The James Kilgour BlogA Life Blog.

I’ve written about Blyk a few times over the past year, since taking up the service. Basically, if you’re not familiar, Blyk is an ad-supported mobile network, which provides £15 free credit each month. See my other Blyk posts here.

Recently, Blyk changed to this £15 credit, from the previous offer of 217 texts and 43 minutes free each month. The new deal is actually a loss of around £10! Also, Blyk increased prices: 15p/min up to 24p/min! (They did reduce texts from 10p to 8p).

Next, Blyk started charging £10 for replacement sim cards if they are lost or stolen. Something that other UK networks don’t do. Also, they stopped the Text Balance enquiry service, and have also stopped issuing invites to the service!

It asks the question, is Blyk financially secure at all? Yes, we are in recession, but these steps are those of a company in dire straights. Hope Blyk will weather this storm that they seem to be in; Blyk is a good service, offering excellent value. I’ll be watching in the next few months.

JK

PayPal offers “a safe way to pay”, being owned by eBay, and offering millions of users Internet payment facilities. It is the most popular service of its type, and all eBay auctions accept PayPal: it’s compulsory!

I recently sold an unwanted Christmas Gift on eBay; it quickly sold for £30.00, which I was quite happy with. eBay charged me 50p for the listing, (I’m quite happy to pay for this). As per the eBay rule, I accepted PayPal on my listing, and promptly got paid. When I checked my account, I found out that actually, PayPal had charged me another £1.25 in “Charges”. What for?

I had already paid eBay, (the owner of PayPal), the required fees, and now they were effectively charging me again! I make hundreds of fund transfers form my bank account each year, and never get charged a penny. Why should PayPal do any different? It’s not like they even provide good customer service: they are useless!

PayPal should have the sense to stop charging its customers, who don’t have a choice on whether they use the service or not. eBay seem to have a powerful position here: and quite frankly I don’t like it. I will have to think whether I use eBay for sales again: it’s not even the cost so much, but the principle.

JK

So the government is going to pump 75bn in new cash into the economy, in a bid to stop the recession. They call this “quantitive easing”. However, to me, this seems like it will just ruin our economy further.

The British Sterling was one of the world’s strongest currencies. Now, with this development, that will surely fall, and if we are not careful, we could quite easily enter hyper-inflation like Zimbabwe.

In addition, the Bank of England has now lowered interest rates to history’s lowest: 0.5%. This is the sixth time rates have been cut since October. If it hasn’t worked before, why are they still trying?

In my opinion, printing more money is not much of a solution. We should try and weather the recession. If this new money printing idea does cause the economy to go caput, then Gordon Brown will be shot for it.

JK

Blu-Ray; the latest development in Video-Disc technology. Offering 50gb of storage; enough for full HD Video films and TV-Shows.

The technology is principally backed by Sony, being offered in the PS3. This multi-national company promises the next generation of Film Quality; you can actually feel like your there. The price difference? Well, for a good Blu-Ray player, the price is around £180-£250, and each Blu-Ray disk is around £5 more than their DVD counterpart. (Usually around £20)

But I don’t think it’s worth it. I recently visited Sharp Laboratories of Europe, who are often regarded as one of the best makers of LCD screens, (they make screens for iPods). They showed me two identical HD TVs, one plugged into a standard DVD player, and the other into a Blu-Ray player with a Blu-Ray disk. While the latter picture was slightly sharper, the difference was nominal! It was only something you would notice if you looked carefully, and I can get a sharp picture like that from my Up-scaling-DVD player anyway!

The thing is, not only would I need to spend extra on buying a player, but also the disks are much more expensive. And, I would need a Blu-Ray player connected to every TV in the house if I wanted to play them around the house; not to mention that 1 of the TVs isn’t HD, and 2 of the HD ones are only 17/19 inches, (the difference would be impossible to see on these). Now that I think about it, I also have my laptop and desktop PCs; these don’t have Blu-Ray drives in them.

To me, Blu-Ray does seem like just a way of Sony and it’s huge consortium getting people to replace all of their old DVD players, disks and old TVs, just to fill their greed for profit, Well, I’m not playing. Not until the price of these players and disks are at an affordable rate for this economic period.

JK

Internet Explorer, the world’s most popular browser, with a 68% market share has now been upgraded to version 8, with the Release Candidate now available. With the upcoming lunch of Windows 7 which will be bundled with IE8, the European Union is launching an antitrust case.

An article on the BBC news website says the following:

"Microsoft does have the advantage of its browser being shipped with its operating system so people that want to shift have to do a lot of work to shift," said Mr MacDonald, a vice-president of analyst firm Gartner.

The EU last week accused Microsoft of harming competition by bundling its IE browser with its Windows operating system.

I personally think this is ridiculous, and is fueling these antitrust claims. Switching to Firefox, Safari or Opera is easy! It’s just a matter of downloading the program, and taking a minute to install it. Plus, a lot of OEM Manufacturers bundle Firefox with their PCs anyway.

I don’t see the problem with using Internet Explorer anyway. IE8 RC1 is a fine browser, and for those who want to switch, they can. It’s not like the browsers make profit for Microsoft or Mozilla. The EU should spend their time doing something more worthwhile.

JK

ChaCha are a fairly new company, in the Question and Answer market. Basically, US users text in any questions they like, free, and ChaCha texts back the answer.

How they do this, is using “Guides”; knowledgeable individuals, who get paid to reply to the questions through the ChaCha web portal. For every answer, they get paid $0.10; the top guides getting twice as much.

Out of curiosity, I tried to become a guide earlier today. Unfortunately, they rejected me at the first questioning stage; the ChaCha Fitness Stage. The topic? ChaCha.

Of course, I had no idea. To be honest, the founder of the company, the place that it was announced and the company’s ethos do not really interest me in the foggiest.

I can imagine how important to an American when their out-and-about to find out that “Cha” means dance in Chinese, and Scott Jones invented the concept. Wow.

I also fail to see how ChaCha actually makes any money. Users don’t have to pay anything to the company to text in, and the texts don’t have ads. Great business model.

JK 

The fierce Dragons of the business world are back; this time on prime time. The show which sees budding entrepreneurs bid for cash backing has run for several seasons, and is very popular.

One question though always makes me wonder; does Deborah Meaden ever smile? She seems to be the grumpiest woman on TV ever!

The new season starts tonight on BBC 2 at 9pm. I’ll be tuning in to see the blood bath that is bad valuations and crummy product ideas. I don’t know why some of the people go on at all. Come on; Tuc Tucs in Britain? An electric egg cooker? Lol. 

Their new book ‘Dragons Den, from Pitch to Product’ is available from Amazon.