Archive | Business

The productivity gap

Despite working some of the longest hours in Europe, UK business is not as productive as many of our competitors on the continent. There are numerous reasons for this, but there does seem to be one reason that analysts are not focusing too hard upon. Sure, you can invest in faster computers and printers. You […]

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Pay and Stay Policies

Premier Foods owns some of the best known food brands in the UK, and is one of Britain’s largest branded food producers. In 2013 Premier food’s sales were £849 million, with a trading profit of £138.9 million. Seemingly a Great British success story. So why are they asking suppliers for investment payments from their suppliers? […]

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Data Driven Deals – A Personalised Black Friday?

Christmas-time capitalism keeps many retailers going for another year, but squeezing deals into such a narrow time frame can have social consequences. There is no doubt that the people literally fighting to take advantage of Black Friday deals are increasingly likely to be amongst the most disadvantaged within our community. But it doesn’t have to be a mad […]

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Undercover Embarrassing Bodies

A new series of Undercover Boss has started recently. I’d stopped watching it ages ago but thought I’d give the new series a go. It wasn’t disappointing in that it was at once utterly predictable, yet still surprising. It was intriguing to follow Phil Couchman, the Chief Executive of DHL in the UK. It’s likely the show was […]

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What are coders worth?

You know something has nailed the zeitgeist when 2 different people send you a link to it, and James Somers really attracted some attention with his article: Are coders worth it? The article is a distillation of Somers’ experience in the web development industry. From the UK perspective he makes the development job market in the US seem […]

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Will Autistic behaviour help SAP?

SAP has built a business upon complex software tools and services, it’s impossible to deny that SAP has had immense success. But nothing lasts forever. Once you’ve reached the top of the technology tree, it’s a matter of time before your business is under siege. Gartner recently revealed that SAP had lost its leadership position in the Customer Relationship […]

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Have the Webmasters moved into marketing?

Those of us who survived the boom and bust of the original Dot-com bubble will recall how the term ‘Webmaster’ was bandied about on job adverts. Webmaster job adverts usually had a single unifying feature; they all contained a huge variety of skills that the Webmaster had to have. If you knew HTML, PHP, ASP, Java, SQL […]

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Developing London as a Smart City

London’s Mayor recently launched a ‘Smart City’ board with a remit to develop a vision for a ‘Smart London’, which basically means figuring out how to use ides, technology and data to make the UK’s capital a leading global city to live, work and invest. London itself has always been at the forefront of the […]

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Moving towards mobile

I’m working in India at the moment. Of course, I’m trying to drink in the culture, but this isn’t a holiday so my mind is mostly on work. However, I couldn’t help noticing something. In India, it seems like everyone has a smartphone. It shouldn’t be a surprise to me to see a smartphone in everyone’s hand, […]

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