MegaPixels-DataMind Blog

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Dorset's first BowShot E-traders' Group launch

Tonight I attended the first meeting of Bowshot in Dorset (I attended a Hamsphire Bowshot meeting and was a Dragons E-Den participant earlier this year). Speaker: Steven Gallaher of Bluhalo) who made these points:

Mystery shoppers; conversions; 6 stats ; google analytics too complex; ; tap into trafflic flow; easy to prurhase; comfortable;

Know your competitors; reinforce brand! Evolve stay ahead; do today what competitoion will do tomorrow

The Long tail = best book; a world of niches ; simplicity is the ultimate sophistication = Leonardo da vinci

52% - 75% shopping cart abandonment!!

Conversion online 1.5%

Shopping basket top right -web 2.0 drag and drop

Ab test L v R

Bag or basket in the uk or usa based in cart

Up sell / cross sell after have bought

Registration before checkout = a NoNo

Messy removal of products

Gencom = Chris Love and ANO

Shipping costs all known before try to buy

Being Confortable is a danger – annoying friend to critizise

Live chat www.etsy.com

Video use – Bournemouth surf guy

Get trust; not built in the bedroom!

Raise design game

Email campaigns

Banner – change it; calendar add monthly every month; moving banner

Content is king - linking is queen

++ Loss leader ++

Separate sight for price comparison – become a aggregator

Industry portal – eg pmp;

Liveperson

Spelling mistakes – very cheap PPC

Less barriers re checkout – don’t get them to sign up; choice of optin

**registered with data protection act – prove that got optin

reposted from: http://bowshot.org/etd.aspx

Dorset's first BowShot E-traders' Group launch

Following the successful establishment of a BowShot e-traders' group in Hampshire, the launch of a second group, based in Dorset, will take place on 24th October. Delegates to the launch will meet from 4-7 pm in Room P401 at Bournemouth University's Talbot Campus, to hear how the group will operate and to meet its prospective new members.

These members will be executives from high-growth bricks and mortar businesses with mission-critical web operations or from established e-businesses on-line sales in excess of £250,000 per annum.

For more information about this group and how it will operate in future, please see below.

Objective

The group will pool its expertise and work together to triple the value of member's on-line businesses within 3 years.

Modus Operandi

When formed, the group will meet on the third Wednesday of each month, from 4-7 pm at Bournemouth University's Talbot Campus. (There will be no meeting in December as this is a usually a hectic time for e-traders). Meetings will be facilitated by Nicholas Steven or by another experienced facilitator, in his absence.

The first hour will normally provide members with the opportunity to discuss their current e-business challenges and to mentor each other.

For the second hour, the group will hear from an acknowledged expert or exemplar in some aspect of e-commerce. These presentations will normally address one of these key interest areas:

Improving conversion
Improving traffic
Improving measurement
Improving the business

The last hour will provide for Q&A and for members to drill down and share their own experience of the topic under discussion. Action plans will be produced and monitored at subsequent meetings.

Membership

This groups will consist of 18 members. An average attendance of 15-16 can be expected at meetings, so everyone has a chance to contribute. It is important that members are the executive responsible for the attainment of their company's on-line objectives. They must have the authority to implement the best practices and ideas that they discover at group meetings. Most members' companies will have on-line sales of more than £250,000 p.a, and many with more than £1m, prior to entry.

Membership fee

Joining fee £150 plus VAT
Annual membership: £1,000 plus VAT

Fees are payable half-yearly in advance or by monthly standing order.

Meeting location

Bournemouth University, Fern Barrow, Poole, BH12 5BB. The meeting is held in one of the University Seminar Rooms. Please ask at the main reception.

Meeting frequency & timings

Members meet 11 times a year between 4-7 pm on the third Wednesday of every month except in December, when the group takes a holiday. Group members are also able to meet other BowShot groups at the BowShot Gala dinner in December.

How to join

Please contact us if you are interested in joining this group.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Head of Chinese Toy Company Said to Kill Himself

By DAVID BARBOZA

Published: August 13, 2007

SHANGHAI, Aug. 13 — The head of a Chinese company that was behind the recall earlier this month of more than a million Mattel toys committed suicide over the weekend, China’s state-controlled media reported today.

Zhang Shuhong, a Hong Kong businessman and owner of the Lee Der Industrial Company, a company that made toys for Mattel for 15 years, hanged himself in a company warehouse in Foshan, in southern China, the Southern Metropolis Daily said today.

There was no independent confirmation of the suicide. A person who answered the phone at Lee Der’s office in Foshan City, near Guangzhou, immediately hung up.

A spokeswoman for Mattel, which is based in El Segundo, Calif., released a statement this morning that said “We were saddened to learn of this tragic news.”

The death is the latest development in a year filled with prominent recalls and product safety scandals involving goods that were made in China.

Mattel, which makes Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels cars, recalled more than a million toys worldwide after discovering that they were coated with lead paint. The recall was one of the largest this year and included 83 types of toys, including Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer characters made under the Fisher-Price brand and sold worldwide.

A string of troubling recalls of Chinese-made products this year has heightened trade tensions between the United States and China and created a public relations disaster for China, whose economy and trade surpluses are growing at a blistering pace.

Experts here say many Chinese factory owners — often under intense pressure to lower production costs — cut corners in making products and regularly use cheap and illegal substitutes. And indeed, in several of the recalls involving China this year, the government says companies intentionally used cheap or illegal substitutes.

For instance, after the United States announced one of the largest pet food recalls in history, Chinese regulators said they found that two makers of food ingredients here intentionally added an industrial chemical called melamine into the feed to save money and artificially increase the protein count. Instead, they created a toxic potion that sickened or killed thousands of animals.

Faced with growing criticism over the quality and safety of its food, toys, tires and other products, China has vigorously defended the quality of its goods, insisting products made here are on par with products made in the United States and Europe.

But the government, acknowledging some continuing problems, has also vowed to overhaul its food safety system, to crack down on companies that counterfeit and sell tainted products and to severely punish those responsible for damaging the country’s image and its booming exports drive.

Just last week, regulators in Beijing revoked the export licenses of the two toy manufacturers, including Lee Der, because of their roles in recalls. Earlier this year, the RC2 Corporation of Illinois recalled 1.5 million Thomas & Friends toy railway sets because they were also coated with lead paint. One of its suppliers, the Hansheng Wood Products Company, also had its license revoked.

Beijing regulators said they revoked Lee Der’s license because it used paint contaminated with excessive levels of lead, which could be poisonous and pose of health dangers to children.

The government said in an announcement last week that Lee Der’s paint supplier had shipped Lee Der a fake, lead-free paint pigment that could be used in producing paint. The government said it was investigating the sale of fake lead-free pigment in China.

In an interview earlier this month, Mattel’s chief executive, Robert A. Eckert, said the company Mattel later identified as its supplier, Lee Der, “is a vendor plant with whom we’ve worked for 15 years; this isn’t somebody that just started making toys for us.”

In its report today, Southern Metropolis said that Lee Der officials said Mr. Zhang received the leaded paint from a company controlled by a close friend.

China now makes about 80 percent of the world’s toys and many of the world’s biggest brand name companies, including Mattel, Hasbro and McDonald’s, use contract toy manufacturers in China.

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

NeatReceipts Scanalizer - Scan business receipts

NeatReceipts Scanalizer
REVIEW DATE: 04.19.07

Total posts: 1

$166.00 - $247.00

By M. David Stone

The first time I saw NeatReceipts Scanalizer ($200 street) was in the Philadelphia airport, where NeatReceipts, a local company, was showing it off. The demo was aimed at business travelers, the scanner's target audience. The combination of scanner and software (then simply called NeatReceipts) was showing in a kiosk, surrounded by stores selling overpriced snacks. The product would scan customers' receipts for those snacks (not to mention other expenses) and let them throw out all the scraps of paper that were stuffed into their wallets—or soon would be.

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		Slideshow \| All Shots

A few months later, I got the chance to review NeatReceipts, which was shipping at the time with the program NeatReceipts Professional 2.0.2. I still had that airport demonstration in mind, so I wasn't surprised that the program worked reasonably well. But it's now more than a year later, and the current version of the software is 2.7.5. I thought it was time to take another look.

The hardware side of NeatReceipts Scanalizer is a sheet-fed scanner capable of scanning paper up to 8.5 by 30 inches. Despite the NeatReceipts logo, the scanner is actually the highly portable Plustek OpticSlim M12 that I've reviewed separately. But NeatReceipts Scanalizer is mostly about the software, which adds two additional modules—"Tax Reports" and "Documents"—to the earlier version's "Expense Reports Manager" (now called "Receipts") and the "Business Card Manager" (now called simply "Business Cards").

Aside from the names, Receipts and Business Cards are largely unchanged, at least in their general description. The main screen of the Receipts module is divided into four panes. The pane on the left shows either search options or an image of the currently selected receipt. The three on the right show a table of folders, a table of receipts in the currently selected folder, and additional information for the currently selected receipt or folder.

The earlier version of NeatReceipts impressed me with how well it enhanced receipts printed with ribbons that should have been changed long ago. The current version does just as well on that score, making nearly invisible ink easy to read on-screen, and it does at least as good a job at optical character recognition (OCR)—recognizing the text and putting it in the right database fields. For information it misses—including, for example, handwritten tips and totals—it's easy to read the originals on-screen and fill in the right amounts.

The same recognition and parsing technology works like gangbusters for business cards. In fact, the business-card module is in the same league as dedicated business-card programs. Thus, NeatReceipts is worth considering strictly for its business card features. Here again, the screen is divided into four panes. Two show a table of contacts and the details for the currently selected contact. Another lets you see any of four scanned images for the currently selected contact—the front and back of the business card, a photo, or one or more pages of anything you care to scan.

The fourth pane lets you list action items and notes for the currently selected contact, which lets the business-card module double as a simple contact manager. You can also right-click on a name in the table of contacts and choose Send Email To, and you can synchronize contact data with Microsoft Outlook or with the online Plaxo service.

The new Tax Form module can generate a long list of tax forms or generate a TurboTax file. Expense-report formats are limited, but if your accounting department insists on a particular format, you can export your data to a standard CSV (comma separated variable) file, which almost any database or word processing program can use to generate a report in any format—assuming, of course, that you're comfortable with the database program's report generator or the word processor's mail-merge feature.

The critical question is whether your accounting department will still make you keep the original physical receipts and hand them in. If you still have to keep track of the originals, you lose a lot of the benefit of the program. And for tax-deductible expenses, I'd still check with my accountant before I threw out the paper receipts.

Not so incidentally, if you'd rather manage the data in an accounting program, or need to enter it for things such as reconciling your credit card statements, you can also export the data to other formats, including Quicken, QuickBooks, and Microsoft Money, and then import it into your accounting program. The process doesn't work as smoothly as I'd ideally like. Depending on your accounting program, though, it may be a significant improvement over having to type everything in.

The newly added Documents feature is modeled on the Receipts module. It lets you create multiple folders and put individual documents into each folder. Unfortunately, it's disappointing at best. The hierarchical structure is not as useful for managing documents as it is for receipts. More troublesome, NeatReceipts doesn't OCR the documents, so you can't find a document by searching for the text in it, and you can't export the document in text format to edit it.

In many ways, NeatReceipts is unique, but it's worth mentioning that Visioneer recently introduced its RoadWarrior scanner, which is also aimed at the business traveler, putting it in head-to-head competition with NeatReceipts. (Neither one, by the way, offers full-fledged Vista support as of this writing, although NeatReceipts has a beta version for Vista on its Web site and Visioneer says it has a beta driver for Vista that will be on its Web site shortly, along with Vista-compatible updates for its bundled software.)

Visioneer doesn't include the ability to OCR-scan receipts and put the data in a database. Instead, it provides Nuance's ScanSoft PaperPort (which is a much better document manager than NeatReceipts). The idea is to manage the images of the receipts in PaperPort but still create expense reports and enter expenses in your accounting program the same way you do now.

You may prefer one program's approach over the other's, but make sure you take a look at both and consider which is the better match for your taste.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

MOBILE PHONE CHARGES ABROAD

EDM 844

MOBILE PHONE CHARGES ABROAD

06.02.2007

Watson, Tom

That this House notes with concern the plight of UK customers and holidaymakers who continue to face higher mobile phone call charges when abroad, particularly if they roam into networks other than their own; believes that this is due to the high wholesale charges of each network operator; welcomes the recent decision by the 3 Group effectively to abolish roaming charges for all customers who travel to other 3 Group networks abroad; notes that this is only possible because they control the wholesale charges of their own foreign group networks; calls for all other European networks to follow this example and to cut their excessive wholesale roaming charges, which currently result in UK consumers making a disproportionate contribution to foreign network profits and being charged excessive fees for making calls when abroad; and, if no such voluntary action is taken, calls on the Government and European Commission to protect the interests of UK holidaymakers and businesses by taking positive action on the wholesale roaming charges levied by European mobile phone companies and examine the possibility of capping the cost of mobile data usage in this age of wireless broadband.