On the 15^th September a number of staff from Fluidata will be running in aid of Action Against Hunger International; a global humanitarian organisation committed to ending world hunger via long term solutions, working towards preventing, detecting and treating malnutrition. Currently they are providing relief work in areas hit by conflict and natural disasters, such as Pakistan.

So it isn’t a marathon that is being run (it is only 10K) but for a group of terminally un-athletic IT professionals it amounts to the same effort. If you would like to show your support please feel free to donate personally or on behalf of your company.

Good luck chaps!

I have been to visit my brother in New York a few times this year who emigrated with work last year. I enjoy going to the ‘Big Apple’ and being part of the hustle and bustle. However I am going for a holiday so it is interesting to see New York through the eyes of my brother who certainly doesn’t see it as a jolly. With programs such as The City on MTV following some airhead through her ‘career’, the city looks like a great place to work with its diverse culture and interesting skyline. The reality, at least according to my brother, is rather different.

Firstly you need to live somewhere. If you choose to live on the island, like my brother, rents are ridiculously high. More so than anywhere in London and at a level that just wouldn’t be acceptable to most. Second issue is eating, while I cook most nights at home you don’t get Sainsbury’s, Tesco or M&S a few minutes from your office or home so most make do with fast food or eat in restaurants. Boiling a kettle is apparently near impossible because of their low voltage. Probably why we fell out over tea in the first place…

Then you have their tube system which is a joke, and near impossible to navigate. When my brother said he takes taxis most places, I thought he was just wasting money, but having had a go it makes no sense. The only good part is their idea of express tubes so you can miss off a load of the smaller stops which would be a great initiative in London. It is also a very class driven system, so you wouldn’t see someone going to a party in a DJ on a tube in NY like you do in London.

Then you have the American style of working which is early, most make it into the office for 7 am, to then sit in cubicles which are too high to talk to anyone else. Which can make working life rather soulless. Obviously London can be grim with everyone here moaning about the weather but try winters where snow is measured in meters rather than inches and summers where humidity and temperature is so high you absolutely need aircon in your flat.

So while you may look out onto a bleak and grey London dreaming of the day when you can emigrate to the ‘land of the free’, remember that it isn’t all so bad.

I had my mother on the phone the other day with a technical problem. For some reason the DVD player had stopped working and was refusing to play the film she had just bought. So after a few minutes trying to diagnose the issue the fateful works ‘Blue-Ray’ were uttered and I fell about laughing. “No mother, you aren’t going to be able to make a Blue-Ray disc work on a DVD player, they are different technologies”.

Now for some, like me, this sort of mistake just shouldn’t happen, it is obvious surely? But having to explain the differences between a CD, DVD and Blue-Ray it got me wondering as to how confusing it actually is, especially to someone who doesn’t care about technology as much as I do. To be fair all three technologies use exactly the same looking disc so why they are in fact different products probably confuses more people than just my mother.

Back in the day every leap in technology would mean a different medium from 8-track to cassette, CD and then MP3 for example. One would not work with the other, and importantly didn’t look the same. This at least kept it simple and separate but to now put Blue-Ray discs right next to DVDs in the shops in similar packaging has probably caught a few people out. Maybe it is in fact a clever marketing initiative to help seed the market with useless discs forcing people to upgrade their player, once they work out what the problem is.

I will try to be a bit more understanding and realise that actually for manufacturers to be successful in the consumer space (which thank god I am not competing in at the moment) your mother needs to comprehend it.

Along with our recent move to a new office in London we also this year opened a dedicated Network Operations Centre (NOC) in Hemel Hempstead. With a growing client base it was important we kept service levels the same and had staff within a few feet of client’s hosted equipment. With our four datacentres in the city predominantly used for connectivity, most customers have taken space in the Hemel site, Centro. The site went live last year and is cutting edge, offering high levels of power perfect for virtual environments.

With part of the site unable to take racks due to loads on the floor it was deemed perfect for a new support team who will operate on a 24/7 rota. With the rest of the site already manned 24/7 it also helps with Health & Safety regulations on lone workers.

But what has proved most successful in my mind is the technology we deployed to link the two offices together. With Fluidata’s current support team based in London it was important the two teams could communicate effectively with each other. Therefore when designing the offices we implemented HD video conferencing which sits permanently at the end of each team to allow them a ‘window’ to the other. By running it continuously it means that very quickly the technology is forgotten about and the relationship between the staff could flourish.

It doesn’t mean there isn’t any on site contact, but it does mean it can be reduced, and both offices are able to work more as one. Visitors have been impressed by the quality and its effectiveness. You just walk up to the screen (or for the support teams sit at your desk) and talk to each other. I think the perception is one that video should be the thing sitting in the boardroom collecting dust, rather than an integral part of the office environment. There are, of course, other benefits such as green credentials and ROI (in terms of reduced transport) but for me the main driver is the collaboration it drives within the business.

I am fed up with the apparent lack of education when it comes to our national broadband networks. Call me old fashioned but I believe in a world where what you sell is what you get and that calling something you are selling one thing but delivering another is surely illegal? So why do the majority of consumer internet providers, namely Virgin and BT, believe it is ok to tell consumers they are buying fibre technology when, in fact they aren’t.

We have been selling fibre to businesses for many years and know all the heartache that comes with planning consents, excess charges and slipping deadlines. You aren’t telling me that somehow Virgin is managing to bring on thousands of customers a day to its 50 Mb/s fibre product without these complications? And why too are their services not symmetrical (ie same speed up and down the line), when fibre delivered to a business premise is – and hence the main driver for having it?

The reason is because the actual cable coming into your house is actually copper. With BT it is your phone line (even with the new and advance ‘Infinity’ product) and Virgin coaxial cable. So the only fibre you are getting is to the cabinet at the end of the street rather than to your actual home. So surely they can’t then tell you that you are getting the ‘power of fibre’ or so on? Yes it is faster but only because they have shorten the distance of the copper, but the delivery is no different to that of ADSL where the cable is just longer going back to the telephone exchange. From here the network is, and for a very long time, have been fibre supporting high levels of bandwidth.

Surely with Ofcom’s apparent hatred of miss selling in the industry, such as broadband speeds, they should be bringing this nonsense to an end?

I am not going to spend time trying to justify myself here but suffice to say petrol is obviously running through my veins more than I previously imagined. The other weekend at 7 am I found myself in the car on my way down to Somerset in search of my next car. I had said to myself last year that I wasn’t allowed to think about cars until I had moved home, and so with the ink still wet on an offer for a new home (the previous Thursday), I was free to look.

I was, of course, just going to look at the car and maybe take it for a quick test drive. It would have been crazy for me to put down a deposit there and then especially when considering a car that barely meets that criteria. It is called the Atom made by the special people at Ariel Motors, who headed up by Simon Saunders was resurrected from the dead when it used to make Penny Farthings back in 1870 before focusing on motor bikes. The Atom was his brain child and one that has stunned car enthusiasts all over the world.

With no windscreen, doors, body panels, heater, radio, airbag, antilock brakes or alarm you have to look very hard to see it as a car. But what-a-car. With 300 bhp available from the supercharged Honda i-VTEC engine the car can sprint to 60 mph in less than 3 seconds! Quite intoxicating especially when sitting inches from the ground with full visibility of the wheels and suspension working in front of you. It has won Autocar’s 0 to 100 mph and back to 0 again competition three times on the trot, achieving it in 11.5 seconds.

So obviously I did what any self respecting petrol head would do and put down my deposit there and then. At least I have 16-months or so to wait until the car is built to justify my decision.

BT announced with great fanfare the launch of Annex-M services on their ADSL2+ (21CN) platform allowing up to 2.5 Mb/s upstream (from standard 1.3 Mb/s). Whooohooo. Excuse me if you detect a tiny bit of sarcasm but really how can BT talk about this being new technology when we have been offering it for over four years? We interconnect directly into the BE network (wholly owned by Telefonica O2 group) and have been delivering up to 2.5 Mb/s upstream to customers for all of this time, even using Cisco hardware.

I mention Cisco hardware because most businesses like to buy it. There is an old saying in the industry that goes ‘you don’t get fired for buying Cisco’. Granted it is pretty expensive but in all the years of doing it I can count the failures customer have had on one hand rather than the calculator I would need to tot up other ‘cheaper’ manufacturer’s hardware.

So you would think that if you were building a national network and launched a new variant (ie Annex-M) you would want your technology to work with Cisco hardware so you could conquer the business market? Well believe it or not, BT have followed the route of Tiscali and ended up with a network that we can’t make work with Cisco hardware! We are struggling to make it work at all to be honest, and that is with a not insubstantial client base already using Annex-M on the BE network which we have been supporting for years.

If this is the best they can do, I assume we are going to have to wait for the fibre to the cabinet services before we start seeing anything near impressive. Or, most likely, someone else will come and do that first so BT once again follow rather than lead.

While I don’t think BP should deserve too much sympathy I am concerned by America’s obvious double standards in the wake of on the Gulf of Mexico spill. Granted there has been a huge environmental impact on the area but to make BP fully responsible when it wasn’t directly responsible for the drilling (Transocean were) seems like a tough position. However, BP have admitted fault and will be, they say, fully responsible for the cleanup. So the fact that America are now drawing up amendments to prevent BP for doing any more drilling in American waters is completely unacceptable. It is as though they are saying the accident was deliberate and that BP, unlike all other oil companies, somehow takes no consideration when it comes to safety. Or is it that they are all as bad as each other, and America is using it as an excuse to offer permits over to American oil companies instead.

The fact is this spill will cost BP billions of pounds, so to imply this isn’t hurting them is an understatement. BP employs more Americans than any other nationality and contributes substantially to their coffers; this should at least give BP a fair hearing. I can’t see, for example, such a stand point being taken against an American company in the same position. It is quite incredible when you look at the safety record of other oil companies and the sanctions put upon them in comparison to BP.

Nigeria for example has sustained a large number of spills, so much so that it is believed to have had more environmental impact than the Gulf of Mexico spill. But I don’t remember ExxonMobil having their knuckles rapped for spilling more than a million gallons of oil into the delta for seven days on 1^st May. The fact that the Niger delta supplies 40% of all crude the US imports should surely have made more headlines? Apparently over 1.5 m tons of oil sin 2006 (50 times the Exxon Valdez tanker spilt in Alaska) has been spilled here in the last century.

So if BP are to lose licences on the basis of this crisis, then the same rules should be applied to all oil companies. Problem is there wouldn’t be any oil companies left!

I spent an enjoyable Wednesday afternoon last week filming tonight’s episode of Top Gear. Through a friend of the family I was able to get a ticket and join a few hundred of my fellow petrol heads to see the almighty Clarkson, May and Hammond preach the word. While I enjoyed the day very much, I don’t think it would be for everyone especially as there is quite a bit of standing around. However with Clarkson on hand to entertain the crowd I even enjoyed that bit as well.

You don’t unfortunately see any racing on the track or the Stig but you get a good flavour of the program and the people behind it. Actually everyone was very relaxed with a fine veneer of professionalism, something only the British seem to do. You get the feeling that if America was making this program there would be darn sight more trailers for the stars and a professional stage, not some shed on the side of a runway. The fact that it is one of the most watched shows on earth with some 300 million people seeing it just shows that content rather than razzmatazz wins viewers.

This being the last in the series, I am looking forward to the next show!

We laughed in the office on the news that Easynet is finally being sold off by Sky as I have been saying it would happen for over a year. Some believed me, some didn’t but my reasoning was sound. Ever since Sky bought Easynet it has been an uneasy marriage of a vast consumer brand and a very business focused one. Easynet was one of the first to get involved with LLU (local loop unbundling) in the UK and were able to launch products way ahead of BT. Something Sky obviously liked when they paid well over £200m for the business even though, by then, they were actually buying an old network and much of it needed to be upgraded.

Unlike O2, who at the same time, paid a fraction of that (£50m) for BE. They had a much newer infrastructure, and after all the upgrades to make it fully national was less than Sky originally paid for Easynet. But when you look at how Sky treated Easynet it was still segregated within the organisation and divisions were created to ensure a nice clean break when the time came to offload it. I think they did very well to get £100m for it, especially as the actual valuable part, the network, has remained in Sky’s hands meaning Easynet are now just a third party with a good supplier agreement. But again, like when Sky bought Easynet originally, it was done by a company who didn’t understand data communications and this time they found some bankers who obviously were taken in. I don’t think the amount demonstrates value for money and it will be a difficult business to float/sell in a few years when the venture capitalists decide they want their money back.

Obviously for us it probably means a bit more competition in the coming months as the business gets some much needed direction, but with no innovation over the past four years they are going to struggle to catch up. While they have an enviable client list, I am sure the customers coming to the end of their dire 5-year terms will be ready to for a change. So good luck Easynet – you are going to need it!