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Proofing and subediting are tricky, demanding and under-rated skills.
Still, the time to find and listen to those skills would be <thinks> before printing thousands of carrier bags</thinks>.
Then again, maybe not.
Let the presses roll. Oh, and see if we can find St Christpoher’s Place on Google Maps…
UPDATE: I’ve shown this to 8 people, none of whom found the typo without prompting.
This is a great idea. It’s become axiomatic that there’s a skills-shortage in ecommerce, but a less-well documented problem with the explosion in ecommerce is the lack of entry-level, junior skills.
Such has been the growth that experienced ecommerce people are now looking at senior management paygrades, but there’s not been the investment within companies to grow the skills of young, generalist people, or those from other disciplines, to become the ecommerce practicioners of next year.
This initiative answers two problems for businesses:
What will the graduates do?
“What’s included for free on our Graduate Academy:
- 3 day residential training placement in July at Reading University
- 15 days of distance and online training during August
- A further 2 days residential training at the end of August at Reading University
- Free access to www.e-consultancy.com for the period of training
- Guaranteed interviews with leading companies”
We’ll take a look at the progress of the Academy in more detail in InternetRetailing, but in the meantime this is a very welcome initiative and sure to be oversubscribed.
Mike Butcher’s recently covered the “Feta” (cheesey ‘beta’ pun – excellent) release of Forkd – a fun community/mashup offering for online foodies.
The pun extends beyond the ‘drop all vowels’ approach of flickr, mosaiqr etc and builds on the interesting notion that an individual recipe may ‘fork’ (as in ‘branch’) as well as be approriated (the very visual ‘forking’ of something from another’s plate).
I particularly like the idea that instead of just ‘rating’ or ‘collecting’ recipies the idea is that you amend, develop, improve and share again.
This is a typically rounded, interesting and polished offering from the good folk at Isotoma (sorry, I mean by “Internet veterans Doug Winter and Andy Theyers”). Heh.
Cheap international mobile calls at Rebtel
I was facing an hour-long conference call yesterday, dialling in to a US access point. I didn’t feel like stiffing my client with a humungous phone bill and as usual I’d left the various headset/handset options for Skype somewhere in a dusty cupboard. Ordinarily, I just shout at the laptop from the privacy of my home office, but this wasn’t an option in an open plan office…
Enter Michael Ross and a text message to check out Rebtel. Wonderful!
I signed up for a $10 credit, getting another $10 free on top and then the magic kicks in.
Via the website one can “convert” an international number to a UK geographic number (ie “free” in effect since my airtime bundle on the iPhone is massive). This must then trunk the call to the US over VOIP network bandwidth to a US POP near the destination phone number. The call from the virtual POP to the ‘real’ number is then a (free) local call. So – a bit like Skype except:
There are some cunning touches: enter a phone number via the website and it’ll send the access number by SMS. Neat. One click to call.
Clearly, there’s an overhead in terms of storing a “Rebtel equivalent number” for each international contact, but this is a small price to pay for the absolute joy of chatting virtually free. The other downside is that the service is less attractive while roaming (since the value of ‘local’ number reduces significantly when it’s not part of one’s free airtime). Furthermore there’s not a ‘static’ incoming number (cf the SkypeIn number), but I’m not being fair here since Rebtel is a service for mobiles, and as such it’s wonderful.
Oh, did I mention it was cheap? Yesterday’s call was 25 minutes and the cost was <drumroll> 16cents </drumroll>. Yes indeed – 8p.