An interesting article on mindmapping in project management

Here’s an interesting article on the use of mind mapping software for project management purposes.

It’s a pretty useful site in general - to quote their blurb, it’s

a focused, growing collection of the best resources on business innovation, creativity and brainstorming.

And as a bonus, here’s a link to their RSS feed!

Free wifi and margins - why I pay more for orange juice than airtime

Monday’s posting about the offline wifi directory seems to have started me off on a bit of a theme. For various reasons, I was over in Leeds for most of the day today, and needed to get web and email access several times. Depending on where I am and what I’m doing, this could involve a GPRS connection from a PDA, or wifi using my Powerbook. The first can happen pretty much anywhere, while the second needs (obviously!) a hotspot.

The last few times I’ve been in Leeds I’ve ended up using a T-Mobile hotspot in Starbucks, mainly because it’s the least-gouging of the prices that are available. This morning was no exception, so I duly laid out £6 for an hour, drank one grande Americano and moved on.

Then later in the day - by pure chance - I happened to be in a large chain hotel on the other side of the city needing web access. I was about to grit my teeth and pay another £5 or so when to my utter astonishment I discovered that the hotspot was open - free - no payment required.

The net effect of this was that I stayed in their cafe for a little over two and a half hours, drank two coffees, and an orange juice and ate a sandwich. It cost me far more than it would have done in paid wifi time, but the hotel was way ahead in the deal - they’d just sold a number of high-margin items from their catering outlet at a time when it would normally be virtually empty. If I’d been charged for the wifi time they would have been lucky to sell me more than a coffee, and they might have made a few pennies on the wifi charge if they had a particularly good deal with the hotspot provider.

Which got me wondering. The marginal cost of my using the wifi for that length of time was precisely zero - the bandwidth would have been there regardless of whether I was using it or not. The cost of the hotspot hardware is virtually negligible in the grand scheme of things, so all-in-all it cost absolutely nothing for me to use the service. Yet the hotel will have made a substantial margin on what I ate and drank, and will make more the next time I head back there with others in tow. So why is free wifi so unusual in the UK? Why are hotels, cafes and the like not realising that they stand to make far more by giving away the service than they could ever make by charging? After all, supermarket retailers have been using loss-leaders like petrol to pull in additional marginal gains for years, so why is the hospitality trade so different in their outlook?

Free wifi and margins - why I pay more for orange juice than airtime

Monday’s posting about the offline wifi directory seems to have started me off on a bit of a theme. For various reasons, I was over in Leeds for most of the day today, and needed to get web and email access several times. Depending on where I am and what I’m doing, this could involve a GPRS connection from a PDA, or wifi using my Powerbook. The first can happen pretty much anywhere, while the second needs (obviously!) a hotspot.

The last few times I’ve been in Leeds I’ve ended up using a T-Mobile hotspot in Starbucks, mainly because it’s the least-gouging of the prices that are available. This morning was no exception, so I duly laid out £6 for an hour, drank one grande Americano and moved on.

Then later in the day - by pure chance - I happened to be in a large chain hotel on the other side of the city needing web access. I was about to grit my teeth and pay another £5 or so when to my utter astonishment I discovered that the hotspot was open - free - no payment required.

The net effect of this was that I stayed in their cafe for a little over two and a half hours, drank two coffees, and an orange juice and ate a sandwich. It cost me far more than it would have done in paid wifi time, but the hotel was way ahead in the deal - they’d just sold a number of high-margin items from their catering outlet at a time when it would normally be virtually empty. If I’d been charged for the wifi time they would have been lucky to sell me more than a coffee, and they might have made a few pennies on the wifi charge if they had a particularly good deal with the hotspot provider.

Which got me wondering. The marginal cost of my using the wifi for that length of time was precisely zero - the bandwidth would have been there regardless of whether I was using it or not. The cost of the hotspot hardware is virtually negligible in the grand scheme of things, so all-in-all it cost absolutely nothing for me to use the service. Yet the hotel will have made a substantial margin on what I ate and drank, and will make more the next time I head back there with others in tow. So why is free wifi so unusual in the UK? Why are hotels, cafes and the like not realising that they stand to make far more by giving away the service than they could ever make by charging? After all, supermarket retailers have been using loss-leaders like petrol to pull in additional marginal gains for years, so why is the hospitality trade so different in their outlook?

Linksys WAG54G

About a month ago I bought a Belkin ADSL Modem With Built-In Wireless Router (yup, that’s what it’s called) after my previous Belkin WAP blew up. At the time I thought it was a reasonably good piece of kit, and blogged something to that effect - however, the long-term opinion is exactly the opposite.

Despite the fact that it was sat no more than 10 feet away (and in direct line of sight) from my Powerbook, I started having real trouble with the Powerbook just dropping off the network for no apparent reason. One second it would be fine with five bars of signal, the next it would be sat there twirling the Spinning Beachball Of Death while the connection timed out. Stopping and starting the Airport card sometimes worked, but often it would be time for a reboot, which is about as close as it gets to heresy in Mac-land.

Then the Belkin box started dropping the ADSL connection, which is something that’s never happened previously - it’s always been rock-solid. Sometimes firing up a reconnection from the admin interface would work, other times not - so the usual solution was a power-down and restart. Which is not what should have to happen.

Yesterday I got so pissed off with it, I banged it back in the box (subconsciously I must have known there was going to be a problem, because I hadn’t got around to throwing the box out) and marched back over to PC World from whence it came, fully expecting a fight because I’d owned it more than 30 seconds and had left the store with it.

To my utter amazement PC World took it back without a murmer - so I ended up walking out with a Linksys WAG54G, which they’ve knocked £50 in a promotion. The fact that it should have been £70 more expensive than the Belkin box shows - it’s way more capable than the Belkin - there’s VPN tunnel termination built-in, WAN administration that works, and full SNMP support, not that I’d ever use that. The downside is that it’s hideous - a great big blue-and-black box with a full-size twig on the back, but it does seem to work - so far I’ve had absolutely no problem with it whatsoever, in exactly the same situation as the Belkin was giving me grief. Although these might be famous last words, so watch this space this time next month…

Notebook ScreensavRZ

Although it doesn’t spend much time in a bag, my Powerbook does suffer from the oily-keyboard-marks-on-screen problem - obviously my paws are too sweaty for the keyboard to remain clean. Up to now, I’ve been using some left-over screenwipes that got half-inched from two or three jobs past, but these haven’t been particularly useful, mainly because the marks reappear every time I close the lid again.

So I invested £10 or so in a Notebook ScreensavRZ, not without a few ‘what on earth have I done’ second thoughts after I’d clicked the ‘Order’ button - after all, it’s a lot of money for a glorified tissue. However, I can report that my scepticism was unfounded - they really are as good as the blurb on the website says. My screen is now as clean as it was out of the box, and shows every sign of staying that way - because the ScreensavRZ (stupid name, but hey) sits between the screen and the keyboard, it’ll keep the marks off hopefully permanently.

Some initial impressions of the iRiver iHP-140

Hardware
It’s well-screwed together, but it’s a different approach to the iPod - Apple seem to be taking the streamlined ‘no external protrusions’ approach, whereas the iRiver is much more knobbly and bumpy. At first glance it looks a bit tacky, but once you pick it up, it seems fairly robust. The screen on the remote control is the wrong way up, but a quick fiddle with a screwdriver fixed that - it’s secured by two screws on the inside of the case. It’s pleasantly hand-sized, and not so heavy that it’s a problem keeping it in a pocket.

Operation
The external remote control can do everything that the main control panel can do - in fact I’ve found it easier to drive the iRiver from the remote than to use the main controls. I don’t find the joystick particularly easy to use - it’s shiny enough for your finger to slip off, and I find myself clicking it in when I wanted to move it. As a result, I tend to nudge it from the side.

The start-up time is about 30 seconds - I hadn’t realised that there would be a lag, which was a bit of a pain at first. Now it’s just something you get used to.

And I now understand why shuffle mode is wonderful. It’s made me realise just how damn eclectic my music is - although then again I’ve never really seen the point in getting obsessive about playlists.

PC / Mac integration

Not integrating with iTunes is a bit of a pain, but not so much that it would change my mind about using the thing. I’ve set up a rsync script to duplicate the contents of my iTunes directory direct to the external disk, so it’s not much of an inconvenience. But it’s not something that Great Aunt Agatha would be too keen on doing, I suspect. And the Mac also drops ‘._’ files all over the place, which the iRiver interprets as files, and tries to play, which causes a couple of seconds delay before it skips over onto the next track.

It shows up as a disk drive in Finder with no problem at all, and acts just like a diskdrive. So Chronosync works fine, and I’ve now got me a 40Gb backup drive…

USB 2 seems pretty fast, but no doubt Firewire would be even better.

The DRM on iTunes is now getting in the way of my listening to music that I’ve purchased in the way that I want to, which is annoying. Doubly annoying that Hymn doesn’t work on a Mac without an iPod, so I’ve had to install a copy of iTunes on my server so I can use it there. I’ve bought the damn music, let me listen to it on the box of my choice!

Sound quality
Sound quality is fantastic as far as my ears are concerned, and there’s more EQ settings than I’m ever going to need. I can’t speak for the supplied earbuds, because I’m using my Sonys - but there’s more than adequate thump and tish to be had. Not that I’m going to start waxing lyrical about the chocolatey-velvetness of the midrange being caressed by an aftertaste of raisins and cinnamon as the hifi pseuds are wont to do…

Conclusions

Functionality-wise, it’s way, way ahead of the iPod. It’s a dictaphone / HDD recorder, radio and disk drive as well as being a music player. That’s something that iPods need to catch up on - looks aren’t everything.

Royksopp - Remind Me

A mad Royksopp video that looks like an animated airline safety instruction card - Remind Me

How much traffic Odious Cinemas are losing

I know I keep banging on about the Odious Cinemas webshite, but this piece caught my eye in a big way. Via Isolani, an analysis of just how popular the accessible version was:

31 percent of Odeon’s traffic was generated by visitors using the accessible version of the website. Now that’s astonishing.

Astonishing is about the word for it. And as far as I can see it’s cast-iron positive proof that Luke “Don’t know a good thing when it points out where my website has gone wrong” Vetere and his marketing droids clearly haven’t got the slightest clue about what they’re doing - to cut off 31% of traffic to your transactional website is utterly, gibberingly, howling-at-the-mooningly mad.

BBC: Powergen fined for hogging market

BBC: Powergen fined for hogging market

Not to mention the countless others that they prevented from switching through their sheer, stubborn, couldn’t-give-a-toss-about-the-customer incompetence…

The Odious Cinemas saga goes global

Wired: Changing the face of web surfing