Irreverent Thinking

Some of you might know what a jubilee clip is - it’s the rather clever clip that uses a worm-drive to tighten a flexible metal band around, typically, a pipe but they are widely used in other applications and, much like a Hoover, is a trade name that has moved into common vocabulary. So what, you ask?

A couple of days ago a car racing buddy of mine was approached by the owner of the “Jubilee” trademark as he had made reference to the said clip on his re-build project. The owner, one L Robinson & Co (Gillingham) Limited, made a threat that if the clip was not one of their’s then the poor blogger would have to remove any reference to the word “jubilee” in the post.

This seems particularly heavy handed. Here is the full text:

Dear Charles

It has come to our notice that your website blog mentions “jubilee clips”

For very many years L Robinson and Company (Gillingham) Limited have been the owners of the well known registered trade mark JUBILEE for hose clips and as such we have the exclusive right to use that mark in the context of hose clips. It is therefore unlawful for any unauthorised party to use JUBILEE when referring to hose clips unless such clips are of our manufacture.

We are therefore interested to learn whether the hose clips you mention on your website are indeed genuine Jubilee clips or hose clips of a different manufacture. If the hose clips are genuine Jubilee clips we are always keen to investigate any problems our customers experience with our product, and we would be happy to receive further information and samples. We assure you that we will look into the problems that you may have experienced and return to you with a full report.

You will appreciate that the trademark JUBILEE is of considerable value to us and if the clips are not Jubilee clips we must ask you to make immediate arrangements to correct your website blog (and any other material which needs correction) by removal of the word JUBILEE. This can be replaced by a reference to the manufacturer’s name and/or to a generic description such as “worm drive clips” or “hose clips”. Failure to carry out this request will mean we have no alternative but to place the matter in the hands of our Trade Mark Attorneys, Withers & Rogers.

This is an important matter and we ask for immediate confirmation that you have complied with our request

Regards
Chris Bunting
cbunting@jubileeclips.co.uk
JUBILEE® CLIPS
L Robinson & Co (Gillingham) Limited
Owens Way, Gads Hill, Gillingham, Kent ME7 2RS, England.
Regd. England 451655

Made me chuckle - the fruitful pastime of trawling the web to find minor trademark violations. They seem to be getting all “web-aware” late in the day, I also note the Wikipedia entry for Jubilee clip is marked for deletion as being an advertisement.

Note: I do not condone the abuse of copyright, trademark etc and all trademarks used within this post are recognised.

I’m quite a convert the rather natty Dolce Gusto one-cup coffee machine and I also rather like their points system that rewards repeat purchases via a pretty interactive (but slow) web-site. I even don’t mind the barrage of emails that *seem* to arrive from them on a regular basis - I call it Bacn rather than spam!

Despite logging-up my points online I hadn’t quite got round to ordering any capsules as I was a) not sure if they would deliver them to my work address b) even though I had reward points to get capsules I still had to pay for delivery which stuck in my throat a little and c) the price online was exactly the same as in the shops. So the arrival of today’s email was a blinder, they were offering half-price on the capsules I buy so I rushed to the site within a minute of the email arriving and tried to order a whole load of them. Imagine my surprise and disappointment when the site advised me that they were out of stock.

Grrrr, was this a cynical marketing ploy to get me to return to the site? Was it a geniune mistake? Did the site apologise or even mention the offer? This is bad, old-world-manipulative marketing - from an era that I thought had died out. Do Nescafe suck? Well, at 10:30am this morning they certainly did. I took a few moments to send them an email explaining (ranting?) my annoyance at this approach so I’ll keep you posted on the reply I get back from customer services.

Internet Explorer 6 is still haunting most web development companies, seriously hamstringing future development but I notice the killing of the last-century browser has a new advocate .Net magazine with their bring down IE6 campaign.

Hooray! Matt Cutts (of Google fame) twittered this today and you can follow .Net on their twitter mission to rid the world of browser evilness.

There is a lot of (twitter?) going on at the moment about Twitter. I’ve watched this grow over the last year from an obscure geek-thang to become the latest place for the big-brands to go jumping (spending) into. Jennifer Van Grove has done a pretty useful summary of the 40 Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them and it’s showing some promise but the big news (for me) is that some of these (really?) leading edge Twitter brands only have a few hundred or maybe a thousand followers! They might be leading edge in terms of thinking but in good old fashioned terms such as market penetration, reach and eyeballs - they are nothing more than a tiny digit in the digital shallow-end. The twittercelebs manage a little better, Tony from Zappos manages a very respectable 30k+ followers whilst our quaintly (read:english) eccentric Stephen Fry manages a brand-busting 300,000 followers.

I’m not sure what this actually says about Twitter, I follow both Stephen and Tony (@Zappos) and it has to be said that Stephen’s travel-based micro-blog seems to a far better read and much more insightful than much of the swamp-leakage that comes out of the corporate world - besides, I really enjoy reading/seeing Mr Fry’s quirky and infectious commentary on the parts of the world he is in.

It’s interesting to see that Facebook has come over all democratic in it’s approach to communications. Probably a backlash from the very poorly communicated re-design last year but this time they are sharing their plans early and are almost looking for pseudo  voting on what they should do whilst at the same time admitting they still plan to “introduce disruptive technologies”. Where facebook goes longer term must still be a quandary for them but it’s nice to see they might be listening to wisdom of the crowd.

Cheers Dave, he’s done a thorough but impartial review of our work on his seminal conversion-rate blog. Specifically he has reviewed the Ultralase site and it comes out as “I do use these example of good practice when discussing improvements with my clients or delegates on training courses”. A glowing reference indeed. Ta!

About a year ago we made the big step to move most of our business applications onto the cloud. This was a good thing and came directly off the back of a huge internal mail migration failure. The world became good and calm. Then today it seems that Google’s webmail client has crashed. 2 hours so far and counting…and oh, the irony, I can still send and receive email on my iphone!

Last week we got an (anonymous) card through our office door…”you were sent an item with insufficient postage…blah, blah”. I’m sure you know the ones, anyhoo, our commercial director popped out this lunchtime to pick up this (potentially) important package. As it turns out it’s a spam package (read: bad marketing thinking it’s clever) containing a pointless “stress” ball. We had to pay £2.24 excess postage and…the best news is that this is the first in a series of 4. I look forward to receiving the next three from iomart hosting - Easyspace your friendly hosting company who lacks a clue.

It’s official, they are added to my official “They suck” list, straight in at number two.

As 2009 really starts to get under way there is a realisation that many “internet technologies” have so seamlessly slipped into everyday usage; twitter, msn, email, FB etc but there is a whole supporting “outer-ring” of technologies and usefulness so today I thought I would raise my glass to TinyURL.com who, for free, convert 1 billion crappy long URLs every month into easy to see, click, type URLS. So much so, I’ve donated $10 to them. Cheers guys

Twittering does generate a lot of crap, pointless noise that I spend almost no time reading/filtering out so it’s a little like being a classic car fan standing on a bridge on top of the M1 hoping a nice Jaguar E-type will happen along but in the meantime being stuck watching hundreds of rep Vectras ploughing up and down.

So how about a tag/tick box when you twitter to mark it “legendary” and then others vote on that status. F*** My Life - FML : Your everyday life stories seems to capture the essence quite nicely although does focus on laughing at other’s misfortune - is there anything wrong with that?