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Holistic Systems
Simons Blog
Something that readers of my TDA 2009 blog may not have realised, is that for the first half (2 months) of the tour, I was writing my blog posts on an Asus eeepc laptop powered almost entirely from a solar panel and li-po battery mounted on the rear rack of my mountain bike.
My home made charger worked perfectly, giving me an average one hour of netbook use per day and also allowed me to charge my mobile phone from a USB port on the netbook. Throughout most of Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya we had very limited access to electricity and on the occasions where mains was available, competition for “socket space” was fierce. There were also security concerns leaving valuable electronics lying around to charge up. Having independence from the grid was very handy and it was a fun and successful experiment 
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The photo shows the top of the unit which consists of a 12 volt and 6 volt solar panels wired in series to give a total of 18 volts and about 10 watts of power. The reason for having 2 panels is that it didn’t occur to me until after I bought the first panel that you can’t efficiently charge a 12 volt battery with a 12 volt power source.
The solar panels are screwed to a wooden frame which had space underneath for a lithium polymer universal external laptop battery to actually store the power. I wasn’t about to subject my poor little laptop to the vibrations of crossing Africa on the back of a hard tail mountain bike.
In addition, there was a “mounting plate” made from 12mm marine ply which was bolted to the rear rack. In combination with the web straps this held the whole thing securely in place on the rack. It also protected the unit from dust and water (within reason) and meant that by unclipping the straps, the valuable parts of the unit could be removed and replaced in about 30 seconds.
The whole unit weighed 2.2Kg + the weight of the bike rack. It was heavy enough to upset the handling of my bike slightly and I guess it made a difference going up the many hills, although I can’t say I noticed ( I was exhausted anyway).
Relatively speaking, my solar panel was quite low powered (size does matter!). It would take 5 days to charge from empty to fully charged, and this would give me about 5 hours of computer use. Combining this with charging both the laptop and my charger battery from the mains when power was convenient meant that I always had enough electricity.
Sadly, after the laughably serious hammering from the “roads” in Kenya, something in the external battery gave up the ghost and the unit stopped working (and started smoking!) at roughly the half-way point in Arusha. By this point, electrical sockets were much more common, and whilst it wasn’t as convenient I was able to keep blogging by charging from mains power. I regret not removing the solar charger from my bike during the “Trans East Africa Highway” section, because then I think it would still be working today 
Some people might argue that it never mattered, but I think I had a moment of insight the other evening .
With freely available virtualisation technology it’s going to matter less and less what operating system you’re running or which operating system your applications need to run on.
My understanding is that Windows 7 includes “seemless” virtualisation to allow Windows XP applications to run successfully without compatibilty problems.
When Linux is able to use something like VirtualBox to provide similar seemless virtualisation functionality then it really won’t matter in most cases whether your applications have been developed for Windows or Linux.
I’m currently using VirtualBox to do ASP.NET development on an XP guest using Ubuntu 9.10 as the host. XP runs “snappily” on the VirtualBox virtual machine and using Visual Studio / Photoshop is sufficiently like running it natively that it doesn’t matter.
The VirtualBox virtual machine seems to have a very small memory overhead (35Mb last time I checked).
Update: It appears that VirtualBox does provide “seamless” virtualisation. This effect isn’t perfect since even though the Windows XP desktop disappears, the Windows applications are not added to the Linux task bar. It works pretty well, but it’s not (yet) truly seamless.
This robotic arm is co-ordinated with a camera to perform feats of incredible dexterity and speed. In the near future these things are going to be everywhere – building, cleaning, protecting, farming. Then what ?
I was recently asked by Asos.com (the leading online UK fashion retailer) to review their e-commerce site and suggest how it could be better.
My intitial impression was that Asos.com *really* know what they’re doing and that improvements were going to be incremental and somewhat hard to find.
After a few minutes of browsing it was clear that whilst Asos have put thought and talent into creating a great site with innovative features there is still massive room for improvement. The same being true of *almost every* website.
Fashion is a difficult product to sell online. Clothing is highly personal and customers all have different tastes in colour, fabric, quality, design and of course fit.
Taking jeans as an example, I’m very choosy: I prefer a specific colour, fairly loose fit, zip fly, “high quality” denim and no “weird frills” such as buttons on the pockets. I also don’t want to pay much more than £30 per pair.
I don’t think I’m asking a lot but finding the right pair of jeans on or off-line is a headache. Any company that can get this right for me probably has my business for life.
Despite Asos.com having 319 different styles of jeans I still couldn’t find a pair that I liked in my price range. This lead me to wonder what the competition were up to and what constitutes “state of the art” in online clothing retail.
The contenders
To get my shortlist of sites I googled “online clothing sales UK”. I picked the top 3 pay-per-click advertisers and the top 5 organic search results. Far from exhaustive, but a good starting point.
This lead me to the following online retailers with a plan to test each site by trying to find a decent pair of jeans:
- peacocks.co.uk
- laredoute.co.uk
- boden.co.uk
- direct.asda.com
- next.co.uk
- debenhams.co.uk
- asos.com
- fashionworld.co.uk
The results
I was surprised by just how far away these retailers are from getting me to part with my money. Asos.com were the clear leaders, although still no “ka-ching”.
Some of the bigger names (notably Next and Boden) were terrible. They appeared to have given no thought as to the process that a customer goes through when selecting a pair of jeans. I hope their current offering is merely a “toe in the water” until they work out how to do this thing right ?
Physically travelling to shops is expensive and time consuming, but none of these guys are going to be getting my money and I’m not getting a new pair of jeans. A lose – lose situation
The leaders
asos.com (chances of me buying : 40%)
Asos have evidently thought about and made a decent stab at solving the difficult problem of online clothing sales. With features such as a flexible product search, good product information and a video catwalk for each product they are the clear leaders of the field.
There are still many refinements and innovations that could be applied to the site but their biggest problem in winning my business is too small a range (despite stocking 319 jeans styles). I’d guestimate that they need double or triple this number to randomly hit the combination of colour, fabric, cut and style that I’m looking for.
Multiply the approximate required number of styles by the number of different sizes offered (38) and you end up with 957 styles x 38 sizes which comes to 36366 potential product lines just for jeans. Realistically, that’s just for starters – you can see why this is difficult !
reason for not buying: nothing i liked in my price range
laredoute.co.uk (chances of me buying 50%)
La Redoute don’t have as big range of jeans at 183 styles but more of their products fall into my price range. The product search is basic and whilst it is effective, it is somewhat labour intensive. I want to be able to filter out jeans with button flies and “weird frills” – not to have to click on each pair and examine the details.
On my second look through their site whilst writing this article, I did manage to find a pair of jeans that I might buy. Not my favourite colour though and bit more than I want to pay. Will think about it
reason for not buying: not convinced about quality
direct.asda.com (chances of buying 20%)
Asda Direct has a tiny range of jeans styles but at between £6 to £18 they are incredibly cheap. Their search interface is clean, simple and unsophisticated but with only 13 different styles it’s good enough for the job.
I liked some of their styles but I wasn’t convinced about the quality. It’s very difficult to get this across from a photograph. I think it’s worth paying extra for quality jeans and I just couldn’t be sure what I would be getting for my money.
reason for not buying: not convinced about quality
The also rans
debenhams.co.uk (chances of me buying 20%)
There’s nothing terribly wrong with debenhams site but there’s nothing terribly good about it either. Like *all* of the sites reviewed you have to look through each item indivually to determine zip / button fly but in debenhams case the information is inconsistently specified (sometimes in different places on the screen, some times not at all).
The product search is a superficially credible attempt but is nonetheless misses the mark. I just couldn’t be bothered to manually go through each primary category and manually filter for button /zip fly – and then try to remember / shortlist suitable jeans.
I *don’t care* about whether my jeans are boot cut, relaxed fixed or classic fit (what on earth do these terms mean anyway?) but I do care about zip flies (and yes, no “weird frills”). Why this isn’t blindingly obvious to e-fashion retailers I have no idea ?
reason for not buying: to difficult to search
fashionworld.co.uk (chances of me buying 20%)
Fashionworld probably had the second best product search (after Asos) but predictably still no zip / button filter.
The product details are poorly presented and the zip / button information is not provided consistently. Overall the user interface for the site feels cluttered and confused.
With a small range of only 80 styles, I didn’t find anything I liked, but then I couldn’t be bothered trawling through each item to find my key buying features.
reason for not buying: not convinced about anything
The loosers
next.co.uk (chances of me buying 20%)
I pretty much buy all my clothes from Next’s high street stores. Good quality and price and their styles are closest to what I like (fewer ripped jeans / t’s and no stupid sounding brands like fatface or crimnal). It’s a pain driving across town to my nearest Next and they only tend to have something I like about 1 in every 5 visits.
I had high hopes for the Next online store but was sadly very disappointed.
Their jeans search forces me to click through their entire range of about 45 styles 3 at a time and to check each product individually for the features I’m after (eg no button fly /weird frills etc). Sorry guys, I’m just not going to bother.
Not only that, but incredibly the Next home page automatically plays a video with loud elevator music when I arrive at the site. This was tacky and stupid back in 1998 but these days, jeez ! What are you guys thinking? Your web agency should be sacked either for incompetence or cowardice in the face of the customer!
reason for not buying: couldn’t be bothered to trawl through items
boden.co.uk (chances of me buying 10%)
Boden have a range of 5 styles in 3 or 4 different colours each. The prices aren’t great (£45) and they only seem to sell stock button fly jeans.
The product search isn’t helpful at all, and you basically have to click through all the jeans (fortunately only 5 styles) to find what you want. The product information they provide for each pair is pretty comprehensive.
Boden also have quite a neat feature allowing you to order your jeans “unhemmed” so that you can get the length just right. They can also tailor the length for you at a cost of £6.
I managed to find some jeans that I like but the absence of a zip fly means no-deal !
reason for not buying: insufficient product range
peacocks.co.uk (chances of me buying 0%)
A nice clean site design but very few styles of jeans. No product search but then with only 6 styles they don’t currently need one.
The prices were cheap but the jeans probably looked it. Almost no product information such “zip / button” was provided. Hey, they’re only jeans right, who cares ? Wake up guys – your customers website visitors care !
reason for not buying: not enough product info. not convinced about quality.
The Conclusion
Sucessfully selling clothing online is difficult challenge who’s time has come. The technology, bandwidth and economic conditions are there for someone to do this right and make trillions
Asos.com are the only team out of the those reviewed that seemed to have fully grasped the issues although they have a way to go before all the challenges are solved.
Asos.com are in pole position but far from unbeatable. Anybody with vision, deep pockets and a sufficiently large warehouse who feels like taking them on would be very welcome to get in touch and have a chat about what needs to be done 
!
An important signal used by Google is the text contained within hyperlinks. Pages pointed at by hyperlinks containing more relevant keywords tend to be ranked more highly by Google and therefore appear higher in the search engine.
For example if I have a target page which is linked to by something which looks like “web hosting packages” then the target page will likely appear higher in Google search results for searches like “web hosting” or “hosting package”. The key is that the link text effectively confers relevance to the target page for the searches that are the same as or similar to the link text.
Using a taxonomy allows a webmaster to easily create and maintain a web of hyperlinks that confer relevance for multiple search terms. Wordpress is a great example of simple and effective taxonomy manager.
1. It almost goes without saying, but open source software (OSS) is free.
2. A vast array of high quality open source applications already exist to solve almost every conceivable business problem.
3. OSS is developed from a more efficient programming paradigm which means more applications can be hosted on a given server.
4. It is incredibly cheap to implement. £30 per year will buy a web hosting package from eukhost.com capable of running a content managed website, a CRM system, a customer support forum and a mailing list manager with 24/7 high quality server-level technical support. This kind of cheap web hosting package is conceivably the 10th wonder of the world.
5. If you do need to “scale out” there are no huge licensing costs. You just need more cheap hardware.
6. A multitude of free pre-written extensions mean that many applications can be enhanced and customised with a few clicks
7. The lack of up front costs mean that OSS applications can be up and running in weeks rather than months or even years. Your organisation becomes more agile.
8. OSS is easy to install can be installed by any non-technical person. The biggest barrier to installation is not believing that it could be this easy.
9. You are able to implement systems that would otherwise be outside your budget. This makes you or your organisation more efficient and gives you competitive advantage.
10. Any computer literate person can quickly install and implement a number of open source systems using a Linux web hosting account costing £30 per year. All without the need for special training or highly paid consultants. Seriously.
11. OSS server software is mature, robust and reliable. On going software maintenance costs can be zero or very low cost.
Open source software is not necessarily the best commercial decision in every circumstance but when you need to get something done quickly and on a low budget then it has clear advantages.
///bfamuis8r7
I missed out on going to the 4 day TEDGlobal 2009 conference in Oxford recently largely because I didn’t have the $4500 entrance fee. That doesn’t matter though because TED videos the presentations and puts them online for free.
Here is a great video to get you started, but the rest of the TED site is *well worth* checking out.
This first video presents some very interesting (and positive) global socio-economic data with a fascinating graphing technique. For anyone that works with “data” the video is worth watching for the “information presentation” alone.
An electrically assisted bicycle that can travel at speeds of up to 80kph. You still have to pedal but it’s quick, cheap and keeps you fit. Sadly, the bikes aren’t available as mass produced items so it would cost you $40,000 if you wanted one …