Please enter your passcode and press the pound sign!

There is probably a whole book on US v UK differences, but I keep hearing this one on calls to the US and I just don’t understand it – why do Americans call this “#” a pound sign – I always think “£” as a pound (sterling) sign or “lbs” for pounds as a weight measure. Is there another sort of pound? I'd call # a hash sign....!

More for less

In corporate life I used to commission work from many different types of contractors and used to judge their value by looking at the ROI or business benefit their work produced, cost was of secondary importance provided there was a budget available. We had some great results along with some disappointments, overall I am quite proud of my achievements.

Now in a small business every penny counts and there are no budgets as such - so I have found it necessary to delve into contractors’ time and materials and learnt a huge lesson as a result.

You can do so much more with so much less, and how much better would the ROI have been if I had dived into the detail and understood the minutia of the work – the devil is as they say in the detail.

Dog Tricks

How does the saying go: “teaching old dogs new tricks” or “teaching new dogs old tricks”? It must be a function of age but it just seems like same old tricks keep coming round and round again – just dressed up with a modern spin. It’s obvious in cover versions of pop songs and remakes of old movies but it shows up in business too like “the customer is king” now we’d talk about “the consumer being enabled by web 2.0 communications”.

Great Animation

Thanks to my friends at Signals with some audio help from the podcaster at Focus Biz Sharedband has a really super flash animation that explains how it benefits customers and a simple overview of how it works.

If you find flash is choppy or poor quality then you could probably do with Sharedband service, so meanwhile best to download the exe file and view it at your leisure!