Wandering around the steets of London, I came across this excellent initiative from Camden Council on how to use QR codes on street furniture. If you see that a light - or anything else - is damaged, you can scan the QR code and report the issue. There's even a phone number and vanilla URL for those who aren't quite up to speed with new technology. There's only one slight issue - the QR code points to this site. The fact that the landing page isn't mobile friendly is bad enough, but…
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I'm not a big fan of URL shortners - bit.ly, t.co, goo.gl, ow.ly, etc - I understand the need for them, but they seem to offer a fairly poor service in terms of privacy and usefulness. Take this recent example from Vodafone. Aside from the obvious downsides (user doesn't know where the link will take them, if it's compatible, link looks like gobbledegook, etc) there is a rather more interesting issue. Goo.gl - along with many other URL shortners - give everyone access to your statistics. …
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As we enter another NaBloPoMo - where I try to write a blog post each day in Novemeber - I thought I'd take a look back at how this blog has developed. On Friday, October 30, 2009, I switched on WordPress statistics so I could get a better idea of what was popular on my site. My average traffic back then was 80 visits per day. Not bad for a backwater blog. Since then, my writing has been getting better (I hope), my content has become more interesting, and I've had several stories which have…
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One of the great things about publicly blogging for the last 5 years, is that I can remind myself of what I was doing this time last year. Or several years ago. The Terence Eden of October 2009 was a busy chap! 22 blog posts! What a guy :-) One post which caught my eye recently, was asking "What are the browser statistics for 10 Downing Street?" Here was their answer UK Prime Minister@10DowningStreetReplying to @edent@edent Top are: IE7 22%, IE8 20%, IE6 12%, Firefox3.5.3 9%, FF3.5.2 7%,…
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No, I'm not talking about Masabi's innovative technology, but of this rather odd bit of advertising found on the back of a train ticket. There's no specific call to action - but there's not much space to play with. Let's give it a scan... sigh A non-mobile site. With an Adobe Flash plugin in the top right which won't work on any iPhones. Why on Earth do marketing companies insist on pointing phones to non-mobile sites. It really bemuses me. Stations rarely have good signal (too many people …
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At the start of 2012, I revealed how many scans TfL's QR campaign was getting. A lot of comments on Twitter & Google+ dismissed these results as a success. A typical response was: 70 scans a day? In a city of millions? Rubbish! This fails to address something that advertisers are conspicuously loathe to reveal - the true "response rate" of any advert is hard to calculate. How many phone calls, visits to a website, or SMS interactions are directly attributable to a regular poster? No one …
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There was a lot of interest in my recent post about TfL's QR statistics. Today, I present to you three very different QR codes and their statistics. These are all taken from the Metro newspaper on Tuesday January 10th. Wowcher First up is "Wowcher", a big quarter page advert on page 28. Wowcher's statistics show a consistently good performance with QR codes. Between 30 - 80 scans per day, and 87 yesterday. Sparks Next is a QR code for "Sparks Marathon" tucked away on page 50. Sad to…
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Last year, I suggested that TfL should use QR codes to point to their excellent mobile countdown service. Looks like someone was listening! I spotted this poster at a tube station. Nestled in the corner is a QR code pointing at the mobile bus countdown service! This is a close-to-perfect use of QR. Points to a mobile site. Easy to scan code. Good call to action. As I suggested in my original post, TfL could customise the code, or print a separate one for each bus stop. …
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There have been howls of protest from Labour voters at the prospect of a Lib/Con coalition. The main complaint is that anyone daft enough to vote for Clegg has caused a Tory government. But is it true? Using data from The Guardian, we can see if the Lib Dems cost Labour a majority. In how many seats did a Labour candidate lose to a Conservative? 137. But this doesn't tell the whole story. In Clacton, even if all the 5,577 Lib Dem votes had gone to Labour, the 16,376 is still well short of…
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There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand statistics and those who don't. ±8. Ever since I took GCSE and A-Level statistics, I've had a healthy appreciation for the way they are presented to the public. I vividly remember my grandmother shouting at the television one night. The news presenter had said "20% of people polled - that's nearly a quarter..." Before she could finish, my grandmother loudly interjected, "Nearly a quarter? It's exactly a fifth!" The way people …
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