Tim Howell’s Weblog

Following up on an earlier post, the Sydney Morning Herald reports:

“Australians will soon have the power to permanently hang-up on telemarketers under new laws being debated in the Senate.

The new laws will allow people to put their phone numbers on a Do Not Call Register that telemarketers must respect or face fines.

Communications Minister Helen Coonan told the Senate that Australians would embrace the register as they generally found telemarketing intrusive.

“We will give peace and mind to those who don’t like, and indeed resent, the intrusion and disruption caused by unsolicited telemarketing calls,” she told the Senate.

“The government has consulted widely … to ensure that there is an appropriate balance between the rights of an individual to privacy, and the need for business to promote their products and services.”

Registration will be available for fixed line and mobile phone numbers and will be free. The call ban will apply to Australian telemarketers and overseas callers working for Australian companies.”

An interesting development; will be interesting to see if anything similar is proposed for New Zealand.

A tip we’re using to great effect: if the phone rings before 7.30pm, our three year-old answers it. Guaranteed to confuse most telemarketers.

Last night, a member of the family won the Dyson Product Design Award, which aim to reward a new generation of emerging Kiwi designers with product design ideas that best demonstrate innovative and inspiring solutions to everyday problems.

In this case the award is for an intravenous pump that is more portable and flexible than other IV drips, amongst numerous other benefits. From an article written before the award was given, Matt has “designed a lightweight device that pumps in the medication or fluids while transmitting blood analysis data back to a monitoring station every two hours - enabling recovering patients to leave hospital perhaps four days earlier to recuperate in the comfort of their own home.“

Another great example of Kiwi technology being recognized, and with potential to achieve significant global success.

Quest Archive Manager - formerly known as AfterMail - won an award at TechEd in Boston last week, providing further recognition for our team.

What’s more, this was an award voted for by peers, which makes it even more special: attendees at the show voted Archive Manager as ‘Best Exchange Product’.

Rod’s also commented on the award - it’s been a great three years.

Rant time. Almost every second night for the past several weeks, including both Saturday and Sunday nights, we’ve been called up by one of several research houses looking to survey us for about a product, service or something else.

As a marketer, I completely understand the need for these organizations to understand and analyze what customers want, across a range of demographics and locations. And normally, we would participate in these. Inevitably our details would have been provided to the research houses by virtue of us signing up to something, purchasing a product or service etc. Surely there is a limit to how far this can go?

Recently, though, the volume of these calls has increased, as has the unsociability of many of the calls, to the extent I tend to decline the opportunity to participate. In the US, the Do Not Call Registry (thanks Michael) is designed to provide an opt-out opportunity for these types of communications. Is there - or is there going to be - an equivalent in New Zealand?

Google is about to release spreadsheet application a web-based spreadsheeting application that allows users to work on, and collaborate within, online spreadsheet data. Importantly, it’s also supposed to allow both importing and exporting of XLS and CSV files.

As with the Google’s acquisition of Writely, an AJAX-based word processor, there will inevitably be commentary about the likelihood of Google competing with Microsoft and its Office suite. For many users, the capabilities offered by these applications will address many of their basic needs, particularly home users and SME users who only have rudimentary requirements.

The enterprise market is a different challenge, and these kinds of applications are unlikely to – immediately, at least – gain traction, as the capabilities of these tools will be limited when compared to the full Office suite, and users simply don’t have the time to reformat and tinker with documents to ensure they work with both types of product. Nor do these applications work effectively with each other as yet.

That said, Google doesn’t need to target this market just yet – using this product, combined with Writely (or whatever it will be called) and Gmail/Calendar create a suite suiting many users, the Google advertising model will drive further revenue, and the FUD it sends at an embattled Microsoft are all inevitable outcomes.

It will also be interesting to see how these applications evolve, with the online capabilities leading to potential collaboration and inter-product integration opportunities (e.g. embedding spreadsheet data within word processing documents and integrating these products with other Google platforms such as Gtalk).

UPDATED: Having received an invite, I’ve been able to try out Google Spreadsheets. Overall the application works reasonably well. There are a number of limitations, such as no filtering, no print capability (although you can export to HTML and print from there) and no graphing functions, but these may come as it is still an early and limited beta. There are still a few niggles, and the importing and exporting of data isn’t perfect, but for occasional users who need something for basic list management and calculations, it may do the job.