Neville’s posterous

Virgin Media is piloting broadband speeds of 200Megabit per second (Mbps) for a small group of users in the UK. Following successful trials in the lab, 100 "lead adopters" in Kent will have access to the high speeds, believed to be among the fastest in the world.

Virgin will be using the high speeds to test applications such as 1080p high definition TV and 3DTV. The pilot will last six months before the results are analysed. A variety of upstream speeds will also be tested. Virgin is able to achieve the speeds thanks to a technology called Docsis 3, which makes more efficient use of the capacity of fibre to the cabinet connections used by Virgin.

And I was all excited about the mother of all broadband 50 meg Virgin package which I'm upgrading to (from 20 megs) this coming week.

Lucky users in Kent!

Well, this is shaping up to be one of the biggest disasters in the history of cloud computing, and certainly the largest blow to Danger and the Sidekick platform: T-Mobile's now reporting that personal data stored on Sidekicks has "almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger." They're still looking for a way to recover it, but they're not giving users a lot of hope -- meanwhile, servers are still on the fritz and customers are being advised not to let their devices power down because anything that's still on there will be lost the next time the device is turned on. Another communique is promised from T-Mobile on Monday to give everyone a status update on the recovery efforts, but at this point, it's not looking good at all.

Update: Apparently T-Mobile has paused the sale of new Sidekicks, as all models are now listed as "temporarily out of stock" on the company's site. Additionally, a warning as been added to the post on T-Mobile's forum which reads: "Sidekick customers, during this service disruption, please DO NOT remove your battery, reset your Sidekick, or allow it to lose power." Scary stuff, Sidekickers.

Hardly gives you confidence in any service that uses the cloud.

Always do your own data backups!

Would you? It's anonymous :)

I just took a look at the website and the map. Got this message: "Server overloaded, too many people are making love right now."

A viral site in the making!

Estee Lauder is offering women free makeovers and photos to use as their profile pictures on social networking sites.

The cosmetics brand will produce shots women can use for their online profiles on sites such Facebook and LinkedIn at department-store cosmetics counters in the US. The photos include the Estee Lauder logo in the background. The promotion, which also includes a 10-day supply of foundation, kicks off on October 16 at Bloomingdale's in New York. It will extend initially to Macy's, Saks and other Bloomingdale's stores in Southern California, Miami and Chicago. Estee Lauder is also plugging it on its own Facebook fan page, which has more than 27,000 members.

The strategy is aimed at younger women as well as older women who are beginning to embrace social media, according to the company.

Imaginative.

Wonder how this idea would fit alongside Gartner's recent research paper that says that online dress codes for avatars should be enforced by employers.

Branded virtual gifts are set to spread from Facebook to Twitter with the launch of a third-party platform that has signed up brands including Cadbury Trident, Nestle and Malibu Rum.

Virtual gifts are not new to Twitter, witness Twesents and Tweetgift, but this appears to be the first service allowing brands to get involved.

The platform has been developed by AdNectar, which specialises in creating marketing campaigns on social networking sites. AdNectar is aiming to spread the gifting concept virally. When a gift is sent all of the receivers' followers will be able to access it and send one too.

Virtual gifts have been available on Facebook since 2007 when the site launched the first range on behalf of cancer charity Komen for Cure.

If I were a marketer/brand manager, I'd love this idea. As a Twitter user, though, I can't wait for someone to develop a script or some method to block anything from AdNectar.

A bit of a paradox there somewhere.

Employers should enforce online dress codes for avatars used by their workers, IT analysts have said.

As business use of social networking sites grows, IT specialists Gartner have predicted that by the end of 2013, 70% of businesses will have behaviour guidelines and dress codes for all employees using avatars as part of their work.

Avatars are two- or three-dimensional images used as visual representations of people on social networking sites.

James Lundy, managing vice-president at Gartner, said: "As the use of virtual environments for business purposes grows, businesses need to understand how employees are using avatars in ways that might affect the business or the business's reputation.

"We advise establishing codes of behaviour that apply in any circumstance when an employee is acting as a company representative, whether in a real or virtual environment. Addendums specific to virtual environments can be added as required."

The IT analysts warned an avatar's behaviour and appearance was seen as a reflection of the individual and the company they work for so employees should be given advice on reputation management, and employers could decide to tell workers to keep their personal and professional avatars separate.

This might seem surprising but if you think about it, not really. The last paragraph is the indicator.

Definitely a topic to include in discussions about organization guidelines and guidance for online engagement, internal and external.

(Via @euan)

[...] At the very least, though, a venue should be able to tell you how many access points they actually have (if it’s just one, you’ve got problems), whether they are managed access points or not, whether dedicated ports with higher priority can be provided for the speakers and for journalists that do not share bandwidth with the audience, how many IP addresses the DHCP server can provide, the total number of people that can be online at once, and the amount of bandwidth available to the entire site. If you can’t get good answers to these questions before the conference begins, you have to assume that they’ll be running a single, consumer router connected to a DSL line and that’s about all you get.

What are some of the best practices for conference organizers? What questions should they ask the conference venue or ISP to know, in advance, if the WiFi is going to work? What are the most common causes of crappy WiFi at conferences? Are they avoidable, or is WiFi simply not an adequate technology for large conferences? I thought I’d ask on ServerFault, so if you have any ideas, have at it!

Terrific post that starts out describing scenarios at events that are all too common.

I've highlighted one aspect of the post as it's one conference organizers don't seem to be paying attention to. That's my conclusion when thinking about the events this year I've asked about wifi or other connectivity, and usually get at most a blank look.

Can't do that, organizers. Being connected wherever you are is increasingly important. Yet, as this post suggests, there's a lot more to it than just organizers who don't ask even basic questions.

When Stanley Works, the hand tool maker, offered an iPhone App that turned the phone into a level, its goal was to create young loyalists to the Stanley brand.

The company does not know if the iPhone app drove a single sale or fostered any brand loyalty. But based on the 400,000 downloads, Stanley declared the iPhone level a resounding success and is now looking for other tool apps. “It was low-risk experiment,” said Todd Langston, a company spokesman.

[...] Advertising apps are evolving from the early novelties, like the Zippo Lighter app, a virtual lighter on the phone screen that has been downloaded five million times. Sit or Squat, a sponsored app that directs people to nearby public restrooms, opens with an splash page for Charmin bathroom tissue. Utility apps are more common, like the noise-measuring decibel-meter app given out by Hearos, a maker of ear plugs.

[...] The biggest challenge for apps as ads for now is that they are best suited to niche markets. No single kind of phone holds a big enough audience to attract many mass-market national brands. “An app that runs on an iPhone doesn’t run on a BlackBerry, and the one that runs on a BlackBerry doesn’t run on Android,” said Mr. Howe, the analyst.

Just as in the early days of the Web, when brands rushed to publish a Web site, companies are racing for apps without knowing why they would need them, said Kiyo Kubo, president of app maker Spotlight Mobile, also in Portland. “It’s starting to get to this point that if you don’t have an app, it’s a little silly; you are behind the times.”

Great article with examples of other companies with iPhone apps. Spot on re early days and similarities with the land-grab picture of the web nearly 15 years ago.

What is everyone talking about or searching for right now? Knowing the terms that are trending at this moment is like knowing the news. With a new API your apps can be just as aware. Lets Be Trends provides programmatic access to the most popular keywords on Twitter in realtime (details at our Let’s Be Trends API profile).

It also offers explanations as to why each is popular, similar to the Twitter hashtag explainer, only this also includes non-hashtag terms. The explanations for trends come from users of Brizzly (the API comes from Thing Labs, makers of Brizzly).

[...] Currently Lets Be Trends only uses Twitter, but it plans to add other services.

Useful to help understand why what's trending is doing so.