Monthly Archives: February 2013

PayPal Here and Greedy Goat at Mobile World Congress 2013

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Mobile World Congress is quite a show. Over 70,000 people descend on Barcelona for the annual mobile industry expo. It’s not just about handsets: it’s about everything related to connected commerce, from phones and tablets to payments and even connected cars.

PayPal president David Marcus shows PayPal here to Sky TV

PayPal president David Marcus explains PayPal Here to Sky TV

For me, MWC 2013 was memorable for the huge interest in the UK version of PayPal Here, PayPal’s flexible and affordable way for small businesses to take credit card payments face to face. The PayPal Here demos were mobbed by everyone intrigued by the way PayPal had reinvented the original Here concept for countries like Britain where paying by Chip & PIN is standard. The UK version is a pocket-sized card reader that connects to a trader’s smartphone via Bluetooth.

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Greedy Goat’s Craig and Mark at MWC with PayPal’s Narik Patel

The fun bit was having Mark and Craig from London’s Greedy Goat ice cream on the stand, serving their delicious goat’s milk ice cream. (I recommend the honeycomb flavour…) Greedy Goat is one of the businesses that have been helping PayPal design the UK flavour of PayPal Here. It trades at Borough Market, and it will be one of the first businesses to take card payments through PayPal Here in the next month or so.

Here’s the video showing Greedy Goat trying PayPal Here at Borough Market.

But there’s more to PayPal Here than just card payments. The future probably lies with something rather more 21st century than a card. PayPal is pioneering payment via ‘check-in’: a quick tap in an app to check into and pay a local business. This opens up so many possibilities for making life quicker and easier: for example, ordering your drink or lunch ready for collection, beating the queue. PayPal is pioneering ordering ahead with Jamba Juice in the United States.

Anyone interested in finding out more about PayPal Here can register their interest and get all the facts at www.paypal.co.uk/here.

PS: we served the best coffee at MWC.

PS: we served the best coffee at MWC.

Disclosure: I am head of PR for PayPal UK.

The Times and Sunday Times Newsstand app – crash!

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I wrote last November that Apple’s Newsstand app was seriously flawed. It promises to deliver your daily (digital) newspaper to your iPad overnight ready for your commute. It’s never worked well – now it never works.

Britain’s News International has just launched a combined Times and Sunday Times app within Newsstand. Judging from today’s performance, this is the worst Newsstand experience so far. I saw glimpses of the Sunday Times front page – but never got any further as the app crashed every time.

Must do better…

Is your car connected to the internet?

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I was intrigued by a BBC story this week suggesting that by 2014 every new car would be connected to the internet.

Readers were quick to rubbish the idea. To take just one example from Ziggyboy:

“I want to drive a car not a computer. If I want to use the internet I sit at my desk and if I want to go somewhere I drive my car. Will there be a new law about using your computer whilst driving. Not that it would make any difference as lots of people still use their mobiles at the wheel and are not caught. I for one won’t be interested I just want a car that get’s me from A to B that’s all.”

Yet I can see real benefits in having a connected car. I’d love my car to pay the Severn Bridge toll for me, saving time at the toll booth. What about a satnav that shows traffic on the map and updates to show diversions if the M4 is closed? A car park finder that will find and pay for a space for you?

Gimmicks? Perhaps. But I’m pretty sure that in 10 years we’ll take all this for granted.

STEAM at Swindon: a worthy tribute to the GWR

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Steam, Swindon

STEAM, Swindon

As a child, I enjoyed going to the Great Western Railway Museum in Swindon. I loved seeing famous engines such as City of Truro and Lode Star – and the setting of a former chapel seemed appropriate given the almost spiritual devotion the GWR inspired.

That small museum was replaced in 2000 by STEAM, a magnificent new museum based in  part of Swindon’s famous old railway works. It’s far more interactive than the old one, and visitors get the chance to drive a train and operate a signal box.

We visited for the second time yesterday. Owen, four, is still unsettled by loud noises, so he wasn’t so impressed by the sound effects, but he loved the various hands-on play areas. We built miniature versions of Saltash, Maidenhead and Culham bridges! And he enjoyed introducing his Brio Duck pannier tank and Toad brake van to their real life counterparts. (Duck, below.)

Duck, meet Duck... GWR panniers

Duck, meet Duck… GWR panniers

The highlight of STEAM is walking underneath 4073 Caerphilly Castle, one of the GWR’s most famous engines. It’s fascinating to glance up to see the machinery of an express engine and tender above you. Curiously and appropriately, this GWR icon spent time in the old loco works in Caerphilly. My sister remembered being taken to see it there – and sure enough, Eric Mountford’s book about the works shows 4073 being repaired at Caerphilly in September 1959.

Through North Star's frame

Through North Star’s frame

STEAM has an excellent shop and cafe. And it’s next to the Outlet Village, including the National Trust’s cafe and exhibition.

Here’s my video of our visit.

STEAM, Swindon

Flickr and Yahoo : why is it so hard to recover your password?

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I used to love Flickr. I didn’t use it regularly, but I liked being able to see great photos of my favourite places. And it was nice to share my own photos, although I wasn’t a regular photo sharer.

Then Facebook came along. I gave up on Flickr, and started sharing my photos on Facebook. It shared far more images – after all, most of my family and friends were already there, so sharing photos on Facebook made more sense. Especially when it was so easy to do this on the go on my iPhone and iPad.

But Flickr still has many strengths. As Wired pointed out, Flickr is great for keeping high resolution copies of your photo collection. And with a new Flickr iPhone app, it has finally recognised we’re living mobile lives.

So when I saw the Wired article (via a friend’s Facebook link…), I downloaded the app straight away.

That’s when the problems started. It’s almost two years since I last used Flickr – I couldn’t remember my user name. The app has an account recovery process, but it’s horribly badly thought out. It kept asking for an alternate email address. It rejected my correct secret answer. After finally resetting my password, it rejected it the first time I tried to log in.  Oh, and Yahoo added a new twist to the usual Captcha frustration: on my Mac: the pop up screen was cut off at the edge (below), with no apparent way to resize it.

Yahoo's captcha confusion

Yahoo’s captcha confusion

To be fair, when I got through this frustration, I found the app was excellent. It’s very easy to share and search for photos. It’s much nicer than Facebook’s app for photography. Recommended – but don’t forget your user name or password…

Social Brands: Lego and Chiltern Railways

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I love Lego. So it’s no surprise that Lego’s Lars Silberbauer was the star of today’s Brand Republic Social Brands event in London.

Lars started on a high: his business card is a Lego character. But his most compelling message was the way the brand has inspired its fans to share their creations and suggest new products.

Lars showed this brilliant video telling the story of Lego. It’s 17 minutes long, yet it’s been viewed by almost four million people. Over half have watched over 15 minutes, showing its appeal. I watched it with my four year old son Owen tonight, and he was enthralled. It shows the timeless truth: great content is compelling. It’s not a corporate video, but a magical story, beautifully told and animated.

I also enjoyed the story of how Lego rode to the rescue when an 11 year old American boy, James Groccia, found the Lego Emerald Night train set he had saved up for had been withdrawn. Lego sent James the precious set. It’s a great example of how delighting a customer can spread goodwill. (The home video showing his delight has been viewed over 1.6 million times.)

The other highlight of the day for me was meeting Nicola Clark, head of marketing and communications at Chiltern Railways. I’ve blogged many times about Chiltern’s excellent use of social media, so it was nice to hear more at first hand. Nicola said that social allowed Chiltern to become the brand it always wanted to be: human, caring about the customer, with real personality. She explained how the company started its social presence after seeing it as a great way to keep customers informed after the snows of 2009.

As Nicola said, passengers often just want an explanation when things go wrong. Tweeting photos of a line blocked by a tree shows us that there’s a good reason why the 0721 is late. By coincidence, Will McInness from Nixon McInnes made the same point, citing client First Capital Connect getting drivers to take photos of flooded tracks.

I took part in a panel discussion with Simon Nicholson from Honda and event chair Andrew Smith, co-author of Share This. I explained how PayPal is growing its social presence and how the company’s president, David Marcus, instinctively understands social as a way of engaging with customers and learning from their feedback. I added that the debate about who ‘owns’ social – PR, marketing or customer service – is meaningless. It should be a partnership with the needs of the audience centre stage. ‘Don’t ask what the customer can do for you. Ask what you can do for the customer.”

I’ll end with a personal story about Chiltern Railways. On Tuesday morning, I told Owen about the famous Pontcysyllte canal aqueduct in North Wales. I added that there was a railway locomotive named after it. I showed him photos from the internet of the aqueduct and the engine. That morning, I saw the engine racing through Gerrards Cross as I waited for my train. When I got to Marylebone, I took a photo (below) to show Owen later. We agreed we’d go on a train pulled by the engine one day…

Pont Cysyllte at Marylebone

Dyfrbont Pontcysyllte at Marylebone

Disclosure: I am Head of PR & Social Media for PayPal UK

Richard III, Leicester and me

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Richard III in Leicester. The king’s skeleton has been found under a Leicester car park 

I took this photo of Richard III’s statue shortly before graduating from the University of Leicester in 1985. It was extraordinary to learn that the university this week played a key role in establishing ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that Richard III’s skeleton had been found in the city.

As I blogged nostalgically last September, Leicester was a good place to be a student, despite its reputation as an unexciting place. I was fascinated by its rich history, including its links with Richard III. The city is already planning to exploit this week’s dramatic news – and who can blame it.

Today’s Guardian included intriguing interviews with actors who have played Shakespeare’s Richard III over the years, including Antony Sher. Sher famously played the role for the RSC during my time at Leicester. He published a wonderful account of his Year of the King, which I read almost in a single sitting in 1992 when I spent a lot of time in Stratford. As Sher recounts in the Guardian:

I became very interested in the fact that Richard is a severely disabled man. Some actors underplay this – but if you read Richard’s opening speech about himself, he is clearly disabled, and has experienced a lot of prejudice, a lot of hatred. This, in turn, has filled him with self-hatred. It’s this that enables him to do such evil to other people. He was used to hatred as a disabled man in an un-PC society. There were no Paralympics then.

We’ll hear a lot about Richard III – the king and the legend – in the coming weeks. 

 

Chris Huhne: the liar who put lives at risk

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The disgrace of former Liberal Democrat cabinet minister Chris Huhne is a tragedy – in the sense that Greek dramatists would have understood. His weakness and foolishness has destroyed his family and his political career. He is sure to go to prison. All for a moment of madness when he tried to escape a speeding penalty.

But wait. The point overlooked in the acres of coverage of the story is that Huhne was a reckless risk taker who put lives at risk. The act of deception that destroyed his career was intended to avoid a driving ban. Yet just weeks later he was banned anyway, for using his mobile phone while driving. The man is a menace. And any sympathy we may have for his former wife – Huhne walked out on their 26 year marriage – is tempered by the fact she put other people at risk through their reckless act of conspiracy. (NB: she is reported to be planning to plead not guilty on the grounds of marital coercion.)

It beggars belief that Huhne thought he could lie his way out of this scandal. He did everything he could to have the case thrown out. That is unforgivable. It makes his likely sentence far worse. And at a time when politicians have a very poor reputation, he has reinforced the view that we cannot trust them – that lying is a natural reflex.That’s very unfair to the many principled people in politics.

The saddest aspect of the case is the bitter estrangement between Huhne and his son Peter, revealed in text message exchanges. That reflects the marriage break up as well as the perjury. Any father reading Peter’s texts would have shuddered at the fate of this father-son relationship. A Greek tragedy.

I love my first generation iPad – but its days are numbered

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iPad 1

Taking the tablet: iPad arrives, 27 May 2010

I got my iPad on 27 May 2010 – the day before it went on sale in the shops. (I had ordered it in advance.) It was love at first sight, as I explained in a blog post that evening. I went on to rave about how quickly it got me to my chosen websites. For the first time in my life, I was an early adopter.

It’s been a constant companion ever since. I’ve used it to watch movies on flights to California, to blog about major events and to read books. I’ve enjoyed listening to music on Spotify’s iPad app. I’ve read the Guardian and Times iPad editions while on holiday and business abroad.

But it’s showing its age. Apps crash far too often. The Daily Telegraph’s iPad app won’t open if I’ve got any other apps open. The Guardian’s iPad edition’s letters links don’t appear most of the time. In short, it’s time to upgrade.

Some will argue that it’s shocking that a device less than three years old costing over £500 (I bought the 64GB model) no longer works properly. I’m more understanding. The iPad changed everything. It wasn’t the first tablet computer (far from it) but it was the first to make the tablet popular. Later models were more powerful, and apps developed to match their higher specs.

I’ll keep my original iPad – but it’s time to accept that it’s no longer good enough.