Cobweb

Iphone

Much to the horror of our technical guys I sucummed to the marketing hype and purchased an phone. The in-store experience was a little confusing as I was told I would have to wait for a SIM card to be delivered by post, so imagine my excitement when during the sign up processm I received a confirmation text from O2. Yes, the sign up experience was every bit as slick as you would expect and the touch screen interface is the best I have used so far. But my real aim was to see how it stacked up against our Hosted Exchange service. I have used a number of Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices and I know that the functionally would not be as good. So what you get is synchronization of calender and contacts to your Outlook client via Itunes and mailbox access through something called IMAP.  My main concern was getting all my contacts on to the device, and this worked very well, I have not managed to get my diary across yet but I sure its me not the phone. Email works and synchronizes well and whilst it is not as good as Active sync its effective. So overall hI am happy, especially as the Bluetooth works in my car, Should you get one use as a business tool? there are probably better devices out there, but as a cool multi purpose device that does your email as well then, you could do worse.

Have a Happy Holiday and keep checking back 2008 is going to be a busy year for Cobweb...

Mark

Win Windows Vista

As its Christmas I thought I'd share a link with you, for the chance to win Windows Vista Home Premium...  Click here to have a go at our Christmas game and if you have a competitive streak in you, enter your highest score and submit your details. 

The highest individual score wins Windows Vista Home Premium Edition (see terms and conditions)

Good Luck and happy snowball throwing!

The changing (dying?) face of email

We were just reading this http://slate.com/id/2177969/pagenum/all/#page_start and were wondering about the predicted doom of email as social-networking, texting and IM takes over from traditional email communications for many people.  Scary stuff, will there even be another version of Exchange?

Of course there will, but my take on the above is this... It’s not a real threat to hosters of business services in our professional lifetimes, or even in the short to mid-term.

On a personal and social level we have been texting and using mobiles for nearly 15 years now (I had my first 'analog' mobile at Uni in '94) and SMS has boomed beyond any initial expectations, but that’s had little impact to the business world (Cobweb are a business email provider, not a multi-million mailbox consumer ISP)

Alternative forms of communication only seem to serve as an increase for information and communications. It’s healthly competition and serves to promote the medium and individuals seem to thrive for more information and contact on a 24/7 basis now.

What this really is, is an opportunity to pull all forms of communications together, and allow your message to reach it’s destination regardless of the medium or location of the recipient. If my status is set as "business contactable", whether I’m at home, emmersed in online gaming, in the car or on the phone – you should be able to deliver a message to me via my preferred medium of choice, be that IM, mobile, home, car, SMS, hotmail, voicemail, audio, fax?, written, visual notification, etc.  That would be really clever! 

Combine these solutions for business, business groups, personal, home and family communications and you’ll be singing! BTW, having a status of "do not disturb" or "authorised escalations only" would be required for me to buy into any service like this...

Hosting market update from Barcelona

We're back from the EMEA Hosting Roundtable in Barcelona and the news is that the hosting industry is "business as usual".    Put simply, customers are demanding more (or expecting to pay less) and the next generation of services are about business focussed features and added value, not the technology.  At Cobweb we've know this is the holy grail and the eternal struggle for a while now.   Keeping customers happy is just just about uptime and speedy support, it's about true value for money and adding value to a business.   

No big revelations really.   SaaS ISVs need help and partners that give them help seem to be more successful that those that don't.    Other messages from within the EMEA hosting community - the correct marketing is the key to success (these things don't sell themselves you know)

One of the biggest benefits of this for me is meeting with other managed service providers who think as we do.  Sharing successes and problems alike is good - I'm established some great relationships at these events, found solutions to problems, and ratified our thinking around strategies and tactics for marketing, technical delivery and innovation.

We have an innovative workshop on Innovations this time - a french university tutor showed us the innovation of art across the last 200 years, using the battle between Picasso and Matisse to illustrate that you can improve upon the best, work with a changing world, deal with the burden of the past, and face chance challenges head on as an opprotunity.    It was truely insipring.   BTW, if you haven't been to Barcelona, I'd recommend it - very nice (and warm).