Technology

Hard work being a technology company at the moment

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I would not want to be in this space at the moment. It is fiercely competitive and every man and his dog has a new angle on targeting, tracking, bidding and the like. Digital has always been like that, a constant stream of questions from clients, planners and other agencies along the line of – ‘you heard of x company, apparently amazing, can you have a look at it for me?’ Being on the inside of a technology company must feel like that at the moment, especially big ones like Google and Microsoft.

The energy at the moment is focused on biddable media whether that be ad exchanges, search of Facebook API and therefore companies have come along like Marin and Kenshoo to challenge the elite. They are new and shiny and fast and they produce product roadmaps about 6 months ahead of the slightly larger more sluggish rivals.

Teams in Doubleclick now are constantly being asked about what can be integrated into their systems like DART search, it’s a fair question because the market is moving so quickly the agencies are having to adapt rapidly and therefore they need their suppliers to do the same. Deep integrations that are hard to move is not a good enough reason to stay with a supplier. It’s not however as simple as doing the usual Google bashing or Atlas bashing, I have some sympathy for them. When they change one thing it has to deliver against all their other systems and make sure that nothing falls over. With great volumes and large customer bases comes a big responsibility to not mess up. Some start up with 5 clients can afford to mess about a bit and change things as it pleases with little or no impact, Google can’t do that.

I would like to see what happened if an agency said to one of these new companies – OK I will move all our spend to you, we want 24.7 customer service, technical support, migration in weeks, nothing to go wrong, we want to check all your contracts and privacy set ups and all the rest. Simply, they would not cope. So on that basis I think we have to understand that there are many pretenders to the crown but they could not all make it and its easy to bash the big boys.

Nevertheless it must be hard work right now and I don’t envy them. Sometimes things just do not work, today we saw the end of Google Wave. Of course we did, it was a nightmare. A small part of me does think though that those resources could be redirected into services that meet the real needs of customers rather than so many experiments. How is Buzz doing?

Outside of that particular field there are so many companies selling data, targeting and tracking. They all want a piece of our client’s websites, they all want a test, it is a minefield out there and sorting the wheat from the chaf for agency digital planners is extremely hard and often hard for the companies to differentiate themselves. I have not seen so many new companies selling their wares since 2000, they wont all make it and as agencies we need to somehow back the right horses..

Business cards the sex end of business courtship

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I realized the other day that I had been in touch with someone at work for weeks and had never seen so much as a business email or phone number. Or that I had lost the number of one of my best friends from University and yet had never lost touch. Staying in touch now is through a plethora of different channels where they do the hard work for you.

There was a time when my contacts in my phone were like gold dust, a pain to lose and painful to replace and yet now I am less precious about it all because some kind website or other has those people just a click away. My roller deck is kind of old fashioned looking, every time I deal my way through business cards I do think how backward it all feels.

I find now with such a connected world that I am approached by a mixture of friends and business colleagues through any number of channels. Sometimes it’s a tweet, but that is still not quite there yet as many of my friends have just reached Facebook so Twitter is like a distant dream. Work people on the other hand, far more, starts with a Tweet and then it’s like a courtship depending on the keenness of both parties as to how quickly it progresses! Is it straight to sharing emails? Perhaps a dalliance around Linkedin, takes things on a step further without full exposure of details..it’s an interesting progression. Perhaps this is why we have cards, it’s like consummation, you have been on an electronic courtship and now you have met and been able to exchange paper titles and verify you are both real.

Once you have crossed all the barriers then you can contact people in so many ways, I have often checked my work email to find that note someone sent me to no avail, ah well it must be in Linkedin, nope, Facebook and on it goes, Foursquare has now moved the game on to straight stalking. I said no the other day to a couple of people, last thing I want is a couple of weirdos following me around and trying to sell me data!

All of this of course means we hardly pick up the phone, the calls are drying up and texts and FB and LI are taking over, you don’t need a call, you just saw them check in at Soho House. I think generally we are over calls and cards. Maybe not the girls, but the boys definitely, It’s always better face to face, so let’s use every means of technical kit to get us face to face and so we can get down to the serious business of exchanging old pieces of worn out card..

Contact me on….

My piece in Mediaweek

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This was a piece done in Mediaweek which I have transferred onto my blog so as to keep records of what people have been saying..

Mediaweek 01.04.2010 Marco Bertozzi hits a nerve at VivaKi. Article here

Marco Bertozzi, back in the media world after a two-and-a-half-year absence, tells Media Week about his new role as EMEA managing director of VivaKi’s Nerve Centre and what will happen when the lunatics take over the asylum

Marco Bertozzi, managing director EMEA, VivaKi Nerve Centre
Marco Bertozzi doesn’t like being away from his pregnant wife Angelina, global brand manager at Unilever, so he got up at 3.30am to fly to a meeting in Madrid and back within a day. But there are no signs of tiredness when he meets Media Week the following day; the only glitch is the fact he hasn’t been warned he will have his picture taken. “I would have worn a suit,” he grumbles.

But then, as Media Week points out, he would look like a City boy, and that isn’t his style. A City boy wouldn’t order a pint of lager just the wrong side of midday, as Bertozzi does as he sits down to talk about his new role at VivaKi, nor would he have staked his career on an intuition that the internet would one day dominate the media landscape, at a time when everyone thought he was “mad and would fail”.

Bertozzi [pronounced Ber-tott-zee] is back in the media world after “ticking some useful career boxes” during a two-and-a-half-year spell at recruitment firm TMP, enticed back to the agency group he first joined in 1996 thanks to an encounter with ZenithOptimedia’s global chief digital officer Fred Joseph, who offered him the role of managing director EMEA of VivaKi’s Nerve Centre division.

The move to “a new job in an old home” felt right, Bertozzi says, because he wanted to pick up the digital thread again, working with leading online publishers – VivaKi has partnerships with Microsoft and Google – and the latest technologies. The basic function of the Nerve Centre is to act as “the Intel chip” inside VivaKi, a future-facing unit that helps the Publicis agencies add value to their clients’ businesses.

The Nerve Centre is more established in the United States, and Bertozzi’s job is to ramp up its presence and investment in the UK, working with digital and management heads across all the Publicis Groupe agencies: Starcom, MediaVest, ZenithOptimedia, Digitas, Denuo and new addition Razorfish. But it is not an agency-within-an-agency; Bertozzi is the Nerve Centre’s only full-time member of staff in the UK, reporting to Curt Hecht, the US-based global president of the Nerve Centre.

Bertozzi explains: “The Nerve Centre is not about creating its own fiefdom; it is about thought leadership. The exciting part of the job for me is working with all the different agencies and people within the group, being in the middle of everything. When people know you they don’t tiptoe around and you get to the root of the issues they are facing far quicker.”

After a “whirlwind” four weeks in the role, Bertozzi has identified two areas to focus on: the US-led Audience on Demand service, which engages with ad exchanges to buy the right type of audience impression in real-time, and VivaKi’s research initiative called The Pool, which works with media owners and clients on “high-end, market-changing research”, such as online video and mobile. Bertozzi says: “The point is to create research that will end up changing the market in response to the answers of that research.”

Early adopter
Bertozzi got into digital as an “instinctive move” back in 1999, when digital was so far off the radar that colleagues emailed Zenith Interactive Solutions, the division founded by Damian Blackden, now EMEA president of digital at OMG, to ask if they could fix their computers. He recalls: “Anyone who got involved in [digital] back then had no knowledge it would be the big thing of the future. TV was the power-base of the agency and I was being promoted, but I couldn’t see myself staying in television.”

Now, of course, Google’s ad revenue has outstripped ITV, and the challenge is to keep up with how technology evolves. Bertozzi started his own blog last autumn, Bertozzi’s Bytesize, purely to understand the digital ecosystem: its viral effect, how people communicate and where the traffic is coming from. He says: “The audience is fragmenting and there are more and more ways of communicating with consumers. The way we plan and buy media, particularly digital media, has to change, because it is so fragmented and there are so many sites.”

The solution, Bertozzi says, is to solve the “big battleground” around data and how it relates to ad exchanges and targeting. He says: “The right audience delivers the best sales. So the future is about technology that allows you to target people in a more sophisticated way, taking into account previous behaviours and overlaying other data sources. I like to think there isn’t a digital buyer in town who isn’t excited by ad exchanges and that side of the business.”

Meanwhile, mobile has had so many false dawns it remains “strangely unresolved”, says Bertozzi, although he believes it will gain momentum over the next year. And social media is coming out of its box to evolve beyond direct response ads on Facebook to a “more refined” art involving blogging, seeding, generating pools of fans and responding to customer issues. “The purer end of social media – when you properly restructure a client’s communications plan around all the social media channels – is still a challenge and that will continue.”

Coming back to the industry following a tough two years, Bertozzi has observed how the recession has “woken people up” to the fact that everything is business critical. “In tough times like recession, people definitely grow up,” he says. In keeping with the new mood of seriousness, Bertozzi is no longer tempted by lavish industry jollies, preferring to drink in low-key haunts with agency colleagues he has known for years, such as the pre-Christmas reunion of Zenith alumni at the Dudley Arms near Paddington.

So, as someone whose career has grown alongside the internet, going from off-the-radar to the central nerve within 10 years, does he now consider himself the elder statesman of digital? Bertozzi, who turned 38 in January, laughs. “No. But there is some pride in the fact that I got involved in digital before the market had confidence in it, as opposed to all the people who joined when they could see it was not going to go away.”

Later, Bertozzi speaks of the day when “the lunatics run the asylum” – when those people who have grown up with digital take the top media agency roles. Bertozzi, with his 12-year pedigree at Zenith, has the credentials to be an agency chief executive, and if his career continues on the same trajectory, the big promotion could come sooner than he thinks. Publicis bosses would be mad not to consider him

Is Flipboard the first App made for the iPad?

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Yes I am addicted to the web and I love Facebook for staying in touch with people as well as a lazy address book and Twitter for sending me through everything I have ever needed to know, and much I didn’t about my business. Since having a child I seem to have only 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there at home and my iPad really fills that gap. It is especially good as you can carry it around when the baby is in a sling – perfect!

I still feel though that I am constantly jumping in and out of apps, looking at facebook, twitter and the rest and also clicking on links and waiting for videos to load, but now that has all changed. Flipboad has arrived. It is what I would describe as the first App made for the iPad with real innovation and thought, its an amazing piece of kit. So amazing that if you try to download and use right now it is overwhelmed with people trying to sign up.

Take a look at this video

It looks slick, it is a brilliant concept, I may never go to any of the other sites again, it makes Tweetdeck look like something from the dark ages and overall shows up the rest of the developer world for being lazy and slow, this should have been created by someone like Facebook or a publishing group or someone who took the iPad seriously.

I wish Flipboard all the best, I love it, and I truely believe this to be the first App made for the iPad

Vivaki Nerve Center launches The Pool video lane

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When I started in the Vivaki Nerve Center I had quite a few things on my to do list. One of the most exciting was getting ‘The Pool’ live.

The Pool is a vehicle through which we would bring together advertisers and publishers to participate in a project that would shape the market in whatever field it is concerned with, drive future facing ad formats and hopefully drive revenue on both sides. It was designed to be objective, a consensus approach but based in consumer insight. The Pool started in the US with fantastic results, if you want to read more about it, click here

Video advertising is the subject of choice. Why is that? Well there are some fundamental factors that lead video to be an ideal Lane in any country. Firstly we all know its growing hugely, unstoppable and more and more quality content is migrating to the web which is not being followed by advertising pounds. That leads to the next couple of issues. The ability of publishers to monetise has been difficult due to the constant erosion of pricing and lack of research to prove it works and secondly it’s a chaotic ad market in terms of formats. If you work on the basis of 50-60% of TV ad pounds go against a 30sec Ad it’s easy to ramp up investment rapidly. Anyone who has done video advertising knows there are too many formats, too many creative approaches and publishers all have their own model. The Pool aims to solve that.

Tomorrow sees the launch to all the major publishers in the UK of The Pool Lane 1 in the UK, Long form video. Vivaki Nerve Center with close collaboration from ZenithOptimedia and Starcom will be aiming to get publishers on board with the project to find the single best Ad format for video across a range of categories of results. Once on board we will work through field research and with the help of clients to identify the winning Ad format.

It’s an exciting project and I hope very high profile, the end result should be a win for the publishers, a win for the advertisers and a win for the agencies in the Vivaki groupe. I hope by the end of this there will be a model that becomes second nature to planners and allows scalable spend in video which has to be a good thing.

I will then be turning my spotlight on mobile. Mobile suffers similar issues if not worse and needs to have a greater industry focus put upon it. The levels of spend in mobile display are appalling when compared with the time spent on mobile devices so I hope in 2011 The Pool approach will drive some great new learnings for mobile.

My Q & A with Exchangewire on Ad Exchanges / Agency models

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Marco Bertozzi is the Managing Director, EMEA, VivaKi Nerve Center. Vivaki is a strategic unit within Publicis Groupe that helps agencies leverage the scale of the group’s media and digital operations to improve campaign performance for its clients. Marco took time this week to speak to ExchangeWire about the Vivaki operation in more detail, the industry’s move to automated audience-buying, and the evolution of the agency model.

There’s much confusion about what Vivaki does? Is it buying platform? Is it a crack exchange trading unit? Can you explain the Vivaki proposition in more detail?

MB: Vivaki is the strategic entity created by Publicis Groupe to leverage the combined scale of its media and digital operations, which represent nearly $60 billion dollars in global ad spend and influence. VivaKi aggregates the marketplace influence of five autonomous brands, including: two global media agencies, Starcom MediaVest Group and ZenithOptimedia; two leading digital marketing agencies, Digitas and Razorfish; and a premiere futures practice, Denuo.

On behalf of its agency brands and their clients, VivaKi faces the market to help identify and build technology, message distribution, audience aggregation and content solutions for the future. VivaKi also includes a “Talent & Transformation Practice”, which leverages the scale of the VivaKi brands to develop and deliver tools and approaches designed to attract, develop, train, motivate and reward the world’s best people.

Sitting at the core of VivaKi is the VivaKi Nerve Center, which serves as a think tank, R&D centre and testing ground to activate new pathways for clients to connect with consumers in an increasingly digital world.

The key objective of the VivaKi Nerve Center is to help deliver better solutions for our clients as the marketing landscape continues to evolve and accelerate at a fast pace, collaboration within the VivaKi family, and across the Groupe, is essential.

To succeed in our mission, the Nerve Center will focus on some key areas to empower our VivaKi agency teams and clients:

Global Platforms & Products: Developing global platforms and proprietary products that help our agencies differentiate and compete in the marketplace. Products will be supported by an advanced underlying technology and data infrastructure that delivers speed and scale.
Industry-Leading Partnerships: Creating strategic global partnerships that provide tangible value for our clients and partners, while differentiating against the competition.

Innovation & Thought Leadership: Investing in innovation and next generation emerging opportunities, like The Pool, which will validate our leadership position in the marketplace.

Our ad exchange solution is called Audience on Demand and is therefore a key strand in the global platforms and products category above and indeed innovation. It’s one of the most exciting areas to touch all agency groups in recent years and needs to have a defined and aggressive focus put upon it. Vivaki Nerve Center has worked very collaboratively with the brands in delivering the Audience on Demand platform to their clients. We are live with Audience on Demand and really excited by the performance of the solution.

Can you elaborate a little more on your role within Vivaki?

MB: My role in is Managing Director of The Vivaki Nerve Center in the EMEA. I report into the Global President of the VNC, Curt Hecht. The VNC has made significant progress in the US and my role is to work closely with the brand management and digital teams to establish how the VNC can help them in delivering the future-facing digital solutions that our clients are asking for everyday. Ad exchange trading through Audience on Demand is a significant area of work for me.

What’s your perspective on automated trading and audience buying through exchanges and other demand sources?

MB: I have been blown away by it. I may be biased and perhaps my background lends itself to making this exciting to me but when you see the potential of automated buying you can’t help but be impressed. It’s worth saying that automated buying is a little misleading. It requires clever optimisation strategies and insights that the agencies need to lead through talented people. I would not want people to think that you a press a button and it’s all done. Anyone who thought search bidding would be automated would testify that is not the case – it is search bidding times ten so definitely not just automated.

The trading platform allows you to target exactly the individuals you want at the price you want. You are buying one impression at a time which makes a CPM approach look outdated although it is not the death of the CPM buy just yet, not least because media auditors would not know what to judge us on! I believe it will ask questions of every agency trading model to some extent or another. It will also challenge auditors to stop judging agencies on an arbitrary discount off a pool metrics, and force everyone to consider more performance related contracts. I think for now it lends itself more easily towards the performance models but down the line I can see far more being traded through this method.

Do you think that large European holding companies like Publicis are now seeing ad exchanges as an efficient channel to buy ad inventory?

MB: I think the large network groups get a hard time for not changing enough and being slow to react. In some ways that may be true but agencies today are very different to those of 15 years ago. They have completely transformed: agencies realise change is inherent in what they must deliver year in year out.

Ad exchanges are just another media / trading / targeting opportunity that have come along, and agencies will embrace it and make the most out of it on behalf of their clients. My experience so far is that all the groups see the benefits of it but that will vary by group as some are more advanced than others. You will see who believes in it the most by how quickly they grow their ad exchange spend because once you start to see the results, clients and agencies alike will want to move their budgets into new the model.

Do you think that trading on ad exchanges makes it easier to leverage agency and client data to deliver better campaign performance?

MB: Trading on ad exchanges will allow data to become more important but actually it’s not the exchanges where the benefit lies but with the use of DSPs like Audience on Demand. It is this technology that allows us to best use data to enhance the performance of campaigns and target only those users that are most likely to deliver a beneficial response for our clients.

The combination of our clients being able to retarget their visitors but on a much larger scale with the introduction of third party data means we can turbo-charge our schedules to deliver at the right cost and at the right level of volume. Those third party vendors need to move quickly over here. We already have demand and they are a little slow to get going. I was pleased to see Phil moving from Yahoo to Quantcast, perhaps a sign of things to come.

Does Publicis have an exchange strategy for Europe, and if so will this be headed up by Vivaki? Are there plans to devote more resource to developing this area of the business?

MB: This is not a UK or US only market place. It will become important across all major markets so of course we will grow our business in those countries. Many of our major European markets are already testing different models and gaining from the insights. Vivaki Nerve Center will take the route that drives the consistency and ability to learn as a group and not at a country/agency level. We are in the very formative stages of this area so it’s important we all learn from each other.

Resources will evolve over time. Some people will re-skill into this area, some will be recruited. But we have time yet to get into that. Rest assured though that the number of people working in this area will grow substantially!

What do you think are the key difficulties in moving an agency toward automated media buying? Is it the lack of technology and data skills that exist within the agencies? Or is it a lack of technology?

MB: It’s not a technology issue. We have the technology and it works. I am sure all of our competitors have their technology too. Some will work better than others perhaps, but generally I don’t see that as an issue. Technology should not be the differentiator for agencies, it’s the people behind it and what it delivers that counts. Clients do not want pitches where we all get our technology out and wave it about; they want to see insights and results.

In Vivaki there are pools of people who understand this new area and those that know less about it but is that not always the way? Over time we will train people and recruit people so that we have the right level of understanding and evangelism in the business. Look how agencies changed around search. We had the same discussions back then and we now have these amazing skill sets around search in the agencies, so I don’t really see too many issues. If you think the opportunity is a good one, you can make things happen.

Do you think the arrival of DSPs into the European market will help agencies bridge this technology and skills gap?

MB: DSPs will allow agencies to build campaigns across multiple ad exchanges, create data pools, and control frequency etc across the whole playing field rather than at a site or network level. They will also provide us with the largest search area when we are trying to find the elusive consumers who have visited our client sites previously. DSPs are enablers so of course it’s a great innovation in the marketplace globally.

I would say that I believe a true DSP is one that’s only interest is in providing technology to do all the above. It should not to try to resell inventory or have morphed from an ad network. There are many blaggers out there and it’s important that people choose carefully in who they work with as you may discover that the systems they provide are not as future-facing as you thought. The market place is very grey around the edges!

What’s your view on real-time bidding? Is it a game changer for the display market? Or are there still fundamental problems that need to be worked through (such as the computational costs) before we see the benefits?

MB: It works. Our campaigns are delivering great results on the RTB strands of the campaigns. I think RTB will be affected by many different elements not least volume of competition, which will only increase. But this is where the clever use of data helps you in RTB: only you know what is deemed a valuable cookie. Hence you will be bidding on it, not the rest of the world. This is different to search where everyone knows that if you bid on home insurance you will sell insurance. This is a huge benefit for ad trading – the agency knows who is valuable not the publisher telling us what is valuable.

Overall I believe that RTB will be a game changer. Suddenly impressions are valuable again in the volume game. Interestingly though, they are valuable from a data perspective and not so much from a context /channel perspective. The rules have changed. What’s premium now?

How do you see the European exchange space developing over the next twelve months?

MB: I think you will see many of the major players in the US getting people on the ground here to push into big European markets. The ecosystem is developing rapidly in Europe, and it will not be any different than the US. There are already companies up and running in Europe, providing ad serving and other services, and they will try to steal a march in these markets. The DSP pure players will soon be driving a more objective approach across Europe. I also think we will see the likes of Google really ramping up in the markets here, which in itself will drive liquidity.

Google is a mirror on society..very scary search suggestions

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Marco Bertozzi:12.05.2010


Have you had a good look at the search suggestions on Google? Well I thought I would do 5 searches to see what comes up and see what the populus is searching for day to day, holy shit its worrying! Here was what I typed in..

Where do I…
How do I…
Who do I..
When do I..
What do I..

Only when I had done this did I realise that if the suggestions reflect what people are searching for then we are in trouble! So what did I learn? Well first of all we worry about a few key things in life..our Blackberrys and iPhones, sex, tax, life in general and Facebook.

There are a myriad of people out there with some fundamental life decisions to be made. Now I am all for starting with a broad search but I particularly like these two; ‘Where do I begin’ and ‘What do I want to do with my life’ fantastic questions! These people have focus issues and or are high as kites and probably sitting in student digs somewhere looking for a short cut. You might think they are in trouble but there is a group of people who have some of the worst issues imaginable.. ‘Where do I find Chuck Norris’ now thats not your average question but seemingly one many are getting their heads around. Politics in the last few weeks has been a hot topic so I would not be surprised if Nick Clegg was one of many searchers against ‘who do I vote for?’ or perhaps Gordon was a number of those asking ‘who do I inform when I move house?’

Life, sex and babies comes up a lot as you might imagine. The second or third suggestion down when you search ‘What do I’ is repeatable for this blog, take a look yourself, it’s not your average question!

There are whole life stages covered in there too. Some of the top suggestions in response to those questions above included:

1. What do I get my girlfriend for Valentine
2. When do I ovulate
3. How do I know if I am pregnant
4. When do I have my first scan
5. When do I stop paying child maintenance
6. When do I retire

People are clearly turning to the web for the big questions, I imagine they start big and work their way through to the important detail questions such as the oft searched ‘where do the Inuits live!’ Christ it goes on and on, weird and wonderful questions that Google is shining back at us…

The state of Facebook is now very much revealed by these searches with most of the ‘How do I‘ search suggestions being around FB. Mainly ‘how do I close my account’ Much has been made of the FB situation, interesting to see how that goes but I think Google is reflecting a little of the sentiment of the population at the moment.

Finally and probably the best reflection of society is the ‘Who do I’ section. A true reflection of our obsession with celebrity with ‘who do I look like’ how is Google going to tell you that? Where does it start? Such a weird question and I think expecting more of Google than one should do, probably easier to answer the question ‘where do I begin!’ Which celebrity do I look like? Who do I share my birthday with? It seems a constant need to associate with celebrity, it’s a sign of the times I am afraid.

So what do I conclude? I conclude that the world’s population has gone mad! What else can I take out of it? Probably best not to dig too deep!

ebay robbed me..new charges they dont make clear

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Marco Bertozzi:05:05:10

I have just received an email in my inbox proclaiming free listing this weekend on ebay!! What a deal, that will save you about £1. What they dont tell you is that they will charge you up to 10% of the final value of your sale, no wonder they want to give you free listings.

I would very much like to see the inner workings of ebay, the day the board sat around and said ‘ I know, lets change terms and conditions, noone will read them, and charge a percentage of final value. How much do you think? umm what about 10%? Sounds good to me. Done’ This is crazy business and I am sure has made them millions but it leaves a sour taste when you have been a regular user of the site, it also makes me feel that it again lets down the web in the eyes of the consumer. Its all too easy to just hide things in sections on a site or send a random email noone reads and anyone who knows ebay knows its a nightmare to find anything to do with customer service. The web needs to clean up in this regard, if you walked into a shop and got lumped with new charges you would just walk out, with ebay, the first you know about it is when you get your end of month bill. In my case that was £33 for one sale.

In the old days you paid lets say £3 for a listing and thats with all the bells and whistles. Now you pay for the listing, lets say £3, again a little extravagant. You then get a bill for about another £30 on a £300 quid item! On top of that you pay by Paypal and they take their cut, before you know it you just lost about 12-14% of your sale. It is a joke. For that reason, I shall never sell on ebay again, its all going to charity.

Nexus One UK release – don’t bother and wait for the 4G iPhone

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Marco Bertozzi 26.04.10
This Friday the Nexus One is available to the wider UK marketplace. I am not sure how big a deal this is to the wider market, feels like the world has moved on in some ways, the iPhone 4G has come along and I think it looks better and acts better from the very little I have seen and read.

I have had the Nexus One for a couple of months and I have to say, other than the fact its quick compared to a 3G (maybe not a 3Gs) it fails on so many other levels! If you are thinking of buying, consider these:

1. Everyone talked about the fact the casing of the phone was tougher and better than the iPhone – i have dropped mine and it has gouged out a corner of the metal casing, in many ways its more obvious than normal scratches and bangs

2. The keyboard is shit. No other way to put it. It’s less intuitive, it does not feel as tactile as the iPhone and it creates gibberish! As an example I could be walking across Sainsbury car park at 2am, worse for wear, pitch dark and I could be writing an email or text that I would probably regret the next day and the spelling would be perfect on the iPhone. It’s like the phone guessed what I wanted to say based on all the other rubbish I had typed before..Nexus One does not even have a guess at it – it will write nit over not for instance. The law of averages says not is a more likely word to go for over nit?!

3. The cardinal sin – the Apps are of a very low quality, they crash regularly, they are not as good and the range is very small, for me a complete fail.

4. This is just me, but having had an iPhone for so long, I have accessories all over the place and not to mention all the music and apps I have built up, none of it can be replicated, not peculiar to the Nexus but still irritates!

There are others but these are pretty fundamental. I just don’t think it is good enough, I have tried but I am back to 4G. Even the Microsoft series 7 phone looks better, so ebay here I come – anyone want mine?

The new Apple iPhone 4G video – a mistake or clever teaser?

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Have to say this is a sexy looking phone, I have just bought a Nexus One so cant justify it, yes I can, no I cant and on and on..I may well find a way – perhaps a 2 for 1 with an iPad? Anyway check out the video below and see what you think..has to get you thinking as to whether this guy really did leave it in a bar, seems implausible..maybe its a decoy, maybe it’s a teaser? Now thats what I call seeding..