Industry News

New .co domain names will open up an opportunity to have the domain name you have always wanted.

Have you ever tried to register a domain name for your business, brand or company website only to find that someone else has beat you to it?

Are you constantly looking for a dot com only to find they are ‘dot GONE’?

Here at Zeta we know the scenario only too well – when clients come to us with a name they want but simply cannot get.  Very often they have to pay thousands to purchase their preferred domain from a reseller or domain squatter.

Well forget .com the name on everyone’s lips will soon be .co. more…

10 days ago (12th June) my friend hosted a World Cup BBQ for England’s opening game against the USA. There was a massive selection of alcohol and all types of juicy animals to throw on the BBQ. As well as the delightful day of feasting Mark had invested in a new flat screen TV for us to witness the USA thrashing.

OK well everything went to plan apart from England actually winning, but the point I am trying to illustrate is we spent a huge amount of money and not once did anyone question our actions.

This is why I wasn’t surprised when IMRG/Capgemini (read the full report) announced yesterday (21st June 2010) that online retail sales have has increased by 22% in May 2010, becoming the highest growth rate since June 2008.

Beer, wine and spirits experienced a massive increase of 23% and electrical goods also jumped up by 13%. Online shoppers spent £4.5 billion during the month of May which works out as an equivalent of £73 per person in the UK. more…

An Orange a Day Won’t Keep Fifa Officials away

Picture this; a group of beautiful women, glowing the colour orange, surrounded by a group of footballers and boisterous men.

Don’t be mistaken I am not talking about a night out with my fake tanned friends, I am talking about the latest ambush marketing stunt at the 2010 FIFA World Cup by Dutch beer company Bavaria!

It was not instantly obvious that the 36 women wearing tight figure hugging bright orange dresses at the World Cup game between Denmark and Holland on Monday 14^th June 2010 were advertising for the Dutch Brewery.

(And let’s not forget ITV pundit Robbie Earle who is said to have provided Bavaria with the free tickets to the World Cup Match who has since been fired!) more…

An Overview of the Creative Industry

The economic growth of any country comes from the government and the private sector. I do not need to tell you about the state the British Government has been left in after thirteen years of Labour Governing. But let’s take a look about the state of UK creative industries:

I speak on behalf of those working in creative industries throughout the UK that many of us have seen a drastic cut back in Private Sector spending – huge cutbacks in client budgets since 2008 particularly in the advertising, public relations and graphic design industries. This being attributed to the massive government spending which has had a negative impact in private sector consumption and investment. When business directors and shareholders do not understand the true importance of marketing these divisions of the business are usually the first to see a slash in budget.

Lucky for those of us in the digital industry we have not suffered so much at the hands of the public sector over spend. In fact we have seen an increase in online marketing spend with more organisations and companies starting to embrace and understand the value of marketing their business and products online. In fact, 66% of companies are planning to increase their digital marketing budgets during 2010 (Marketing Budgets Report, econsultancy 2010).

Creative SME’s have competed for public sector contracts

In attempts to further conserve profits many SME’s have turned to the public sector to sustain their business. This has proved a good strategy in some cases but has generally not been the case for creative SME’s due to the rigid procurement processes which prevent smaller private sector providers from competing for public sector contracts. Sam Allen, search expert at Zeta wrote an excellent post about public sector organisations using private design agencies.

Labour ‘spin’ has resulted in a negative reputation for Marketing and PR

PR is often said to be about reputation management yet through poor and ineffective attempts to manage themselves the UK government has damaged the meaning of PR. more…

At least that is the message denoted by the latest high court ruling which places website and blog owners at risk of liability from the user generated content displayed on their sites.

The verdict was delivered after Labourhome.org owner Alex Hilton was sued by Johanna Kaschke. Kaschke was objecting to a libellous comment which appeared on the labour home site which was written by a user.  The content was accusing her of having had links with Baader-Meinhof, a German terrorist group.

Although Hilton did not write the comment or make it live, the fact that he actively moderated other areas of the website by …”exercise(ing) some editorial control on parts of the website and in particular on the homepage.” held him liable.

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Pupils as young as 11 are given iPhones to spy on their teachers

Headlining the Daily Mail on Monday (5th April 2010), it was revealed that pupils as young as 11 are being given iPhones to give instant ratings on their teachers.

This move is an example of the latest Government ‘pupil power’ drive, claims the Daily Mail. But the use of modern technology in such a way is also a pre indication of the Governments latest plan for a digital Britain (You might want to read Henry’s previous post about Gordon Brown’s plan for a digital future) coming into play.

Is the Government justified in allowing pupils to decide educational policy?

The new plans revealed by the Government early this year mean that as of September 2010 all schools in England and Wales would be legally obliged to seek pupils’ opinions and views on major decisions and policy making.

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OFCOM has forced Mobile operators to lower their fees for transferring calls from one network to another from around 4p a minute to just 0.5p a minute. A move that has been welcomed by everyone involved (even some of the mobile operators). But this story is small news compared to the tectonic shift in mobile operations which must occur soon.

Scarcity of Supply

Mobile network providers can only levy such massive charges because of the scarcity of supply. At the moment we are all forced to use a mobile network to get access to voice and data services on the move. But with the expanding WiFi coverage in the UK and possible introduction of WiFi towns (like Swindon), this scarce resource is set to become highly abundant. more…

Gordon Brown unveiled his plans for Britain’s digital future yesterday with the goal to make Britain the leader in the digital economy by 2020. Brown split his plan into three phases:

First to digitalise – to make Britain the leading superfast broadband digital power creating 100 per cent access to every home;

Second to personalise – seizing the opportunities for voice and choice in our public services by opening up data and using the power of digital technology to transform the way citizens interact with government;

Third to economise – in the Pre-Budget Report we set out our determination to find £11 billion of savings by driving up operational efficiency, much of it enabled by the increased transparency and reduced costs made available by new technology.

Brown talked about superfast broadband for every household;  250,000 new jobs in the digital and creative industry , a transparent government giving the people of Britain input into politics, the launch of ‘mygov’ – an open source website using linked data (semantic web) so citizens can pay taxes and book hospital appointments all from one place, and Sir Tim Berners Lee heading up a new Institute of Web Science. more…

The old dinosaur of IE6 has taken another step closer to its final demise.

On Friday Google announced that from 1st of March 2010 it will no longer support IE6 and from that date, users of older browsers (IE6 included) may find that key functionality in Google Docs and Google Sites will no longer work properly. Other parts of Google will also stop working as changes are made without the excessive amount of effort required to make web 2.0 sites work in a web 0.5 browser.

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On Wednesday Apple introduced the iPad – a 9.7 inch multi-touch device that bridges the gap between computers and smart phones.  They have priced it very aggressively  with the basic 16gb Wi-Fi model starting at $499 and the 64GB 3G model topping out at $829.

As technology becomes increasingly pervasive in all our lives we need to be able to interact with it more efficiently.  Computers are okay when you’re at your desk, but there’s so many times when you need to access the web where turning on your computer is too time consuming and your smart phone interface is too fiddly to use (yes even on the iPhone).

What is the semantic web?

The web we know today is designed for humans. We can efficiently navigate between 1000s of databases and accomplish tasks that would have been really time consuming only a few years ago, but these databases are not designed for machines so we often find ourselves have to struggle to interact with many systems to achieve what are, in principle, simple tasks.

Let’s look at an example. more…

After the reports last week that Chinese hackers exploited the vulnerabilities of Internet Explorer; we have been reminded again of the importance of developing according to web standards rather than to support a single, specific web browser.

The hackers were able to exploit security vulnerabilities in the 10-year-old browser and operating system  combination of IE6 on Windows XP.

This was a zero-day exploit, which means it was a new-found vulnerability that the vendor (in this case Microsoft) and antivirus / security companies were unaware of. Meaning there was no security fix for this issue.

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The recent comments made by Tory MP Greg Hands surrounding the new NHS 60th anniversary logo, which cost £12,000 to create, has resulted in uproar in the design industry and has raised issues within the public sector (PS).

The original comments by Hands, were originally published by the Times on the 26th December 2009 (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6968036.ece)

I understand the design industries reaction to the comments made by Hands, his comment of; more…

Finally the music industry can sit back and stop moaning about file sharing. The days of downloading music are coming to an end. Not because of Lord Mandelson’s digital economy bill but thanks to excellent streaming services. Last.fm and Spotify are now first choice options for listeners and music lovers. Mandelson has already received a lot of negative comments from many digital experts. Most significantly from BT and Talk Talk, two of the biggest ISPs who are supposed to be on board. He really has turned up to the party a little late, how many people will still be downloading music files in 2011?

Who wants to download anymore? Ask yourself the question, when did you last download a music file? For me it was at the start of the year. Then I purchased my new machine which meant I was faced with managing the thousands of MP3s scattered across two computers, three external hard drives and a handful of memory sticks as well as the box of smashed up CDs. more…

Who was expecting the 12th May to cause such a stir in the world of search? Well it was the second Searchology event hosted by Google and if the first event (when Google announced universal search) was anything to go by, we should have been prepared for some serious progress announcements from the search giant.

Timing could not have been more appropriate as Twitter is surrounded with speculation of challenging Google’s search share with its own search functionality.
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Well Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 last Thursday, 19th March 2009. To some this may be the end of the browser wars as IE8 does indeed come with vastly increased standards support. Microsoft, to its credit, took notice of developers who spoke up about the way the browser would by default serve up pages in its IE7 mode. To get it to render in the IE8 standards mode, the developer would have to ‘opt-in’. Thankfully Microsoft did change this, so the default behaviour is IE8 standards mode. more…