Quantel opens its doors

I was lucky enough last night to get a tour round the headquarters of the global technology leader based in my home town of Newbury… no, not Vodafone, the other one. You may not have heard of Quantel, but if you own a television, you’ll be familiar with their work. What do they do? An interesting question, and I suspect the answer has changed in subtle ways over the past few years.

Quantel basically invented TV graphics. Their breakthrough product was Paintbox, responsible for some of the many crimes against art witnessed on the world’s TV screens in the 80s. When you bought a Paintbox, you were buying the ability to do something you couldn’t do otherwise. Was it the hardware or the software? It didn’t really matter.

Nowadays, of course, things have changed. Any Mac or PC is able to do a startlingly good job of video editing, and the software you need is probably thrown in for nothing. So why are Quantel still here? In a word, speed.

Over the course of the evening, we were shown a few demos of what their kit can do. A lot of it was very underwhelming, for anyone familiar with Premiere, iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, or (at a push) any decent graphics package. Yes, my £1000 home PC can theoretically do that too… but not with HD-quality footage (or higher… 4K anyone?), and certainly not in a second or two. Suddenly, the capability is a commodity, and it’s all about the hardware. Again.

Are the Quantel guys losing sleep at the growth of YouTube? Hardly. The HD revolution has only just started, and higher definition TV needs beefier editing kit. That’s where Quantel come in.

Google as cool as Subbuteo

Search Engine Watch gets quite excited at news that Google is now officially a verb in the English language, following its inclusion by the Oxford English Dictionary’s online edition. How cool is that? Not very, when you realise that other brand-based additions this month included Brillo, Speedo and Subbuteo. (Admittedly all as nouns, though.) Oh – and, most aptly of all, ‘anoraky’.

Sell to government, for a fee

Supply2.gov.uk is a dynamic new government-backed service designed specifically to give companies easy access to lower-value contract opportunities (typically worth under £100,000) offered by the public sector.’ But don’t be fooled by the prevalence of the word ‘free’ – if you want to see opportunities out of your immediate locality, you’re going to have to pay for them. Not a huge amount exactly, but still, it’s another cashflow hit.

A couple of words of advice, guys. There shouldn’t be an apostrophe in explanation of area’s. (Ouch, it even hurt me to type that out.) And can I suggest you don’t refer to the Republic of Ireland as one of the ‘home countries‘, or lump it into a ‘national’ category with the United Kingdom. Last time I checked my passport, Ireland was a separate nation from the UK. It’s even recognised as such by the United Nations. Granted, you can walk from one to the other without getting wet – but then again, these days, you can walk to France too.

Sorry to labour the point, but people have a nasty habit of killing each other over precisely this issue.

Best blogging platforms for business

An interesting posting from Forrester researcher Charlene Li rates the various blogging platforms out there, and identifies ‘three clear leaders’ – Movable Type, WordPress and iUpload. The first two were pretty obvious choices, but I confess, iUpload is a new name to me.
Charlene includes one line from her full report which rings many bells: ‘a company just dipping its toes into the blogging waters may want to start with Typepad with the goal of transitioning to a more robust, software-based platform in the future.’ Certainly that’s what I’ve been encouraging people to do… and you don’t have to look too hard to find plenty of big names, especially in the media business, doing likewise. Here’s a few to get you started: the Daily Mail group, The Times, Sky News… and until recently, the BBC. Oh yeah… and Charlene herself.
Is it worth mentioning that that Six Apart has an affiliate scheme, where people can earn $3 for every subscriber they pass on to Typepad? 😉

Setting your Sky+ via the web

Few technologies have changed my life the way Sky+ has. It’s now extremely rare that we ever watch anything at the time of its original broadcast… and not just because we have a baby daughter to contend with. (The one exception, though, is live sport; there’s just no fun in fast-forwarding through it.)

Something in this month’s Sky magazine caught my attention en route to the recycling bin – the ability to set your Sky+ via mobile phone. I’m quite excited about this… but as a Windows Mobile smartphone fan, it’s very disappointing to see that the Sky By Mobile system isn’t compatible with my own pocket. 🙁

But salvation is at hand: according to Media Guardian, ‘By the end of July the service will also be made available on Sky.com.’ If anything, the web seems the more logical place to use such a service. How many people will browse through the hundreds of digital TV channels on their mobile phone’s tiny screen, to see what’s available?

I have a nasty feeling I’ll start setting the (downstairs) Sky+ box from the (upstairs) PC. Just because I can.

Jadu promises DIY CMS within hours

Jadu isn’t a name I have come across before… but when anyone promises a ‘revolution‘ in content management, I’m prepared to listen. The company’s claim is certainly ambitious: ‘Websites that previously took weeks to develop can now be compiled in a matter of hours.’ And even more appealing – their Galaxies product ‘puts control back in the hands of the user, enabling non-technical webmasters to create a CMS themselves.’ Blimey.

The Leicester-based firm is smart enough to see the business opportunity in local government, and tailors its product accordingly. The sales pitch talks in terms of ODPM’s ‘required outcomes’, and the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (ahem) is fully supported. The E-Government Register hosted by Brent Council lists a dozen councils who use the company’s products. Understandable, when you look at a comparison like this.

The company website deliberately avoids any technical language: so much so, in fact, that it’s hard to pin down exactly what the product is. The heart of their CMS product seems to be the ability to generate customised CSS, building on top of a number of predefined templates. The site itself has filenames ending in .php, so you have to assume that’s a key part of it. A page on Technology talks about Apache, Debian Linux and MySQL. But there’s no denying, it’s an impressive sales pitch, and it’s hard to see what’s missing from their features list.

Guardian plans rolling PDF edition

I guess something like this was inevitable: the Guardian has announced plans for a downloadable PDF edition, with updates – presumably based on its website CMS – every 15 minutes.

Users log onto Guardian Unlimited and download an eight to twelve page A4 pdf featuring the latest news. They can select any of five news-streams: general news, international, economics, sport and media stories. (It) is likely to appeal to a lunchtime and evening commuter market wanting a live print-based update. It will be launched later in the summer with BT as the launch sponsor.

I’m only surprised it has taken so long. I remember, at the end of the last century, as I boarded an internal flight in the US, being given a rather crudely printed-and-stapled ‘newssheet’ of the latest headlines. It didn’t feel especially cutting-edge at the time, but maybe it was.
Inexplicably, the Guardian’s press release doesn’t include the accompanying visual; thankfully, the Press Gazette‘s virtual reprint of it does. It’s interesting to see the Guardian newspaper identity coming across so strongly; and highlights the fact that the Guardian Unlimited sites are now lagging very sadly behind in the design stakes. The Berliner edition, complete with new masthead, made its debut on 12 September 2005. That’s a heck of a long time ago.

Personalisation 2.0

I’ve managed to get myself involved in a long-term government website project, with very grand ambitions for personalisation. Registered users will be able to ‘save stories’ to a personalised area; request notification when an article changes; etc etc. All sounds great in principle.

Yet each time I look at the personalisation options, I can’t help feeling it’s the old way of doing things. Another website to register for; another page demanding to be my default hompage; another password to remember; another place I have to remember to visit.

I can’t help reaching the conclusion that ‘personalisation’ is a concept whose time has passed. And in truth, despite all the promises, it never truly happened in the first place.

Personalisation, for me, is the ability to get the information I want, in the place I want. And in the 2.0 world, that place is my RSS consumption tool. I’m currently reading 78 different RSS feeds, from 78 different websites. It is my personal selection of what I consider important – from everywhere. And given the simplicity of the RSS format, there are countless different methods and tools for consuming that information – a web service like Bloglines, a personalised homepage, a desktop tool, a plugin to my browser or email client, an email service. I can choose the one which suits me personally.

I was told yesterday that RSS feeds of content from this big government website are not in scope. The important word I wish to add is – ‘yet’. 🙂 With RSS becoming omnipresent, not least given its status within Windows Vista (if that ever arrives), I’m worried that our efforts to build a personalised area will be wasted.

Guardian kisses Google

The Guardian should know better. A story today claims ‘UK mobile phone users can now access Google news and email’. Well, can someone tell me what service I’ve been happily using for the past six months or more? And why Richard Wray’s piece reads more like a Google press release? How can a respected news source make comments like:

‘Google News looks set to become the de facto news site for most mobile internet users.’

Er, leaving aside the speculative nature of that comment… allow me a moment of pedantry. What exactly is a ‘de facto’ news site? Terrible.