Author: Danielle

When Amazon.co.uk launches a sale, it really goes all out. And you sometimes have to dig through a lot of rough to get to the diamonds – we learned that the hard way during the last few Amazon Prime Days.

So when we find the deals that are actually worth singing about, we do so from the rooftops. And that’s exactly the case with the Amazon Spring Sale reductions on Samsung’s awesome Galaxy Note 8 and Note 9 duo.

Click here to see all of Amazon’s Spring Sale smartphone savings

So what are the savings? The most eye-catching offers come on Amazon’s Samsung Note 9 SIM-free prices, where you can get £200 off the RRP of the 128GB model and a massive £250 off the starting price of the 512GB version. That means SIM-free prices of £699 and £849 respectively.

Happy to go back a further year for a 2017-released Galaxy Note 8? Then the saving is even more extreme. There’s a stated 39% off the usual price, bringing it down to under £500. That’s an extraordinary price for a phone this good.

So if you’ve been eyeing up new mobile phone deals and like the look of Samsung’s Note series, now’s the time to strike. The only question you’ll need us to answer next is what the best SIM only deals to put in it are!

Read more on Amazon’s Spring Sale:

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The Lexus Design Award is a big deal. You can tell that as the six finalists who, gathered in a trendy warehouse space at the epicentre of Milan Design Week, talk eagerly about their innovations. 

The ‘super six’ as we’ll call them have been whittled down from a total of 1,548 worldwide entries from no less than 65 countries. And, on the day the press got to give them a grilling about their inventions, the handful of finalist’s were also due to find out who was going to win the 2019 Lexus Design Award just a few hours later.

To be honest, all six of the finalists are winners. Just to get this far in a competition that has grown in stature since it was first launch back in 2013 is a huge boost for these innovators. Inventing things is one thing, but getting them to market is incredibly difficult, particularly when you’re often doing it under your own steam. They all seem unanimous is stating that the support from Lexus has been invaluable.

However, what adds another level of excitement to the 2019 Lexus Design Award showcase is the diversity that’s on offer. There’s the groundbreaking Algorithmic Lace bra, and Arenophile, which seeks to find a new purpose for desert sand. Flood mitigation housing project Baluto is clever, while Green Blast Jet Energy, which harnesses wasted jet engine energy to produce power, seems really promising too. 

Hydrus, meanwhile, seeks to minimize the effects of offshore oil spills whilst Solgami is an origami-inspired blind system for windows that can generate electricity and improve illumination. It’s a real mixed bag. And, perhaps surprisingly for a competition started by a car manufacturer, there isn’t much here to do with the automotive industry.

In an exercise that looked more like a speed dating event than a chance to talk to inventors about their ideas, TechRadar got to work our way around the warehouse space talking to most of the creators.

Meet the inventors

We kicked off by meeting Lisa Marks, from the USA. Her idea? That Algorithmic Lace bra. This, in essence, is a bespoke bra made specifically for women who have undergone a mastectomy. It’s been custom crafted, she tells us, using a new technique involving algorithmic patterning to make three-dimensional lace.

The idea is quirky, but undeniably clever. What’s most intriguing about the story is that Lisa, an industrial designer, has managed to blend craft research with algorithmic design in the first place. Her thinking suggests a real community-based mentality; she wants to promote sustainable methods to help craft communities.

Creating lace by hand and combining it with tech seems a bit strange, but it all starts to make sense as she elaborates on the concept. The idea is so impressive it ends up bagging Lisa the 2019 Lexus Design Award a hour or so later.

The good vibes continued as we moved on to Ben Berwick, an affable Australian who’s developed Solgami. This fascinating invention uses origami geometry to give apartment residents a closer connection to their external environment.

It’s basically a neat twist on the window blind, which helps to both illuminate poorly lit urban spaces more efficiently as well as generating electricity. It seems to be one of those ideas that, you think, must surely have been done already. Except it hasn’t. 

Given the amount of windows that exist around the globe, the invention has the potential to be huge. Berwick developed the concept initially while he was doing a Master’s degree in engineering at the University of Tokyo. It is, however, an invention that could be rolled out anywhere. Ben cites hospitals as the perfect place where he could take the idea next. 

We also met Dmitriy Balashov, a Russian entrant who specialises in industrial design. His idea is equally impressive when you consider the potential. Green Blast Jet Energy is an innovation that makes it possible to harvest the otherwise wasted energy of aircraft as they take off. Considering major airport hubs around the world have jets taking off as frequently as every minute it seems like this invention has serious potential too.

Of course, in a way having the idea is the easy bit. Jumping through the many logistical loops and making an invention commercially viable is something else entirely. It’s an issue that LDA judge John Maeda thinks is perhaps the biggest part of the challenge.

Before he became a technologist, Maeda started out in venture capital, so he knows a thing or two about finance. Raising it for unorthodox ventures isn’t easy he explains over a coffee. But, being in a competition like this certainly helps open a few doors along the way.

That’s something winner Lisa Marks will find a little bit easier having taken that prestigious first prize. “Lexus doesn’t have to do this,” she said as she accepted her award. “They could be a successful brand without it. But it shows their commitment to design and to a better world.” 

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AMD is still well and truly dominating Intel in the processor world, selling more than twice as many chips as its rival according to one retailer.

The latest stats from German retailer Mindfactory, for the month of March, pegged AMD as selling 69% of all CPUs, meaning Intel only held a 31% market share.

This is a familiar story by now, as if you rewind six months to the retailer’s September 2018 figures, AMD held almost two-thirds (65%) of the market. And that has increased slightly since, with AMD at 69% in November, shifting 16,000 units compared to Intel which managed just under 8,000 sales.

In these most recent March statistics, AMD sold around 13,000 units compared to Intel’s 6,000, opening up the gulf even further.

Of course, we can’t judge the overall market based on sales figures from one single retailer, but it does give us a fair idea of the lay of the land, and we can also take the historical perspective into account. In recent times, Intel’s sales have remained relatively flat at Mindfactory, whereas AMD has picked up huge momentum, selling twice as many CPUs in November 2018 as it did in November 2017.

As Wccftech, which highlighted the figures, points out, this is now the third quarter in a row in which AMD has outsold Intel’s chips, making the former’s domination of the market pretty clear-cut (at least from this relatively limited perspective).

Gremlins in Intel’s works

AMD has clearly been buoyed by its competitively priced Ryzen processors, and equally, Intel has been held back by production difficulties with its latest silicon – particularly stock shortages of more affordable CPUs (with its manufacturing issues, Intel has chosen to focus more on high-end models, as they carry more of a profit margin).

Which was the best-selling processor of all at Mindfactory? That would be the Ryzen 5 2600 six-core CPU, the 2600X spin of which is our pick for best mid-range processor currently.

Intel’s top-selling chip was the mighty Core i9-9900K, believe it or not, despite its cost, which reinforces what we were saying earlier about the firm’s shortage of low-end CPUs.

Therefore it’s not particularly surprising to hear that if you compare revenue rather than unit sales, AMD is only just in the lead, accounting for 54% of the money flowing into the German retailer’s coffers. So Intel is barely behind in terms of profit rather than pure numbers of CPUs shifted.

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Sometimes it’s better to have a program that’s just superb at just one task rather than one that does a lot of things in mediocre fashion. In this case, I’m talking about the $45 R-Drive Image, which does everything related to imaging of disks and the related tasks, but leaves file-base backup, syncing, etc. to the competition.

The reward for the laser-like concentration on is the most reliable imaging I’ve ever come across, not to mention a very lightweight system footprint.  

Features

R-Drive image creates image files of disks and individual partitions, that is, it creates a bit-by-bit exact copies of the contents of your drive, including the layout and boot sectors, all written to one handy container file that’s easy to store and archive. While file backup saves your important data, images are used to recover your crashed system to a point in time so you can get back to work more quickly. Not to mention, recovering all that optimization you did to get things just the way you like them.

As R-Drive Image also supports Apple’s HFS/HFS+ files systems, it can also be used to protect Macs, including those running Windows under Boot Camp. The Windows partition isn’t protected by Time Machine. You’ll need to do this from the boot media, but that can actually be fun in this case. Alas, the newer APFS isn’t supported, but the company informed me that is in the works. 

Okay, I have a weird idea of fun, but accompanying the regular GUI version of the recovery app is a character-based one. Boot from the USB/CD/floppy boot media (yes, floppies) that R-Drive Image will creates, and you can both intimidate and amaze your friends. 

IDG

The R-Drive Image interface isn’t fancy, but it’s pleasant enough to look at, and logically steps you through the tasks. 

IDG

The program also sports a clone function and nicely, will do both incremental (all changes since the last backup) and differential (all changes since the initial backup) imaging. Scheduling and scripting are provided, as well as logging though you must open the About dialog to enable it. Not the first place I’d look, but as there’s no dedicated settings dialog…

There is one ability I personally miss and that’s the ability to create .VHD files or .ISO. Why VHD or .ISO? Simply because they can be easily mounted on Windows, and in the case of ISO, any operating system, to recover files without the need for the proprietary software that created it. 

Call centres have a bad reputation among customers, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

There’s no such thing as an average day in a call centre. For starters, no two customer queries are the same. 

This makes resolving complaints and improving customer satisfaction an ongoing challenge – and the key to success is how organisations invest in overcoming this challenge.  

When good is no longer good enough

The call centre might not be at the core of a business, but it will always have a major impact on the firm’s overall success. A negative call centre experience can affect a company’s brand reputation, its customer retention and its bottom line.  

Customer expectations have never been higher; we’re a nation of consumers who are more likely to complain if a service doesn’t meet the high quality that has come to be expected. The best call centres aim for more than ‘satisfactory’; they are looking to provide exceptional customer experience. Unfortunately, for companies and customers alike, high-quality experiences are the exception, despite six in ten organisations seeing customer experience as a key point of difference between them and their competitors. 

The problem is that companies are failing to act on their own aims. While 92% of companies cite their customer experience as a top priority, more than half of call centre customers rate their experiences from “very poor” to just “okay”.  

Why change has to be more than skin deep

As shown above, a well-run call centre can make a big difference to both a business and its customers. So, how do companies go about achieving the high-quality interactions they need? How do they improve their existing customer experience?  

It’s tempting to start with the frontline staff as they’re the people who actually engage with the customers. However, this ignores the underlying problems with how the company works. Any analysis carried out by the leaders on the actions of their staff has to spark real change throughout the business. If not, what’s the point?  

Another problem is assuming that call centre workers have the right tools for the job in the first place. If the case complaints management system is not fit for purpose, there’s no chance of even the best employees being able to deliver high-quality customer experience. 

Bringing the conversation together 

Many call centres struggle with their customer experience because they still work in the past. They still operate on a business model built around a time when voice calls were almost the only way to contact a company.  

Today, tech-savvy people who communicate in different ways dominate the workforce (and customer base). Customers now expect to have access to companies via many different channels (including social media), while employees expect to use systems that facilitate (and link) these multi-channel conversations.  

Customers can have more than one interaction with a company’s call centre – often with many agents and sometimes across more than one channel. If the call centre team can’t bring individual interactions together then customers could become frustrated, which could in turn threaten your brand reputation. 

Many companies believe their call centres have the right tools and systems in place to support their teams, but there’s no guarantee of actually making the most of this. How can they be sure their people have access to the right information at the right time (while also restricting sensitive data)? How do they know that their customers are happy with their experiences? How do they know reports are creating insights that make the business more competitive?  

The answer to this is that companies can never do too much when it comes to checking their processes and assuring quality. Focusing on QA in a call centre is vital. It reveals where teams can improve and gives leaders an accurate overview of how the business is operating. Effectively, it tells companies everything they need to know. 

Quality is the assurance customers need 

The benefits of effective QA are clear. Accurate information and transparent processes improve loyalty among both customers and employees, which becomes easier to achieve because QA encourages businesses to become more data-driven. It reduces the instances of mishandled interactions and provides useful insight to avoid a recurrence. 

Similarly, the real-time nature of QA information means companies can spot costly mistakes before they have an impact, with employees also being more likely to buy into the process, knowing it is has a clear framework based on up-to-date metrics. Even better is the fact that QA works alongside existing case management solutions. Rather than requiring a costly replacement, QA improves both the use and analysis of the systems in place, allowing companies to take a step back and gain a clearer picture of how their call centre works (or doesn’t, in the worst-case scenario).  

Assuring a high-quality customer experience

There’s little doubt that QA will have an immediate effect on a business. While the long-term plan would be to completely reshape the way the company works, leaders and employees alike will most definitely notice results straightaway. They’ll soon see the difference it has on customer interactions and, eventually, they’ll see the positive impact it has on brand reputation. 

The changes don’t have to end there, though. With responsive, insightful tools, companies will have the ability to go even further, changing existing call centre practices and even the entire business culture to provide the best customer service. The key is to create a call centre experience that exceeds customer needs; a business that keeps its goal in mind will undoubtedly find it easier to achieve, with the difference being between knowing exactly how to improve customer satisfaction and having almost no idea at all.  

So, what’s the plan for your business? Do you want to learn from your mistakes and create a better customer experience, or would you prefer to stay in the dark about your performance?  

The choice is yours…

James Wood, Director Of Business Development, EMEA & APAC at Aptean

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Openreach’s fibre to the premise (FTTP) network is now available to more than 1.2 million homes and businesses.

BT-owned Openreach is embarking on a major build of FTTP, with ambitions to reach 10 million premises by the middle of the next decade. It has pledged to expand the scope of this rollout if the investment conditions are right.

The rollout is supported by the government, which wants 15 million properties to be connected to fibre by 2025 and wants nationwide coverage to be completed by 2033. It would then consider switching off the UK’s copper infrastructure.

Openreach FTTP

Openreach CEO Clive Selley said the company is on track to reach its initial target of three million homes and businesses by the end of 2020. In total, it is connected more than 14,000 properties every week.

“Since the launch of our build programme last year we’ve made huge progress – honing our skills, tools and techniques, driving our costs down and helping our engineers to go ever further, faster and more efficiently,” he said.

“Last month we announced plans for Salisbury to become the first entire city in the country to have access to our FTTP network – in what is expected to be the fastest city-wide network build in the UK.

“But it’s not all about being a fast builder, we’re also keen to encourage fast adoption. We recently launched a consultation with industry to decide how and when we upgrade customers to this new future-proofed digital network

“None of this would be possible without our engineering workforce – which is why it is fantastic to see so many new people wanting to join the country’s largest team of telecoms experts working to expand, upgrade, maintain and install services over Openreach’s national broadband network.”

The next stage of rollout will focus on Northern Ireland, with Armagh, Bangor, Ballymena, Greater Belfast, Coleraine, Derry-Londonderry, Enniskillen, Lisburn, Larne, Newry and Newtownards all earmarked for coverage. This brings the total number of ultrafast locations up to 38.

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