Archive for November, 2009
Five miles to save the planet
Posted by Powwownowgreen in Opinions on November 27th, 2009
Chances are you may have seen the new campaign from the Government’s Act On co2 initiative. It’s not as hard-hitting as some existing climate change campaigns (check out this polar bear one!) but it outlines the simplicity in doing our bit to help in the fight against global warming.
After all, we can all drive five miles less a week, can’t we?
Well, I thought I’d prove it by cycling to work once a week. Because, at Powwownow, we like to practise what we preach. Hopefully it might make you do something similar.
We’re lucky at Powwownow to work in Richmond, a lovely part of the world (come visit us sometime!) I live roughly six miles from work – a distance I’ve always seen as a bit too far to cycle but my journey by car is often slow (as it is throughout London during rush hour). But since seeing the ad, I’ve dusted off my bike and donned the saddle once more.
And to prove I didn’t cheat, here are a few photos of my cycle ride to work this week.
A cold but pleasant winter morning
An enjoyable downhill stretch
They're not camera-shy, are they?!
I don’t want to go over the top with how much I enjoyed my cycle, but I can honestly say I felt less stressed and a lot more awake once at my desk.
So awake, in fact, that I decided to try to quantify the benefits of my new journey.
Firstly, by doing my 12-mile round trip by bike instead of car, I saved 4.32kgCO2, burning off roughly 520 calories.
My car (a Ford Focus) does around 40mpg so I saved 0.30 gallons of petrol, a cash saving of around £1.42.
So if I did that journey just once a week, I’d save 224.64kgCO2, burn 27,040 calories and save myself £75.84 in petrol a year. Not bad, eh?
What’s even more inspiring is that if all 20 Powwownow employees did the same, we’d collectively save 4,493kgCO2 a year.
And that’s what it’s all about, really. Just making those little changes. And once everyone makes these small changes, we’ll really start to see some big differences.
So what are you waiting for? On your bikes.
The Flybe Response
Posted by Louise.Rowlands in Opinions on November 26th, 2009
The One That Got Away
Posted by Buca Pearce in Guides & Useful Info, Opinions on November 24th, 2009
As a Portuguese Water Dog I’m bred to help the fisherman in Portugal pull their nets onto their fishing boats, however living in Windsor and working in Richmond (to be honest i have no idea how i arrived in either of these places) i feel a little lost. I cannot even see the sea from my Master’s house. There are lakes and rivers for me to swim in but not that many fisherman that need help pulling their nets in. I do try to help the ones with the big rods sitting on the bank. I run around them, jump into the lake hoping to aid them pulling out their catch, only to be shouted at and chased off.
So I have found myself a new job, and officially launched a new breed of dog – the Portuguese Squirrel Chaser!
Here’s my story! About three times a week I get to go for a long run through Windsor Great Park (a very beautiful place to go walking). Whilst out on my runs, I thought I would please my owner by catching him a squirrel. I know that he loves me and I felt this urge to bring him a present to say thank you.
On each run I’m presented with 3-4 opportunities to catch a squirrel. To be honest im refining my skills and until i learn to climb trees i always feel the Squirrels have the advantage, until today……….
It was about 7.30am and we had just passed Bishops Gate in the park, when out of the corner of my eye I spotted a Squirrel playing in the grass. Off i went full pelt with the taste of Squirrel in my mouth. About halfway to the squirrel i made the decision to change my approach tactics (having watched the Cheetahs on BBC 1s Life last night). I crouched down and started crawling along the ground watching the Squirrel frolicking in the early morning sun! With about 3 metres between me and the Squirrel i decided to break cover and pounce. The Squirrel was looking in the other direction and my stealth like move gave me the upper hand. With just a metre between me and the squirrel he spotted me and darted for the nearest tree, which was over 10 metres away. ‘Your mine now’ i thought to myself. The squirrel tried running from left to right to avoid my snapping jaws, but he was too slow and the tree was too far away for the squirrel to find refuge. So with one final bust of energy i had the squirrel by its tail in my mouth. It was going mad struggling around and trying to scratch me but being proud of my catch i raised my head up and turned to show my master! So happy I started bounding toward him forgetting that I had a mouth full. I let my Jaw drop open and the Squirrel was gone straight up the nearest tree. By the time I have realised what was going on it was too late. Fortunately my Master had seen his present and I had half delivered on my promise to bring one to him.
Anyway better luck on Thursday!
Fly Powwownow announces first special offer – 5,000 free conference calls
Posted by Powwownowteam in News on November 20th, 2009
As you may remember, last week Powwownow launched an advertising campaign and a new web site www.flypowwownow.co.uk in response to airline Flybe’s ad claiming that ‘Conference Calls don’t win business’. Our message is clear: you can spend hundreds of pounds flying to business meetings, or you can organise a conference call with Powwownow that costs just a few pounds. You will save time, money, and CO2 emissions by doing so.
The site and the campaign have been extremely well received and have created a large amount of buzz, and we’ve decided to take things one step further. In response to another campaign – BA’s offer of 5,000 business class flights to new and existing exporters, flypowwownow.co.uk is now offering 5,000 free conference calls for SME’s. Again, the difference is clear: the business class flights aren’t really free once you take into account taxes, travel and charges, whilst if your UK telecoms provider gives you free calls to landlines (as most do these days), organising a conference call via the instructions provided will cost your business precisely nothing.
We all love travelling. You get to see new places, meet new people, try new things. Often, however, business trips involve seeing the same old places (airport, another airport, hotel room, meeting room), meeting the same people (client, client’s boss, client’s colleagues), and trying nothing new (no time available after all). What’s more, many business decisions can be made just as easily via a conference call in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost to your business and to the environment. For all these cases, flypowwownow.co.uk is ready and waiting, and we hope you’ll take advantage of our free calls offer.
Overcoming the junk mail filters
Posted by Powwownowteam in Techie Talk on November 19th, 2009
(image courtesy of danshill)
We think we’ve done pretty well at Powwownow over the last few years. But that doesn’t mean we’ve not had our challenges.
And one ongoing challenge we’ve experienced is finding a way to avoid our communications (which are essential to how we provide our service) being intercepted by email client junk filters.
As Andrew explains in an article in today’s Telegraph, the success of Powwownow relies heavily on our customers receiving the information they need to be able to hold a conference call. Without that information, there can be no Powwownow. And the number of calls to the help desk asking for information to be re-sent suggest that it’s not a seldom occurrence.
So, while some of the big boys have the tools and the tricks to overcome the spam filters, for the little(r) guys like Powwownow, it’s not so easy.
It’s not a battle we intend on losing, however. We’ve not been shy on investing on new technology to make us compete in the telecoms sector, and we’ll continue to do so in the future.
And, if you do have trouble receiving details from us that you think you really should have received, please get in touch and we’ll do our best to make sure you do get the info you need – now and in the future.
Cake Club
Posted by Louise.Rowlands in Events on November 18th, 2009
The first rule of Cake Club……if you don’t make cake you can’t eat cake..
Here at Powwownow we like eating cake and we like a bit of a competition so we thought we’d combine the two and have a cake off!
Now the competition is simple:
- Tell the club chair you want to take part
- A list is drawn up and you are pitted against one of your fellow cake club members
- Every Monday two members bring in their offerings
- The rest of cake club blind taste them and vote for their favourite
- The winner goes through to the next round
- After knock out stages one lucky club member is crowned king or queen of cake club
There are a few rules:
- The First rule of Cake Club: if you don’t make cake you can’t eat cake..
- It must be a cake YOU have made not bought and not by anyone else
- It can be any sort of cake/ biscuit/muffin/cookie/ but must be sweet
- It is a blind tasting so keep your entry secret
- If you fail to produce a cake on your day your opponent will automatically go through to the next round
So Monday 16th November saw round one and Alena and Louise went head to head
Louise produced a walnut cake with coffee icing
Alena made chocolate brownies with walnuts and bananas
Much tasting went on
And after a hard fought competition Louise was declared the winner with 10 votes to 4.
Next week’s heat on 23rd November sees the Development team up against the sales team in the shape of
Mark
and
Neil
So tune in again next week to see what our boys cooked!
Lou x
Looking back at the Future
Apollo 11 Eagle Banner
The 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings recently got me thinking about how I imagined the future would be then and how it actually turned out.
One of the highlights of my childhood was the Apollo moon program. Whilst I am not actually old enough to remember President Kennedy pledging to put a man on the moon before the end of the 60s and, for that matter, I don’t know where I was when he was shot (I was probably throwing my toys out of my pram), I do distinctly remember both the actual moon landings and the various missions that lead up to them.
When an Apollo mission was in progress it would be the main topic of conversation and conjecture at school and must see TV in the evening. When Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon we all wished we were there with him. When the Apollo 13 mission went wrong we felt that we had a personal stake in getting them back to earth – even though allow we could do was watch and wait. If you had told me then that we wouldn’t go back to the moon after 1972, I would have assumed that it was because we had gone to Mars and then on to other galaxies!
It is hard now to convey the excitement that surrounded the Apollo program and the prevailing optimism about the future of technology that it was a key part of. Our teachers used to tell us that our main problem when we grew up would be how to fill up all our leisure time. Everything would be automated and we wouldn’t have to work more than a couple of days a week (I wish!). We believed that domestic robots would do the housework; we would get cheap, clean power from nuclear energy; food would be in pill form (I can’t imagine why I found that attractive!); personal transportation would be via jet pack or flying car; and medicine would have cured all disease. Also, I would have confidently predicted that by now we would have worked out how to teleport and to travel through time!
I may have been naive as a child but at least some of my optimism was well founded. A lot of technological advances have been made that have vastly improved both our quality of life and our life expectancy - some predictable, some not – and many technologies have been applied to things that they were never intended for! Despite all this there is still a part of me that feels a little bit cheated by how technology has developed (admittedly, mainly about the jet packs!).
Here are some of the things that we didn’t get and what we got instead:
- We didn’t get personal jet packs but we did get the Segway
- We didn’t make contact with extra-terrestrials but we did have to wonder whether the contestants on Big Brother were from another planet
- We didn’t get unlimited cheap nuclear power but we are able to buy our electricity from a gas company
- We didn’t get holidays on the moon but we did get Ryan Air flying us to places never visited by mankind before
- We didn’t get time travel but we did get UK Gold endlessly repeating the past
- We didn’t get food in pill form but we did get snail porridge from Heston Blumenthal
To provide some balance here are some technological advances that I think have improved our quality of life:
- Personal music players – I can now carry my entire record collection in my pocket
- Mobile phones – remember what is was like when you had to find a working phone box to call someone and then when you did they weren’t in?
- GPS and satellite navigation – mind you I know people who still get lost when using their sat-nav
- Super glue
- Smoke detectors – making our houses, workplaces and places of leisure safer.
- Lasers – we all thought that they’d be used as weapons but they are used for everything but – from eye surgery to scanning groceries!
To finish off here are some future technological advances that I am looking forward to (in descending order of likelihood)
- Replacement body parts will be grown in the lab – allowing acute conditions to be cured and opening up endless possibilities for plastic surgery
- Virtual reality will produce worlds that seem so real that real reality will seem less than real
- Cars will be fitted with fuel cells – they’ve been working on them for years so they must get them working soon!
- A manned mission will land on Mars
- The secret of eternal youth will be discovered – probably by Tom Hanks in a film based on Dan Brown book
- Someone will build a time machine out of a De Lorean …..
- I will get my jet pack!
Well I am an optimist!
The real cost of air travel
Posted by Powwownowteam in Opinions on November 12th, 2009
Here at Powwownow, we don’t mind a bit of honest competition. But recent advertising from the people at Flybe.com seemed a little less than truthful. So we felt we ought to take a little direct action with our own ad, published today in the London Metro.
OK, so it’s a little cheeky of us to take their ad and throw it back at them. But we felt there was something important missing in their claim that face to face meetings – and particularly face-to-face meetings that involve air travel – are ‘better’ than conference calling.
It’s not just that they were knocking our business, or that many of their statistics were questionable (more about that in a moment). It’s that they seem to think that the only cost of air travel is financial.
We don’t agree.
As you and I well know, air travel is highly hazardous to the environment. When the rest of the world is trying to do what they can to minimize the impact of business activities on the environment, Flybe are cheerfully endorsing the eco-unfriendly option. But the thing that gets us is that they don’t even acknowledge this, thereby suggesting that businesses see the monetary price of a ticket as the only factor here. If I was one of their customers, I’d be insulted.
Anyone who has read our blogs here will know that we are proud of our green credentials, and that we are not leaping onto a bandwagon for commercial reasons. Many of our customers are small, cost-conscious businesses who know all about keeping outgoings to a minimum. But they are also aware of their wider responsibilities, and are proud to ‘do their bit’ for the environment. So suggesting they don’t care is really not fair.
But what about the ‘facts and figures’ quoted by Flybe?
They say, for example, that face-to-face meetings will turn 40% of potential customers into customers, compared with only 16% without face-to-face contact. But they fail to mention that this figure comes from a non-peer-reviewed US study sponsored by two industry groups, the US Travel Association and the Destination and Travel Foundation. The latter’s website says it exists to “bolster the destination marketing profession and travel industry”. Come on guys.
Flybe go on to say on their website that conference calls simply don’t win business. Well, the fact is that you can meet far more often if you only need to pick up the phone – and you don’t need a researcher to tell you that the more often you meet, the better your relationships. And don’t forget that your environmental credentials are increasingly requested in new business tender documents. Your ecological attitude clearly matters – not just to the planet, but also to your attractiveness as a business. Since when did a poor environmental record help you win business?
And we’re not the only ones picking up on this: see also this excellent piece from the Guardian.
Horses for courses
But let’s be reasonable for a moment. Sometimes, face-to-face is best – of course it is. And sometimes – if Flybe were big enough to admit it – they would agree that it’s really not worth travelling when you can have a perfectly good meeting over the phone. The thing is that, every time you avoid travelling, you don’t just save a stack of money, you can also pat yourself on the back for doing the right thing by the planet.
We just felt we needed to put the record straight. For the sake of the truth, for the sake of all businesses with a conscience – and of course for the sake of having a bit of fun by making a parody of their ad for millions of commuters to see this morning.
PS: If you want to avoid air travel, why not register for free and start enjoying our free conference calling service yourself?
Movember Rain
Posted by Carl Pappenheim in Opinions on November 9th, 2009
When you look upon my face
You can see some hair unchained
And darlin’ when I kiss you
My lip don’t feel the same
‘Cause nothing stays bald forever
And we both know faces change
And it’s hard to use a razor
In the cold Movember rain.
We’ve been through this such a short, short time
Just since the month began
Though hairstyles always come and fashions always go
Well it takes a certain someone to grow a ‘tache today
‘Tache today.
And if you could take the time to back my facial panther
It would be all worthwhile
Raising cash for prostate cancer
(Prostate cancer)
So if you want to support us
Then darlin’ don’t hold back
Just visit our web pages
And spend some cash for ‘tache.
Workspace: the final frontier
Posted by Powwownowbizfish in Opinions on November 4th, 2009
Is your workspace holding you back?
Let me explain. Because of what we do [we're a conference calling company in case you didn't know], when we talk about business efficiency, we usually look at ways businesses can save time or money by changing their methods. But a conversation the other day prompted me to wonder whether there wasn’t an opportunity for greater efficiency staring us in the face every time we sit down to work – ie should we be doing something different with our workspaces?
Are they optimally designed? Could we rearrange things to increase productivity? I decided to research the issue, and how better than to look at the workspaces of the world, courtesy of Flickr? I had a look around and realised workspaces can be loosely categorised into groups. Which one is yours? Or, more to the point, which one would you like to be?
Techspace [courtesy of No Robotcha!]
Tech heaven. The more screens the better. And three mice [mouses?] doesn’t mean inefficiency, it means business. Note: no need for desk space to store paper. Everything is digital.
Artspace [courtesy of velluminous rex]
Form before function. Beauty before practicality. When your workspace looks this good, you can’t help but be inspired to produce better work. Ideal for people with creative jobs, large offices or simply with money to burn.
Minimalspace [courtesy of macgeek 13]
Cool. Small. Enough said.
Clutterspace [courtesy of victory island]
Back to reality. A workspace that is lived in, with a filing system understood by one person only. Comfortable, real and reassuring. My kind of workspace.
Greenspace [courtesy of subdued 7]
Beautiful. Calming. A space designed to take you away from the dirty commercial here and now, and transport you to another level. Whether it leads to greater productivity or just weirder dreams, I don’t know.
So how does your workspace compare? Look around yourself now. What could you do with yours? Would more creative surroundings help you? Or could you just do with a little tidy up? Or are you happy with your clutter – because at least it’s your clutter.
Let’s hope at least that we’ve provided some inspiration for a workspace that either makes you happier or more efficient. Or, ideally, both.
-
-
You are currently browsing the archives for November, 2009
Recent Photos
