Crikey, March already!
Posted on March 11, 2006 by Tim Huckle
Filed Under Ramblings |
Embarrassingly quiet on here lately. I’ll make an effort to engage a few more colleagues and would like to open up this blog to any interactive investor user who wants to make a suggestion, have a rant, or talk about the latest £’000 you’ve invested in biodiesel…
That said, the final point might not be so relevant and it’s not all quiet on the investor discussion side of things. We’ve seen continued growth in bulletin board volumes and site traffic generally over the last quarter - which in turn has provided our sales and product teams with the groundwork to help generate some very positive revenue figures. Two years on from buying back interactive investor from AMP and we’ve most definately completed the turn-around phase.
Just to make it that bit harder for our sales team, there’s a few of us pressuring them to stop selling pop-ups/unders going forward. In my opinion, any agency selling those delivery options to their clients need a kick up the backside and I can only imagine they reduce our credibility in the eyes of those users who may have yet to stumble upon a pop-up blocker. Surely the days of pop-ups are numbered this year, what with IE7 arriving shortly (74% of our users are IE6), and Windows ‘Defender’ having these sanity saving devices active by default. Some of us have no option: accepting pop-ups is all part of testing and all I can say is that I no longer dream of Carol Vordeman in the same way having had her pop-under me far too many times recently.
So what’s new. Well, our IFA site was launched recently, a new markets and AIM page goes live shortly, and we continue to make significant strides towards delivering more engaging, relevant and accessible editorial content across the site via a new content management system. You’ll also notice on the homepage a ‘user activity’ panel which, whilst simple to achieve technically, illustrates our belief that interactive investor has a strong community base with whom we need to work closely to develop further tools and services…ideas on this blog please. Reassuringly, it also indicates at the time of writing there are 954 other people like me up at such a crazy hour on a Saturday morning!
Had an interesting chat in the pub this evening with colleagues about the true value of Google Earth once the initial fun of finding your house, previous house and a UFO had warn off. Clearly it offers great educational opportunities for schools and of course we assume it will all tie in nicely with further enhancements around localised search; however I must admit I hadn’t used it in the last few months and the Google love affair, for me at least, is still exclusively with their search engine.
It dawned on me when I got home however that there had been an ongoing question about whether Dashwood House, the office block where we occupy the first floor, had a satellite dish on the roof. ”I could find our office and zoom in on Google Earth!” I excitedly informed my wife, who still doesn’t quite understand the importance of getting a TV signal on to our plasma screen in time for the World Cup.
Finally, my first legitimate use for Google Earth! (Dashwood House, Old Broad Street, London.kmz) I pondered over the image for several minutes…. Lots of aircon extraction units; but no real sign of a dish. In my sobering state it then struck me that the images didn’t look that recent - the tables outside McDonalds at Liverpool Street Station just aren’t like that any more. I know, I buy my salad their most days ;) A “JFGI” later and it seems London images are dated to 2001. Google Earth still not much use to me after all.
Anyway, enough rambling. Please feel free to post, we value your comments.
—-
NB. There is database maintenance work scheduled for Monday 13th March 2006 and Tuesday 14th March 2006, from 11.30pm to 2am, which will result in the site being unavailable whilst we do testing. Apologies for this unavoidable down time if this may affect you.
Comments
One Response to “Crikey, March already!”
Leave a Reply
The revolution begins Carol - http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/carol