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EDITOR'S BLOG |
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Risky recession
From ‘Opinion’ column, issue 37 – November 2008 With the UK economy now firmly in recession, there is a sense of nervousness in the business community. It’s not just a question of how healthy your own business is, but also one of how well equipped your customers and suppliers are to survive the economic downturn. In the tracking and telematics market, there has been a gathering trend towards leasing assets and services rather than owning them. However, while it might make the balance sheet look better, it also creates a certain vulnerability to external circumstances. Tracking companies whose business model is based on volume-selling of telematics “black boxes” on a pence-per-day-per-vehicle basis, and not on building long-term relationships with customers, are particularly at risk. Despite its maturity, the tracking market remains volatile – and that’s the very characteristic the banks are currently keen to avoid at all costs. So some of those suppliers could have a hard time of it. Read whole of above item Email us about this item
Power to the people: multiple mixing and matching in a wireless world
From ‘Hanging Up’ column, issue 37 – November 2008 I like to think of myself as techno-savvy. I appreciate the benefits that mobile communications deliver, both personally and professionally. Like many people in the past decade, I’ve gone from being wowed by how clever wireless communication is to taking much if it completely for granted. Even my mother has joined the wireless revolution. Despite being an avid silver surfer, she was reluctant at first to consider a mobile phone, having managed perfectly well for 68 years without one. The family insisted she join the wireless community after she got stranded on a rural railway station one evening, having caught the wrong train, but with no means of letting anyone know she was OK and still able to get home, albeit three hours late. Now she is an avid texter, has discarded her digital camera in favour of the one on the phone, and was last seen trying to convert some old CDs to MP3 format to be transferred via the phone’s SD card. Read whole of above item Email us about this item
Telematics can cut your fuel costs
From ‘Opinion’ column, issue 36 – September 2008 Despite the many widely-acknowledged operational benefits offered by vehicle tracking and mobile data systems, a sceptical hardcore of vehicle operators, especially smaller businesses, remains resistant to their blandishments. Such operators argue that it’s not that difficult to manage a fleet of 15 or 20 delivery vehicles or service vans without telematics. And in a small office, they ask, who would be responsible for reading and taking action on information the telematics system provided? This year, however, has brought a major development that is helping convince even the most sceptical that perhaps there’s something in this telematics business after all: the stratospheric rise in the price of fuel. Read whole of above item Email us about this item
A pocketful of tags? It could be just the tikit
From 'Hanging Up' column, issue 36 – September 2008 Are you walking around with a handful of RFID tags in your pocket? Probably not; but at least one organisation would like to think that in the near future you might. It’s Alcatel Lucent, which has just launched a product called tikitags. Yes, the name has a lower-case initial “t” – adopted, one suspects, not just as a gimmick, but also because the company wants the word to creep into our vocabulary as a generic term. Term for what? Basically, for tags that you can attach to things to give them a kind of digital identity. The company is promoting the idea as bridging the gap between the physical and digital worlds. Read whole of above item Email us about this item
A licence to kill?
From ‘Opinion’ column, issue 35 As a publication supporting mobile computing technologies, we always feel uneasy at legislation that threatens to curb its use. We backed the law banning the use of handheld mobile phones in the UK, and we continue to feel a sense of indignation when we see it so often flouted. But we balked the idea of curbs on all use of mobiles by drivers. We felt (and still feel) that this seems tantamount to banning drivers from talking at all. So how should we feel at new sentencing guidelines for England and Wales? Some commentators have suggested that under these guidelines, prolonged use of a mobile phone by a driver who causes a death will now make the driver liable to a prison sentence – even if the phone is not hand-held. It comes under a new category of offence created in the 2006 Road Traffic Act – namely causing death by careless driving. Invoking a custodial sentence under this law might sound draconian, but maybe it’s no more than reasonable. If the driver’s mind is somewhere other than on the road, is that a mitigation for accidentally killing someone? Read whole of above item Email us about this item
We are pleased to inform you that your package is not where we say it is, but tough luck because we don’t care
From ‘Hanging up’ column, issue 35 Picture the scenario: you have an urgent need for a widely-available but slightly specialised product. Following a short online search, you find an e-tailer selling the product at the right price, and because you need it within two days, you’re prepared to pay for next-day delivery. The price is not too extortionate, and delivery is promised before 10.30am. Reassuringly, the e-tailer offers online consignment tracking. So you go ahead and buy it. By 10.30 next day, you’ve guessed it, no sign of the delivery. You check the e-tailer’s consignment-tracking Web page. The parcel is in the carrier’s Hemel Hempstead office, it states. Well, that’s good. The pre-10.30 window may have been missed, but the depot is only 20 minutes away, so maybe the driver got held up in traffic. Clearly the carrier company has some form of consignment tracking system in place. It has, after all, told the e-tailer that it has arrived at my local depot; and that information is on the e-tailer’s own consignment tracking page. But the tracking system doesn’t seem to extend beyond this. Two telephone calls to the carrier, one by the e-tailer, one by myself, fail to elicit any more details, apart from the assurance that the package is on the delivery van. Great. But no, they can’t tell us when it might be delivered. No, there’s no way of communicating with the driver. And no, they don’t know why the delivery is late. Read whole of above item Email us about this item
You were seen
From ‘Opinion’ column, issue 34 You’re delivering in an inner-city area. There’s nowhere to park, so you stop on a yellow line: not ideal perhaps, but a perfectly legitimate ploy. You return to your vehicle and drive off. Job done. Then a few weeks later a fixed-penalty parking notice drops through your letterbox. How come? Well, because you were caught on a closed-circuit TV camera, and someone thinks you were parking illegally. Under new parking enforcement rules sanctioned by the Traffic Management Act (2004), this is going to happen increasingly. So what do you do? Were you in the wrong? You probably don’t really know, and may not even remember the incident very clearly. It’s far too late to argue the toss with a warden, and in fact there wasn’t one, anyway – unless you count someone sitting in an office miles away. So you pay up simply to avoid the hassle of contesting the fine. And next time you’re in that area, you proceed a lot more cautiously. |