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Elsewhere…

More geospatial news from an aggregation of web logs…

‘XK’ country code for Kosovo
Some of you have already noticed that we are now using ”XK‘ as temporary country code for Kosovo. While the US standards body ‘FIPS’ has found it worthwhile to assign a country code to Kosovo (KV), the International Organization for Standardization, ISO, has yet to assign a code to the former Serbian province. The ISO [...]
Why customer experience matters Pls RT #custexp
I just signed up for an account with ******* (name withheld, you will see why) so that I could try out their service which I had read about on my favourite social network (begins with t).
To sign up I had to provide quite a lot of information but to be fair the service has a commercial model that probably needs this information. I then waited for my account to be approved, not too long after I get my user name, some quirky meaningless combination of capitals – FAIL 1 – I want to choose my own user name or use my email address not have another one to store or remember.

Move to first try at logging in. Minimum system requirements Windows and IE – Aargh! FAIL 2

OK so that’s me off (and about 35% of browser users) but why not warn me about their requirements before I filled in the application form? FAIL 3

Then I thought that if I wasn’t going to be able to use their service I would prefer that they did not keep my personal details in their database. Where is the account settings or other link to manage my account and delete if I want? Nowhere (and that is not a pun on my company name) – FAIL 4

So I then sent this mail to their customer services dept:

I registered to use your services only to discover (after taking time to register) that the service only works when accessed from a Windows based machine running Internet Explorer neither of which I have or wish to acquire.

Approximately 35% of internet users now use a browser other than IE and the number of people using operating systems other than Windows is rapidly growing as well. Shame that I won’t be able to find out how good your service is or view the quality of ******.

Since I am not going to be using ****** I wanted to delete my account and remove all of the contact information that I provided to you, unfortunately there is no obvious link to manage my account details or to unsubscribe. Could you remove my details from your database and confirm to me that this has been done.

Thank you

Back came this response

Good morning Mr Feldman

I can confirm that the account has been closed

Kind regards

****** *******

Senior Customer Service Executive

Am I missing something here? No apology for any inconvenience caused, no explanation or response to the points made, no regret that I wont be able to use their service or spend money with them. And this person has the title Senior Customer Service Executive! FAIL 5

I sent back this curt response

Thank you

No apology for any inconvenience or explanation of design choices

I get the message

I haven’t heard anything else. I won’t be using this company, nor would I recommend them to anyone that I know. FAIL 6

You may be wondering why I have not shared the name of the company, I don’t want to flame them or cause them undue embarrassment (although maybe they would not care). The reason for posting this is to illustrate how easily a poor customer experience can convert a potential champion into a peeved “detractor” (that’s the language of customer experience and satisfaction analysts).

Now if the detractor has a well read blog (not me) or media access or an active social network the company could find itself facing some pretty poor publicity. I don’t want that to happen to these guys but I do hope that if they read this blog or a tweet about it (and they might) then they think about retraining their Senior Customer Service Executives.

If you wanted to share this story with other companies who could learn from it then the tag #custexp would enable others to follow the viral spread of the story and learn how important every customer contact is to the success of a business.
UMapper, geotagged tweets and the late Michael Foot
Last week UMapper announced a new feature to their service that makes it amazingly simple to build and customise a map that can show geotagged tweets based on any search you choose.
Today I have been following the flurry of tweets about the late Michael Foot (if you are about my age he might be an old hero).

In Less than 5 minutes thanks to UMapper and Cloudmade I was able to put this together. No doubt many of you could do much more imaginative things with UMapper. If Michael Foot doesn’t interest you then just change the search term in the bottom right hand corner of the map and search for tweets of your choice, or go build your own twitter map.

Interesting to see how London centric the tweets are. Pan the map or zoom out to see how the density varies.

At one level I think it is incredible that embedding an interactive map like this with social media real time feed is so simple and accessible to non technical people, who foresaw this 5 years ago or even 2 years ago? However in the same week that UMapper announced this new capability Platial one of the original darlings of community mapping and neogeography announced that they were ceasing operations, presumably because they had run out of money (apparently they had been running on volunteers and thin air for a while. One of the founders said

“Platial was a movement and it will be carried on a thousand fold. It is real and irrevocable. It put the power of maps in the hands of people and lets us see the world as an interconnected tapestry of stories and perspectives.

Sincerely, Di-Ann Eisnor”

What does that tell us? Maybe even movements need a business model.

Maybe someone out there will have a view? I feel a couple of posts on business models and sustainability coming on. More soon
Integrating ASP.NET with Drupal in the Acquia Stack
A while back, I posted this about running SharpMap on Apache. At the time, the ability to run ASP.NET on Apache was mainly a curiosity to me but had little practical value. Recently, I had the need to revisit this technique for a project. I used the same post I had used previously as a [...]
LinqPad Spatial Challenge
To get up to speed with new things in C# 4.0, I’ve been reading C# 4.0 In A Nutshell by Joseph and Ben Albahari.
To illustrate examples, the book uses LinqPad, a freely downloadable tool. I recommend the book, and I highly recommend LinqPad. Still, there is room for improvement with LinqPad. [...]
PUG Conference
Here’s a summary of my thoughts after attending Monday and (half of) Tuesday at the ESRI Petroleum User Group (PUG) conference.
The Interp/GIS Gap
In the Operation Database panel, Bill Burroughs described the gap between geologic Interpretation and GIS as being one of the big challenges for developers of software tools. I think a tool like [...]
Browsing WeoGeo Market Using the ESRI Silverlight API
Updated: This demo application now running here.
At the 2010 ESRI Federal User Conference, WeoGeo announced the availability of a toolbar for interacting with WeoGeo Market and private libraries from within ArcMap. This, combined with Dan Dye’s series of posts showing how to use the WeoGeo REST API with Python got me thinking about how [...]
Ahoy me hearties, we all be pirates!
There’s a fantastic article in today’s Guardian (via Computer World Magazine) about the International Intellectual Property Alliance, who say that countries advocating the use of open source software should be put on a “Specialist 301 list” (ie a trading watch list) because open source “weakens the software industry” and “fails to build respect for intellectual [...]
Heading to the 2010 ESRI Federal User Conference
I’m heading out this morning to the FedUC. Since it’s in my back yard, I usually hit it every year but, this year, I’m staying up in the city to save myself an even more hellish commute than usual. The lingering snow and ice has thrown roads in this area into mayhem.
Rumor has it that [...]
The times they are a changin
I have been looking through the feedback from the AGI GI in 2015 survey that we ran as part of the foresight study that will be published soon (just need to finish my third of the editors intro). One comment caught my attention “none of the big 3 software vendors will still be around in 2015″
Not sure who the big 3 vendors are? Well change 3 to 5 or even 8 and you have pretty much swept up all of the players in UK GI software supply. How many of these companies will be around in 5 years time?

To survive let alone flourish GI software providers are going to need to change dramatically to adapt to the challenges of new business and technical models. Some will be too encumbered by their legacies or their management. Will anyone rember them in 2016?

So who do you think will be the winners and losers?

More thoughts on this in the intro to the AGI Foresight Study in March.

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