MillsMash

Ok, I was looking forward to Nielsens presentation on 30th of June 2009. It was billed as “Launch of Nielsen Online Media Measurements for MENA” and they said “The Nielsen Company … will announce the statistics for participating website traffic in the (MENA) region”. Now the Middle east is crying out for some decent online statistics, in fact its crying out for any market data. Hell, they don’t even know who watches what on TV here!

So the idea that Nielsen, a well established renowned media research company where going to release figures about internet usage in the region was fantastic.  I was thinking age ranges, average usage time, most visited sites, online activities etc. A gold mine of information.

Well sadly i was shocked, disappointed, astounded and speechless by the end and here’s why.

This is a company which prides itself on its data and data analysis. So why did the presenter try to tell us that the break down figures for marketing spend across online, TV, magazine, etc. in Australia (even though we’re in MENA!) in 2007 had probably not changed much in comparison to today’s figures? Yet only a couple of slides earlier in the presentation they had said that online ad spending had gone up and as we all know marketing budgets by in large are frozen so therefore the % share for online must have changed.

Then there was the fact that this was billed as stats on the region, yet there where no stats about the region. The most we got told was that Maktool saw a drop in visitors in the region during june because people had left for the summer. A taxi driver could have told you that! Also, apparently usage dropped over the weekend, shock horror. And finally, usage increased on news that Michael Jackson had died, ground breaking!

Then as a sad indictment of their lack of knowledge of even their own product, when a member of the audience asked what the difference between Nielsen’s online tools and Google Ad Manager & Analytics, the presenters where unable to provide any compelling insight or differentiation. The reasons given where that Nielsen’s tag implementation was ’standardised’ across all websites and their results auditted by  a 3rd party. Now, given that Google tools are free and Nielsen’s cost quite a bit and if Nielsen what to try and persuade a region historically bad at research and tracking to invest in their tools they are going to have to come up with far better reasons then these. Hell, I can rattle off half a dozen reasons without having to think to much but that’s not my job and their presentation has certainly not indeered me to support or assist them.

One final sad twist in the tale is that I posted my thoughts about the presentation on their linkedIn discussion about the event and within 24hrs the discussion was no longer available.  Seeing as they are a company embracing social networking and marketing the importance of tracking online ‘buzz’ to enable companies to respond this just goes to show that someone in Nielsen (hopefully just this region) does not get it.

Come on Nielsen, pull your socks up and take the region seriously!

[Rant finished]

——-

Bootnote

I received a response from Tahir @ Nielsen which went some way to addressing the issues i raised but did not wholly satisfy me. I will ask him if i can use his response on this blog and post an update.

From time to time I use web sites which frustrate and anger me. I’m left wondering why they are hard to use, why so little thought has been put in and why some obvious opportunities have been missed. But what really really makes my blood boil is when I see a site that has been badly developed, especially when a developer has taken a reasonable, sometimes simple concept and made a complete mess of it.

Today I have, amongst other things, been looking over a clients site, Sorouh. The website is far from the worst i’ve seen in this region, in fact it looks positively up-to-date compared to some i have seen. The design is simple with a good amount of information and even has a site map for SEO purposes but then i started to notice strange things. The site map link was not being recognized as a link, on hovering over the “Developments” menu the link shown was different from the page you landed on. Then i looked at the source code and i nearly cried.

The developments home page is nearly 800Kb in size, the homepage html alone is over 1700 lines and 155kb in size and the javascript is 700 lines long and 214kb in size! All the page displays is a bit of flash, a few images and some 400 words! Who ever developed the site seems to have included every Ajax / Javascript library. The have surrounded simple links with entire html tables which then have onClick events on them which over-rides the link its surrounding. Every menu link is re-written in javascript and the links that appear in the html are different to the ones that appear in the javascript.

I fail to understand how someone can code such a simple site so badly. Time is not even an excuse as they have way over complicated it and at least doubled if not trippled the amount of work they needed to do. Programming should be simple, elegant and serve a purpose, not a complete waste of time and space! What makes this worse is it’s so un-necessary, adversely affects SEO and impacts the time taken to display the page and thus the user experience.

Since i was a child Christmas has been about spending time with family and friends and try to forget the woes of the year & work. Admittedly most years have massive arguments, fights over presents and certain family members falling asleep by 5pm. However, one thing that was certain is that no-one would be shopping not just because all the the shops where shut but because we had better things to do. Hell it was one of the fours days of the year that my step-father, being a green-grocer, would actually shut his shop (the others being boxing day and new years day + 2nd Januray). It was always strange but good to wonder around my local area and see all the shops shut and that the only people out and about where out for a walk generally with their family and friends. If fact since 2003 its been illegal for ‘large’ shops to open on christmas day.

However, it appears that, according to IMRG, nearly 4 million British people went online on Christmas day and spent £102 Million pounds! That to me seems immensly sad and an indicative of the state of current society when 10% of the population (over the age of 16) are spending their time (at least in part) shopping on their computers. It’s bad enough they are on their computers rather than interacting with their family and friends bar for the following reasons:

• Trying out a new game
• Communicating with family abroad / else where.

Has society really got to the point where would rather shop online on christmas day then spend time with family and friends? Ok i accept that there are people out there who don’t have large families or if they do the last thing they want to do is spend time with them or even that they are not christian and don’t want to celebrate Christmas. But to consider that 10% of the adult population is shopping on Christmas day, now that is sad! Christmas is truely dead!
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/245079/four-million-brits-went-online-shopping-on-christmas-day.html

David Cameron has recently stated that:

“Fibre optic broadband is changing the way people work and do business, and it has the potential to completely transform our economy.

“It could open up new markets for our creative industries, promote innovation, create new, family-friendly jobs as people can work from home - and help reduce carbon emissions.”

Really? What in the same way that we would have paperless offices and remote working within the last 10 years? I’m curious as to what basis he makes this claim.  I don’t see that fibre will bring anything other than a faster more reliable internet service. It will allow for IPTV, IP Telephony and a better on-line experience overall. As for working from home, current broadband allows for this and for the vast majority of what people need in as such that they can:

• receive and send large emails with attachments,
• use skype and other comms programs even with video
• remote desktop into work computers
• use online services such as salesforce.com, google docs etc

What would Fibre-to-the-home give them that they have not already got? And even with broadband things have not improved  within family life. In fact with faster connections, blackberries and the like it seems that people are working longer and harder causing a larger drain on the individual and the family. You could argue that faster ubiquitous communications are actually putting a great strain on familys as we all spend more time in front of the computer and not interacting with each other.

Businesses definately need faster internet connections as more and more personnel use the company connections for work and pleasure. Homes also need faster internet connections as more devices come online, with more laptops in the home and soon more appliances ‘needing’ internet connections we do need more bandwidth. I’m all for faster internet and Fibre-to-the-home but it won’t make the massive impact that Cameron is promising. Just another headline grabbing political gimmick!

Getting Wired about being Wireless in Dubai

In a modern city you would expect internet connectivity to be fairly easy, prolific and rapid. It seems however that in Dubai if you expect it to be easy or fast it will be anything but!

I’ve been travelling around different cafe’s attempting to browse the internet, a few coffee shops have their own connection which once you purchase an item you are given their WPA or WEP key which works reasonably well. However, the majority of Malls and coffee shops use Etislat’s wireless connection which is very much like BT’s OpenZone in that you have to pre-pay to gain access. And this is where the fun begins.

Although the Etislat’s gateway portal has a facility to take credit card payments, trying to create a new user account has resulted in a system error (which they know about according to shop staff). This error has perpetuated for over a week. The portal also gives a contact support number however this number on works from Etislat mobile and landline phones, I’m on du (another Dubai mobile provider).  My UK phone works with Etislat however it does not recognise the local number either.
So I discover, after being bounced around from shop to shop, you can purchase pre-paid ‘i-zone’ card which you can then use to access the internet. However, trying to find a store that sells these is another matter. I am currently sat in the Emirates Mall, one of Dubai’s plushest which boasts Etislat i-zone wireless throughout, but you can’t buy any i-zone cards here! I’ve been told that you can purchase ‘pay as you go’ mobile phone credit for Etislat phones and use that however you need an Etislat mobile phone to use it!!!!

Finally I manage to purchase an i-zone card and attempted to use it. One would assume you just scratch of the panel to reveal a code and enter that into the gateway webpage, right? Oh no, not in Dubai, here you enter the code and your mobile number, you are then sent an SMS text with another code which you in-turn enter into another webpage to gain access. I try this but enter my du mobile number and guess what, I get no text. So I try the same number with UAE country code, still no text. So I try my UK mobile (which is actually connecting through du) and within 5 seconds I get a text! Turns out the service won’t work with du, talk about anti-competitive.

So, I’m on the internet and surfing happily away for 2 hours when suddenly my wireless connection drops and I’m assigned a new IP address (don’t know why) meaning my previous wireless session is dropped and I have to re-login to the gateway webpage. However this time it tells me the account is already in use and I can’t connect. I try going to the log-out page in the vain hope that I can force it to log my machine out but no. So I try phoning the support number on the i-zone card again that only works from an Etislat phone! Thankfully the store I purchased the card from is only round the corner so I pop-in and explain the issue, the lady is very understanding but cannot help. However, she kindly suggests I use the shops landline to phone Etislat and speak to them.  After endless phone options and speaking to two operators I discover that as I did not log out (not that I could off or wanted too) it will take ½ hour for the system to disconnect me due to inactivity at which point I can re-connect. The operator, obviously, has no way of doing this himself, that would be easy and there is no page I can force it from! So I wander round to another cafe which takes about 25mns and connect again, however this time the Etislat wireless refuses to give me an IP address. There is another ‘open’ wireless connection called Tsunami which I try (ensuring my firewall is set to max) and it works and takes me to Etislat’s gateway portal where I can login. This all works fine but I’m extremely concerned that Etislat’s wireless does not work and that this Tsunami connection is a trap for tourists. If it wasn’t for the simple fact that Dubai is one of the safest places I’ve ever been (I’ll happily leave my laptop for 5mns in a public place!!!) and that I am security conscious and aware then I would not dream of using this Tsunami connection.

Now today I am in Mall of Emirates, my credit has run out and I can’t buy more here, there are no free connections and  the credit card facility is still not working. So the only thing left to do is to write this rant in MS Word and then post it up when I eventually get a connection.

I’ve also noticed that this mall has 2 open wireless connections, one called ‘ETISLAT’ and one called ‘etislat’. The one if full caps, which is normal the SSID I connect to refuses to give an IP address while the lowercase one works fine, if only I had credit. This is not only insane but amazingly lack security and poor usability. But then this is Dubai, what am I to expect….

——————-

UPDATE:

Turns out there is a Virgin store in the Emirates Mall which has an Etislat stall in it and they sell the i-zone cards. There was an Etislat stall outside the Virgin store and not only did they not sell the cards they did not know there was a stall in Virgin or that they sold the cards. Interestingly when i tried to buy the card the sales person asked if i was really really sure and did i know the issues in connecting

Recently I have taken some time out of work to sell and move out of my house and prepare to move to Dubai. I also wanted to use this time to read up on the latest .Net techniques, frameworks as well as explore a few other development platforms. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this time and it has made me realise how important it is for developers, no matter in what position, to keep abreast of the latest developments within their communities.

Anyway, over the last month or so I have been playing with a number of new .Net packages (MVC, ASP.NET WSAT, Linq to SQL to name a few), using VS 2008, reading up on the advances in the .Net 3.5 framework and getting back in touch with the community. I’ve really enjoyed getting back into the thick of it and have been pleasantly surprised at how far .Net & ASP.Net have come in assisting developers to rapidly role out and maintain applications. I was even starting to feel quite smug with myself at learning new techniques and ‘tooling up’ for work. So imagine my surprise and frustration when it’s announced that Linq to SQL is being dropped by Microsoft in favour of ADO.Net EF!

Now I can appreciate that Microsoft wants to concentrate their development on ADO.Net EF rather than have two separate similar frameworks for data access and manipulation however Linq to SQL was/is a great fast & simple way to access data sources without all the hassle of data sets and Stored Procedures. Having only played with both for a short period of time and not having used either on professional projects I’m not able to fully argue the pros & cons of either framework however what I can say is that by dropping Linq to SQL, Microsoft is in danger of losing the trust of the community and preventing development at the cutting edge.

Think of all the projects which have used SQL to Linq which are now redundant, all the time people have spent creating documentation and assisting other developers in learning the new techniques which has now been a waste of their time. Why should they continue to support emerging technologies for them only to be pulled, who’s employers are going to continue to let their developers experiments with the latest Microsoft techniques if they fear they will not be supported going further? A great example is the new stackoverflow.com website which has been developed using some the latest cutting edge .Net techniques including MVC & Linq to SQL. To ensure easy maintenance going forward they will now have to consider re-writing their DAL using alternative technologies otherwise future developers working on the site will have no idea how it works.

The one saving grace may be that Linq to SQL was released to the community so perhaps some people will take up the baton and drive it forward. While Microsoft is making some great moves to work with the community by releasing code on CodePlex as well as the being more open about development but all this risk’s being in vain if the community turns its back.

Suppose I better get on with learning ADO.Net EF and pray it doesn’t get pulled too.