My father and I have been trying for some time now (around 20 minutes) to direct my grandmother to the power button on her new HD ready LCD flat screen television.

The power button is hidden on the leftmost edge of the television, behind is a component input.  We have been unable to point this out to her.

But this made me think.  How could the television have been designed better?  Of course it could have had better placed and more tactile buttons but the television could have been networked.

Consider this, a range of electronic devices, such as PVR’s, DVD players, televisions – even microwaves for example all networked together and connected to the internet.  I would be able to establish a connection with my grandmother’s house.  I could invoke the device and command it remotely, i.e. turn the thing on.

Now, that’s all right if you have a family member who is computer literate enough to manage that.  Let’s consider that you do not.  The answer is to have a home monitoring system, just like you get for alarm systems.  When you have a problem, you telephone up and the representative assists you.

It would take a lot of work but the networked home optimised for the aged could, one day, be a reality!

©2008 The Blog of Ross C Brown. All Rights Reserved.

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I must have fallen asleep a few years ago as my favorite British company is now going into Software.  Tesco, your local grocers is going to be launching a line of competitively priced software applications such as firewall and CD burning as well as photo editing software.  I am sure that they obviously read one of my blog posts from a few months ago when I suggested that software companies stop worrying on the value of sales but the volume of sales to make their money.

The software titles have been developed in association with Formjet Plc - presumably that means Formjet made them and Tesco placed their bold logo on the splash screen.

I doubt that they will be able to bring out an image editor that poses any threat to Adobe, but seeing the titles are priced so competitively I may as well buy them and try them out.

Lets forget about software and think more about Tesco for a moment.  I headed over to their website today to research this post and I was surprised at what I discovered.  Tesco are now offering insurance, telephone, cellular, broadband, and legal services.  Not only are the offering that, but they have a movie rental business as well as an offshore trading division to beat the prices of Play.com on DVDs and CDs by a few pence.  Its Super Marketing if you ask me.

And despite everyone one hating them, the still managed to make £1 Billion (£1 000 000 000 (about £65 a second)) profit in six months.  I sure wish I had shares in Tesco!

Oh, and people, please stop getting angry at Tesco.  There seems to be a terrible British attitude to the successful.  If you ask me, well done Tesco!  If you are an independent retailer, ask yourself how Tesco started and raise your game to compete with them, don’t come crying to me!

If you are intrested in learning more about the Tesco Software there is a nice website for you:

• Tesco Software

©2008 The Blog of Ross C Brown. All Rights Reserved.

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