Author: Shaun

Categories
Rants

20Twenty: The Lost Soul of Banking

So Standard Chartered Bank, in their infinite greed, er, wisdom, have decided to sell off online bank 20Twenty.

If they do manage to sell the service to another bank, it will be 20Twenty’s third owner in 4 years. And yet 20Twenty customers are still as fierce supporters of their bank and its low costs and impeccable service as they have ever been.

It is so sad to watch a bunch of loyal customers having their money be screwed around with by some stupid multinational third-world wh0ring bank who were only interested in buying an easy banking licence in the first place.

Unfortunately I’m one of the loyal customers. Fuck Standard Chartered for fucking with us.

SWANilicious post – My First Firefox Extension

So yesterday I discovered SWANilicious (sorry, Sun employees only) .
SWANilicious is Sun’s internal implementation of de.lirio.us, an open source equivalent to the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us.

Of course, having used the Firefox del.icio.us post plugin for quite some time I wasn’t really willing to go back to using a javascript based bookmarklet to add links to SWANilicious.

So I took apart del.icio.us post and changed it into SWANilicious post.

So I’m proud to announce SWANilicious post version 0.1.
Download it here.

I’ll be working in the near future to make this a more generic de.lirio.us posting extension, but it seems to work fine for now.

Speculation on Google Sun Partnership

Right now the levels of curiosity have been driven sky high into what will be announced by Google and Sun later today.

Both external and internal to Sun at least.

My money?
I place it on something along the lines of Google Sound/Music Search.

A kind of music referral service, if you will – “the software likely wouldn’t be sold separately, but instead be added onto its servers” and resold to the Napsters and iTunes of this world. The theory fits in with Jonathan Schwartz’s software service and delivery ideas, although not very tightly.

But that’s just a guess.

We’ll see.

Enter Stormhoek Disruption

Well, it’s done. My market has now officially been disrupted by Stormhoek through my blog and gapingvoid.

A bottle of Sauvignon Blanc was delivered by Kempen Wine Merchants (who seem to have a good range of wines they trade in).

Here’s the proof: (with my own genuine gapingvoid marketing note imitation)

Stormhoek Wine Blogger Freebie

Ok I didn’t get a number or a leaflet – that’s Hugh’s department, but I got the juice. And besides, I know I’ve got Limited Edition Bottle Number 1 of x for South African bloggers.

I guess you could say that the cluetrain just pulled in at my station.

Thanks to Graham and Stormhoek, as well as Hugh Macleod.

A review to follow soon…

Dreary Leery …

Leery playing at Charelli’s. All right I guess. They didn’t blow me away though. I’d think twice before going to see them again.