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Weekend outage 13th - 14th June 2009

Posted on June 15, 2009 by Tim
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Some users will have noticed all of our services were unavailable from Saturday late afternoon through to Sunday.

We apologise for this unplanned outage, due to a power failure in one of our cabinets at our primary data centre. Whilst the majority of our hardware has fault tolerant power supplied from two separate circuits, our master nameserver - which broadcasts information to ISPs about where our websites can be found - wasn’t covered in this way.

Due to the extended outage our secondary nameservers, provided by one of the leaders in outsourced DNS solutions, also timed out since they could not get updates from the master server. At this point an increasing number of ISPs would have failed to resolve our web addresses and returned ‘not found’.

Resolution: Power was re-established to the cabinet at 06:00hrs on Sunday morning following which a disk failure became evident on the server in question. The server was rebuilt and services re-established early Sunday afternoon. As is the nature of domain name resolution ‘DNS’ , it would have taken a varying amount of time for ISPs to re-establish their records with us , but for most it would have been instant.

The failure did not warrant a full DR failover to our secondary data centre as this would have created an equal amount of downtime, possibly more, due to IP routing delays.

Prevention of further occurance:

1. We now have a standby master nameserver along with the two primary nameservers at our main data centre.
2. We anticipate replacing the last remaining hardware not offering fault tolerant power supplies in the next two to three months.
3. Futher 3rd party availability monitoring has been added to our DNS services.

Due to the nature of this outage we were unable to provide our transactional customers with links to their trading accounts by way of our usual holding page. These services remained unaffected throughought however unreachable via our site obviously.

Transactional customers are advised to bookmark the relevant links directly to allow continued use if such an occurance should happen again. These links are available via the help page at http://www.iii.co.uk/help

Playing a small part in something BIG

Posted on May 21, 2009 by Tim
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So, the call came in late last Friday afternoon. 

A major site launch of a confidential nature needed some support in terms of being able to deliver advertising for a major sponsor who had booked banners and pre-roll advertising but had no capability to serve such.  The production company involved in the creation of the site (and TV programming) knew our CEO.

“We serve ads, we could do it”.  Promises were made…the site launched Monday…the weekend was cancelled.

OpenX (formerly OpenAds) saved the day.  I don’t care what agencies think about the reputation of DoubleClick (which we also use) versus open source alternatives - in terms of flexibility and knowing that we could serve out what has turned out to be several million more ads for no additional ’service’ fees there was only one choice.

The only real challenge to setting up a new ‘website/publisher’ and campaign, then loading up the 3rd party ad tags and giving the web developer the invocation code to use was that the campaign booked was only to be served to US viewers.  The advertiser turned out to be Ally Bank (formerly GMAC) - a major US financial institution.  The solution was adding MaxMind’s GEOIP database, which I’d used in the past, and added the functionality to our installation at interactive investor relatively easily.

Pre-roll video advertising was solved by using the LongTail Video (JW Player) plugin: Adtonomy ; their choice of JW Player to display the production company’s FLV files was a good one.  Very flexible. I like it a lot and am currently exploring swapping out the player we use for iBall and Moneywise to it.

So, by Sunday evening it was all done and tested.  A signed NDA later, I’d had some exclusive access to what was to become a global story on Tuesday afternoon and was deemed to be of such scientific importance that Google dedicated their home page to it.  Not in to fossils myself, but it’s certainly got some attention.

So, just every now and then something is thrown at you which ends up being quite an honour to play a small part in.  What IDA would have thought of it all is anyone’s guess.  The site: www.revealingthelink.com  - (no, you won’t see my handy work unless you’re in the US)

 
Now to talk to our head of infrastructure and inform him where all the bandwidth has gone. Mark, its your problem now ;)

StockTwips launches

Posted on April 22, 2009 by Tim
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Warning: This post contains lots of words beginning with Tw….

I’m not a great user of Twitter; but it seems millions are. I guess as a means to send and receive messages between large groups of people it’s pretty efficient.

The service has moved on somewhat from the days of tweeting your friends to say you’ve just gone to bed. Tweeting them again a few minutes later to inform them you’ve turned out the light…..etc. Today, Twitter is the one of the most prevalent examples of the social web and is responsible for many outpourings of mass hysteria (or hysterical masses as is often the case when rumours that create a corporate hate agenda turn out to be false - most recently Amazon falling victim).

News, mostly factual it has to be said, gets round fast on Twitter without doubt.

What better day to launch our latest project ‘StockTwips’ therefore than on Budget day - a service aimed to capture the ‘twittering potential’ (?!) of UK investors. OK, so ‘Budget’ isn’t a listed company on the London Stock Exchange - our main focus of coverage going forward; but it sure will impact a number of them in some shape or form.

Whilst StockTwips does intend to focus on providing a filtered view per company of all tweets being made on it by investors (simply add UK:VOD for example to your tweet if I’m boring you already) ; we thought we would introduce you gently to the potential of Twitter and StockTwips by showing you just what it’s capable of.

So, as Alistair Darling stands up to deliver his budget speech - launch this page - and get the views of fellow tax payers in real-time.

PHORM? No thanks!

Posted on April 15, 2009 by Tim
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We today took the step of opting out all of our group websites and thereby protecting our users from having their usage analysed by the PHORM service.

For more information about PHORM and it’s risk to your privacy :-

http://www.inphormationdesk.org/
http://www.phorm.com/
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/250043/major-websites-urged-to-boycott-phorm.html

Spotted on the way down to the Waterloo & City Line this morning

Posted on April 15, 2009 by Tim
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A gentleman keenly watching his share prices on our iPhone application.

Great start to the day.

Audience Development

Posted on March 10, 2009 by Matthew
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Notes from a recent presentation (the link to the presentation is at the foot of the post):

Audience development - pivotal to success

Audience Development is split between retaining satisfied customers and growing the customer base.

customer acquisition

one

manage SEO of all pages taking into consideration current best practice

by order of importance

on page:

off page:

and remember

(thanks Dave Chaffey)

and then work on the 77 tips found here

two

network with SEO and audience development professionals to keep abreast of current best practice and innovations within the sector

make sure you are on Linkedin and join the

audience development group
Digital Publishing Network
LinkedSEO Group

make sure you are on

Twitter and follow the right people

three

run inhouse guerilla SEO best practice workshops in collaboration with marketing departments for content teams and front-end development

for content teams look no further than presenting the
BASIC principles of online journalism

for development teams look no further than running through point one

four

develop content sharing partnerships with third parties

research your sector and communicate with competitors direct and indirect and any other sites with similar content

start non-commercial content sharing by linking to each other’s content

remember - the link is king

five

Linkbuilding

ensure that you link from your content

remember - it’s a conversation

the web conversation should have no walls

build up links

tools and people that can help

Publish2.0
Onlinejournalism
Newsless
Buzzmachine
Silobreaker
Daylife
Yahoo Buzz
delicious
digg

and Twitter Tools

six

manage Social Media reputation:

embrace trends such as microblogging tool Twitter as access to new audiences and method of communicating with existing audience

“Dell believe $1m worth of business from Twitter”

Twitter Tools

Twitterfall
Monitter
Twitseeker
PleaseRT.me and Retweetist - retweeting tools
Filttr - filtering Twitter
beamagpie - advertising
Twist - trends
Twitbot
retweetradar
twilert - email alerts
Pingvine and Twitterfeed- RSS aggregator

seven

For content/news sites: every morning email a list of keywords to be used in titles and intros for the day’s content Google Trends and Google Keyword Search

customer retention

one

strengthen culture where customer retention is as important and vital to the business as customer acquisition

customer feedback should be viewed as some of the most important data available

involve all employees in positive and negative feedback

from it all employees will learn

what is important
what is relevant
what can be done to make positive change

two

customer retention is an ongoing conversation and that conversation requires managing and developing day to day

get to know your customers

beta groups
customer feedback roundtables
user testing
outbound calling

involve all departments including marketing, product and contact centre to develop a better understanding of customer’s needs and requirements

three

action customer feedback and develop further customer loyalty

and

feedback to customer the positive changes you have made

four

increase online dialogue with customers with a willingness and courage to publish and share concerns, questions, grievances

five

continually test important areas of the site using no/low-cost tools and action feedback into site enhancements/tweaks/BAU improvements

Website Grader
Web accessibility tools
Userfly and Feedbackarmy - User testing
Yahoo Site Explorer
Silverback - Guerilla user testing
SEODigger
Chalkmark, Treejack, OptimalSort at Optimal Workshop

six

create ‘User Experience team’ with existing members of staff to place the user voice into decisions

even if the team is only of ‘one’ a lot can be done

reference

Leah Buley’s How to be a UX Team of One

seven

reputation management: monitor the web for discussion (positive/negative) and proactively re-act

set yourself up with the monitoring tools for Twitter

and

Google Alerts
Trackur (+ free guide)
Reputation

(Audience Development presentation on Slideshare)

Google Finance Android App - ’streaming’ ?

Posted on March 5, 2009 by Tim
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Since I launched (still?) the only stock market application to truly stream tick by tick data on to the iPhone and Android I feel that I’m fairly qualified to comment on the continued mis-use of the term ’streaming’ which is used widely by my competitors and most recently by Google Finance who launched their Android app this week -

Streaming, particularly in the context of market data, has always meant a continual stream of data whether it’s a digital audio stream or in this case tick by tick market data. Typically it relies on a ‘Comet‘ style interface between the handset and the market data source.

That’s not to say streaming data to a handset is necessarily the right way in which users want to consume market data, particularly those who might have stupidly expensive data plans (which thankfully doesn’t seem to be the case with UK iPhone and Android users) ;  however with more brokers likely to offer instant execution against a price streaming to their handset I feel it’s the way to go.  Where not in place already, stock brokers will be moving away from the 20-30 seconds validity period for an offer to be executed on your ’screen’ (think mobile) - the market can move too rapidly these days, which is where a comet style streaming connection will come in to its own.

References:

http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2009/03/finance-for-android-app.html
http://www.lightstreamer.com/pieceofnews_0030.htm
http://lightstreamer.blogspot.com/2008/12/shareprice-android-application.html
http://www.shareprice.co.uk/mobile/

Beyond the Crisis: Debating the role of innovation

Posted on March 2, 2009 by Matthew
Filed Under Technology | 1 Comment

Response to the questions posed for debate at tonight’s (2 March 2008) Innovation Forum event ‘Beyond the Crisis: Debating the role of innovation‘ at the Hub Kings Cross (34b York Way, London N1 9AB) - ‘there may never have been a better time, or a greater need, for profound innovation’ and that ‘during and after the economic downturn, innovation and transformational change will be more important than ever. The sooner far sighted strategies are developed and implemented by government, business and other agencies the better life will be for ordinary people – in the UK and beyond.’

Mark Nicholson’s response:

How can we explain the causes of the crisis: Financial system failure? Greed? Lack of productive locations for investment?

It’s a combination of factors. Firstly there was a large element of greed and people taking on far too much risk.   A symptom of the inflated expectations the markets have for the profitability of companies.  This causes them to have to “bet the farm” just to meet expectations.

The other main factor is the inter-connectedness of the work economy which means that a failure in one part can bring down the whole system.  Combined with the incredible complicity of the world financial markets you find that few people really understand how it works, consequently the risk of debt instruments was not really understood by the traders buying them.

·  To what extent is the crisis a product of lack of innovation?

Ironically the problem may actually be down to innovation.  The Credit Default Swaps were an innovative product but one that was not clearly thought out.
Innovation is one the buzz words that most angers me.  The dictionary definition of innovation is use of a new idea or method.  Just because something is new doesn’t mean it is a good idea. CDSs were a new idea and a very bad one as well.

·  Where and how is value created today?

Value is created in solving customers’ real needs profitably.  A lot of what has been sold and what is now being left on the shelves were products that were not adding real value to peoples lives by solving their problems.  As such it was easy for consumers to stop purchasing these.

The other way value is created is through continuous improvement which has in manufacturing lead to impressive reliability.  We now need to apply the same approaches that have worked so well in manufacturing to the knowledge economy.

·  What role can government play in facilitating innovation and value creation (or getting out of the way)?

They must support education and lifelong learning by removing all tax on training courses and training materials.  I have paid for a post graduate course and am still tax on that and taxed on ebooks I buy because they are considered software.  Education should be encouraged and the governments policy of taxing education will reduce the number of people training in the skills the country needs for its future.

·  Does fundamental research need to be championed?

The introduction of the transistor lead to the IT industry which is a major driver of the world economy so if the research lucks out then it can bring huge benefits.  I would champion research but not at the expensive of more beneficial areas such as championing continuous improvement.

·  Where do ordinary people’s interests fit into debates about the future?

People should have the right to fulfil their needs which according to Maslow have 5 levels.  What we do in the future should be done with this in mind.  We should not bring in anything which will harm the ability of people to fulfil their needs.

·  Is the crisis a basis for taking on more ambitious challenges?

No it isn’t.  Lets sort out the basic challenges before we move onto ambitious.  Set SMART objectives and meet them rather than Big Hairy Goals that cannot be realised.

·  Are networked tools a key to dealing with the recession?

Not in the current form which although good for general networking and discussion are not sufficient for collaborative working which will be vital in creating new products that will thrive in the recessionary times.

·  What are the contemporary barriers to innovation?

There are too many to list but the most important factor would be the lack of risk taking and ability to take calculated risks.

·  Is there untapped potential in the design and creative industries

Only if they can combine their innate creativity with critical thinking.  We must learn to do both right and left brain thinking.  People may use too much left brain thinking but that is not done well.  Critical thinking skills need to be learnt to use the fully potential of the left brain.

Original post: Response to Beyond the Crisis: Debating the role of innovation

Matthew Solle’s post:

Nico Macdonald has organised an Innovation Forum event ‘Beyond the Crisis: Debating the role of innovation‘ for the 2 March 2008 (tonight) at the Hub Kings Cross (34b York Way, London N1 9AB) to debate that ‘there may never have been a better time, or a greater need, for profound innovation’ and that ‘during and after the economic downturn, innovation and transformational change will be more important than ever. The sooner far sighted strategies are developed and implemented by government, business and other agencies the better life will be for ordinary people – in the UK and beyond.’

Themes to be discussed are:

There is no doubt that innovation is in short supply - most institutions are chanting the mantra ‘retrench, retrench’. I’m finding widespread belief that the present crisis is viewed as merely a blip and things will soon return to a semblance of how things were before (advertising, magazines as examples). There seems to be a lack of understanding that the game really has changed and there is only a future, a future with different rules and business models.

So many business models are still operating with the one way channel of selling to their customers but not listening, involving and opening up to their customers. The financial sector (including financial services) is a good example.

Taking into consideration a number of the questions above there is no doubt that many industries, particularly many elements of the financial services sector, need to reinvent themselves and innovate to survive and prosper.

This recent Wired article - Road Map for Financial Recovery: Radical Transparency Now! - regarding the need for radical transparency of financial data is a brilliant example of what is required.

Tonight a range of London professionals will debate the above points and I will update my post with the findings.

I will also endeavour to Twitter the main points of the event as it happens using this tag - #InnovationBeyondCrisis which you will find here - Twitter Search

Original post: Beyond the Crisis:  Debating the role of innovation

Announcing ‘SharepriceAir’ - desktop ticker application

Posted on December 2, 2008 by Tim
Filed Under Technology | 12 Comments

We’ve just released an Adobe Air desktop ticker in to public beta , allowing users to keep an eye on their investments in ticker format on their screen.  Prices are currently delayed.  Use the ’settings’ option (the ‘cog’ icon on the right) to add / remove instruments and position the ticker to your own preference.  Supports multiple monitors.

Download here

We’d welcome your feedback using the comment function below.

Shareprice Android app goes live

Posted on November 27, 2008 by Tim
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Utilising Lightstreamer’s Java SE adapter and the Android SDK, our v1 Shareprice app was released to the Android Market today.  Search on the T-Mobile G1 (more handsets to follow no doubt) via the Finance section for ‘Shareprice’.

Like our iPhone app, it’s free to download and streams real-time LSE data for registered users of shareprice.co.uk on a contended connection basis.

Initial feedback seems to suggest the Android userbase is somewhat more ‘immature’ than the iPhone’s.  Our first 2 app comments within a few minutes of it going live:-

“My d*ck hurts”

“Julio u suck balls!! Now that’s funny”

This ‘useful’ feedback style seems to be prevalent across all apps.  Perhaps Google have hired some 13 year olds to review apps as they go live or something. We won’t take it personally guys, honest.

keep looking »