Apple settle out of court with Swiss Rail over iconic clock design

You want to use an iconic Swiss design from the 50’s that is still in use today for your globally dominating phone..so you call up legal and get them to check the design rights owner is ok. Maybe a license deal?…or err..what the hell..just use it anyhow without any of that pesky trademark or copyright paperwork nonsence…like…maybe no one will notice in a country obsessed by clocks and rich enough to equip newborns with iPhone 5’s.

The Swiss, famous for time keeping, finance and chocolate surprisingly did notice that Apple had started to use their national railways clock design on the new iPhone OS and have now settled for a $21M payment to allow Apple to use the clock design.

See the…similarities between the Swiss National Railways clock design and Apple’s below.

 

Daily Mail coverage here  and a little bio on the designer Hans Hilfiker who apparently also standardized the size of Swiss white goods!

Google’s UK Market Share drops below 90% for first time in 5 years

Hitwise have recently reported that Google’s UK market share has declined below 90% for the first time in 5 years. Hardly the end of the world for Google, who now have a reported 89.33% UK market share of search, but still notable.

Hitwise data is drawn from ISP monitoring relationships rather than just from panel data so tends to be quite reliable.

Full details of the report are available at The Drum

What would moving your agencies website to Pinterest or Youtube look like?

Ever wondered what moving your agencies website to Pinterest or Youtube would look like?

Have a gander at Cyclonix a small Bay Area agency on Pinterest and BooneOakley a North Carolina agency on Youtube. I think they have both done a good job but probably would not opt for this option on a permanent basis due to the limiting constraints of both platform and fact that social platforms (more Pinterest than Youtube) can lose their edge and audience.

Also unless you have great stats like BooneOakley, showing interaction figures is a risk. FInally displaying last post/update dates risks making the sites look a tad ghost ship like if the last update was a few months ago. That said, as a project to open up clients minds and demonstrate creative lateral thinking it is nice to see the initiative and these guys walking the walk.

Advertising on Twitter now supports Gender Targeting

Twitter has enabled gender specific targeting. As Twitter’s advertising product blog states, they are using secondary signals to guess gender rather than use an explicitly stated Gender data field, which as you may have noticed is not asked by Twitter. Twitter estimate they get it right around 90% of the time, and where they cannot establish gender, they will not offer that user profile to advertisers.

More details here: http://advertising.twitter.com/2012/10/gender-targeting-for-promoted-products.html

Facebook IPO Stock Price supported by huge underwriter buys

Will Facebook lose value from IPO price of $38 any time soon? Maybe.

The chart below shows huge underwriter stock buys at $38 which is helping to keep the floor at $38

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Credit: @Bourbon_Meyer via Business Insider

How is VAT charged across EU member states

Should you be very bored or have a penchant for the migration of assetts across borders, here is the EU Customs & Taxation Unions short guide of how to charge VAT across EU member states
http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/how_vat_works/vat_on_services/index_en.htm
Enjoy.

SES Speaker Biographies and US L1 Visa Applications

I remember my L1 US Visa application process when I moved to USA for Ask.com

Apart from the glamour of Oakland,CA (North Silicon Valley…..no…really) the visa application process was hilarious. By the time HR had finished the write-up it literally said ‘Bill will be an asset to US National Security’ (my team used to do stuff like track inappropriate content publishers)

The L1 document was the least British self deprecating process ever. Nothing in my 3 pages of  ‘why Bill should be allowed to go to the US’ was anything but true, but it was also like the most positive..caffeine fuelled new manager giving you a staff review during a cross-country run.

Yesterday I had to step into cover a colleague who couldn’t talk at SES. Typically I keep a fairly low profile and and work on technology, human relationship or financial levers to business and stay out the spotlight. Anyhow…at very short notice I had to prep a talk for the UK State of Search industry panel and supply a biog. Quickly  written on blackberry during the fire alarm at Google’s Avinash talk…I sent it off in 90 secs and thought no more of it.

It just appeared in my Google alerts and it was like a flashback to the L1 process..only this time I’d written it and am blushing at the megalomania sound of it. Then I read around for a while on different sites and you’ll notice something about most biogs…how few people talk about their roles as parts in successful teams and focus on a very singular voice of ‘I made xyz’ as if the successful team element dilutes rather boosts their relevance to the world….certainly everyone led and true as it may be, ‘collaborated to achieve’ is less present.

I don’t know about you but it’s harder and harder to strike out alone and deliver something without being part of a team….and it’s great teams that get the results in most of the world I live in. If I could never lead a tech initiative again, but just make teams work consistently excellently I’d be cool with that.

On this point, not progressive enough yet to rework my client pitch bio sheets, but maybe one day I’ll take the leap and say:

‘Was part of a great team. Full Stop. The company did xyz. Full Stop. We learnt xyz. End.

So..time to eat my own 2am love up advice.

Shout out to my old peeps..a truly amazing gang I was honoured to work with and miss everyday…. Gary Chevsky (Engineer 1 and THE man at Ask.com, also my old boss), Steve Orr (still at Ask.com 11 years in and resident genius, 3 way co-parent of Smart Answers), Mike Tierney (All your tech is happens now), Michiel Frishert (we’ll always have maps), Rona ‘eat my TFE mod/ don’t you dare’ Yang, Charlise ‘paint my cake, eat my SA’ Tiee, Hope (NY Gentry Dictionary Empress) Hackett, Scott ‘Make Rocket Go’ the Visionmeister Grieder, Mike ‘would you like an affiliate ID with that…no..I’ll fire you next time’  Poynter, Vlad ‘Ukrainian Matinee Idol’ Sayenko, Vlad my Russian friend and last but in my UK team 1st…Hugh ‘Laughing Lord Lucan’ Poynton. You were it, we was there..and it was a pleasure to do my little bit along side you. All the best to my old Ask.com friends still fighting the good fight. …and maybe one day Ask.com will…..well… youknow.

See you in 51o.  

(Apologies to those I missed out…thing about teams…so damn many people to love)

Twitter Outage Forces Me To Reunite with Blog ex

Books are being burnt to keep warm and the weak and wounded getting hungry looks from SEOers. 

Twitter is down during SES London and it’s really just business as usual but goddamit I need to Tweet that Twitter is down. 

Humbled by Twitter offline ness, I’ve been forced to go back to my blog for a reunion. 

Not that I Tweet much or blog much anymore as work eats my life, 

But I’ve noticed that whilst 140 char Tweet on the lack of Twitter (ironic/unlikely surely) could be an interesting Tweet…as a blog article it really……..isn’t. 

Twitter Outage promotes new G8 vote on social media law?

Search Engine Quality

I’ve just launched a new blog on Search Quality at http://blog.searchenginequality.com/ 

The focus is on improving search relevancy, freshness, spam reduction and a myriad of other themes that paid my wages for 8 years and still very much remain a key interest of mine. There may be the occasional post on SEO and PPC that are relevant to agency types but for the most part I’ll be writing about Search Engine Quality issues.

Google Penalties

How warnings of being “Penalized by Google” can sometimes be the online equivilent of the big bad wolf.

Clients are often be told by SEO consultants that a wide range of technical issues will lead to their website being “penalized by search engines”, notably Google.

The fundamental message this sends is inaccurate. This message can lead to dogged adherence to change without good business reason or SEO advice being disregarded as scaremongering.

There is only a small range of activities that search engines actively penalize, yet many reasons for poor performance that could appear to be penalties if cruedely interpreted.

This is not to say that search engines do not heavily favour certain sites for reasons other than pure query-document match relevancy but thats another post altogether.

Being organized and conforming to expected standards = Good SEO (blazing a trail is to be encouraged but be aware search engines take a while to catch up, and only follow the trends that have significant human user traffic already)

So here is my offline metaphor to explain why the penalties are not always penaties. Lets compare SEO and crossing international borders.

Event: Imagine arriving at JFK to change flights to San Francisco, on a last minute bargain single ticket & forgetting the address of your hotel. Casually mention your girlfriend lives in SF and it’s a romantic surprise visit. Several hours later, as you leave secondary interviews, you’ll have missed your onward flight with no recourse, face overnight hotels at your expense, a 24 hour delay and the costs of an airport issued ticket home to reassure US Immigration. Your Intentions? Good, Your Outcomes?, Bad.

But it’s important to realise none of the inconvenience “caused by US Immigration” was motivated by a desire to punish.

Analysis: The passenger was not trusted to perform as expected, had failed to conform to system requirements and had to be processed in a secondary manner requiring multiple research activities from a resource constrained team and systems.

Unlikely as it seems this scenario happens every day at airports around the world.

Event: The online equivalent of this story is a website re-launching without a URL cutover strategy, integrating large volumes of third party feed into it’s pages, not publishing a valid sitemap at an easily found location, with hard to interpret dynamic URLs and no inbound links as years of link equity is lost to 404 error pages. Site traffic drops precipitously for 90 days while the programme sponsor rides out the turbulence spending valuable time reassuring senior stakeholders everything is going to be ok and there will be a positive ROI. Of course it normally does, but it’s been stressful.

None of the inconvenience “caused by Google” was motivated by a desire to punish.

Analysis: The website was not trusted to perform as expected, had failed to conform to expected standards and had to be processed in a secondary manner requiring multiple research activities from a resource constrained team and systems.

Unlikely as it seems this scenario happens every day at huge online companies around the world.