Battle for Football TV Packages heats up

With the start of the new Premier League season just around the corner, the battle between Sky, BT Vision and Virgin Media is really heating up following a ruling by Ofcom earlier this year.

Ofcom ordered Sky to reduce the price that it charges rival digital TV providers, BT Vision and Virgin Media, to include Sky Sports in their TV packages. Sky have had to reduce their prices to BT and Virgin by 20%, which now means both these providers can really compete in the market for live Premier League football.

You may have seen all three of these providers advertising hard in the build up to the new season, with BT offering the best value football package at just £29.98 a month. For this you only get Sky Sports 1 and 2, but you do get ESPN and Vision Sports which more than makes up for it. To get BT Vision, however, you need to be a BT Total Broadband customer, which may put some people off.

Sky have recruited Eric Cantona to lead their campaign, and are trying to position themselves as the only choice for the proper sports fan. They offer the full Sky Sports line up with Sky Sports 1, 2, 3, and 4 all in HD, Sky Sports News HD and ESPN for £48 a month. However you can get Sky TV with the Sky Sports Pack for £39 a month.

Virgin Media, on the other hand, only offer Sky Sports 1 and 2 in HD, but their main Fanatics Bundle does also include Sky Sports 3 and 4, Sky Sports News, ESPN and Eurosport for £50.50 a month. The Virgin Media Fans Bundle is much more competitive, however, and offers Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and 4 for just £33 a month.

It will be interesting to see who comes out on top in this battle of the digital providers. You would expect Sky to be leading the way, but BT and Virgin are now real players in the market for live Football. To compare these football package click here.

For the purposes of disclosure this is a sponsored post not written by Dan.

I came across this little gem on a forum and thought I would share as it certainly made me chuckle.

Just thought I would post this little jQuery snippet which simply updates the value of input field based on value of another. This can be particularly useful in some situations where information can be duplicated for example perhaps on a billing and shipping address form etc.

Example for standard text based input field:

$(“#src-field”).change(function () {

$(“#otherfield”).val($(“#src-field”).val());

})

.change();

I recently ran into some problems with 123-reg after taking advantage of their offer on .eu domain names and finding that the REFUSE to update the Company/Organisation field on the Technical Contact.

As they were offering .EU domains for around £1.20 I thought I would grab a few and grab myself a bargain, however I soon ran into problems when I tried to update the contact information for the domains.

As you can see below, for the technical contact on a .EU domain it clearly states that users need to contact support in order to have the Company/Organisation field for the Technical Contact changed.

So, I did as told and opened a ticket with 123-reg to have the detail changed… which they flat out refused to do – Read their reply below.

My Initial Message:

Please change the company on the technical contact from “Webfusion Ltd” to “XDnet Web Services” for the domain xdnet.eu

Thanks,
Dan

123-Reg Support Reply:

Dear Dan,

Thank you for contacting 123-reg on the 01st April 2010.
The technical contact cannot be changed. This information will remain as it is on the domain as we are the technical contact of the domain if you have registered the domain with 123-reg.

If we can be of any further help with regard to this or any other matter, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Kind Regards

Farhan
123-reg

My Second Reply:

123-reg and/or WebFusion Ltd is NOT the technical contact for my domain. You are the registrar.

I work in web hosting, I am my self a domain reseller and I know how the who is works. Please don’t BS me.

Your own system states that “* For .eu domains, please contact 123-reg support if you need to change the Company Name.” you also have support articles stating the same.

As I am the owner of the domain, and you are the registrar it is your responsibility to update the who is with the information the owner (that’s me) requires.

Please do so.

Regards,
Dan Rodgers
XDnet Web Services

123-reg support Second Reply:

Dear Dan,

Thank you for contacting 123-reg on the 01st April 2010.

I can confirm we can change the ownership details for the domain, however not the technical information unfortunately.

If we can be of any further help with regard to this or any other matter, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Kind Regards

Faiza
123-reg

Now as you might imagine, while yes the technical contact company is only a small detail, I still found it unacceptable that 123-reg was actively choosing to deny a simple request which I am more than entitled to do as owner of the domain.

I decided I wouldn’t let it rest, so persisted. And it worked.

I thought I would give 123-reg the benefit of the doubt, and thought that perhaps there might be some kind of limitation for changing the Technical Contact Company, so I went straight to the source and contacted the dot EU registry (eurid.eu) which stated:

EURids accredited registrars should be able to make changes under
registrant technical contacts and this can be done without any fees from
EURid.

So, after I established that this wasn’t the Registry, this left one link in the chain to contact – Tucows which is the real registrar behind 123-reg (123-reg are a mere reseller of Tucows).

After a couple of emails to Tucows they went through proceedure of contacting 123-reg about it and requesting the login details for my domain to the central OpenSRS management system. After no response and 123-reg still not replying to my support ticket asking for the login Tucows forced it and sent me the login details themselves.

Which provide me full management of my domain, direct with the registrar! Win!

I decided I would share this little story, both to share my anger at 123-reg’s lack of co-operation in the matter and also to hopefully show other users who may be facing the same problem with 123-reg and their .eu domains a way to have the details on the domains THEY own correct for the owners.

I would also strongly encourage people facing this problems to get in contact with the Tucows Compliance department on compliance [at] opensrs.org who can hopefully help you resolve the problem and eventually gain full management over your domain. Please also drop a comment below as I would love to hear from others facing this problem.

I recently has a interesting pondering as to if it might (theoretically) be possible to reduce the amount of VAT that you as a person pays for the normal every day goods and services we all use.

Now I will get my mini disclaimer out the way… I have not acted out nor intend to act out anything which is mentioned in this post, nor do I encourage or endorse anyone who chooses to do so after reading this.

Bottom line, I am just thinking out loud, don’t sue me if you try it and its illegal.

Anyway, as I was saying… 17.5% of pretty much everything we all buy as UK residents is VAT (Value Added Tax), however it is my understanding that companies which are VAT registered have the ability to claim back VAT on all their purchases and of course are required to charge VAT on the goods they sell.

Now as I mention I have done pretty much no research into this idea and have no clue about its legalities.

But I wonder… Could you (in theory) register a Ltd company, for example “The Company of Dan Ltd” register it voluntarily for VAT (as you don’t have to register unless your revenues are > 68K/month, but you can do it off your own back) and then instead of Dan buying all his goods and services “The Company of Dan Ltd” buys and pays for these items by means of a directors loan from… you guessed it Dan.

So now we have a company which has brought a load of stuff and borrowed money off its only director to do so, now because this company is VAT registered it can (in theory) claim back the 17.5% VAT on all the taxable goods, “The Company of Dan Ltd” can then donate/give the items it purchased to Dan.

Now, there would be other costs to consider, for example say £20 to register the Ltd company and around £500/yr to have an accountant balance the books (required).

So now if you spend more than £2971.43  [ ((£500 + £20) / 17.5) * 100 ] on taxable goods everything after that you save 17.5% and if we assume that at the end of the year the tax man goes, ok fine we owe you… £xxxx in your VAT claims the company now has £xxxx money, which of course can be put straight into your back pocket by means of “The Company of Dan Ltd” paying off some of its (probably reasonably large) directors loan from Dan.

Now the company serves no business point obviously and if this is/was legal would purely be a tax dodge, and you would eventually end up with Dan being director of “The Company of Dan Ltd” which owes Dan many 10000′s in directors loans… which Dan being the generous feller he is… can write off… leaving Dan with a company with no debts and saving 17.5% of most of the things he buys…

Now as I said in the begging I am not and won’t be trying this, but I am still interested to know if its *LEGALLY* possible or if there is some rule or legislation which would prevent it from being allowed… as always, comments are welcome.. particularly if your a business lawyer who (doesn’t want to sue me) and can provide an answer if to this is (theoretically) possible.

Google suggestion? Prostitutes.

When Googling for a street in my home town it suggests prostitutes.

I thought I would write a little review for the iPod dock/alarm clock I got for Christmas, hope this helps!

The Goodmans GCR1872 iPod Dock Alarm clock is a small stylish device which which has 2 handy alarm timings, includes a FM radio and also Aux input and output.

The alarm clock function allows for 3 types – iPod (plays iPod), Buzzer and FM Radio and the display panel also includes many brightness levels.

The sound quality is pretty good considering it only has 2 x 3W small speakers.

While I liked the Goodmans GCR1872 iPod Dock Alarm Clock I recently had to return it because the iPod connector came away from the main circuit board.

A lot of the problem I found with this product us the iPod Tocuh (Gen 1) didn’t properly clip into the mount, so I either had to not use a mount of have the iPod Touch mount improperly fitted, which probably lead to extra strain on the dock connector.

Unfortunately because this cost me £39.99 and it broke in less than 2 months, I have to recommend you avoid this product as it seems like it is poorly built in places and is not long lasting with long term use… which is a shame for such a nice compact little gadget.

So for Christmas I got a nice little iPod dock/alarm clock, and ever since I got it I have wondered why what I would think should be fairly easy integration wasn’t done which would make using the dock much simpler.

Now the obvious integration features with iPod docks are obviously the play functions (play, pause, skip etc) but why stop there?

I was slightly puzzled why I would need to set a basic thing like the time on the dock when I am plugging a device which knows the time into it! Why couldn’t it sync the time with the iPod? Surely that should be a very simple function…

Of course this extends further to things like the alarms themselves, why couldn’t they be set to the iPod alarm times?

Of course I can understand that many of these functions might be different for each iPod dock… However one of the great things about the iPod (at least the iPod Touch and iPhone) is the Apple App Store; which leads me to wonder why there can’t simply be a nice little custom App which can interact with the dock and allow the user to set the functions and settings for the dock and alarms using the nice 3.5″ touch screen display instead of some fiddly archaic buttons?!

All of this seems like simple things which would make the end user experience for using Apple iPod/iPhones with docking devices much smoother and user-friendly.

Now as with all things I am more than happy for someone to correct me if I am wrong and to hear your thoughts… So what do you think? Why is Apple/dock manufacturers missing this potential?

I thought I should make a post to shout about the system I am currently developing (Currently in Alpha) which is an alternative SMS to Twitter system – eg. You text TW followed by your message and that gets tweeted out on your Twitter account.

Now firstly I will explain WHY I have made this because I know lots of people might think, why bother, twitter already have that!

But alas, not quite. Twitter does have a UK text number, however it has a rather irritating downfall, its a Isle of Man number… so on some networks – like mine T-mobile – which do not have any special deals for the twitter number it means texting this number isn’t included in your SMS allowance and is charged at International Region 1 rates, which is 25p/SMS last time I checked! Which is a lot more than the 3 – 10p PAYG customers might pay, and a damn site more than the cost of unlimited texts.

So now you know the reason, texting this number is cheaper for some people because its properly UK based.

Now for a little bit of tech.

The way the Alpha system is currently working is very bare-bones; there is currently no front end at all and it is purely based on 2 cron jobs working with 2 databases.

My aim is to develop the system so it has a SMS Api/Gateway core, which is the part of the system which interfaces with the actual SMS gateway I am working with, so this runs and grabs all new SMS messages on my account and stores them to the core database.

I then have the SMS to Twitter part or App which then interfaces with the core system, to retrieve and process SMS messages for tweeting.

So as the text system is based off keywords eg, SMS must start with “Tw” or “dansgalaxy” to be picked up, so I register all the keywords with the gateway, and then the core system picks up all the SMS for my account picks out all the info and dumps it into a database so i can easily find and process the SMS and then you have Apps which can interact with the core database to use the SMS.

So currently the SMS to Twitter system is based on a keyword of “tw” so the App authenticates with my core system, and is then able to retrieve the SMS messages which uses the keyword of “tw”.

The system then checks the information for the SMS, picks out the senders phone number, which is then looks up in database to and finds the account holder, and is then able to tweet the users SMS using Twitter Authentication details stored in the database.

Because the system is in Alpha, currently it is very basic however I have great plans for this system and hope I can develop it into a full system where users who wish to use it can sign up authenticate the system with their Twitter account using OAuth instead of the username/password combination and enjoy a simple tool.

All thoughts and suggestions welcome.

Yes, I am sorry. This is a rant.

Recently I was recommended a site Vision2learn.com and thought I would take a distance learning/online course to build up the CV and gain a useful qualification.

Their website says about how courses are for 16+ etc so thought, great a free course! Apply online, got a huge wad of paper work in the post, after spending almost an hour, reading over and filling in all the registration forms, I called the number to check if I had to fill in one of the forms… and was told the course was only available for 19+… and the call ended pretty quickly after that.

Now me being extremely irritated that not only was I unable to do a course, which according to their website, I see no reason as to why I shouldn’t be able to do, and to have spent my time filling out a ton of paper work, much of it filling in the same thing 40 different times.

And now, it’s 2 days after I emailed them and still no response… and yet they can send me promotional emails telling me to sign up for courses!!!

Bottom line, Vision2learn which is run in connection with Somerset College suck.