The Widget UK Blog

As Widget is now the exclusive distributor of the Bebook Electronic Book Readers in the UK, I packed the unit into my case when heading off on a business trip to the Netherlands last week.

Once again, Widget is in the final cut for Specialist Distributor of the Year Award at the CRN awards this year.

The final award is decided by voting from the IT industry on the Channel Awards website.

Anyone working in a computer related industry can vote, but you must vote from a company email address, not a hotmail, yahoo or googlemail email address.

Please help us win this trophy by going to the  Channel Awards website and voting for us!

SMS Text news writers have seen the Pocket Surfer 2 advertised on Reading station and have pronounced it fine for Normobs - apparently a normob is a normal mobile user.

Pleased to see the adverts are looking good. I’ve been playing with the PocketSurfer for a while now and I really like it — in the context of a normob...  read more

Unlike a TV campaign, the roll out of an outdoor advertising campaign is more gradual as they can't change all the posters you have booked at once. Since the new PocketSurfer 2 posters have been going up, Widget and Datawind staff have been taking unusually long tube routes to work to see different Underground stations, or walking up and down the length of a whole platform, spotting the adverts we have placed.

Here is a link to our Flickr account showing a variety of the posters we have snapped.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pocketsurfer2/sets/72157604670140788/

The PC Retail Awards at the Café Royal in London were attended by more than 300 industry executives, including Mark Needham, Managing Director of Widget UK, seen here presenting the trophy for Best High Street Multiple Retailer to Mike Khalfey and Helen Keppel-Compton from JLP.

Mike described the award as 'an acknowledgement of the hard work, dedication and passion for products of the selling and buying Partners'.

Widget were sponsors of this award, as part of its committment to retail in the consumer electronics sector.

This year, for the first time, Widget is in the 'Hot 100' a ranking of private UK companies by the magazine Real Business. As part of the process, I had to be interviewed by, possibly one of the more junior members, of the editorial team.

I told the interviewer that the most popular product we sold was TomToms.

"What's a TomTom?," she asked.

It seems a long time ago, but when Widget first started selling for TomTom in the UK, I was constantly asked this question. When I explained what a satellite navigator was, people were often sceptical about whether GPS would work.

I suppose that being asked this again is a sign that market saturation is still some way off for GPS! 

After a PC Pro magazine reviewer compared the PocketSurfer2 unfavourably to a Microsoft Windows Mobile device, reader Ben Calascione wrote it to offer his view.

"I've been waiting a long time for a way of getting mobile internet acces, and have made a few expensive mistakes along the way," he wrote in a letter published in PC Pro issue 161 dated March 2008, "so after waiting all these years, I think you're a bit harsh on the PocketSurfer 2. It is really expensive at £180 for the device and one year's subscription. The alternative you offer, the HTC TnTN II weighs in at more than £400. Add web access costs at £20 a month and you're pushing £700 for the first year. By my maths I could buy a PocketSurfer, throw it away after 12 weeks and still be better off."

Having been a reviewer, I know that this is exactly the sort of maths journalists never have to do - they are normally loaned kit, and frequently get devices where someone else is paying for the airtime. Readers who have had to pay their own money to get a device often have a much better appreciation of value than review journalists.

Partly because TomTom is a European company, GPS devices are one of the technology areas in which Europe leads the US in adoption. One of the results is that US stock analysts pay a lot more attention to trends in the GPS market here in the UK.

So this morning, when DSGi (Dixons as was) reported that sales of navigation devices "are down slightly year on year'' in a conference call, I found out about it from an early rising stock analyst in California.

The comments puzzled me as well as him. As a distributor or wholesaler of TomTom and other GPS devices we see a lot of the market and our sales of GPS devices are up significantly year on year, both by value and even more by volume. Price erosion has been harsh, and customers are ever more demanding on delivery and price terms, but the market we can see is still growing in the UK. 

A few weeks ago one TomTom executive told me that market penetration for GPS was still only around the 20% level in the UK, so if this is true there is still a distance to go before the UK market reaches saturation point.

At the tail end of last year, the Pocket Surfer had a very good write up from the Financial Times columnist, Jonathan Margolis, who described it as a pocket internet device that I actually think has to be the most remarkable new product of the year, the Apple iPhone included."

“It gives you broadband-speed internet on a proper colour screen anywhere in the UK, more or less free, using basic phone networks rather than fancy 3G...[It] is head and shoulders above the iPhone when it comes to mobile web access.”Sales, as Mr Margolis predicted, have been good, but the age distribution of customers has been much different to that which we expected.

I have in front of me a letter from a 69 year old customer in St Helens, Lancashire, who says that he bought a Pocket Surfer from us on December 24th. "I then telephoned you on the 27th December for some advice on how to use it," he continues. "Although I was on the 'phone for about 9 minutes I still can't seem to get the hang of it." In conclusion he asks us to print out the manual from the DVD from him as he does not own any other computer and cannot therefore read the manual.

This is not the only such call we have had. When we planned some elements of the product, such as the manual on DVD, we expected more customers who would write to us in text speak than customers who put an apostrophe before the word "phone".

For the second year running, Widget has appeared in the Sunday Times Fast Track list of Britain's 100 fastest growing private companies.  This year we are in there at 36, with a compound annual growth rate of 95% over three years.

This year the Sunday Times commented that "this Hertfordshire distributor hopes it has hit the jackpot for a second time by winning exclusive distribution rights in Britain to Pocket Surfer, a handheld devices that allows users to access the internet direct."

Becoming TomTom's first UK distributor was the factor behind the growth over the past three years, and while Pocket Surfer is now the fastest growing part of our business, TomTom is still growing sales value, albeit at a rate of 20% - 30% per annum rather than the 95% we were experiencing.

Marketing Director Mathew Jones, seen relaxing above, is a committee member for the Biggleswade and District Scout Group, and led two tables of Widget staff and guests to the Scout Fundraising Ball last Saturday.  With the help of his dulcet tones on the microphone, the ball raised over £2,000 for the Henlow Campsite Appeal.

Thanks again to everyone who helped

 

Between December 2003 and March 2006, I wrote the Real World Computing column on PDAs for PC Pro magazine.

Here is a list of the articles published and their contents, which possibly rather belatedly, I have put on the Widget extranet so that they are available to the public.

The articles are at  http://extranet.widget.com/resources/images/PC%20PRO%20articles/

RWC PDA 113 published in PC Pro March 2004
Subjects covered Palm OS Pocket PC

RWC PDA 114 published in PC Pro April 2004
Subjects covered. Cloudmark spam trap, Bluetooth – the growth path, fatuous technology ads.

RWC PDA 115 published in PC Pro May 2004
Subjects covered. Wifi on Pocket PC, Boney M: We remembered Psion and wept.

RWC PDA 116 published in PC Pro June 2004
Subjects covered. Palm OS Cobalt, BT broadband and bandwidth, Password Plus.

RWC PDA 117 published in PC Pro July 2004
Subjects covered. Eric Benhamou: PalmSource Chairman, Vialta videophone, wireless connectivity limitations.

RWC PDA 119 published in PC Pro September 2004
Subjects covered. Psion Teklogix Netbook, Windows Smartphone, linkedin.com.

RWC PDA 120 published in PC Pro October 2004
Subjects covered. Email software, email collecting, Bluetooth Blues.

RWC PDA 121 published in PC Pro November 2004
Subjects covered. PDA market, push email, Battery Pack Pro, Bluetooth yet again.

RWC PDA 122 published in PC Pro December 2004
Subjects covered. Treo 600, Tom Tom car kits.

RWC PDA 123 published in PC Pro January 2005
Subjects covered. Pocket Informant, Elogbook.

RWC PDA 124 published in PC Pro February 2005
Subjects covered. SpinVox, Mobiluck, Dell Axim X30, Bluetooth Blues unfairly accused.

RWC PDA 125 published in PC Pro March 2005
Subjects covered. Data security, Blackberry software with phones, 3G downloads.

RWC PDA 126 published in PC Pro April 2005
Subjects covered. 3G phone usage, MindManager.

RWC PDA 128 published in PC Pro June 2005
Subjects covered Data Access

RWC PDA 129 published in PC Pro July 2005
Subjects covered Software Oscars

RWC PDA 131 published in PC Pro September 2005
Subjects covered Pocket PC Mp3 players

RWC PDA 132 published in PC Pro October 2005
Subjects covered T5

RWC PDA 134 published in PC Pro December 2005
Subjects covered Email and Podcasts

RWC PDA 135 published in PC Pro January 2006
Subjects covered PDA market

RWC PDA 136 published in PC Pro February 2006
Subjects covered Mobiles

RWC PDA 137 published in PC Pro March 2006
Subjects covered Mobile phones

RWC PDA 138 published in PC Pro April 2006
Subjects covered Smartphones

RWC PDA 140 published in PC Pro June 2006
Subjects covered WEEE issues

• Main
• archives
• Albums
• Links
• Admin

• Of Management and Millbands
• Byte Night 2010, October 8th 2010
• Widget in the FT
• DAB Radio: Chronicle of Death Foretold
• Writing Blogs and Writing Hymns
• Using Social Media tools in Marketing Technology
• Pogoplug makes impact at new price point of £79.99
• Mio updates its Navman range of GPS devices
• Opportunity for more channel involvement in Byte Night, the IT industry annual sleep out.
• BBC's Working Lunch reviews the Vexia Econav Satnav

• General [74]

• RSS 0.90
• RSS 1.0
• RSS 2.0
• Atom