What’s IT all about?

I am a member of an online networking group called Ecademy. It’s a useful forum for a number of reasons. In theory you might expect it to be a source of business leads, but it doesn’t really work that way. Instead I find it is a good source of information an encouragement from fellow business owners, a place where support is freely offered in the expectation that the favour will be returned should it ever be required.

One particular aspect of Ecademy that I recently found useful is the ability to run polls. First, though, a word of warning. As a forum for entrepreneurs it is certainly worth bearing in mind when interpreting Ecademy poll results that you are mainly talking to a very distinct group of people, i.e. owners of very small businesses (1 to 5 people). There are exceptions, but my experience is that there are a lot of one-man-bands on Ecademy

Bearing that in mind, I asked a very simple question - “Do you use Skype?”. To date there have been 71 responses, thus:

Yes, for personal calls only

6%

Yes, for business calls only

10%

Yes, for both personal and business calls

59%

No, but I use another VoIP solution

7%

No, I only use landlines/mobiles

18%

Now I will reiterate that it is a very ad-hoc poll to a very select group, and difficult to draw conclusions from. However, I find it interesting in a couple of ways. Firstly, Skype usage is pretty high, which reflects a surge in it’s popularity on Ecademy over the last six months or so. So there appears to be broad acceptance of the benefits of VoIP as an alternative, or at least a companion, to more traditional telephony, with 82% of respondents using Skype or another VoIP solution.

The second interesting aspect, for me at least, is the preponderance of Skype over other VoIP solutions. This is almost certainly affected by Skype being the de-facto standard for VoIP and, increasingly, IM on Ecademy. But it may well also be a reflection that, for small businesses, there aren’t many effective, business-oriented, affordable VoIP solutions.

So why this poll in the first place. Well I will blog more in days and weeks to come, but it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that I have a potential solution for those small businesses that want enterprise-grade VoIP without the enterprise-grade cost. More anon.

Well, I’ve finished the travelling phase of the project and am finally back and have a chance to catch up on my thoughts. I have certainly learned one or two things whilst I’ve been visiting just about every major city and town in the UK which I would like to share with you.

1. I need a new laptop. The 6 year old Toshiba that has served me well just isn’t up to the challenges any more.
2. Travelodges may have very cheap rates for overnight stays (if you book far enough in advance), but they make their money in other ways. £7.50 for breakfast is extortionate, and don’t make the mistake I did and use their dial-up internet access. Having said that, overall they were a good choice for the 25 to 30 overnight stays I had…they’re clean and you’re not paying for stuff you don’t use.
3. Ubiquitous wifi access is some way off. I stayed at one hotel with free wifi (not a travelodge but rather a very nice B&B in Plymouth - The Dudley Hotel), a few where one could pay for wifi, but most of the time it wasn’t an option.
4. The TomTom software I bought for my Palm Lifedrive paid for itself many times over. However, it was not perfect, and I never could get the traffic updates to work (although I think that was more down to my Palm not wanting to talk bluetooth to my phone when the TomTom app was running).
5. Town centres across the UK are all pretty similar, or if not aspire to look similar.
6. Scotland in January is bloody freezing

Anyway, now I’m back I’m in a position to progress some exciting new stuff that I will be blogging about over the coming days and weeks, so watch this space !