Calculating the real cost of cloud computing

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

This week I have been getting unpleasantly confused by a pre-Christmas present of cloud computing hype. Take the CEBR 2011 Cloud Dividend report, commissioned by EMC, which joyfully predicts that the cloud will benefit the European economy by as much as £148.9 billion per year by 2015. Other highlights include the creation of 289,000 jobs in the same timeframe, although the UK could apparently lag behind the rest of Europe courtesy of our relatively poor broadband infrastructure.

As regular PC Pro blog readers will know, I’ve already suggested that there is such a thing as free cloud computing for the small business. OK, the free lunch option is restricted to the very small end of the small business scale, and even then we are talking more Google Mail than a fully blown data centre in the cloud, but it’s a start. The smaller your business, the bigger the benefits of the free cloud rings true as far as I am concerned. What’s more, I would contend that it’s a damn site more relevant to most small businesses than reports of some notional global economic value of cloud computing sponsored by a company pushing the cloud as hard as it can.

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Prince William’s wedding is more dangerous than porn

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

It is bad enough, for someone with no great interest in the monarchy, that the engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton has now dominated TV, print and online news outlets for the past 24 hours solid. I know I risk being verbally scolded by the twin-pronged pro-Royalty army that is the combined forces of the blue-rinsed brigade and readers of Heat magazine, but I think I can safely say that the forthcoming Royal wedding is now officially bad news. I can also say that you would be safer searching for porn than searching for news about the Royal nuptials.

Security researchers at the Websense labs have uncovered the first wave of poisoned search engine results to wash onto Google and Yahoo alike, using everything from promises of ‘Prince William Wedding Photos’ through to the much more generic, and likely all the more successful as a result, ‘Prince William Wedding’ as lures to sites which will hit the unsuspecting and unprotected visitor with the latest drive-by download attacks.

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Google Instant: how blacklisting could damage your SEO

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

Making sure a small business gets exposure when it comes to Google search is big business in itself. But what happens to your SEO strategy when you unknowingly fall foul of the Google Instant blacklist?

The Google Instant what, I hear you asking? Ah yes, it’s not exactly something that the search giant is shouting about from the rooftops, unsurprisingly, but certain keywords and phrases are censored when you use Google’s new predictive search feature.

As a writer, I understand better than most that some words can be offensive, but more often than not that offensiveness comes from the context in which words are used. And that’s where I start running into real problems with the kind of all or nothing, list-based censorship that Google is employing – and the impact it has upon the innocent small business struggling to get noticed online.

Sure, if you are using some racially or sexually offensive slang in your marketing I have no sympathy when your campaign and business crashes and burns. In fact, I jolly well hope it does. However, if you’re using keywords such as ‘domination’ and ‘naked’ within a totally innocent business-related context then I fail to see why that business should be penalised by a severe dose of misguided political correctness.

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If you’re drowning in email, try Gmail Priority Inbox

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

New research says that modern office workers are suffering from information overload and email is the counter-productive cause. Yet not only is getting to grips with email not rocket science as far as the average small business is concerned, it doesn’t have to cost you anything either.

In research which covered more than 1,000 workers from a number of UK-based businesses, OnePoll (on behalf of salesforce.com) concluded that “unnecessary emails are the bane of the modern office, with seven out of ten workers complaining about being sent irrelevant emails or being copied on emails of no interest”.

To be specific (with my specifically sarky remarks in parenthesis) the research suggested that the average office worker receives 43 emails per day (yay, I’m above average in the amount of email I get: 500 per day here) and some 11% get between 51 and 150 emails per day (hah! still above average). That 38% complained about suffering from information overload is the statistic which blew me away. Not because I think it’s one of the big problems facing the average small business today, but exactly the opposite.

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The wrath of Gates

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

There are doubtless a number of things Microsoft employees will miss about Bill Gates when he toddles off to airdrop billions on charities, but his email rants won’t be one of them.

To mark his passing, the Seattle Post Intelligencer has dug out what it bills as an “epic rant” to poor Jim Allchin, describing the world of pain the Microsoft boss sufferred when he tried to download and install Windows Moviemaker in 2003.

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Yahoo SearchMonkey is simply bananas

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

Look, everyone who has ever read any of my PC Pro columns over the years will know that I am something of a Firefox Fanboy, just like anything that makes my web browsing more efficient and effective. Which is probably why I think the whole Yahoo SearchMonkey thing is just simply bananas.

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Get orf moi broadband!

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

Michael Phillips, the Product Director at ConsumerChoices.co.uk, has today called for Government action to redress the balance between townies and rural users when it comes broadband. He says that “recent analysis has shown that we have a distinct first and second class society in the UK when it comes to Broadband speeds. Rural areas are getting a raw deal when it comes to their home broadband service and coupled with the ‘out of area’ service charges many broadband providers apply, they are suffering a double whammy.”

Well, I am a rural broadband user and while it did, I have to admit, take a couple of years longer to arrive in my village than in the nearest market town a few miles away, it is here now and working well. I get an average speed of between 3000 and 3500kbps, which is not stellar by any means but god damn if it isn’t fast enough for sending my email, browsing the web and even streaming the (very) odd bit of video when the wife is out.

My ISP, Zen, do not apply any additional ‘out of area’ service charges just because I chew straw and eat with my hands, and I do not feel like a second class netizen it has to be said.

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