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Renting books
Consider the situation: Student’s receive reading lists of fifty books to read for an assignment. Their local University library has five of each book, and there’s two hundred plus students on the course. Worse than this, but these books are needed by the people on the second year of the course too. So ultimately we have even less an amount of books for these student’s to borrow for their assignments.
Why not have a de-centralised rental system that competes directly with these libraries? Even if you go to your university library, city library and local library - there’s still not enough to go through everyone. Put it online and deliver books straight to those student’s homes for a fee, it doesn’t even have to be directly to a student’s home: just deliver it to the university and have them pick it up there.
It could easily be per book, per month or per student term. Better yet, don’t aim directly at student’s and just have a student plan that student’s can actually afford.
I’m not talking eBooks, but the real thing you hold in your hand and can scan copies of for references. You’re solving the national university problem based around the lack of books, and you’re going to have casual readers that want a book or two a month as well. The market would be completely begging for this solution.
The option to buy could be implemented if needed and you could even let people send in their own books to increase your library, giving them credit or money for doing so. Especially when we’re talking old educational books some students don’t need to own after leaving university.
Get it done Amazon.
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NTL becomes Virgin Media, but will they provide the light so badly needed?
NTL today re-branded itself as ‘Virgin Media’ in a bold move by Virgin. Why is it a bold move? Because the Virgin brand (with the exception of their phones) are a trusted brand - NTL is completely the opposite.
Changes include a new ‘download movies/tv shows’ service for broadband users (something I’ll certainly be looking into), ‘no limits’ broadband (something previously promised by NTL), a much much simpler website and from the looks of it - real HDTV support. I’ve also noticed their policy fully supports companies making lawsuits against their customers such as ‘illegal’ downloading and that Virgin will support them in any way they can (something that NTL stopped a while ago, since the time of ‘the letter’ coming in the mail).
Beforehand the website had become so cluttered for use that made no sense that it not only was it annoying to use but you had to click 3-4 times to get to a page that you wanted - and that’s if you where clicking in the right places.
Here’s five things ‘Virgin Media’ needs to do to revive NTL out the dark ages:
- Make the broadband stable. It needs to stay up 24/7 and not have constant ‘down time’ for ‘maintenance’ at eight hours a time. Support your users and give us real ‘uncapped’ downloading - no hidden messages when the user downloads too much one month.- Revive the promises of NTL from their Digital department. We hear about ‘new 200gb boxes that let you record and all this jazz’ every time someone comes out to replace one of our NTL digital boxes (which is once a year, at least). I want to see some of this in action.. I want to see these boxes and have the company show me that something is happening rather than just talking about it. Up until now those ‘jazz boxes’ have been in testing for two years.
- Hire some decent programmers for the digital service - or just use Telewest. Telewest merged with NTL a while back and we’ve not seen a single benefit from it. However, Telewest offers instant channel browsing, a real guide system, smaller boxes, better remotes, instant on-demand, teletext… shall I keep going? The point is, Telewest have done something great with their software on their boxes, NTL haven’t - why isn’t this something all customers are experiencing?
- Stop closing NTL customer support buildings. My mum used to work at one and this building has shut down 10 or so departments out of 12 or so since she left. Not a direct reflection of her leaving but merely a showing of how little NTL has valued customer support that comes from this country. We are now shipped to India where people don’t know what ‘E4′ and ‘The family movie package’ actually is - which makes our calls three times longer and ten times more frustrating.
- Bring the Virgin brand in with force. Give us a sleek red box with the Virgin brand that becomes the purple cow of boxes underneath the television, give us something to say ‘Virgin have come into the digital market’ and don’t stand still with the innovation and improvements for four years like NTL have done with their ‘Jazz boxes’
- Number six (isn’t there always one extra?) - improve the damn interactive service. Why can’t NTL users press Red when it says so? Sky customers can.. I can only presume this is because it’s a bad platform behind it. We can on E4.. and recently BBC, but not really anywhere else.
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Digital receipts
Why haven’t receipts gone digital yet? Why is paper still used for this?
I don’t know about you but when I receive a receipt at my local Co-Op or Tesco I simply put it into the bag and it gets thrown away along with the bag once my shopping is put away. And I can’t even begin to imagine how much paper and ink is wasted along with all this. Sure it’s recyclable, but who cares? Your still chopping down thousands (probably tens of thousands) of trees for all these wasted receipts.
My proposal - integrate it into bank cards. Let me click on a transaction in my online banking account and view the details for that purchase. How? Integrate it via the PIN input system, get a data standard for it all. In the end all the system would be doing is sending a few kilobytes instead of a few bytes through the fibre optic cable.
Better yet, localize the system - make it a gimmick with your store card. Let me view my Tesco receipts on my Tesco store card login online. Tesco already keep the data for market research purposes.. why not let me view it after purchasing at the store? Put in a simple ‘do you want receipts?’ option in my login so I can turn down receipts automatically upon the swiping of my club card. “Take your receipts with you!” - help me build an automatic shopping basket online of my regular goods. The possibilities of laziness are endless.
One step further - the mobile phone. Store it on my SIM card via some kind of infrared scanning. One for the future, but something to think about (especially with the emergence of payment with mobile phones in Japan, which hopefully is coming to the western world sooner rather than later).
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Five things Mosso Web Hosting can do to improve
Recently I wrote about 10 things I love about Mosso Web Hosting. This article is about things Mosso can implement to make me love them even more.
1. Cron jobs
Haven’t really had to use them up until recently, you can of course work around the need for them but it’s not an ideal situation. Ideally cron jobs would be included by default straight in the control panel.2. Hierarchical FTP access
At the moment I can access all my sites via the same FTP connection and the same username/password (which I absolutely love). But what if I want to allow a friend or staff member access to a specific site or directory within those sites and only that specified place? At the moment you just can’t do it, and it’s a big requirement of the majority I’d say.3. PayPal billing integration
Integrating PayPal into their billing system would allow me to bill people who I host automatically instead of doing it myself. Unfortunately the masses don’t have Mastercard, Visa or American Express.4. A development blog and/or road map of things to come
Whilst finding out about upcoming things internally makes me feel like ‘one of the team’ - it doesn’t tell everyone else about it. People visiting the site looking into the service would be much more impressed if they saw a road map showing what the company is working on. Whilst there’s a ‘but people will steal it’ complaint coming from someone - what other service is there like Mosso that could possibly steal an idea?A blog and/or road map would vastly improve the site.
5. Small thing: statistics
In the control panel it will display ‘0 of 80.0 GB’, in my mind this would be much better if it said ‘931 MB of 80.0 GB’. This goes for all other statistics around the control panel too.Also the control panel uses awstats, which is all well and good - but I feel that building something that displays information from Google Analytics, Feedburner or the like would bring web hosting based statistic packages into the current century.
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My message to ThinkVitamin
In short and in anwer to your poll to gather just why the site has fallen from grace - publish something other than weekly job board updates and use the site for something more than a platform to publicise your other ventures.
It used to be that they had regular updates and some promise in what was to be published in the coming weeks/days. Now they just seem to have more job adverts for us and no real amount of content to read.
As of this post - their last 7 RSS entries are 5 weekly job sum ups, a review of Microsoft Expression Web and one post including their poll to ask a load of questions to their readers. Need I say more?
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