Hurray!

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I’ve just been reading an article in AdAge about how Sephora is simplifying the product review process by letting people read reviews on their mobile phones. In some retailers in the US, they are actively encouraging people to look at products in the store then actively read the reviews about them on their phones. Our old friends BazaarVoice are powering the platform.

So, I completely agree that product reviews from people like you and expert reviews and advice are increasingly more important in making a buying decision, but I’m not convinced this behaviour can be adapted easily for a mobile phone setting. For a start, they have to get our their basic handset and browse to a “mobile” site to enter the product name / code, then filter through the crap results to hopefully find what they wanted, then click it and read some tiny reviews on a small screen – all in a matter of hours!

I’ve seen this try and work before back in 2002, and yes, times have advanced but people couldn’t be bothered then so what makes us think can they be bothered now? Even scanning the barcode of an item is probably not as straightforward as it seems. The only light on the horizon for mobile phone reviews might be through the smart phones like the iphone – but honestly answer me this:

Are there really any downsides to writing down the name of the product you like on a piece of paper then researching and buying it online back at a computer?

So, anyone tried out the security feature on the iphone to get it to lock you out if you enter too many incorrect pin numbers? I got to 7 before it locked me out for 5 mins, but didn’t have the guts to get all the way to 10 and see if it really did wipe itself… any takers?

Well while we’ve been making a lot of back-end changes to the site over the last few months, we’ve also been doing a few business deals here and there to:

• Increase the number of products and categories on the site
• Increase and enhance the number of user review sources we import
• Bring more expert sources and partners to the site

Our first announcement concerns the item at the top of the list where we have just signed a deal to try out our first services categories for both broadband and mobile broadband (the one with the little dongles for your laptops. In order to do this, we’re please to announce a deal with Mobile Broadband Genie who will be helping us launch these categories in the next two weeks.

It’s a great deal for us as we get to utilise a vast range of broadband providers, prices, and information to apply the Crowdstorm system and algorithms too.

We’ve got some more announcements too – but one step at a time eh…

So, pretty much everyone knows you can download the new itunes 7.7 from Apple right now, but after a bit of fiddling we’ve actually managed to find a loop hole that lets you browse all the new Iphone Apps right now – before the launch date:

Here’s how:

1. Download iTunes 7.7 via Apple Software Update on your mac or PC
2. Load up itunes, go to the store page, and type “aim” into the search box in the top right
3. In the middle of the screen you’ll see a new box “Applications” and inside a link for “AIM” – click this
4. Now you’re on the AIM page – you’ll see “App Store” in the breadcrumb trail at the top – click this, and hey presto – you’re in

Enjoy!

Update:

Winners announced:

• Best Audio/Visual Brand – Panasonic


• Best Domestic Appliance Brand – Miele


• Best carmaker – Mazda


• Best Broadband Provider – Zen Internet


• Best Airline – Singapore Airlines

Tonight at the British Museum, there is an event called the Which? Awards going on, to help find the ‘best of the best’ in products and services.

Apart from all the boring fluff leading up to it, the 1:45pm (a whole afternoon jolly) kicks of with:

• Best Domestic Appliance Brand


• Best Audio Visual Brand


• Best Broadband Provider


• Best Credit Card Provider


• Best Current Account Provider


• Best Carmaker

We’re going to send some guys over to cover it and hopefully have the results for tomorrow.

On a final note, sometimes people confuse us as competing with Which? where as we’re actually a research hub that brings the best reviewers and publishers together in one space – including, hopefully, some of the great content they have over there. Oh – and we don’t charge for it

Crowdstorm awards anyone?

With everyone talking about the possible features in the new upcoming iPhone V2 – I thought it was actually worth a piece on a range of user interface improvements they could offer at the same time. Some of which you’ve probably been inwardly fuming about but never really thought it deserved enough energy to mention.. so here we go..

1. SMS and Phone should not be separate. The Phone area has contacts, voicemail etc.. but not the SMS option which would fit much more nicely in this section rather than being an independent icon and area. Americans – please listen – SMS is not some new fangled phone add-on.
2. Contacts needs a “search” function. There are numerous occasions where I can only remember a surname or the company the person works for – don’t make me drill alphabetically through the entire list. Sure, I can reverse how the names are sorted in terms of first or surname first – but this is a pain to keep changing and doesn’t help when I need the company name.
3. Clicking a phone number in email / Safari should be cleverer. I like the feature to click a number and it immediately starts to dial it – but please start to handle country codes better! If someone types +1 (0)233 34434 – it tries to dial the entire thing including the number in brackets and of course fails. Learn that a number in bracket is optional and only used if the country code preceeded by the plus symbol is not used.
4. You can’t switch to something else while listening to a voicemail. Often someone leaves a message from a “blocked” number and reads out the number I should call them back on via the voicemail message. So what I try and do is flick to the dialpad to type in the number as they read it to me, yet the voicemail then stops and needs to be played again. Pah.
5. Calendar needs a search function too. If it’s supposed to be a mirror of iCal – put the search in!
6. Stop overwriting Safari windows. I’ve noticed in the latest software that if you click a link from an email to open up a new window in Safari, it will tend to overwrite something you’ve previously had open if the maximum number of windows are already open. I’ve left a webpage up their once to come back to later only to find the iPhone has loaded a new page over it.
7. Finally, have a single button easily accessible from the main menu that lets me turn on and off any battery-sapping features in one go – wi-fi, bluetooth, and now 3G. Do we really need to keep going to settings all the time…

The site’s being a bit slow this week after the soft, soft launch – mainly due to our cache being optimised for the old site rather than the new one. We’re on the case as top priority and hopefully there will be some significant speed improvements over the weekend. Thanks for being patient!

Hurray – we’ve finally got our much improved site out there for Crowdstorm UK and Crowdstorm USA

We’re concentrating on making it stable now, ironing out the remaining 67 bugs, and ensuring the speed is high enough. If you see any bugs or want to make some general feedback – use the green link at the top of the page, fill in your comments, then press submit. We’re not making a big fuss about this one as we’ve still lots of things to do to it.

You’ll notice we’re now importing a lot more content in user reviews and expert reviews, and we’ve got a few deals to announce in the next few weeks. Also – welcome to our new Television and DVD Player categories!

Key things still to do:

• Clean & simplify a few of the pages
• Implement new designs for user profiles and dashboard
• Work on a smoother login process
• Make it easier to ask questions and submit other content types
• Improving the algorithms for Crowd recommendations, related review content etc..
• Rewrite and check all the emails and alerts we send to users
• Watch and monitor how everybody uses the site so we can improve things..

Lastly, as mentioned above – this is a quiet release and we don’t want anyone blogging it in the current format, if you don’t mind. Ta very much.

We’re getting ready to launch the new Crowdstorm product (V3) tonight and Sobek is currently tweaking the google adwords code while I’m browsing iStockPhoto looking for better images of numbers in circles! Strange what you do late at night…

I liked the image above as it reminds me of the networking effect of people sharing product recommendations with each other.. Right, time for another cup of tea and onwards and upwards..