My experience with Voda recently involved them conning me out of money on the one hand and refusing to take my money on the other. It is truly a company that hasn’t the vaguest clue what its customers want.

In November I realised they were gouging me for a 15MB data plan at €8 when they also offered a 500MB data plan for the same money. I cancelled one and ordered the other. As they cannot help themselves when it comes to screwing customers, they did the cancellation immediately but did not enable the new plan until Dec 15th. I then received a bill for €289 which was mainly data charges.

It appears I’m not the only one who has been snared by this since a short conversation (with lots of time on hold) to customer service got me a full refund with no acceptance of guilt on their part and dire warnings to use Vodafone Live as my access point or it would happen again.

Which brings us to the second part of this sad tale where we move from ripping the customer off to just good old fashioned incompetence and misleading advertising.

So I’m signed up for 500MB “Mobile Internet”. None of the text or links on the entire purchase flow indicate ANY special terms and conditions on this plan. Silly me, it appears that as long as Voda have some Ts and Cs buried on a page somewhere on their site, they can get away with false advertising.

This “Mobile Internet” is nothing of the sort. It is some 20th Century walled-garden bullcrap with an internet makeover. From what I can gather on Jaiku, they insist on “Live” being used as the access point because they have no ability to meter on “Voda ISP”. That’s just laughable.

I tried using this joke of an access point on Thursday. My results using the phone browser:

• Cannot log on to GMail
• Cannot log on to Jaiku
• Cannot log on to Twitter
• Cannot use Jaiku Mobile app
• Cannot use Fring IM app

Vodafone Live is not an internet connection, it is a bastardized hamstrung http proxy and the Advertising Standards Authority should come down on them like a ton of bricks.

But it gets even more ridiculous than that. I rang Voda to ask how I make use of the HSDPA 3.5G feature on my brand-spanking new N95-8GB (which I bought from them). I wanted to get their “broadband” package for it so I’d have 5GB for €14.99/€29.99 a month. The reply? They cannot provide this service!!!!! If I sign up for “broadband”, it is an entirely separate account for one of the sperm modems with a separate SIM. “Well you could put the new SIM in the N95, but of course then you can’t receive voice calls”. Well actually I could if you let me use VOIP on it, but you don’t.

I think I know what is going on here. Separate business units run “mobile internet” and “broadband” and they cannot figure out how to integrate the billing and/or metering. In other words they are a deeply dysfunctional organisation in terminal decline that sells devices it isn’t even capable of supporting.

To add insult to injury, I discovered that the Vodafone Live access point does work at 3.5G. It’s a pity none of the sites or applications that I use every day are actually accessible on it.

So here is my offer to Vodafone – I want to give you €29.99 a month. I want to use HSDPA on my phone. I want to use my phone as a modem for my laptop. I want access to every single site on the internet (no that doesn’t just mean the web) and I want no limitations on ports, protocols or payload. Wake up, smell the coffee and take my money in a honest transparent way. If you cannot figure out how to provide me with this, you’ll be a footnote in history like blacksmiths when the Model T took over.

This isn’t a huge amount of work (time-scale is over the next few weeks and effort is probably less than a person-week), does not require design expertise and would suit anyone between major contracts or looking for a nice side project to exercise their mark-up muscles. There will probably be future opportunities for follow-on work.

We use a templating system called Kid but it is very straightforward and requires minimal learning effort. You can be located anywhere worldwide since we are based in Cork Ireland and you’ll be working with developers in the UK and Sweden.

If this sounds interesting please contact me on conor at argolon DOT com. Alternatively, if you know of anyone that this might suit, then please forward it on to them. Ideally we are looking for someone who can start yesterday!

Imagine if the guys had provided all the wifi for free yesterday? They could still use the logon screens so they get the branding opportunities but it would have been such a coup! Maybe an idea for some of the upcoming European conferences?

Or maybe offer it non-free to most people and free as usual to FONeros with the strong message that if you become a FONero, you’ll get it free at the next conference

Hey Antoin – how about a trial run at the Irish Blog Awards on March 3rd?

The latest slap in the face for existing customers is their Smart2Go application (as reported in The Register)which looks really impressive by providing mapping and route planning on your phone. Whilst they fully support all “Generic Windows Mobile 5″ devices, they only support five of their own most recent phones. It’s amazing that I have to go to a Nokia site to find the best ad ever for buying a Microsoft powered phone.

Those Compact III Windows Mobile 5 devices from Vodaphone UK (made by HTC) look really really good – built in keyboard, Wifi and only £260 on eBay unlocked. If they had GPS they’d be perfect. Oh, and of course they run Smart2Go.

Ideally I want something that has decent navigation capabilities within a podcast. If I could bookmark my positions in individual MP3s so I could quickly return to where I was listening, that would be awesome too. No, the FF button is not sufficient.

The old Tungsten T is actually a better device for playing MP3s, particularly in the car due to the bigger buttons. I use the Real Player on it and it had the potential to be very good. Sadly it looks like they are not doing any development on it. I tried a few other MP3 players on the Palm but the UIs were designed by people who clearly never use their own products. I’m surprised no-one built a player for the Palm that emulates the iPod UI using the touch-sensitive screen.

What kills me about the TT is that it is still a great piece of hardware and a tactile delight but the lack of memory (16 MB) means that no new software supports it. Browsing the web using Opera Mini on it rather than on the N70 would be an infinitely better user experience. But there is no JVM for the TT so no Opera. A TT with Opera using bluetooth to the N70 would be a joy.

I’ve come to the conclusion that my next handheld device (whether phone or PDA or both combined) has to have a touch screen. I’d almost be tempted by the iPhone apart from [a] it’s an Apple [b] it’s completely locked down [c] it doesn’t have 3G [d] it only has one button.

I had a look at Lifedrives and TXes on eBay but they are still silly money. I could get a Dell Axim for far less money (anyone have experience of the Axims and their music playing abilities?). Tom showed me his Smartphone on Sunday – a Voda branded HTC job with touchscreen and Wifi. Only £150 on eBay. I’ve a feeling I may go down that route eventually and finally sadly say goodbye to Palm.

Any tips at all? Any comments telling me to buy an iPod will be spiked

Technorati Tags: MP3, podcast, Nokia, N70, Nokia+N70, music+player, Palm, Tungsten+T, Realplayer

I did finally manage to order the free router by signing up with a dummy account using the same postal address as my real account. It just arrived, five weeks later. So I take it all back, those FON guys are straight up and I remain a big fan of the idea. Hopefully someone in Kensington in London has one so I get free wifi in my hotel when I’m at FoWA.

Technorati Tags: FON, Fonero, FOWA, router, wifi, community

There are no commonalities between IE7 and FF apart from one – Sun’s JRE. I’d recently installed the latest v6 JDK. Sure enough when I uninstalled it and went back to v1.5.0_09, all was well with both Firefox and Internet Explorer. I’m not sure who to blame with this, ROS or Sun. To be fair to ROS, they have been very standards compliant over the years and are still using a Baltimore Security Applet from many moons ago so my guess is that Sun have broken something.

If you get the auto-upgrade message from Java for v6 and you use ROS, decline the upgrade.

Technorati Tags: ROS, Revenue, Revenue+Online, Sun, Java, J2SE, J2SE+6, Firefox, IE7

A few simple tips for the Revenue: Put the name and direct line of the person who sent us the letter on everything you send us in addition to a reference number. Also put the name and number of the person who is job sharing with them. Spend a few euro and send all of your switchboard operators on a training course which cover the meaning of the phrases “public servant”, “customer service” and “manners”. Rather than the nonsensical “which department do you want?”, why not train them to ask “what is your query in regard to?” and “do you have a reference number?”.

Is the work of junior staff checked by supervisors? It was clear within moments of talking to someone competent in there that the missive we received from you today was entirely in error. You’ve just wasted 3 person hours of Argolon’s valuable time. Should we receive a tax rebate for that?

Finally, perhaps you’ve heard of decentralisation? Why then does a Cork based company with Cork based directors receive incorrect paperwork from Dublin? If you’re going to send us incorrect paperwork, I’d prefer to get it from Cork. We finally got to the very helpful Benjamin in the Cork office who sorted us out in no time. BTW, give Ben a promotion.

Yours Sincerely,
Conor O’Neill
Managing Director
and Customer, Cork South West Revenue District

Technorati Tags: Revenue+Commissioners, Customer+Service, decentralisation

We were dead in the water for a week the last time. We’ve been crawling for 24 hours this time. BT needs to do something now about LLU or the Wimax boys will eat their dinner when it is rolled out.

Technorati Tags: Boradband, ireland, BT, Eircom, Cowboys, Amateurs, Third+World+Service, Shameless

This is a lovely idea which obviously only starts working really well with a certain critical mass. It takes the subsidised boxes and some early adopters to seed the thing but looking at the map of Ireland, I see some activity. There are even installs in Ballydehob and Skibbereen. There is one other location listed in Bandon (Grove Leisure Club) but the icon does not show it as active.

Setup involved plugging it into the back of our existing Linksys router and powering it up. It provides two networks – one for sharing which has no access to your own LAN and one private encrypted one for your own use. I have heard no reports of it causing any security issues.

Even tho the price is now €29.95 incl P&P but plus VAT, it is still a bargain for a wireless router and the reality for most people is that the amount of sharing they will be doing is minimal.

Technorati Tags: FON, Bandon, Ireland

I finally bit the bullet a few weeks ago and turned off sxore due to the serious bugs and lack of development on the important features of the system. This meant that all comments from the “sxore era” disappeared off this blog. This annoyed me sufficiently that I spent the odd spare minute between business plan iterations fiddling around with some code to get my content back.

Last night I finally cracked it and pulled all of the sxore comment data into WordPress. I haven’t programmed in anger in a very long time and it was frankly embarrassing trying to do even the simplest things. Programming is not like riding a bicycle, it is more like playing the piano – without practice, that part of your brain bit by bit becomes dull. Still, it was a bit of fun which provided some distraction when the numbers in the financial spreadsheets all started swimming before my eyes. Let me know if you spot any major glitches.

The script will:

• Insert comment_content into wordpress
• Insert comment_author into wordpress
• Insert comment_date into wordpress
• Insert author_url into wordpress

Outstanding issues include:

• Seeing some blank comments in sxore which are not imported (not sure if we have data loss there)
• Seeing some comments with no date in sxore which are marked with the date of the previous comment
• No ability to retrieve email addresses of commenters
• No ability to “thread” comments
• comment_date_gmt set to same as comment_date

If you are in the same boat that I was and wish to revert to standard WordPress comments, then I’m happy to share the code (despite its shocking dreadfulness). The script is written in Python so you will need to install that to run it. I highly recommend Activestate Python, not just because it is a good distro but also because it is very ironic. It also requires the MySQLdb extension and the Beautiful Soup extension.

One of the taglines for our new venture is “your data on your site under your control”. If only I had realised the importance of that line back in April, I could have avoided a lot of wasted time and effort.

Technorati Tags: sxore, sxore_remover, sxore+remove, Python

Technorati Tags: Skype, Moo

I have always liked the idea of sits like RentACoder and Elance for small bits of work but had never tried them. Anthony, down in Ummera, recently asked me for advice on a site re-design he was considering. In particular, he wanted to get rid of frames. One “expert” he encountered had offered to do the work, some SEO, some “links” and a few other trivial things and wanted well over a grand for the work. I thought it was crazy money and told him to have a look at Elance. He liked what he saw, put up a description of the work he wanted, got 14 replies and had exactly what he was looking for done in less than a week for €100 by some guys in India.

Due to his success, I decided to take this route for the logo on the basis that it may not be the one we launch with but at least it will look nice. I described the basic idea and the company name and some simple thoughts we had ourselves and within 24 hours had 11 bids ranging from €70 to €200. Most of them were clustered around the €100 mark and locations ranged from India to USA to Argentina back to Ireland.

In this case, the selection process was quite easy as we did it on the basis of the portfolios. In general the Indian ones were overly fussy and too detailed. The one that really leaped out at us was the Argentinian portfolio. They have a very strong theme to their design and you almost know that the work has a latin origin. Within four days they had the proposals back to us. Most of the vendors promise 4-6 samples and then infinite revisions on the one you pick. From what I can see they (quite reasonably) put all the effort into two whilst the others are pretty much throwaway. We loved the first option, got a few tiny tweaks and will have the final work in the next day or two.

I’m now completely sold on this idea and highly recommend it to anyone looking for low value, fast turn-around work. In fact, from now on, anytime I think I’ll do a bit of work on something, I’ll do an ROI on my time first and may shoot it over to Elance instead.

Technorati Tags: rentacoder, elance, odesk, outsourcing, graphic+design

The main areas are obviously software development, graphic design and datacenter operations. To me it it no different than getting a lawyer to do your legals or an accountant to do the books. The generally accepted wisdom is that you should never outsource your core competencies but one issue I see is that many people are not clear on what their core competencies are. Just because we are building a web application does not mean that software development should be one of ours.

The roles of the core management team are Product Management, Project Management, Sales & Marketing and Funding and that is where most of the effort has gone. However, the biggest mistake we have made is not nailing down the outsource providers in the first few weeks. We’ve changed direction on development several times which has delayed things more and more. But the prototype is now properly underway and we will soon have something we can demonstrate to potential investors.

When we started looking for dev houses, we assumed it would be trivial to find expertise in web application development. To our dismay, most vendors idea of a web application is a web-site with a bit of PHP. We worked through tons of unsuitable vendors whose sites tell one story but whose expertise tells another. I’ve successfully worked with teams in India, Japan, USA and China so I had no fear of offshoring to India. The reality is that without recommendation, it is impossible to sift through the thousands of outsourcing firms there. All of them claim to be able to do everything so the idea of working with someone that far away was dropped.

We then moved the focus to Eastern Europe and found some potential suppliers in Poland, Belarus, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Latvia, all of whom seemed quite competent. A simple filter removed about half of those, that filter being “how expensive is it to fly there and back”. Belarus was coming in at €2000 whilst Poland was less than €100. In the end for several reasons, all were dropped for the prototype but are still in our short-list for full system development.

We did talk to one Irish company and one US one. Both were more than capable of doing the work and very easy to communicate with. But for the prototype, we just felt they were overkill and the costs were too high. Both remain in our short-list. Just to give some sense of cost, from all the vendors, we received quotes that ranged from €25 an hour to €120 an hour.

One of the greatest annoyances of the past few months was the number of vendors who never replied to our inquiries and I have to say that the UK was by far the worst offender there. When I was on the other side of the fence, every inquiry was leaped on whether we had the resources available or not. The services business is all about building and maintaining relationships and none of the vendors who ignored our questions will ever get business from us as a result. We did have three great responses from the UK including one that simply stated that they did not have the required expertise. That sort of honesty means that they are top of our list for the areas that they do work in.

In the end, we found our vendor through a specific technology mailing list. This is something we should have done on the first day. For any work which is going to cost more than a few hundred Euro, you really do have to use those whose reputation you are at least familiar with and whose existing work speaks for itself.

The large amount of work that has been put into requirements definition should now make the task of building the system far easier. We know exactly what we want and how we want it to look. As long as we strictly control changes to minimise the development time, we should be able to claw back some of the lost time over the past few weeks.

Technorati Tags: outsourcing, offshoring, nearshoring, design+services, professional+services