Dec 29
Ben KingLife Almat, bit10, Earlsdon, flying, PPL, Warwicknet
As 2008 winds to a close, I am reflecting on what an brilliant year it has been, if 2009 is as good I will be a happy chappy, here are some of the highlights and lowlights of my year:
- Moved into my new house in sunny Earlsdon.
- Completed lots of work on the house – still much more to do though!
- I went snowboarding twice, once to Chatel with the excellent Alpine Air, and once to Les Deux Alpes (not soo good!).
- Successfully completed my departure from bit10 and creation of Warwicknet.
- I got banned from Pizza Express due to this blog! (However the amazing Millsys in Earlsdon more than compensates).
- I travelled to Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, Netherlands and Hong Kong doing the work I love i.e. building and deploying networking solutions for people.
- I started learning to fly, passed and got my PPL(A) just before Christmas, thanks to the wonderful people at Almat, in that time I have clocked up 48 hours in the air, of which 15 have been solo.
And much much more…
Bring on 2009!
Oct 22
Ben KingBusiness bit10, Business, Other, Selling, Web/Tech
Talking about: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/blogs/simply-better
Andrew has quite rightly identified one of bit10‘s recurring problems, people often fail to understand everything we do. Mostly they pigeonhole us into being experts in the thing they use us for…
Of course this is entirely our fault, we start by hiding behind ‘Full service digital agency’ who ‘Loves doing digital’, but few people realise what this means, then we somehow fail to make the effort to communicate to our customers what we actually do.
This problem is exacerpated by the fact that our customer research has told us that current bit10 customers NEVER look at our website (hence our site now is firmly targeted at new customers).
The solution is frankly simply down to plain old conversation, take the time to chat to your customers to identify their current and future business needs and then point our where you can help them! As per usual everyones enemy… ‘Time’ gets in the way.
For the record, bit10 do:
- Internet, intranet, digital marketing strategy and consultancy
- Creative web design
- Web application development
- Accessibility testing
- Usability testing
- Web analytics
- Online marketing (dm, adword and affiliate marketing management)
- Hosting
- Internet connectivity (University of Warwick Science Park only)
Basically everything Internet! 
You can see the full blurb here.
And thanks Andrew for giving me an excuse to list bit10s services on my blog!
Jul 06
Ben KingBusiness, Internet bit10, Interweb, Web/Tech
For the last 2 months, I have been trying to renew our Microsoft Partner program membership, it is a very painful experience.
Today I finally got someone on the phone at the MS Partner program who could help me.
Essentially there is a highly painful online process to go through, which i set off onto using Firefox (under Ubuntu)…
Why oh why do this MS? It just looks bad, and reinforces peoples view of you as monopolistic.
When I mentioned it to the guy at the partner program, its response was ‘Well we give you the software under the partner program, so you have no excuse not to use it’… Completely missing the point that I might prefer to use Linux for other reasons…
Anyway, towing the line I struck up IE6 (yes using CrossOver Linux), and somewhat amusingly most of the navigation wasn’t visible to me unless I hovered over it.
Sigh…
May 31
Ben KingBusiness bit10, Business, Systems, Web/Tech
Commenting on: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/20/vbi_triscan_blag_espionage_fears/
Wow, you know you have hit the bigtime when one of your clients gets in The Register with a full on bit of espionage.
To cut a long story short a client of ours, VBi Limited, got broken into a load of kit stolen under extremely suspicious circumstances.
The ‘baddies’ broke in, gained access to the server room within minutes (the server room, located in a highly unobvious location), and whipped in excess of 30 drives out of the servers.
Sunday 1st April, the phone rang, I will never forget the moment I had a particularly aggressive hangover, ‘Hi Ben, its Chris here, we’ve been robbed!’ (well he used something a little more aggressive than ‘robbed’, but I am trying to keep my blog relatively expletive free’).
We broke out the disaster plan, the first hour was assessment i.e. sent the client, Chris, in to find out how bad it was – meanwhile i engaged on a major recovery program of my own, consisting of Berocca, bacon of eggs and enough water to drown an otter.
A couple of hours later the verdict came back, we had lost pretty much every removable drive – so that’ll be a full on recovery then.
Monday 2nd April, Les and I were in the car at 6am on the road to rainy Blackburn, enroute trying to acquire 30 odd replacement hard drives, Dell frankly were as much use as a server without hard drives, in fact we couldn’t even find the right phone number to get someone who could vaguely begin to think about the merest possibility of helping us within the next week let alone the next few hours.
Fortunately our good friends at Serversource, in Northampton, came to the rescue and had all the drives complete with caddies, with us in Blackburn, by lunchtime. Good work fellas!
Thanks to Les and I working our magic, by the end of play Monday we had restored the AD, all servers base restored, by the end of play Tuesday we had completed a full recovery of all services…. CRM, Intranet, Exchange, the whole works.
Thanks for coming!
May 04
Ben KingInternet bit10, Interweb, Web/Tech
Our worthy MD, Alexander Craig, has gone back to the shop floor to do a bit of web design again, for his sister! Check it out… www.tonicraig.co.uk
Dec 18
Ben KingPlay bit10, Life
So last friday night, Teamsales descended on an unsuspecting Coventry… you can see some of the results here…
Dec 04
Ben KingLife bit10, Life
I have hit severe guilt about my poor blog, leaving unloved… All I can do is make excuses, my life just doesn’t seem to have enough hours (or train journeys) to pander to its needs, so while I have been gone great things have been happening:
- bit10 completed its purchase of Networks New Media
- bit10 has a new Non-Exec director in the form of Alan Malik (director/owner of the ultra successful Exasoft).
- bit10 has just had its best sales quarter ever (an undisclosed sum )
- I personally recovered from the Cannonball 8000 (took a while mentally, physically and financially)
- bit10 placed in the top 20 fastest growing companies in the midlands, top 150 in the UK, for the 6th year running!
- My role at bit10 is in the process of changing from being Business Development Director to Strategic Director, which basically means I am formally responsible for the strategy and direction (and problem solving) at bit10. Woohoo!
- My addiction to a certain online game persists to eat my life when not a work (which is also probably to detriment of my blog!).
So maybe now the nights are drawing in I will try to be a little more useful and blog again!
Oct 10
Ben KingBusiness, Internet bit10, Business
6/10/6 was a momentos day for bit10, we made our first acquisition of another web development company, Networks New Media. Networks have been a long time local competitor of bit10.
The aquisition brings approximately 270 new customers of varying sizes and an estimated half million pounds of additional turnover.
Woohoo!!! <- Happy Ben
Sep 11
Ben KingBusiness, Internet bit10, Business, Interweb, Web/Tech
Wow who’d have thought that having a great website developed was soo traumatic, especially when you own a company who does web design.
My trauma however is no reflection on the bit10 people doing my project, its more of a reflection on my inability to really know what I want!
We are now on our 3rd major design iteration and probably our 50th minor iteration, and its starting to look fantastic.
The main thing I have learnt from the experience so far is that we employ fantastic designers however they aren’t mindreaders. So unless you are the sort of person who can visualise exactly what you want and convey it in simple terms others can understand (neither of which I can do), then the design process has to be iterative.
Mental note to self ‘sell clients far more design iterations’. :)
Aug 10
Ben KingBusiness, Internet bit10, Business, Interweb, Web/Tech
We are redoing our website, because frankly its a bit rubbish, it consistently fails to convert traffic into leads, and it is a pretty poor reflection of bit10, a classic case of the cobblers shoes.
We know what is wrong with it and we have kicked off a project to get it right.
The great thing is that Ally and I get to be bit10 customers, and we are running the project as if it was a client project and we are going to do it textbook.
Steph is our messenger (project manager to the non informed), Stuart is our technical lead.
The first step, which is to complete high level project requirements is complete, and a budget allocated… you can read it here.
The next step is to kick off the ideas generation and actually decide exactly what we are doing… that happens this afternoon.
So far my experience as a bit10 customer has been a good one, however I am frustrated by the time it takes to ‘do the job properly’ – although I totally appreciate the necessity!
Older Entries
RSS
Recent Comments