THINK / Musings» Blog Archive » lines in the sand …
..nice complement to my recent eComm presentation on the ‘new optimal industry stack’…
Cloud Computing Inquiries at Gartner
…not surprised to see financial services at No. 1. Nice also to find out that insurance is not a financial service… (Gartner=muppets)
Facebook challenges financial regulators: FINRA | Technology | Reuters
…slowly but surely the socio-institutional paradigm creaks forward to adjust to the new technological paradigm…
I need some statistics that didn’t seem easy to find via normal organic search. Would be very grateful if you could help me find the following:
Amazon.com: No. of Marketplace merchants, No. of Associates, % of overall sales coming from these channels
Apple: No. of Apps in Apps store, No. of individuals/companies developing apps, no. of members in Apple Developers Network
Facebook: No. of Apps in Apps store, No. of individuals/companies developing apps
Microsoft: No. of members in MSDN
Please send numbers and/or sources to @nauiokaspark on twitter
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
…one more step on the road to the sixth paradigm…
If you are thinking of renting a serviced office from Avanta, you might want to think twice. We were tenants for almost two years and during that time I must say it was ok - the building was well kept and the staff were friendly and helpful. But it certainly wasn’t cheap.
Then we moved out. We left the office in pristine condition, and when doing the checkout the Avanta represented remarked as much and said we didn’t need to have any cleaning done. Just repainting the walls as we had put up two pictures and a whiteboard. I thought even this was pretty cheeky given I’m sure this would fall under normal depreciation / dilapidations but since it was only going to cost £100 or so I figured it wasn’t worth arguing about…
A day or so later in the midst of the hectic move I signed the checkout sheet without noticing that cleaning had been added (c. £250…) Nice.
Obviously when we took on this space we had to put down a deposit and upon leaving the contract stated this would only be returned 60 days after check out. Setting aside the cynicism of this provision (after all I had agreed to it when signing their T&Cs), I have to say I was mildly annoyed when 60 days later nothing arrived… I waited a week or so (just to take into account any lunacy around business days or holidays or some such rubbish I thought they might have in the fine print) and then when still nothing had my associate contact them. Once. Twice. Three times…
When finally she was able to speak to someone with authority, we were informed that we had to ‘request’ the return of our deposit in writing and as soon as this was done, they would prepare a cheque. Request??? It’s OUR fucking money. Plus you’ve taken our rent payment for two years by direct debit so why don’t you just transfer the money to our account instead of making us go to the bank???
Well good luck Avanta, I hope the extra profits made by the interest you skim off customer deposits and the odd one who doesn’t chase you when their money isn’t automatically returned to them, makes up for the people who knowing how lame and slimy you can be, never consider renting from you in the first place.
I also feel very badly for your employees who were always friendly, professional and helpful - must be awful for them to have to enforce such cynical corporate policies…
