PS - Apologies for not blogging much recently, I've been shockingly busy, I always think the irony of business blogging is that you probably have most to say when you have the least time to say it.

PPS - Typepad has changed, the good news is that links now open in new windows, the bad news is that it seems strange and clunky, I imagine we'll all get used to it?