Zarr issued a press release yesterday about the spam filtering service we offer to various businesses around the UK.
Within a few hours, I got a phone call from Touch FM Radio that cover most of the Midlands. I did a short interview with them, they recorded it and played some extracts this morning.
I’ve had two phone calls today from people who’ve recognised it as being me. Haven’t got a clue what they’ve said, but nice that PR does seem to work!
Zarr is one of the newer types of business where we don’t have any stock to hold, and virtually everything we do is electronic. We keep post to a minimum, we don’t have a fax, we use email as much as possible.
The solutions/sites that we develop are of course electronic too, and each site is effectively a computer program generating the webpages. Even all our brochure websites are more than plain HTML in that they have forms allowing users to make enquiries, menus dynamically show depending on where you are in the site - and we also have visitor statistics that record what each user does such as are they returning visitor etc.
Each website we develop has a core “framework” of code that we’ve spend a long time developing, and its a flexible solution and we put this functionality into each site. As an example, we have a ecommere ‘module’ that some customers assume we develop it each time for them - when infact weeks or months of work has gone into it in the past and we are reusing that previous work. It make take X sites for that to pay off, but you can also compare it to buying a car - the car hasn’t gone through all the EU emmissions testing, NCAP road safety tests each time - instead each car manufacturer spends millions of R&D, ensures it passes all the tests and then each car sold helps to make of £X of the R&D investment.
The program code that we use is our intellectual property and its well guarded and secure within our business. Due to events in previous weeks and months, for any employers out there, I would strongly recommend you do the following to guard your intellectual property as much as you can - and it this applies to any intellectual property:
If you have grounds to believe that intellectual property has been stolen, or taken without permission, suspend employees immediately on full pay while you investigate. and once you have investigated, if you think they have, go through the formal disciplinary process, plus call the police and report it as a crime.
Thats all I can advise for now - if it helps you then fantastic!
I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a while, but now its atlast safe to write. I’m a strong believer in working hard, and in general for those that work hard they will reap the benefits - although it may take some time.
What I don’t like is people who abuse other peoples good will, or are deliberately malicious in their actions.
There is a national body called Business Link who provide advice to startup and existing businesses and help them overcome their business problems. In the Coventry area, Business Link are targetted with helping some of the poorest areas, or areas that have been identified as needing financial injection to get them “better”.
Now there is generally funding available from Europe or from the government to help these businesses - but there is a catch to stop the system being abused. If for a project to improve a business comes to, for sake of argument £5000, Business Link will provide funding for 50%, as long as the company provides the other 50%.
The majority of projects that Zarr have done for Business Link are exactly along these lines where companies want to have an new online presence, or even extend their existing website. There are other bodies providing the same type of services as Business Link.
As from a few weeks ago, Zarr has “sacked” a client who had used us to get free funding money on the pretence of us doing work for them. The whole thing had gone on for quite a while (in the league of 1-2 years), but we were dupped into providing the necessary paperwork, but we never received the money and our “sacked” client pocketed it. It came to several thousand pounds that they benefited from.
This annoys me on two sides - firstly the funding money comes from taxpayers money - so people like you and me. So its short changing us. Secondly, its just utterly dishonest and a complete abuse of the system thats setup to help businesses. That money could have helped someone else who was in need of it.
There were some other reasons contributing to us sacking the customer, but I do take a small element in satisfaction that they had to setup their website again. It must have taken them time and money and I would guess quite a bit of stress and hastle.
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