two seven

A year or so ago, Last.fm started charging for their service. I was pretty gutted, since I had been listening to Last.fm radio pretty much all day. Sure, it’s okay to charge something for a decent service—and Last.fm is very decent—but what really got up my nose was that they were only charging people who were listening outside of the US, UK and Germany. What’s up with that? The internet is a global market—geography means nothing on the internet.

So I stopped listening.

Anyway, twelve months later and I’ve kinda got over it, so this morning I paid up and became a subscriber. Ah, it’s good to listen to my favourite tracks again

Last.fm really is a great service. And as if my battery doesn’t last long enough as it is, I downloaded Mobbler to my Nokia E90. Mobbler is—as the name might suggest—a mobile scrobbler. It’ll scrobble music you play with the Nokia music player, but more importantly, it will stream Last.fm radio.

So, if you haven’t already done so, sign up to Last.fm to track your listening, share your taste in music, discover new artists and check out my profile.

Oh, and I’ve added my listening history to the blog sidebar

It’s been a while since my last post.

During that while, I’ve returned reluctantly to New Zealand from an incredible 12 months in Switzerland. I was working for an outstanding company (Best Of Swiss Web 2009) on some outstanding projects.

I made some great friends, had some great times, learned to snowboard, lost nearly 15 kilograms, braved rubber bullets and tear gas on the 1st of May, and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

I’m now back in Auckland, and am three weeks into my new job as Web Development Manager at Vodafone. I’m part of a great team and am really hanging out to do great things on/with/through the web

Another thing I’m looking forward too is the next Auckland Web Meetup on the 2nd of July. It’ll be great to catch up with friends, eat pizza, drink an Epic, learn more and be inspired.

I’ve got a new mobile number (+64 21 623 923) and am making the most of my Nokia E90 (I know, it’s not an iPhone). I use Twibble as my Twitter client, and am continuously updating my location with Google Latitude. You can see my current location on the sidebar, along with a few feeds of Dan-generated content and links.

Seth Godin writes in his post License to stall about business-to-business sales. He explains that the majority of people you encounter are empowered to stall, to say ‘No’, since they are easier to train and are safer.

The reason this system evolved is straightforward: the yes people are rare in a typical organization, because they have responsibility and power. So they are busy and need to be protected.

I totally see how this works, but Iimmediately thought that this paradigm was equally relevant in the area of Customer Services.

How often is it that – unless we have a very trivial request – the first person we speak to will be able to help us right away? “I’ll just put you through to so-and-so”, or “I need to talk to my manager/supervisor. Can I call you back?” are par for the course.

I am becoming convinced that for any given company, having quality Customer Service is more important than the quality of their product or service. For a large established company, quality Customer Service seems to me to be more important than sales or acquiring new customers. And yet it seems that the larger the company, the poorer the customer service. They have huge outsourced, off-shore, standardised, systems that have you pushing every number on the keypad before you get through to the wrong department, who aren’t able to help you and aren’t able to transfer you to the appropriate person.

These systems are set up to be defensive – the goal is to reduce cost, which means getting rid of the customer as soon as possible. That is not customer service.

Oh, and customer service also includes website usability, IA and quality of your search tool; read Lance Wiggs’ experience with Dell.

I’ve still not heard back from Dell about the dead graphics adapter in my Inspiron notebook, either. But that’s another post.

Read it here.

I’ve had a blog post in draft for ages, but this isn’t it. The draft post has extensive tables of stats that lie half-finished, but it was getting a bit out-of-hand, so here’s a very abridged version.

The post looked at benchmarking the JavaScript performance of various browsers. Here is a sneak preview:

Of course these stats mean nothing without some explanation, so here goes.
I’m using the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. You should read what it’s benchmarking – it does a bunch of core JavaScript stuff, like raytracing and string operations and stuff, no DOM or browser API tests.
I ran these tests under Windows XP, on a Dell Inspiron 9300.

My draft post was/is going to also include the browsers on my MacBook Pro, as well as results from the Mootools Slickspeed JavaScript framework benchmark tool.

The results are interesting, especially with IE6 thrown into the mix. The separation between the old and new generations of browsers is clear.
Opera 10.00 alpha was only released yesterday, running on a new rendering engine, Presto 2.2, which utilizes Opera’s new futhark JavaScript engine, and so I expected it to be a bit faster than it is; Safari, FF3, and Chrome are all faster.

Google Chrome is considerably faster that the others.

I do most of my work on the Mac, and so use Firefox with its extensive array of invaluable extensions, particularly Joe Hewitt’s Firebug, and Chris Pederick’s Web Developer Toolbar. On the PC, I use Firefox, and occasionally Chrome, when I feel the need for speed.