Another good video produced by Scofield Editorial, very accurately demonstrating the difficulty in negotiating a price for a product between a vendor, such as a SaaS vendor like Letopedia, and the client; shown here using real world examples. The client who either wants to make an identical product themselves, or use your product for free. Watch it here or on YouTube.

People are moving in and moving out, all the time, these signs tell us that people are on the move. This movement is the livelihood of the letting agent. But they are also a subtle reminder of the state of our economy. Those empty offices and homes, unwanted, spell a downturn for the economy. The closed shops is the end of someone′s business dream.

From anyone who has lived in rented flats knows, these signs are either never taken down after you move in, or show up 3 months before you move out!

These ‘To Let’ signs appear on the side of buildings, in our streets, up and down the country, and even overseas like the picture above. As a monument to them, we've created a rather niche group on Flickr, simply entitled ‘To Let Signs’. There are literally thousands of photos on Flickr alone of To Let signs, many of them comically defaced to become ‘Toilet’, it is a challenge for photographers to take something so ubiquitous and make it look good, in the way that photography does.

Considering how common these signs are, you would have thought some effort would have gone into their design, the sad fact is that they are all nearly identical, and very same. Perhaps it is time that someone came up with a fresh take on the sign.

Many people react to these signs as being a sign of the times. With all this recession and economic down turn, especially in property and housing, these To Let signs have sprung up everywhere. Even once large corporations now have shrunk down their offices. For example, BP closed down its Environmental department that had it's own office and moved them into their HQ, because there was so much spare office space left there after all the lay-offs.

The feedback so far has been fantastic, the group is less than 15 hours old, and already has over 100 photos added by it's new members. We′re going to add a rotating feeds of the new photos to our journal in the sidebar.

Join our Flickr group ‘To Let Signs’ and add your To Let Sign photos.

Here are some favourites...

A very motivating animation commissioned by Grasshopper, a Voip provider in the US, about how people can come and make the world easier. This is our objective with Letopedia, through using the technology to make the daily lives of workers in the lettings industry easier, and to ensure that it is also done sustainably. Watch it here or on YouTube.

The guys over at fixoutlook.org have sent a clever message to Microsoft complaining over their choice to use Microsoft Word as the HTML renderer in Outlook 2010. Their decision to effectively cripple their Outlook software has angered developers, as the result is that Word does not support standards based HTML, and will make our lives very hard, if not impossible, when it comes to sending formatted emails to Outlook users.

In just over 3 weeks, their campaign has gained the support of nearly 25,000 people, including Letopedia, but Microsoft continues to back their decision. Although we only use web-based email systems in house, and have had a very positive experience with Google Mail for Google Apps Premium, we would never go back to using Outlook, but many people we email as part of the use of our software will be using Outlook.

The mosaic is being sent to William Kennedy, VP of Office at Microsoft, in an effort to reverse his decision; it is composed of all the avatars of all the users that took up the issue, and our Twitter avatar will be in their somewhere, we wish them good luck with their campaign.

This is our avatar as it appears on the mosaic.
follow us on twitter to see it!

In response to the article Can Enterprise 2.0 Afford to be Boring? by Venkatesh Rao...

I have mixed views to your article.

I agree, that all standard business/enterprise work is boring, but I don't think Enterprise 2.0 is boring, if anything, it should make things more interesting (when done properly).

There are 2 things that Enterprise 2.0 software should do to make work less boring.

1. It should replace a human task, and the software should do it itself. This includes crunching numbers, analysis. For example, a company ordering system that automatically places a new order with the supplier when stock is low is an example of something done by Enterprise 2.0 systems, that before would have had to be done by a human, and that is a boring task.
2. Enterprise 2.0 software should also make work transparent, as in the data and information we manage as part of our business lives should be seamlessly connected between our daily tasks, and between our colleges. CRM systems, online billing sites, call centres, sales peoples mobile devices are all able to connect and share the same data with Enterprise 2.0 software, something that was impossible before it came about.

Even the the UKs biggest supermarket Tesco has an API for people to write software for now, an Amazon has had one for years, and in their case has resulted in additional sales. The UK popular bookseller Waterstones, actually used Amazon to run their own branded website via an API for years instead of running their own, this is an example of something achievable with Enterprise 2.0 semantics.

So work is very boring yes, but Enterprise 2.0 can be a solution to that. Good interfaces are the beginning of jazzing things up.