Winking at the moon

If there was an icon of human potential in my childhood then I guess it was two things: the Saturn V rocket and Commander Neil Armstrong.
I'm old enough to have seen the fuzzy, barely legible black & white broadcasts of the Apollo program, and to have stared in wonder at those first footsteps on the moon.
The Apollo 11 mission and Armstrong's giant leap for mankind made you believe that the world could be about the art of the possible.
Armstrong literally had the world at his feet. Yet the true mark of the man was that even though his 'first' was something no one else could ever repeat, he never exploited it personally.
Only as an advocate of scientific research and exploration did he ever speak out.
The news that he's died at 82 has a real poignancy to it, partly because it feels like a piece of my childhood has gone, but also because we're still waiting for the next big thing in terms of human space travel.
The message his family put out is a perfect tribute to a great yet modest man:
"For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink."
I can't see the moon right now but the next time it's out we should all remember July 1969.

MIPIM: What next for Nottingham?

Back in March, I was lucky enough to hitch a ride to MIPIM, the international property, investment and economic development expo which takes place in the agreeable surroundings of Cannes.
I went with Team Nottingham, the informal group of surveyors, architects, civil engineers and other property professionals who kept the city's flame burning on the international stage after the city council decided it could no longer justify a yacht in Cannes harbour at a time of cutbacks.
While I can guess at the politics behind this decision, it left Nottingham looking a bit small town compared to the UK's other big cities. Team Nottingham has tried to overcome that for the past couple of years by paying for key officers from the council's development and inward investment teams to come with them.
Their presence added value to discussions about potential deals, and helped put the city in the spotlight when a major inward investment was announced and an award for being a key European business city was handed over.
But how will Nottingham tackle MIPIM next year? Getting your presence right takes months of planning and it has to take some key decisions very soon.
The first is what Team Nottingham is. Should it remain an informal group of property businesses using the city's name and opportunities as a hook to try to develop relationships and opportunities? Or should it go back to being what every other city at MIPIM is - an official delegation led by a figurehead where business and officials unite around a purposeful message?
And can Team Nottingham stay at the compact size it's been for the past couple of years?
The answers aren't straightforward. And it isn't just the existing Team Nottingham that has some thinking to do. The city council has to decide whether it's serious about one of the single biggest inward investment events in the world.
With a £600m tram expansion, a £140m fast road to the motorway, a £60m City Deal, a £60m transport interchange, an Enterprise Zone and a major push for a creative quarter all signed off, a half-hearted presence would be like building a moonshot and leaving it on the launch pad.
In short, it has some serious bragging rights and tangible opportunities rather than me-too CGIs. And worries about council staff being seen near flash yachts can be forgotten. What Mipim is - and isn't - is now well understood where it matters.
It clearly wants to influence the future direction of Nottingham's presence at MIPIM. So what is it bringing to the table in terms of resources and ideas?
As for the current Team Nottingham, it will struggle to maintain its compact size, especially if the city council comes back on board properly. The council can't support a closed club, and the Team sorely needs greater resources if it is going to raise its profile. More team members ought to mean more resources whether that's cash or in kind.
This is a sensitive issue for some Team Nottingham members, who probably feel the work (and money) they put in to keeping the whole show going for the last couple of years entitles them to either sectoral exclusivity or a better deal than latecomers.
The biggest question of all is what kind of profile Nottingham wants at MIPIM. Derby appeared to have a bigger budget and a slicker presence in March. But that presence was very traditional and ended up looking and sounding similar to a number of other English provincial cities, who seem to think samey CGIs and weary 'open for business' slogans are all you need.
Nottingham mustn't fall into that trap. Nor does it need to: it has some genuinely unique opportunities in the shape of tangible, properly financed projects rather than political pipedreams. A shoestring presence and me-too messages will sell those opportunities short.
There has been the odd hint sometimes that the city council doesn't see this kind of event as important, as if it is blinded by the glitz and doesn't appreciate the number of high-level decision-makers who lie behind the show - decision makers whose millions deliver jobs and growth.
Sure, there are aspects of the show which seem overblown and distasteful. But that is only one part of it and isn't where the real business gets done.
The city doesn't need to spend a fortune ( though the price of hotels and apartments means a yacht is actually a cost-effective presence). It can be smart rather than showy. But MIPIM is a stage - and Nottingham has to come out from the wings and step into the spotlight.
Come next March, Nottingham, and it's show time.

Virgin Mobile gets into a sticker situation

What is it about Virgin and its unfailing ability to rescue miserable defeat from the jaws of a simple victory?
If you’ve seen Simon Dare’s blog, you will have come across a succession of problems with Virgin Media and Virgin Mobile, where an issue crops up, Virgin promises faithfully and sincerely to intervene at the highest level…and nothing much happens.
Add my daughter’s Virgin Mobile to the list. In one fell swoop Virgin has ensured that it will lose a customer and that poor old Blackberry, whose commercial woes are bad enough as it is, will be avoided like the plague.
In the process, it’s also hidden behind unfair and unreasonable assumptions, but we’ll come on to that.
My eldest daughter has a Blackberry Curve on a contract bought through the Virgin Mobile shop on Clumber Street. It’s gone without a hitch until this summer, when the phone started to freeze regularly.
The Virgin shop said this wasn’t uncommon and suggested we try to update its software. Bad move: it froze permanently and wouldn’t reboot. Still, it was under warranty.
So, I called Virgin technical support and they decided it should be sent off for either replacement or repair. It would, I was assured, be a straightforward process which would take only a few days.
As Simon Dare’s experiences have shown, ‘straightforward’ doesn’t mean the same thing to Virgin’s customer service procedures as it does to you or me.
Today, I took a call from Donna in customer support (who was unfailingly polite, by the way). She explained that the manufacturer (i.e., a Blackberry technician) had looked at the phone and seen a mark on a sticker inside the back of the phone.
On that basis, Virgin concluded that someone might have gained “unauthorised access” to the phone, there was a risk a “third party” might have fiddled with it, and – who knows – may be they caused the fault? Therefore, The Warranty Will Not Be Honoured. Hurrah for Virgin Mobile – that’ll be a flat fee of £50 to have your phone repaired, please!
No. It won’t.
Let’s dissect this ludicrous scenario.
1) I have no idea what the mark on the sticker was. Virgin could get hold of a photo of the mark but said it wasn’t their policy to show the photos to customers! The only way I could see it was if they sent the phone back to me, still broken. Fail Number 1
2) The user of the phone is my 13 year-old daughter. While she’s certainly intelligent, she doesn’t know one end of a circuit board from another and, as far as I’m aware, has yet to study electrical engineering. The idea that she – or anyone else – “tampered” with it somewhere between comedy and defamation. Fail Number 2
3) Virgin Mobile has no evidence that the phone has actually been tampered with. It has simply concluded that this “might” have happened. And with a mountain of non-evidence in its possession it has decided not to honour the contract. Great business ethics, eh? Fail Number 3
4) £50 to repair a two year-old basic Blackberry? They’re worth buttons…Fail Number 4
5) I asked Donna to escalate my complaint, so she went away and spoke to someone. The answer was depressingly, pathetically predictable: rules are rules. Fail Number 5
6) Congratulations – you’ve finally reached the end of the process and the customer has been lost! Fail Number 6.
I put across the insanity of this whole scenario to Donna, but she – and her supervisor – appeared to be imprisoned inside a process which had decided that the chance of a quick £50 based on some threadbare assumptions was better than keeping a customer.
This isn’t a story with a happy ending. Simon Dare’s experiences tell me nothing will come from Virgin Mobile (unless you know otherwise, Graeme Oxby). And my daughter has a spare phone, not her Blackberry. They’ve let down a child.
We are, at least, wiser in two ways. The contract with Virgin Mobile won’t be renewed because it can’t be relied upon and its idea of customer service appears to be that the customer is guilty and will serve Virgin Mobile. It decided to walk away from a warranty on the basis of unfair and unreasonable assumptions for which it did not have conclusive supporting evidence.
A lawyer would rip it to shreds. So, I suspect, would an electronics engineer.
And my daughter’s next phone won’t be a Blackberry. They appear to wear out and be prone to strange marks on that immensely complicated component called ‘the sticker inside the back’. These marks can cause your phone to be unusable and expensive, it seems.
Bye-bye Virgin Mobile. It’s not been nice doing business with you.

Government fiddles while economy burns...

There’s an ominous lead story in today’s Financial Times which suggests “senior government figures” are discussing whether they should buy out the remaining privately-held shares in Royal Bank of Scotland and fully nationalise it.
This would be an enormous step and, in a government led by the Conservatives, a surprising one.
It’s important to note right from the start that the story doesn’t quote a single named minister, but a series of euphemisms for high-level sources – ‘ministers and officials’, ‘some at the top of government’, and ‘one official’.
This smells to me like a story that has been floated by either political advisers to a minister, a senior Whitehall mandarin, or even a Lib Dem member of government.
These discussions are said to be drive by government ‘exasperation’ at the barriers banks continually put in the way of lending money to business.
That exasperation is almost certainly shared by business.
But I’d be amazed if this government nationalised any bank unless we lapse into another global economic crisis.
It flies in the face of Tory philosophy, would be hugely complicated, and the idea that government could force a state-owned bank to do things other banks won’t or can’t throws up all sorts of competition issues – never mind leaving the taxpayer exposed to much greater risk.
It would also take ages before the nationalisation process was complete and the state-owned bank was able to miraculously turn the financial tap on.
Nor would it alter three fundamental problems faced by our economy.
The consumer appetite for credit which lay behind so much of the boom expansion just isn’t there. Consumer credit markets have been shrinking. Some of that may be because cheap credit is not available, but so many people are still paying down debt.
Many businesses are reluctant to borrow, particularly that breed of privately-owned firm which hates the whole concept of ‘working for the bank’. For some of them, one of the key issues is not so much the cost of borrowing as the cost of basic facilities.
Then there is the stupefying spectacle of the eurozone’s inexorable crawl towards the next bit of sticking plaster, with one fix after another leaving markets pretty much convinced that the EU looks likely to fall apart like a melting icecap.
The problem for government is that, despite all this, it needs to be seen to do something. It’s actually floated plenty of initiatives – ranging from the Regional Growth Fund to yesterday’s Funding For Lending programme.
But they are progressing at a glacial pace – partly because government itself dismantled some of the very structures which used to get money spent at the grassroots (think East Midlands Development Agency).
Neither is it marketing and communicating some of these initiatives properly (here again, it got rid of the long-established Central Office of Information, which had a presence across the regions).
Banks are a problem. So is the expectation that there are quick fixes to enormous structural economic problems which go well beyond these shores – throwing money at our economy won’t make a key export market any better.
But nationalising RBS would be a government fiddling while our economy burns.