Tag: bt

The best and worst of Hotel Wifi

Lloyd hotel from the north view

Hotelchatter posted up a list of its best and worst wifi enabled hotels. Its mainly American centric but there is a international version here.

Number one in the international version is the Lloydhotel.

Amsterdam: Lloyd Hotel. Free WiFi. Worked so fast in this large hotel. So fast we downloaded an entire season of The Office on iTunes within two hours.

Even 2 years ago it was flipping fast and effect-less. Every 4 rooms shared a wireless point and there was more that enough through-out the rest of the hotel to get wireless outside, the lobby and beyond. I think the only place you don't get wireless is in the lifts. I also got upgraded to the D level penthouse on the weekend, so I'm a little bias generally towards a simply awesome hotel.

Since joining Backstage, I've spent a lot of time in hotels and always try to pick hotels with Free Wireless. Usually the problem I get is that the wireless is in the lobby not the rooms or its not actually free its pay wireless by someone like Tmobile, BT or much worst Eurospot. The other issue is that most hotels don't care or have no one who actually knows the difference. When trying to book a hotel in Newcastle I phoned up about 12 hotels and at one point had to describe the BT open zone, Tmobile logos over the phone because the reception couldn't tell the difference between free and pay wifi. No lie!

So yes the situation in the UK is pretty dire once you get out there. I'm certainly thinking about submitting some of the hotels I've been to on the international hotelchatter site. I remember a hotel I stayed in during my last trip to Manchester, it costs equivalent to 10p a minute for internet access through a wired connection (there were no bundles or offers available) I believe it was operated by swissport or europort. And thats the biggest problem, you can read the website and find it does have internet access but what kind is unknown by even the staff or management.

On the upside, GNER trains have wireless through-out the trains and although it costs about 10 pounds for 24hours, its certainly worth it for a 6 hour journey to Scotland. Recently I heard the Cloud have covered the City of London (business square mile) in rich wifi. I don't think its free but at 11.99 per month for unlimited (yes what does unlimited really mean) data its not a bad deal if your wanting wireless in the UK. The cloud has also been pretty good about inter-operating with BT and I think you can even interop with Tmobile hotspots. There's no douht where ever you go now in London at least, there is some kind of wireless and its usually operated by one of the big 3. Sometimes I do see Orange hotspots, but I can't seem to get Orange to just add it to my existing mobile bill.

Generally its all a big mess but soon I'm sure like the Marriot adverts I keep seeing, hotels will wise up and start highlighting the fact they have free wireless (although I'm sure it will just get added into the room bill).

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Mashup* Identity 2.0

So first up I'm not that impressed with being invited to an event, turning up and not finding my name on the list. Then a slap in the face when I get hit with a bill for 35 pounds. Having no cash, means I'm forced to hand over my business card so they can invoice me. Not impressed!

Down into the BT showcase area and the magic of the not long gone BarCampLondon2. Who do I see? Nat Bat, my co-hoster from BarCampLondon2. Thank god because all I can see otherwise is lots of gray suits.

Tony Fish introduces the evening by ending with the words “how do we make money from this?” Enough said really

The first speaker gives a brief overview of the all the issues to do with identity. But never once talks about people owning their own identity. Richard Baker from BT now, finally he mentions user-centric and multiple identities/personas. He also mentions that fact we need to think about the other mediums in regards to identity. His example of call centres is good. Richard finalise his talk by pointing at the balance between risk, convince, costs. Nice sensible talk. Now Simon Wilison, so the wireless fucks up and simon can't show how it works – nightmare! So on with the show. After explaining the benefits of open ID in the Single sign on, simon talks about identity projection. Projecting your id from one system to another. Thankfully Simon mentions that OpenID isn't the silver bullet, there are caveats like trust. Simon gives a cut down talk from the future of webapps. Fast paced and maybe lost a few people but it was really good. At the end, Simon finally got to demo openID.

Now the Panel. Eger from the government slates openID because its too difficult for most users in the UK. Missing the point of Open ID, which is, its open and decentralized. Most of the questions about Open ID were easy pickings for Simon who rubbed his hands with glee when getting those OpenID 101 questions. There were some good questions banded around at the end but by then the hour long debate had gone on too long for most of us.

So generally Mashup reminds me of the events I use to go to when I first moved to London. There good if your into business but generally only scratch the surface and usually the people want to know how to make money out of the thing under the surface. I'm surprised no one just came out and said where do I make money out of Open ID, maybe because Simons slide on why the enterprise should be using OpenID was too clear?

The event was well run but I felt the most important person there was Simon and besides the internet screw up, he could have had more challenging questions at a geekdinner or something. I have to question the cost of the event too. Its quite a lot for 3x 10min talks and then a hour panel session. Yes there was buffet food and drinks for free but thats 35x 100+ people. Maybe I'm dead wrong but personally I didn't get much out of the evening except a couple of peoples contract details.

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BarCampLondon2 is over…

Ending BarCampLondon2

BarCampLondon2 could not have gone much better. It was a great experience and dare It, better that the first one. Thanks to everyone who turned up and made it an unforgettable event. I've had a total of 3 hours sleep over the weekend, so my brain is crying out for bed. But who could know Werewolf could be so intense….

Werewolf

lots more to come… but in the meantime, I'm uploading video to blip.tv, pictures to flickr and my slides to slideshare. All using the BarCampLondon2 tag.

So my account of BarCampLondon2 should be pretty consistent with most others. It was a bloody good event. The venue supplied by BT was nothing short of amazing. We had the showcase arena which includes autoriumum fit for CEOs including 180+ investers. Thseat wewcomfortablele enough for me to actually sleep hours unlikeke the Yahoo offices last year, we only had a couple of so called rooms. Instead we spaces with either a 60 inch plasma screen or projectors with over 100 inch screens. Most of them seateabout 4040people, so with 3 spaces upstairs, one in the middle and 3 downstairs. There was more that enough room. But at the same time, it never felt like there was no one around. Talking of which 70+ people stayed over night, how do I know? Because I went around about 5am and counted. This is over double what we had last time and according to Chris Messina better that the last San Francisco BarCamp. Quite a few people didn't go to sleep over night, they opted to stay uthrough thehenight. In total we had about 170 people, but i did notice some new people during the day, so I would say we weren't that far off 200. I also think the people who really wanted to present did get a chance, also this time around no one had more that one session.

This time around we also had wireless connectivity, this time via BT Openzone passes. We (the organizers) were honestly worried about 24 hour passes. BT offered a lot of Openzone passes but each one cost its full price of 10 pounds. So obviously BT wanted to keep the costs down. Hence we didn't throw them out the crowd. We worried there wouldn't be enough for everyone during the whole of BarCamp. So come Sunday morning we would have a 100 people asking for new passes at the same time. We tried to setup ut itwasn't to be. In the end it all worked out and out worst fears didn't happen.

Talking about Organizers, Nat and Jason were a pleasure to work with. Some people might remember me asking for a co-organizer to work with a while ago. A lot of people were interested but in the end I choose Jason because he was super excited to be involved and lived pretty close. Nat although living in Oxford was also very excited and offered to do what she could remotely like print out signs, etc. Both of them were enthuastic and were willing to spend a lot of time on BarCampLondon2. I had maother offersersbut some were less excited and some had already done a BarCamp in another country. I really wanted to give new people a chance to get a feel for BarCamp and who knows might happen in the future. So big thanks to Nat and Jason once again, couldn't have done it without you guys.

So in more details behind the decisions of BarCampLondon2.

Eventwax, was recommended to me by Nat. I setup an account (wishes it had OpenID support) and liked what I saw. So I used it and gave the account details to Nat and Jason too. Our first problem came with the firsign upnup period of 1.5hrs. I allocated 100 tickets and they all went in 1.5 hours. Now that was fucking amazing but the message which you got when you then tried to sign up wasn't very useful. So much so, that our friends who don't speEnglishish as there first language didn't quite get the odd messageabout tickets and went ahead and booked their airplane/train tickets. So in that case I would send out a invite or clue them into went the next wave of tickets would be. Some could say thats unfair but its tricky if that person has already bought there tickets. I had a lot of complaints about the words tickets aattendeesees. I would love for the Eventwax guys to build in the ability to change the wording through out the site on a event by event bases. Tabilityity to also say this event is free and costs nothingwould be useful. I didn't try out the promo code stuff but that certainly looks useful for guest tickets in the future, would certainly beat sending out invites. The different levels of tickets was damm useful, because I could do the wave thing with tickets. So after the first 100, I started putting out tickets on the wiki and a few email lists. The same is true of the 3rd wave. Eventwax allows you decide in advance when tickets go live and stop. Date is great but time would also be very useful, as midnight isn'tvery useful for most people. Cancellation are a pain to deal with eventwax (although thank you to everyone who did email us), it would be great to have an aggregator ticket which looks how many spaces are actually left and offers them up as a ticket. On the last wave of tickets I had to keep cacluating the difference and changing the tickets for the last wave. That was a pain. Looking back I shouldn't have left the last wave of tickets till 2 days before the event but I really wanted to reuse all tcanceledledtickets. In the end we ended up with about 20% not used.

One last thing about the ticket thing, I wish I'd never mentioned IDs and checking. That caused a shit storm which I thought might actually shadow the event. My reasoning behind it was because yes I did hear about people selling tickets and getting multiple tickets under different names. There might have been some truth to it all but in the end we still had the 20% drop off.

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Did you get a email from Octane about BarCampLondon2?

BarCampLondon2 17th-18th Feb 2007

I just do not understand. When did Press Release mean emailing everyone who wrote about BarCampLondon in the last year?

Ben and Tom make their feelings known and rightly so I have to say.

I have little to do with the emails which went out today. Honestly if this was even mentioned to me I would said no this is certainly a very bad idea. I did agreed with BT putting out a press release. But I was under the illusion this meant emailing newspapers, magazines, etc not bloggers. Lets cut the crap, does a event which sold 100 tickets in 1.5 hours and is now holding back tickets to the public currently need even more PR? No I don't think so. You only have to whisper BarCampLondon and
people are kicking off emails asking when and where to sign-up. This is no bad thing because BarCampLondon was such a great event last time and I'm sure it will be even better this time around.

What killed me about the emails from Bethan at Octane PR was.

  1. Bethan used a Press release which I had corrected previously when BT sent it to me, Nat and Jason recently.
  2. The link to BarCampLondon2 was wrong in the emails
  3. The email addresses must have been found by searching Google or Technorati
  4. The start of the email twists the truth to sound like it comes from a trusted source
  5. The emails were sent to people who merely mentioned BarCampLondon not BarCampLondon2 (hence Ben got one although he lives in SF)
  6. Bethan must not have done much research into the event because even I got a email and I'm a bloody organizer (geez)
  7. The signature for Bethan Thomas, account manager at Octane PR is over 10 lines tall! Do they have no shame?

I do not want this to distract from the great work BT has done in opening up its building for BarCampLondon2. We really have a great space and BT were happy to offer us even more. They even had a backup venue in case we felt the BT Centre in St Pauls wasn't suitable (no idea how they could have felt that). I'm sure it will blow over in the next few days, plus everyone is talking about the BBC CBBC World at the moment to notice most of the blogs
charting the email (although I expect the number to grow by tomorrow).

My personal apologies goes out to Ben, Tom, Drew, David, Adrian, Nat, Richard, Leisa and anyone else who it went to.

I do promise to talk to BT and I'm sure they will appreciate the honest response they are getting from bloggers. Last but not least a quote from the Cluetrain.

To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities. But first, they must belong to a community.

For those wondering about the email, look no futher here it is.

Hi Ian,

I notice that you’ve registered your interest in going along to BarCamp London this year. Just wanted to make sure you have the updated details on the event and have the registration details if you do want to go along.

Thanks,
Bethan

News Alert

January 23, 2007

BT BACKS INNOVATION BY SPONSORING BARCAMP LONDON


As part of its commitment to driving innovation in technology at every level, BT has announced it’s the lead sponsor of BarCamp London 2007.

The event, which will be held at BT Centre, London, on February 17 and 18, 2007, is the second to be held in London and is part of a worldwide programme of conferences that includes Los Angeles, Montreal and Seoul.

BarCamp London brings together the UK’s technology community to share ideas and learn about technology in an open environment. These include attendees from design, usability, marketing/PR, digital agency work and venture capital backgrounds, as well as developers and programmers.

The BarCamp rules are very clear and create an environment where there are no spectators, only participants: everyone who attends is expected to present, give a demo, lead a session or support the event in some way. This helps to get everyone involved, but also creates more of a community atmosphere. First time attendees have to make a presentation or lead a discussion.

Gavin Patterson, group managing director consumer at BT Retail said: “As a company, we’re driving innovation in the technology sector, both for businesses and consumers. BarCamp is at the heart of this and brings together some of the most talented people in the industry, creating an environment where they can share, discuss and develop the latest technology and services, which is why we’re sponsoring the latest event in London.”

If you’re interested in finding out more about BarCamp London 2007, please go to http://barcamp.org/BarCampLondon or register at http://cubicgarden.eventwax.com/barcamplondon/register

—
Bethan Thomas
Account Manager
OCTANE
A division of LEWIS – Global Public Relations
Millbank Tower, Millbank
London, SW1P 4RS

Tel: +44 (0)20 7802 2662
Mobile: +44 (0)7714 768952
Web: www.octanepr.com

PRWEEK – Top ten all-sector agency, 2005
PRWEEK – Number one in UK technology PR league, 2003, 2004, 2005

Best Companies – Michelin-rated one star accreditation, 2006
The Sunday Times – Top 100 best small companies to work for, 2005
The Holmes Report – Top Ten international consultancies, 2005 & European SABRE awards finalists, 2006
Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) Excellence finalists, 2006

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At long last me and Sarah are back online

Demon internet

Well at long last Demon have hooked us up. I'm crossing my fingers that it will still be up tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. I only noticed when I got back in today and the ADSL light was not flashing any more. As before the 1meg connection was automaticly upgraded to 2meg and actually the upload speeds seem really good from Woolwich when compared to Beckenham.

I'm however waiting to see if Demon or BT will actually phone, email or even text me to say I can now finally use the broadband connection. Who wants to bet its going to be never…

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