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Which? Awards 2008 - the best products and services

Philip Wilkinson on Jun 17, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products

Update:

Winners announced:

• Best Audio/Visual Brand - Panasonic


• Best Domestic Appliance Brand - Miele


• Best carmaker - Mazda


• Best Broadband Provider - Zen Internet


• Best Airline - Singapore Airlines

Tonight at the British Museum, there is an event called the Which? Awards going on, to help find the ‘best of the best’ in products and services.

Apart from all the boring fluff leading up to it, the 1:45pm (a whole afternoon jolly) kicks of with:

• Best Domestic Appliance Brand


• Best Audio Visual Brand


• Best Broadband Provider


• Best Credit Card Provider


• Best Current Account Provider


• Best Carmaker

We’re going to send some guys over to cover it and hopefully have the results for tomorrow.

On a final note, sometimes people confuse us as competing with Which? where as we’re actually a research hub that brings the best reviewers and publishers together in one space - including, hopefully, some of the great content they have over there. Oh - and we don’t charge for it

Crowdstorm awards anyone?

Google Merchant Search - is the end for price comparison sites?

Philip Wilkinson on Jun 03, 2008, in E-Commerce

It had to happen eventually - Google begins moves into the price comparison arena, starting with financial services through it’s new Google Merchant Search feature:

Today, if you type in phrases such as “compare loans”, “cheap credit cards”, and so forth, you get a range of comparison sites from the likes of MoneySupermarket and GoCompare who have spent years getting high rankings in the natural search results or paying a premium for the paid advertising.

Now, Google can’t remove them but it can take a massive piece of the action. Imagine typing those phrases in now and actually getting “google merchant search” results at the top first, in the same way blog and news results currently appear!

It doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to see how this can also apply to utilities, cars, flights, and generic shopping categories like consumer electronics (a la Kelkoo). This is huge! I’ll do a follow up post on this shortly - just wanted to get some first-hand comments and feedback first..

Is Online Retail Growth Slowing?

Philip Wilkinson on May 28, 2008, in E-Commerce

Well, if it’s true it was bound to happen but I think the statistics are skewed somewhat. Firstly, let’s take a look at the report from e-marketer that originally spawned off my post:

According to the chart, the US growth of online retail will slow between 1.5 and 2% each year from now on hitting 8.9% in 2012. This of course is natural in any type of market and online retail will definitely be maturing by then.

What it doesn’t take into account is that this varies completely by the category you look at, and they even say themselves that the chart does not include travel. For example, check out a chart from Jupiter which shows categories such as apparel including things like footwear and outdoor clothing growing 400% from 2004 - 2010.

Anyway - what do you reckon? Have they got it wrong or is e-commerce finally maturing? At least it’s going to stay ahead of off-line retail in a credit-crunch environment

7 iPhone Interface Issues that Really Need Fixing

Philip Wilkinson on May 26, 2008, in Products

With everyone talking about the possible features in the new upcoming iPhone V2 - I thought it was actually worth a piece on a range of user interface improvements they could offer at the same time. Some of which you’ve probably been inwardly fuming about but never really thought it deserved enough energy to mention.. so here we go..

1. SMS and Phone should not be separate. The Phone area has contacts, voicemail etc.. but not the SMS option which would fit much more nicely in this section rather than being an independent icon and area. Americans - please listen - SMS is not some new fangled phone add-on.
2. Contacts needs a “search” function. There are numerous occasions where I can only remember a surname or the company the person works for - don’t make me drill alphabetically through the entire list. Sure, I can reverse how the names are sorted in terms of first or surname first - but this is a pain to keep changing and doesn’t help when I need the company name.
3. Clicking a phone number in email / Safari should be cleverer. I like the feature to click a number and it immediately starts to dial it - but please start to handle country codes better! If someone types +1 (0)233 34434 - it tries to dial the entire thing including the number in brackets and of course fails. Learn that a number in bracket is optional and only used if the country code preceeded by the plus symbol is not used.
4. You can’t switch to something else while listening to a voicemail. Often someone leaves a message from a “blocked” number and reads out the number I should call them back on via the voicemail message. So what I try and do is flick to the dialpad to type in the number as they read it to me, yet the voicemail then stops and needs to be played again. Pah.
5. Calendar needs a search function too. If it’s supposed to be a mirror of iCal - put the search in!
6. Stop overwriting Safari windows. I’ve noticed in the latest software that if you click a link from an email to open up a new window in Safari, it will tend to overwrite something you’ve previously had open if the maximum number of windows are already open. I’ve left a webpage up their once to come back to later only to find the iPhone has loaded a new page over it.
7. Finally, have a single button easily accessible from the main menu that lets me turn on and off any battery-sapping features in one go - wi-fi, bluetooth, and now 3G. Do we really need to keep going to settings all the time…

My Twitter Usage - stats revealed

Philip Wilkinson on May 18, 2008, in Fun, Social Media

I came across a cool tool today that lets you see some interesting stats about your Twitter usage, via: TweetStats

For example, I’m averaging around 26 Tweets a month right now, with Nov being nuts where I posted 73. Mostly I tweet around noon or 4-5pm on wed or thursdays. I was one of the early adopters having used it since Dec 2006! The top people who have often replied to me are @PaulWalsh and @mbites, while the interface I use has been fluctuating with Twhirl probably going to be topping the lot soon:

Now, not stopping there, I wanted to see what the tweet stats of those titans of the Internet UK world @PaulWalsh and @mbites looked like:

As you can see, Paul doesn’t get any work done as he spends his day on Twitter with easily around 700 - 900 tweets / month, spread throughout every day, and even some between 4 and 8am! Dahowlett, aido, and conoro help make up their Irish contingent, and Paul prefers the web interface for twittering.

Now, Mike has a bit of catching up to do, especially as he’s a journalist! An average of only around 255 a month, mostly in the early morning tues-wed. Often just has one-one chats with PaulWalsh and JemimaKiss by the looks of it, and uses Twitterific and the Web to post his tweets.

Ok - must stop now before I get carried away Any Twitter leaderboard anywhere?

Google lied? - PPC trademark restrictions NOT lifted in UK?

Philip Wilkinson on May 16, 2008, in E-Commerce

So, I’m been hearing a few things around the grapevine about Google not actually having lifted keyword trademark descriptions on quite a few brands even though they made a big song and dance about it in the UK, in fact saying:

“Please note we have made a policy revision that applies to complaints we receive regarding trademarks in the UK and Ireland. Beginning May 5th, 2008, we will no longer review a term corresponding to the trademarked term as a keyword trigger. However, we will continue to perform a limited courtesy investigation of complaints regarding ad text purported to be in violation of a trademark.”

So, can anyone tell me why a ton of brand names are still being protected by the Google Adwords system either when you try and write the ads or a day letter when an email arrives from them saying “ad disallowed due to trademark reasons”?

For some evidence, check out this campaign running on the outdoor clothing site Webtogs.co.uk (noting the banned phrases in red and dated today):

Taking this a bit further I thought of trying out a few more major brands and came across some inconsistencies (click on the image to see it enlarged):

See how Disney, Yahoo, eBay, and Virgin seem ok (but I wouldn’t be surprised I’d get an email about them being disallowed in a few hours), yet Google and Amazon are banned for “trademark reasons”!

So, has Google lied to us? Was this just a big stunt to get some publicity and more ad money going their way?

Site is being a tad slooow!

Philip Wilkinson on Apr 30, 2008, in Products

The site’s being a bit slow this week after the soft, soft launch - mainly due to our cache being optimised for the old site rather than the new one. We’re on the case as top priority and hopefully there will be some significant speed improvements over the weekend. Thanks for being patient!

V3 Crowdstorm has arrived - UK & US

Philip Wilkinson on Apr 25, 2008, in E-Commerce, Products, Social Media

Hurray - we’ve finally got our much improved site out there for Crowdstorm UK and Crowdstorm USA

We’re concentrating on making it stable now, ironing out the remaining 67 bugs, and ensuring the speed is high enough. If you see any bugs or want to make some general feedback - use the green link at the top of the page, fill in your comments, then press submit. We’re not making a big fuss about this one as we’ve still lots of things to do to it.

You’ll notice we’re now importing a lot more content in user reviews and expert reviews, and we’ve got a few deals to announce in the next few weeks. Also - welcome to our new Television and DVD Player categories!

Key things still to do:

• Clean & simplify a few of the pages
• Implement new designs for user profiles and dashboard
• Work on a smoother login process
• Make it easier to ask questions and submit other content types
• Improving the algorithms for Crowd recommendations, related review content etc..
• Rewrite and check all the emails and alerts we send to users
• Watch and monitor how everybody uses the site so we can improve things..

Lastly, as mentioned above - this is a quiet release and we don’t want anyone blogging it in the current format, if you don’t mind. Ta very much.

Nearly there - Crowdstorm V3

Philip Wilkinson on Apr 25, 2008, in Entrepreneurship, Products, Social Media

We’re getting ready to launch the new Crowdstorm product (V3) tonight and Sobek is currently tweaking the google adwords code while I’m browsing iStockPhoto looking for better images of numbers in circles! Strange what you do late at night…

I liked the image above as it reminds me of the networking effect of people sharing product recommendations with each other.. Right, time for another cup of tea and onwards and upwards..

Online Shoppers Trust Each Other

Philip Wilkinson on Apr 06, 2008, in E-Commerce

New research out from eMarketer again, argues that shoppers are increasingly trusting each other when it comes to finding credible information advice about products or companies:

The fact is that knowledgeable and trusted peers provide valuable advice and insight to people trying to find the right products to buy and gain the advice and information they need. In fact, JupiterResearch reckons that online social network users were three time more likely to trust their peers’ opinions over advertising when making purchase decisions:

 So, what does this really mean… Well, I think that people are actually getting more savvy in how they find and absorb information and that people are now looking to credible expert sources and trusted peers compared to just lists and lists of anonymous or not-related reviews. Ultimately no-one wants to be fooled by advertising or biased reviews, and having trusted sources from experts, opinion leaders, peers, and friends - can really help people feel more confident in their product research.

Social Graph + Research + Shopping -> 2008 is the year..