Category Archives: technology

the tax year change and other stories

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so in the early hours of the 6th april I wonder how many other people were busily runnig update scripts on their company databases  to ensure the next tax year figures came into effect and no doubt how much searching of emails and file shares occurred to try and work out what you did the year previously or the person that carried out the task has left and the first you know about it is either a calendar entry pops up to remind you or sometimes its too late and the data coming out the system if found to be in error.

why does this situation occur? too often project budgets do not allow for maintenance screens and routines to be built or the project has overrun and cost cutting forces these tasks to be removed and be deemed a bau support process. quite often design decisions fail to recognise that certain key information may change on a set date , even worse are the cases where by  values are hardcoded into an application meaning the application has to be modified and redeployed.

examples i have seen of hard coding have been VAT rates who would think the UK rate would change from 17.5% to 20%, obviously the millenium example of upper date checking against 31/12/1999 and where a structured numeric identifier is used to identify a category or type i.e. 200000 to 299999 is crime novels; 300000 to 399999 is graphic novels unfortuantely what happens when the numbers are exhausted.

you would hope that this would not occur in todays system solutions but i have seen that this not to be the case. cutting corners and lack of forward planning are still very evident in enterprise solutions

privacy, social and search

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Once again a high profile celebrity has been granted a court injunction to stop the reporting in the uk of details of a threesome his partner was supposedly involved in. the injunction only applies to the UK. A US news publication has named the celebrity and his partner and given details of the infidelity.

Almost immediately and namely the social media networks were awash with the names; google and bing searches were just as fruitful. As with other high profile celebrity injunctions and more serious criminal cases such as the recent adam johnson case anomonimity if granted cannot be guarenteed. Naming such prople in the UK granted anonomous status in the UK can result in prosecution of the person that releases the details though how many people have been prosecuted I am unsure.

Obviously one could argue that injunctions surrounding celebrity relationship scandals just show that some people have too much money; quite often the same celebrity is quite happy to sell stories of their life to magazines for vast sums of money but are not so keen on scandal appearing in the pubic domain even if their partner knows the details.

Where as victims of crimes committed against them who have been granted anonimity should be allowed to remain anonomous,

So how do Social Media and Search Engines fail to protect the victims.

If you take google and bing as search engines the search pages as part of the search result have content sections that show related searches that have been carried out by other users. The search boxes themselves show drop downs of related searches. Quite rapidly the names of people granted anomonimity appear in these sections. From these names it can be quite easy to find more personal information of these people.

Even twitter and facebook have similar search functionality where related results and searches are shown. Quite quickly innocent names can on twitter appear in the trending section.

Obviously quite quickly the results are adjusted and names are removed by moderators but one would presume this would only occur after a complaint has been made. The alogorithms dont seem to stop everything and perhaps only the link to the content that has been complained about. It is quite easily to spoof your location and search in countries where the data has not been removed to find the details that have been surpressed in say the UK.

More should be done to stop victims names from becoming known in the public domain; the internet has no borders and court orders in one country do not apply in other countries.

The Apprentice 2015

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So the final of the 2015 apprentice lineup was between Joseph Valente and Vana Koutsomitis.

Joseph’s business plan surrounded expanding his plumbing business by pitching an idea to become preferred suppliers to property agents to areas outside of his current region

Vana’s business plan was to launch a dating app that combined online dating with game playing. The games would be a form of psychrometric analysis.

Industry experts and Lord Sugar quickly picked up the fact that Vana’s business would require more than the £250,000 investment to get to market. Vana had spoken to an app developer who suggested a basic app with few features would cost £30000 to £40000 to develop and for a more fully featured app would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and would need marketing.

Lord Sugar chose Joseph Valente as his business partner.

In his final summing up Lord Sugar did say he knew technology rather than the service industry, but the required investment for Vana’s idea seemed to be the downfall of her idea. Questioning her further she admitted the £250000 would be used as seed funding to get an app developed and to market and hopefully withing 6 months they would have 100000 users, She admitted she would have to get further funding to succeed but believed she could sell her idea to get extra funding from Venture Capitalists.

Unless Lord Sugar was willing to put in more money this would water down his shareholding so probably was not an attractive proposition. One industry expert implied there were about 15 dating apps coming to market per month.

It does make you wonder how people with ideas can become successful in the internet/app world. The average person could not easily provide the funds that are being suggested. Most successful apps are free and people seem to expect them to be free. In app purchases seem to work but there has been numerous negative reports of how easy it is for people to run up very large bills to use the app or if a game (progress further). This is especially true of apps aimed at Children.

Up until recently adverts were fairly non existant on apps and users were using the app version more tha the browser version of sites. Today apps now do show adverts but numerous ad blockers exist to stop ads from being displayed though these apps are being outlawed by the app stores; even some websites have been coded so that they show a banner to users if they have ad blockers installed in the browser and wont let them use the site unless the blocker is disabled.

It seems that perhaps bedroom technologists will be lucky to succeed; though this is no different to what happened in the video games industry as todays video games have budgets that are in excess of hollywod feature films. The likes of manic miner and pacman just dont get developed today

It will be interesting to see if Vana does launch her app.

google to reward mobile friendly websites aka mobilegeddon

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From April 21st 2015 google will be implementing mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal when searching via a mobile device see article. For a while now google has been displaying an indicator against mobile search results to show websites as being mobile friendly.

For example search for is my site mobile friendly on a mobile device and you will get

mobile-search-1

notice the Mobile-Friendly indicator, as opposed to from a desktop

mobile-search-2

The change basically for your site comes down to one factor; has your site has been optimised for mobile

If it has not then its probably before the 21st April a little too late to make the necessary changes. So your site for mobile searches at least may fall down the rankings whether this will happen will remain to be seen though others understandings seem to indicate the change is bigger than the introduction of Panda and Penguin.

Google provides two means of determining your sites mobile friendliness

i) An online mobile tester see link This provides the ability to test on a page by page basis your sites mobile friendlyness

ii) Google webmaster tools see link note you will need to be signed up to google webmaster tools and have your site verified for this to work.

Using the mobile tester for two sites I have visited earlier shows two contrasting results

www.metoffice.co.uk

site-1-good

www.explore.co.uk

site-1-bad

The met office should have no problems come the 21st April.

On the over side googles tester indicates that explore worldwide has mobile issues notice if you exand the imge how google provides indicators as to what it deems to be wrong

If we look at the homepage for a rival company Exodus www.exodus.co.uk

site-2-good

google reports the site is mobile friendly. In theory from 21st April ny search on a mobile device for small group adventure travel could rank exodus above explore worldwide. Currently explore are ranked 2 on page 1 when searching for this term, exodus are on page 2. Note any paid search results will not be affected.

The google page 1 results pn the 19th April 2015 for the term small group adventure travel is as follows:
mobile-search-1-before

I will post the result of the search on the 21st April to see if anything has changed.
So what can be done to make a site mobile friendly? I will provide a follow up article on the current methods in the coming days.

 

21st April Update

So todays the day of what has become mobilegeddon, google has confirmed the update has started rolling out. A quick test throughout the day of the travel term small group adventure travel has shown no changes. Others are indicating that they believe it could take a week for the changes to become evident.

29th June Update

Well a full two months after mobile ranking  was rolled out I thought i would review my search criteria for small group adventure travel to see if the 2 websites i indicated hand changed positions

Page 1 now has

small-group-june

This is showing the results without the adverts; notice how positions 2 and 3 are for pages that have not been flagged as mobile friendly; exodus still appears on page 2. In fact on page 1 only the gaadventures site has moved down the list. What does this tell us; my thory is that the content of the pages is more highly ranking than the mobile site signal.

Checking googles mobile website check shows both the explore and imaginative traveller pages in these search results fail the mobile friendly test.

Obviously my analysis of just one search term is a minimal sample  but does appear strange and seems the worry of mobilegeddon may have just been that a worry.

The Overloaded Duck

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Last nights BBC2 Masterchef The Professionals featured the finalists preparing food at a world renowned 3 michelin star restaurant.

I’m sure (well I know) I was not the only one that whilst the programme was showing tried to access the web site of the restaurant and found the site not responsing at all and timing out. It took a while after the program finished no doubt due to people watching back on iplayer, etc for the site to recover.

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