Category: fun stuff

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End User fun stuff

The youth of today… iTunes and LPs

The youth of today doesn’t know how to put an LP on a record deck.  That isn’t entirely fair.  It is pretty obvious that you take the vinyl disc out of its sleeve and slot it over the little nipple in the middle of the deck.

The only thing is on my old “music centre” in the attic you have to select tape, CD, phono or tuner and to someone who just downloads from iTunes it isn’t altogether clear that phono means record player.

I also had to show him how to press “start” to get start the deck revolving and move the arm over.

My 12 year old needed to write a review on a jazz record for his homework and Duke Ellington fitted the bill perfectly.  Problem is it was on 12 inch LP and in the attic.  I sometime retire to the attic on a Sunday afternoon with my pal Terry and a few beers to play with the train set and listen to some of the 250 albums and hundreds of singles that live up there.

Just for the record 12inches = 30cms and LP = Long Playing record. Happy days.

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Business fun stuff

Trefor.net first anniversary

Just like the Queen has two birthdays, “official” and “actual”, I realised over the weekend that so do I.  “Blog” and “actual” :-).

My first blog post went out on Monday May 19th one year ago.  Since then I have written over 330 posts and had around 70,000 visits.

The year gone by has also been a successful one in business as Timico attained 4th place in the Sunday Times/Microsoft Techtrack listing and was winner of the ITSPA Best Unified Solution Award.

Trefor.net is still very much small beer in internet terms but we all have our own little worlds to live in and this is mine. It is an exciting place to be .

PS my actual birthday is the same as Donny Osmond’s! I’ll leave it to you to track down if you need to know it badly enough. I’m younger than him though 🙂

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End User fun stuff

Encarta – the passing of an era

Microsoft is closing down Encarta, its paid-for online encyclopedia.  It now holds such a small market share, 1.27% according to The Register,  that it is no longer viable.

I imagine few tears will be shed.  It is worth noting though that this really does represent the passing of an era.  Not “the Encarta era” but the era represented by the likes of Encycopedia Brittanica of which Encarta was just one of the last in the line.

In its time Encarta represented a big change in the market.  Up until then Encyclopedia Brittanica was sold mostly by door to door salesmen and came in around 30 large bound volumes.  As a kid I would have loved to have had a set but it was also impractically expensive for my parents.  I imagine that salesman only needed one sale to live off for a week. 

The word encyclopedia will probably now disappear into the history books having been replaced by wikipedia.

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Business fun stuff

Happy New Year

This, as you will I’m sure understand, is an automated post. Written in the dying working hours of 2008 it has been scheduled for an unnaturally early time on New Years day as a precaution against the extremely unlikely event that anyone will want to read this blog today. Most of us will still be in bed.

To those who have made the effort, a Happy New Year to you and may you prosper in 2009.

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Business fun stuff

What’s Going To Happen In 2009?

I would be writing this from my Caribbean beach home if I were really any good at predictions. Having said that there are a few macro level changes I think will happen in our industry that are worth putting down as reference points. Some of these might be considered obvious but are none the less valid – they will be high profile in 2009.

  1. Facebook will come of age as a business tool as well as a social networking website. Linked-In will struggle to keep up with Facebook.  Twitter will gain in strength.
  2. The use of web based conferencing and collaboration will grow significantly in the face of the economic downturn and the need to cut costs. 
  3. The ISP industry will see some big consolidations. In the UK the Big 6 will become the Big 4. 
  4. Mobile VoIP will become mainstream for business.
  5. The ISP industry and the Music industry will finally get together to combat illegal P2P downloading.
  6. Liverpool will win the Premiership. 

6 predictions are enough. It reduces the chances of getting it wrong 🙂 .

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Business fun stuff

What's Going To Happen In 2009?

I would be writing this from my Caribbean beach home if I were really any good at predictions. Having said that there are a few macro level changes I think will happen in our industry that are worth putting down as reference points. Some of these might be considered obvious but are none the less valid – they will be high profile in 2009.

  1. Facebook will come of age as a business tool as well as a social networking website. Linked-In will struggle to keep up with Facebook.  Twitter will gain in strength.
  2. The use of web based conferencing and collaboration will grow significantly in the face of the economic downturn and the need to cut costs. 
  3. The ISP industry will see some big consolidations. In the UK the Big 6 will become the Big 4. 
  4. Mobile VoIP will become mainstream for business.
  5. The ISP industry and the Music industry will finally get together to combat illegal P2P downloading.
  6. Liverpool will win the Premiership. 

6 predictions are enough. It reduces the chances of getting it wrong 🙂 .

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Business fun stuff

Review of 2008

2008 has been a very busy year – as they all seem to be. The action started early on when Timico acquired Twang.net. This is the third ISP we have bought and the process is getting slicker every time. Soon afterwards, the integration of the Twang and Timico network infrastructures began. Twang ADSL users all saw an immediate improvement in network performance and web surfing experience on the larger Timico network.

In the summer we established a separate Network Operations Centre in Ipswich to take care of the growing Timico core network. Previously this function had been split across a number of locations as the company grew and acquired businesses. A well as settling the team in a single location we set about hiring developers to provide the growing number of customers (both internal and external) with a world class ISP capability. 

September saw Timico appear 4th in the Sunday Times Techtrack 100. This was up from 10th last year and an improvement that thrilled everyone involved.

We then had the installation of our 21CN Hostlink – a resilient dual Gigabit Ethernet fibre connection over which we then ran the ADSL2+ trials. 

Finally in December Timico won the ITSPA Award for the best Unified Solution. This was for the best ITSP that was also an ISP. Many VoIP service providers do not manage the underlying netowrk that is used to carry their voice traffic. Timico does and has now been recognised for the excellent job it does.

Along the way the company has grown to over 130 employees and has broken a number of it’s own records in terms of sales, profitability and numbers of subscribers.

On a personal basis I started this blog in May and am now pleased to say that it is getting in the region of 40,000 hits a month and growing by the month. I welcome any constructive feedback readers might have. I was also elected to the council of the Internet Service Providers’ Association (ISPA) which is proving to be a very interesting place to be.

This is in addition to my role on the council of the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association ITSPA. Being on both councils I think gives me a pretty unique insight into what is happening in the UK’s internet world and I hope that some of it comes through in the blog posts.

The activity within ITSPA has grown this year and the organisation now holds regular networking events, dinners and workshops which are proving to be very popular.

During this year the Web2.0 revolution has gained pace with Facebook coming to the fore and plenty of new sites such as Twitter making the news. If you want to hook up with me on Facebook I am trefor davies. On twitter I am tref – the benefits of being an early entrant.

This year people have moved on from talking about VoIP to talking about Unified Communications which is good for Timico because that really is where our VoIP service has been pitched since the beginning. The rising cost of fuel and the green agenda is also helping to drive the market for us.

I am very excited about 2009, despite the economic downturn . It is an opportunity though I’m sure not without its challenges. The landscape is going to change yet again and it is good to be part of the game.

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End User fun stuff

Panto

I was at the panto in Lincoln on Boxing Day. As usual they had three kids up on stage at the end for some freebies. In the brief interviews we discovered that there were two nine year olds and a six year old and that Santa brought them a laptop, an iPod Touch and a Nintedo DS for Christmas!

I guess this is good news if you are in the technology business!

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Business fun stuff

Have A Good Christmas

I’m shutting down now until Monday 29th. Happy Christmas to all my friends and readers.  Here’s hoping that Santa recognises that I’ve been a good boy all year!

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Business fun stuff

Scale Is Important

This is a business where scale matters. One machine costs £100,000 and can process 16 million bites a day. It takes 45 weeks to grow the bite in the ground and they are pulling for 50 weeks of the year. They grow 8 million per acre!

What on earth am I talking about? Chantenay carrots actually which is what I mean by a bite in this case. Thats a heck of a lot of carrots. I’ve just been to a soiree where mine host runs a carrot processing plant in Nottinghamshire. I got talking to him about his vegetables and was totally fascinated with the statistics important to his business.

He runs three carrot polishing machines. They can also be used for potatoes and parsnips, though with different brush sizes obviously!! Next time you buy a baby carrot in the supermarket remember that it has probably been cleaned for your delectation by my friend Martin.

There was also a farmer in the room and I would have been happy discussing carrot pulling until the cows came home had I not had to take the kids home to bed.

What a wonderfully diverse world in which we live. It’s not that different to communications. Bits, bytes, brush size (?). The language is the same. Check out your carrots here.

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End User fun stuff

Duck Suicide Rate Rises In Run Up To Christmas

Apparently suicide amongst ducks is on the rise in the run up to Christmas. This latest victim was clearly unable to cope with the pressures that come at this time of year.

Speculation is rife amongst the Timico Network Operations Team as to what made this particular individual “go over the edge”. On the surface what to the outside world looked like a cheery duck clearly had an inner angst.

The team offered the following possible explanations:

  • The duck’s pension fund was tied up in the stock market, and Woolworths in particular
  • He couldn’t face having the family over to stay during the festive period
  • There are other more sinister reasons involving a knife and fork and an orange…

Whatever the explanation our thoughts are with the family. It is not known whether the trend is also being seen amongst other members of the poultry community.

If anyone can shed any more light on this tragedy please leave a comment. Remember a duck is not just for Christmas. It tastes great at any time of year 🙂

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Business fun stuff

A day in the life

Life is rich. If yours isn’t you should seriously think about doing something about it. I was wondering what to write about today out of the many things that are going on. In the end I thought I’d just rattle off a list of things I was involved in during the day because I believe it illustrates the point of those opening three words.

Got in and made a cup of tea. Then spent time discussing a contract we are about to sign with BT. Checked up on progress of our 21CN trial orders. Sat with tech support discussing a Virtual Machine project we are looking at. Discussions with our new Business Development Director who starts in January (more on him in due course I’m sure). Meeting with Cisco to discuss marketing plans for the Cisco Small Business portfolio for 2009. Lunch with Cisco. Meeting with Nortel to discuss hosted VoIP propositions. Drop Nortel off at station. Arrange tech meeting to discuss SPAM strategy for 2009. Conference call with VoIP Operations Manager to discuss specific customer technical issue. Home to take kids to cubs. Catch up chat with CEO. Go to school prize giving evening (son Tom won prize for English  and yes of course I am proud of him). Chat with headmaster congratulating him on chosing son as prizewinner. Home. Kiss wife. Do emails and write blog post.

Tomorrow is another day, another blog post. Friday is a day off to take the kids to the Lincoln Christmas Market. Check it out here. They get hundreds of thousands of visitors each year (or so I’m told). We live slap bang in the middle of the action so it is difficult to ignore. One of the kids’ school shuts down for the duration because access to it is impossible. The parents run a cafe which raises around £10,000 each year for the school PTA funds. Thats one heck of a lot of teas and coffees at a pound each. 

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End User fun stuff

Thanksgiving

Today is Thanksgiving day in North America. Not many of my American friends are online,  Jeff Keni Pulver being the odds on exception. I expect they are all being thankful for the day off and gearing themselves up for the supersized feast that is to come.

It occurred to me that this was a good time to ask around the Network Operations Centre to see what the engineers had to be thankful about. Of course I had to discount “having you as a boss Tref” comments, partly because none of them came my way. Hmm.

Ben, Head of Net Ops, said we should be thankful for the internet. Ok. Uhuh. The others were more imaginative.

Paul said he was thankful for Nunzilla! It’s definately a good one. Photo below.

Ian said he was thankful for his black characterless keyboard. I must say it is impressive. Thank you for that.

Anyone wishing comment on this post should do so, please. Imaginative things to be thankful for will be acknowledged and if worthy, may result in a prize.

PS note the product placement 🙂  !

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Business fun stuff

The customer is king

Every now and again the business throws a bone at the Engineering team as a reward for being good boys. Yesterday it was my turn and I got to go to Gordon Ramsay’s Restaurant at Claridges Hotel in London.

Of course there is more to it than that. This was a lunch with some of our most important IP networking customers to say thank you for their business. Doing business isn’t just about selling a customer a product or service. It is about building long term mutually beneficial relationships and this is what I was doing at Claridges.

Meeting up for a convivial lunch provided the right setting to promote a constructive dialogue. It gave the customers the opportunity to provide Timico with feedback regarding how we are performing and to open up new potential avenues of business. I also like to make friends with our customers. So much of your life is spent at work that you have to enjoy it. The Timico attitude is not “us and them”. It is simply “us”.

It isn’t logistically or financially possible to take every customer to Claridges. However this doesn’t mean to say that we can’t treat all customers as kings in the service we provide them.

As a bonus Gordon himself turned up resplendent in his chef’s gear and a great time was had by all. And don’t worry. I know how much people enjoy reading about others having a good time so I will be sure to keep you updated if I do anything like this again 🙂 .

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End User fun stuff

Bangor University Industrial Panel

Attended the Bangor University Engineering Department Industrial Panel meeting yesterday. I always enjoy a trip back to my alma mater. It is an honour to be asked.

The Electronics and computer science departments have enjoyed a resurgence with entries up by over 50%. This is no small achievement in an environment where kids are moving away from the harder maths and science based subjects. The computer science department was ranked 4th in the country by the Guardian newspaper.

Universities are having to be innovative in attracting students and at Bangor they are given a free laptop in the first year. Clearly a marketing initiative that seems to be working.

It was interesting to note that entrants in engineering departments around the country  require additional coaching in maths. This is apparently the case regardless of the university, Imperial College and Cambridge included!

Life for students has changed in other ways as well. When I were a lad nobody had a job in term time. There wasn’t time. Lager was 40 pence a pint and you had to be in the pub by 7pm to get a seat!

These days they all need to work to pay the bills.  This is in turn must have a knock-on effect on academic performance. On a recent visit to Lincoln University I was told that a typical student graduates with £7,000 of debt. That’s over $11,000 for the benefit of American readers (subject to a continually shifting exchange rate).

I look forward to the next opportunity to help the Univeristy. The picture below is of the members of the Industrial Panel. A fine body of men and women 🙂 . It’s not often I wear a tie!

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Business fun stuff

In the land of technology the well trained man is king

During the first seriously exciting 4 years of Timico’s being the biggest lesson I have learnt is the importance of training.

A big part of the value that Timico provides to its customers is the knowledge of its employees. Engineers are constantly going on technical courses. Indeed Timico runs its own courses for business partners wanting to climb a learning curve and manage their own installations for their customers.

One area where training is not as straightforward to apply is in the area of front line sales. There are no sales training courses that teach people how to sell the mix of technologies that Timico offers (mobile, fixed line, internet, VoIP, IT services, PBX etc etc etc in case you didn’t already know).

So we have to do it ourselves. This semester the salesforce has been participating in what we called the “Multi-Site Campaign”. Multi-site because Timico specialises in selling solutions to organisations with people spread over many locations.

As well as taking part in a competition to see who could sell the most multi-site business the sales teams have been getting involved in mentoring sessions with your truly and others. I am pleased to announce that the winner is Jo Smith. Jo gets a trip for two to New York to go Christmas shopping.

I guess the point, for any customers reading this post, is that this doesn’t mean that a Timico sales person is now going to be selling to them more aggressively and on more fronts. It means that you are going to waste less time talking about things that are not relevant to your business.

The time that you do spend with Timico, and I am grateful to you for that, is going to be more productive and I trust that the professionalism of our staff will make you feel that it is time well spent.

Timico CEO Chris Tombs congratulates Jo Smith upon winning the multi-site competition. In the land of technology the well trained woman is in fact queen.

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Business fun stuff

Credit Crunch

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End User fun stuff

The Ducks Are Lined Up

We have just finished hiring more staff for the Networks Operation Team. This has taken some time because we wanted to be sure that we found the right people.

I have to say that the wait has been worth it. Timico now has a superb core of people that will drive the network forwards. I’m sure it helped that they had the new Network Operations Centre to move into but also that there is a lot of technical action here at Timico. The business is constantly developing.

We are very fortunate as a business in the people that we employ. Today I sat in at the final presentation of a group of corporate account managers who had been working on developing multi-site communications solutions proposals. The team, mentored by yours truly, did a great job (I know, I know I would say that wouldn’t I).

I guess the point is that it’s people that make the difference to a business and to our customers and I am happy to be working with such a great crowd.

The photo? Ducks, because they have to be lined up to be successful, and because you can’t always take life too seriously. 

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Business fun stuff

Must read items

I like this blog to be populated mainly with original material from the Trefor Davies world. Sometimes you just have to link to another source to give credit for magnificent reporting. The two links below are both from the Register.

This first one reveals that the management at Thus have inadvertently compared the Cable and Wireless acquisition of their company with the Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster.

The second appeared a while ago and was a beautiful piece of prose designed to be read by afficionados of the Technology Section of the Sunday Sport – I assume there is one.

Long live the free press.

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Business fun stuff

4th Fastest Growing Technology Company

It’s not often that reading the Sunday Times gives me a thrill. It did today because I came across the Techtrack 100 supplement and discovered that Timico is now rated as the fourth fastest growing business in the table.

Last year we ranked tenth which we felt was quite an achievement. This year I had forgotten all about it so the surprise is doubly pleasant.

This is an exciting time to be around in the communications industry. Lots happening. Lots of change. Companies have to be nimble to succeed and I think Timico is fortunate to have people with the talent to make things happen.

Watch this space!

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Business fun stuff

Diversity

I was taking a look at the Timico open order book and was staggered to see the diversity of types of company that we have as customers. I couldn’t identify what they all did from the name alone but those I could I wrote down.

Courier, damage management, domestic appliance distributor, baby goods shop, sporting goods manufacturer, printer, skip hire, transport company, optical goods company, nursing agency, drilling services, recruitment agency, dentist, property developer, golf club, martial arts company, travel agent, design company, estate agents, charity, solicitor, farm, training agency, personal friend of mine, petroleum company (big one J ), a domain name registrar, financial services company, tyre fitter, insurance broker, an university, sportswear marketing, graphic design, cooker manufacturer, Church of England diocese, flower seller, gas services, sprayer (?), blacksmith, bathroom vendor, wine reseller, entertainment agency, asylum seeker support company, bus company, computer services, enterprise agency, theatre, flooring, cladding, electrician, soft drink distributor, advertising agency, company from the Isle of Man (incidentally where I grew up), a cooperative society, aircraft company, conflict management, shipping agency.

The striking thing about all these companies is that whilst they operate in a very diverse set of markets they all need the same communications and IT products and services. The great thing from Timico’s perspective is not only that they want to buy services from us but that the diversity offers a degree of protection from any market fluctuations in a given sector.

My favourite was a school for cocktail bartenders. There’s always going to be a need for a good barman.

 

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Business fun stuff

Just got away from the crowds for a few days – back to work tommorrow

No takers.

Nobody to save.

Still a few available.

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Business fun stuff

Listening to the voice of the customer

Timico lives or dies by the quality of the service it provides its customers. The continuous improvement to the service levels is something built in to framework of the business.

 

Monday morning is “Voice of The Customer” morning where complaints and feedback from customers received during the previous week are looked at by senior management.

 

You might argue that a business with its house in order should not receive any complaints. However with somewhere in the region of 10,000 businesses entrusting the care of their communications to us there is potentially always going to be someone with a problem – typically “my phone line hasn’t been working for three days” or “something has gone wrong with my broadband”but it can be more serious.

 

We look at whether there could have been a better way to service the customer with the problem or whether there is an improvement that could be made to our process. If necessary a director level member of staff will own the communications back to that customer.

 

In fact the contact details of each Timico board member are available on the website so that customers can reach senior people directly if they believe that the system has let them down for any reason.

 

Happily there are weeks where no specific complaints have been received and the occasion is used to talk about general ways of improving the service.

 

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End User fun stuff

Generation Y in action

Here’s a link to my son’s website.

 

http://www.tom-davies.net/frontpage.html

 

He hosts a radio programme in Lincoln and is encouraging listeners by making his website interactive.  You can register to become a member of the “Wake Up To The Weekend” Nation and also vote online for members of the “National Government” There is even a pictorial security code that you have to enter when you register “for security purposes”

 

He is 16.

 

The point is that this generation does this instinctively. The revolution is only just beginning.

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Business fun stuff

Hello world!

This blog has been started to enable me to comment on what is relevant to  consumers of communications products in businesses in the UK. The industry is going through a more rapid change than it has ever seen and perhaps for the first time we are beginning to  see how VoIP and the IP revolution is going to move telephony on from straightforward voice. With the advent of Web2.0 we are moving on from searching for the killer app (and deciding in the absence of being able to find anything that it must be voice after all!) to experiencing a rich mix of communications capabilities and services. What is more our imaginations are being inspired to come up with new ideas at an unprecedented rate.

 

Having seen it all start in the consumer space companies are now beginning to understand how to apply web based services for business. At Timico, for example, we use the whole gamut of technologies that might be considered to have started in the consumer space and moved into B2B (presence, IM, blogs, wikis, VoIP to name but a few). We were the first service provider in the world to introduce SIP trunks based on the AS5200 SIP platform to the Nortel BCM PBX and first to provide a mix of Nortel hosted carrier-side Unified Comms services as an overlay to Enterprise products.

 

Capabilities that might have historically been in the  domain of the  large enterprise  are now entering the world of the smaller businesses. Access to smaller customers is being made easier by the advent of e-business. Reach is increasing and costs are coming down.

 

There are other interesting dynamics at work. The move to a web based environment is creating a huge demand for collocation space at a time when power is at a premium and the green agenda is coming to the fore. This is in turn bringing forward developments in power reduction and the implementation of virtual technology. Increased web usage is driving up costs for ISPs whilst at the  same time users expect to pay less. Investment decisions are becoming more complex as are the technologies needed by business and as a result outsourcing is becoming more and more the norm.

 

It is an exciting time to be playing the game and in this blog I will be discussing what’s new, what’s useful and hopefully having a good time whilst at it.