Last-minute Christmas shopping

With recent statistics indicating that consumer confidence is returning to the high street, online stores have been welcoming large numbers of shoppers through their home pages ahead of the festive season. Indeed, this year’s ‘Manic Monday’ – an annual event that marks the busiest day of the online shopping calendar in the run up to Christmas – saw the largest concentration of online spending ever recorded, with festive shoppers reportedly handing over £1.4 million in the space of a single minute around lunchtime.

Online retailing now plays a crucial part in the balance of the UK retail sector – and is set to become even more important in the next decade. Retailers take e-commerce seriously, and this includes the infrastructure underlying their websites. ‘Manic Monday’ may seem like a curious consumer phenomenon, but leading retailers take it very seriously indeed and take extra precautions to make sure their sites are able to deal with the massive rise in traffic.

Manic Monday has now passed, but there are a number of similar rises still to come. Today marks the cut off point for the free basic delivery services many online retailers offer. It is likely that many won’t quite have managed to get all their Christmas shopping done by this stage, so stores may be in line for another peak in last-minute trade. Those online retailers that have prepared, by ensuring their web presence is supported by a scalable managed hosting platform, stand to benefit from a welcome boost in sales. Those who haven’t could be setting themselves up for a nightmare before Christmas.

Exclusive Membership Ensures Top Quality @ Bestsecret.com

Bestsecret.com is an exclusive online shopping portal providing huge discounts (up to 80%) on luxury designer brands and merchandise. However to take advantage of these amazing offers you need to apply for membership and unlike most e-commerce websites you cannot simply make a request to join online.

In fact to take advantage of BestSecret.com offerings you will need to be recommended by an illustrious member of this fashion community circle or work for one of the elected companies. Members are also required to maintain the confidentiality of brands and pricing available on the site in order to protect their distinguished suppliers. Even with these restrictions in place the number of members is still growing at a phenomenal rate.

The success of BestSecret.com is surely down to the wide range of designers and the pricing available on their luxury goods. Or is it the use of this VIP concept, the exclusivity of their membership. One thing is certain, with such an elite customer base comes the requirement to provide a top class website experience.

High availability, performance and reliability are key factors to customer retention on an e-commerce platform. NTT Europe Online is very proud to have been chosen to deliver this vital part of the operation as Bestsecret.com’s preferred managed hosting partner.

Successful Marketing Campaigns and Digital Media Content Delivery

EastEnders 25th Anniversary - Marketing Campaign

From a business perspective all communications or content is usually developed and delivered according to the needs of customers or future target prospects.  Digital content distribution over the Internet should form part of your overall brand marketing strategy and compliment existing initiatives. A great example of this is the recently launched marketing campaign by BBC to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the award-winning UK TV drama EastEnders on the 19th February 2010.

First, they will broadcast a completely live anniversary episode revealing a highly anticipated resolution to a long-standing story.  Second, they collaborated with thirteen talented writers aged between 17 and 20 to create EastEnders: E20, available exclusively to on-line audiences from January until the live episode. EastEnders: E20 is a new drama about four teenagers showing their view on living in East London and how they interact with each other and the some of the original TV EastEnders cast. The writers will also produce extra on-line material, including video blogs, designed to enhance and extend the entire dramatic experience.

So when it comes to designing a successful marketing campaign it certainly pays to think carefully about not only what content is valuable to your target market but also how, when and where to distribute. The methods or channels used to market your brand should complement each other and ultimately satisfy your target market. Let me know if you have a favourite marketing campaign that uses digital media content delivery to complement its effectiveness.

Communication breakdown – Strike 1!

A little while ago we were talking about some of the technical challenges online retailers are facing in the build up to Christmas with potentially huge traffic spikes.

In the UK however, online retailers have a new challenge – with postal workers voting to take two 24 hour strikes in protest about changes to the national postal system by the Royal Mail this week. The challenge for online retailers now isn’t about handling traffic, but more the logistical challenge of actually being able to hand over their goods to paying customers when the UK’s leading parcel service goes out of action.

The strikes are by no means without financial implications, with the estimated cost to UK online retailers of around £220 million, according to research commissioned by shopping comparison engine Kelkoo and reported on Computer Weekly http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/10/15/238151/postal-strike-could-cost-online-retailers-220m.htm. For the IT-minded there are also a few technical challenges with many e-commerce businesses (and their managed hosting partners) needing to re-align their back-end systems and tracking services with those of new courier companies.

From what we’ve seen, most of the biggest e-tailers have full redundancy plans with private courier and delivery services picking up where the Royal Mail dropped off: you should be able to rely on taking delivery of your online shopping!

Clouding the Judgement

Another week, another hiccup in the cloud. You’ve no doubt seen the news: a server failure has wiped the personal data of T-Mobile Sidekick users in the US. It’s unclear how many people are affected, or why the server suffered the issues. What is clear is that this incident, and the media reaction, will provide ammunition to the doubters of any technology or service branded with the term ‘cloud’.

Let’s make no mistake, whether this event affects one or one million of the Sidekick customers, this is a bad incident. The loss of any data, particularly in a time when we are ever more vigilant of terms such as ID fraud, is always a significant problem.

However, I do not believe this should in any way delay the acceptance of cloud computing. I am completely biased of course, but I do believe that the cloud can be a business changing technology in the right circumstances, and not just for small businesses, but large scale enterprises like T-Mobile USA. The key is to go with a provider with a global network that has in place back up servers to catch the ball, so to speak, if another server goes down, a provider that gets to bottom of what went wrong and explains how it has ensured it won’t happen again. This isn’t something a cloud in the original sense can provide; in this instance, a private cloud is what’s needed. We’ve talked about it quite a lot already, so I’ll leave it at that.

Incidentally, I heard that Google’s various cloud offerings have had about seven hours of unscheduled downtime in the last year. How many hours of unscheduled downtime have your on-premise servers had in the same time?

Preparations for Eurobasket 2011 have already started!

It is amazing to see how a global event like Eurobaskets needs to be organised in all matters.

I have talked to our client Nick Marzoli, responsible for IT at FIBA Europe, about the organization of Eurobaskets. See the most interesting aspects in the short interview below.

++++ Interview ++++

Andrea Otto: Spain is the European champion and Serbia is in second position, but the game with the most views on the website http://www.eurobasket2009.org was the preliminary round, Germany against Russia. Did you expect that?

Nick Marzoli, FIBA Europe: I assumed that it would be a preliminary round. During the preliminary round up to 4 games are played in parallel, which means that basketball fans cannot follow all the games on television – then the live web scores become a good alternative. With regard to the Germany vs. Russia game being the most viewed, I do not entirely understand it myself. One reason may be the time. The game was played on a weekday at 16:30 when very few people are at home watching television. However, this is only one possible explanation. The exact number of visitors changes with every game and every championship; depending on how popular the sport is in their country and how successfully their team plays. For example, in Lithuania, basketball comes before football. This is why I always find analysing the number of visitors very exciting.

Andrea Otto: “After the game is before the game,” said Sepp Herberger, a German football legend. This certainly applies to the organization and your duties around the IT of FIBA Europe. What planning and preparation time goes into a project such as eurobasket2009.org?

Nick Marzoli, FIBA Europe: Indeed. I have been in contact with Lithuania since last year regarding the European Championship 2011. Of course, it is now only a rough first draft. This lead time is very important for us so we can also align ourselves with the various agencies and service providers. Every 2 years the championships take place in another country, which means new terms and conditions on the ground for all of us. This of course relates to online projects in addition to many other areas.

Examples include ensuring the IT infrastructure in the halls, from good working conditions for over 1,000 accredited journalists to data and statistical services, accreditation systems and much more.

Andrea Otto: Were there any technical or other incidents during the games?

Nick Marzoli, FIBA Europe: Absolutely not. The site was 100% available. The traffic is difficult to predict and can have extreme peaks, especially in the sports business.

This means rescheduling its capacity every year. Thanks to NTT Europe Online, and the experience we have gained over the years, we can completely rely on the infrastructure and avoid any incidents.

Andrea Otto: 8 million visits, 30 million page views. These are surprisingly high numbers. Are you satisfied with the overall result?

Nick Marzoli, FIBA Europe:

The numbers are as expected, on the same level as in 2007. A large increase was not expected because the hype around the event in the host country itself, Poland, was significantly lower than in Spain in 2007, who had become world champion the year before. Another reason is some of the great names such as Dirk Nowitzki or Andrei Kirilenko were missing this time. Therefore, I am satisfied with the overall result. For Lithuania 2011 I expect a significant increase as it will lead to qualification for the 2012 Olympics.

Thank you for the interview.
http://www.eurobasket2009.org
http://www.fibaeurope.org

Big day for live streaming: Ukraine v England

Tomorrow is a big day for live video streaming: depending on who you read it could be the moment it could go mainstream. I’m talking, of course, about the the England football match being made available only online.

I think there are two sides to this. There’s been the borderline hysteria of certain parts of the media, stirring up controversy and asking whether people should pay for one-off games, should it be accessible to all, the number of people that are actually going to be able to watch the match, the pricing of it, whether the technology has the capacity, the projected one million viewers and the inevitable discussion about whether England matches should form part of the so-called “crown jewels” – national sporting events that are free to air.

The other side to it is that perhaps it isn’t the earth-shattering development people say it is. The match has little riding on it as England have already qualified, albeit I’m sure they would like to keep their 100% winning qualifying record. Perhaps that’s the point: the broadcasters would never have passed on the opportunity had England still been in the hunt. Herein lies the opportunity as well: with nothing to be decided, audiences were never going to be particularly high (if they break six figures many industry observers will no doubt eat their hats), yet should the match pass without incident, it has a high enough profile for the organisers to trumpet its success.  Technically, it will be quite some feat if a million concurrent streams, focused on one country, is achieved, so I for one will be watching (in a professional capacity of course!  I need to see how Perform performs) and will eagerly await any published results.

Video streaming itself is nothing new, thanks to video-sharing sites like YouTube, the BBC’s iPlayer, 4OD; more and more viewing is taking place online, with the iPlayer wracking up five million plus downloads a week.

Streaming live events is something we do throughout the season for UEFA with the Champions League, and the European Championships. When we do it, however, the games we show are often also available through other, traditional broadcast methods. Tomorrow’s England versus Ukraine match will be the first time, to my knowledge, that a high profile event with potentially a high level of interest will be broadcast exclusively via the Internet.

It will be interesting to see what happens – I hope for the sake of live event streaming providers like NTT that this is a success.