I’m very pleased to announce that revenue from adverts on the transfers pages of our Airport Guides network (http://www.heathrow-airport-guide.co.uk/taxi-transfer.html) has now reached in excess of £10,000 a month.

We’ve been very close to this target for a few months now so it’s a great personal achievement to finally surpass this figure.

What I’ve Done:

Here are three simple rules we use at Fubra that I believe have helped me achieve this goal:

Ensure Lead Quality – There is no point in contacting a company whose advert won’t perform well on our site. An irrelevant advert would not benefit from our services properly. It would also disrupt the experience for users as they are using the site for their own needs.

Before initial contact I first confirmed that the potential lead provides a relevant service, in this case airport transfers, and also that they operate to or from the local area.

I also discovered that our advertisers, as well as the users of our A.G sites, benefit greater from a wide choice of transfer options. Taxi, chauffeur, minibus and coach all provide a different service and between them cover all needs a potential customer may have. I now aim to get a variety of travel companies advertising, not just taxis.

Even a couple of limousine and coach companies have advertised with us!

Assist Customers/Advertisers – Although our subscriptions include no fixed contract, I always aim towards building a long-term partnerships with each of our advertisers. The best way for us to do this is by helping them build a successful advert and proving our competence when an issue or query arises.

We also closely monitor the performance of each advert and are always willing to share the stats we have for an advert with the advertiser. We would also help an advertiser try and improve the efficiency of their advert if needed.

I believe that advertising is trial and error, and I often suggest trying a few different structures to find out what works best for each companies’ advert.

Welcome Feedback – All input helps us make the decisions to improve our sites/services. If there’s a problem (negative feedback), we can take it on board to resolve the issue in the most rewarding way for all involved. All positive feedback is used to boost my confidence and give me job satisfaction.. So thanks!!

The really positive comments also make it onto the Testimonials page of our sites:
http://www.heathrow-airport-guide.co.uk/testimonials.html

For those of you who aren’t familiar with AffJet, it’s an application for affiliate marketers which aggregates all of your affiliate marketing statistics in one place for easy network analysis and bigger profits.

Below are some screenshots of the new designs, and you can read more about the changes we have made, or try it our for yourself at AffJet.com.

The G Cloud framework is a way that the UK Government buys services to ensure that all companies have a fair chance of supplying UK Government and to make sure that the UK tax payers who fund the Government get the most economic solutions.

Applying has been a positive experience and there have clearly been a number of government employees who have worked very hard to open up the process and engage more with businesses. We are now going to try engage positively as well and make sure that we can provide a high level of service and listen to the Government requirements as we would with an ordinary commercial customer.

The Government has defined their requirement using 4 lots:

1. Infrastructure as a Service
2. Platform as a Service
3. Software as a Service
4. Specialist Cloud Services

They estimate that the total value of services that they are going to buy under this agreement is a massive £60m and the Cabinet office has today launched Cloudstore a dynamic online catalogue there were a mix of SME’s and larger companies approved in this first round have listed details of their services. There were 258 successful applicants in this first round.

Government buyers interested in moving to the cloud have been instructed that the services are commodity services and there is no need for the suppliers to enter further competition to win business – a whole new approach to government procurement.

Prices for the CatN vCluster are from £5 per month + overage fees. The cloud platform service allows customers who buy it to host web sites and mainly targets customers using WordPress but the underlying technology is highly advanced and can be used to host any IT service.

The CatN DBMS service from £25 per month plus overage fees is a specialist service for hosting high transaction MySQL database instances which may be required by government departments who are launching high traffic web sites such as ePetitions where they expect to make heavy use of SQL databases.

These terms are exactly the same as our usual commercial terms and this has ensured that Government buyers can ensure they are getting good value by buying in the open market at rates already paid by commercial customers.

We first became involved in Government work when we decided to use the data released by the cabinet office around page hits and costs for running government web sites to showcase our PaaS technology platform. We migrated the department for transport website to our servers using scraping technology and then modelled the costs of hosting it you can read our blog about it here and a recent update one year on here.

We are now looking to get approval for working with Government at IL3 or perhaps above which is a government security measure but while we make preparations for our application we are still able to host government web sites and systems at the lowest impact level.

We believe the shift in the way Government procures IT services could fundamentally change the industry and save UK tax payers huge amounts from the current estimated £16bn IT spend which is flowing predominately to large contracts which lack transparency.

We are confident that if both spend and focus from Government is directed towards innovative SME IT firms with useful cloud products and services like CatN then this could provide huge economic benefits for our stakeholders and the UK at large and we look forward to being a part of this shift.

Since October, Google introduce a clause in their usage terms that states that if you do go over 25000 user sessions a day then they can start charging you a fee for use. Not such a big deal some may say and Google did note in their developer blog…

Based on current usage, only the top 0.35% of sites will be affected by these limits, meaning that the Google Maps API will remain free for the vast majority of sites.

— Google Developer Blog

On the usage statics from a post last year on their blog that means 1225 sites will be affected (probably more).

One of our sites, World Airport Codes, is one of those sites. I suppose it’s nice to be thought of as one of the 0.35%, but not so good that the costs of using Google Maps on this particular site would be more than it earns in advertising revenue.

So our search for a replacement started!

There are a number of solutions out there that still offer a free service, you just have to look and take into account that they may not have as much functionality as Google Maps offer and a different library to work from, but with a little work and some real thought, they can be just as good, if not better.

Our solution for World Airport Codes was two fold; a Javascript map API and a map tile service.

Javascript Map API

For the Javascript map API we went with CloudMade’s Leaflet as it’s lightweight, simple and open source. It’s also one of the nicest looking APIs out of the box both looks-wise with the navigation being very simple and contemporary and it’s implementation Javascript giving Google a run for it’s money. The only issue on the initial use of Leaflet, for us, was that they do charge for commercial use of their map tiles, so we had to have a look at a different map tile provider; which Leaflet makes very easy to implement just by changing one URL.

Map Tile Service

The most popular source of map tile data out there is OpenStreetMap; we also found that, in some places, it’s updated more frequently than Google Maps thanks to the open community that a few of us at Fubra have already contributed too. The issue we did file with using OpenStreetMap tiles directly was that of a shallow one; they’re just not that pretty…

Open MapQuest uses data from OpenStreetMap but adds it’s own style to the maps that we think looks better than Google’s. And the other thing is it’s free! Open MapQuest ask that if you are going to load more than 4000 tiles per second then to email them with your estimated usage. This, I believe, is to do with making sure their servers can cope and that your not going to be a resource hog. On top of that you must include a snippet linking back to them saying they have provided the map tiles.

They do look great and provide a level extra level of information missing from Google Maps such as coastal boarders, a relief map and airport runways (helpful for World Airport Codes).

Putting it Together

If you want to use Open MapQuest tiles in Leaflet then all you need do is change theses lines of code:

var cloudmadeUrl = 'http://{s}.tile.cloudmade.com/YOUR-API-KEY/997/256/{z}/{x}/{y}.png',
    cloudmadeAttrib = 'Map data © 2011 OpenStreetMap contributors, Imagery © 2011 CloudMade',
    cloudmade = new L.TileLayer(cloudmadeUrl, {maxZoom: 18, attribution: cloudmadeAttrib});

To something like this:

var	cloudmadeUrl = 'http://{s}.mqcdn.com/tiles/1.0.0/osm/{z}/{x}/{y}.png',
	subDomains = ['otile1','otile2','otile3','otile4'],
	cloudmadeAttrib = 'Data, imagery and map information provided by <a href="http://open.mapquest.co.uk" target="_blank">MapQuest</a>, <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/" target="_blank">OpenStreetMap</a> and contributors, <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/" target="_blank">CC-BY-SA</a>';

var cloudmade = new L.TileLayer(cloudmadeUrl, {maxZoom: 18, attribution: cloudmadeAttrib, subdomains: subDomains});

What we are changing here is the attribution text (which is longer) and adding the new URL to grab the map tiles from and setting an array of sub-domains for faster loading. That’s it really.

We now have a map that used to look like this previously with Google:

Our Google Maps previously

But now with Leaflet and Open MapQuest it looks like this:

Now with Leaflet and Open MapQuest implimented

If you want to learn more about working with Leaflet then check out their documentation page and for more on using Open MapQuest tiles as well as other services then head over to the developer page for that.

Other solutions

Our solution for World Airport Codes works perfectly for what we want it for but others may want more, or just want to check out other mapping solutions. Here’s a list of those alternative solutions for Google Maps and notes we have taken in regards to their usage (in no particular order):

• Ovi Maps – Yahoo! now use them for their mapping solution, but there is a clause in their terms that says usage “may be or may become subject to charges” (see point 9)
  
  

  Ovi Maps

• OpenLayers – a completely open source project from Open Source Geospatial Foundation released under the FreeBSD license
  
  

  OpenLayers

• OS OpenSpace – a mapping API project developed by Ordnance Survey, but only UK mapping data is available and you are limited to loading 65000 map tiles a day
  
  

  OS OpenSpace

• Bing – the main competitor to Google but comes with more restrictive usage of “125,000 sessions or 500,000 transactions in a 12 month period”
  
  

  Bing Maps

• MapQuest – I’ve already spoke about them, but they do provide their own APIs to use and have the best license info we found
  
  

  MapQuest

Hopefully that will help provide more ideas for using something other than Google Maps for your web app. If you have any other alternative solutions then please feel free to leave a comment!

Marble Solar is a new business dedicated to the design and build of commercial and residential solar power panel systems. It is a collaboration between Fubra Limited and the directors of the Marble Group, a construction firm we have invested in.

Working with our friends at Bytewire over the past 2 months we have built, what I believe to be, one of the best solar PV estimation tools available online.

Step 1a – Enter your postcode

Step 1b – Draw your roof

Step 2 – View estimated income

Step 3 – Book a survey appointment

The estimator allows you to draw an outline of your roof on Google Maps, and select the orientation. It will then propose a suitably sized system for your roof, and uses either SAP 2005, or NASA solar irradiation data along with panel efficiency information to estimate the amount of electricity you could generate from the system over the course of the year. This data is combined with financial data such as Feed In Tariff rates and some assumptions on future price inflation to give you a projection of the amount of income and savings the system may generate over it’s lifetime.

For me, it’s great to see what our network of small companies can achieve when we work together.

Last week he took his PHP 5.3 Zend exam and passed, which now makes him a Zend Certified Engineer. Ollie’s 16th birthday is not until the end of July, so at just 15 years old I think he must be one of the Youngest Zend Engineers in the world. Do you know anyone younger? If so, leave us a comment.

We offer several partnership options to sellers, but the one I’ll talk about here is where we sell their home furnishings directly from furnish.co.uk, just like a marketplace. For example, a customer finds a coffee table on furnish.co.uk from a particular seller, adds it to their basket, checks out and pays, all without visiting the seller’s own website. The seller is notified of this and dispatches the coffee table to the customer. We take a commission on the sale.

A legal minefield
Technically, this is relatively simple. But it’s a legal minefield if done the wrong way. Any business that takes payment for goods becomes accountable under the Sale of Goods Act 1979, Distance Selling Regulations, etc. Several websites such as Not On the Highstreet appear to do precisely this with home furnishings; they take payment from the customer, pay the seller a proportion of this and keep the rest. They then attempt to contract out of their statutory obligations in their terms and conditions, insisting that it is in fact the seller who is liable in the event of problems. However, in my view and that of my solicitor, if this were ever legally challenged, it would fail. Legislation to protect consumers cannot be ousted by private agreement. It’s the equivalent of those shops who put a “No Refunds” sign in the window. The situation is that, like it or not, if a company accepts payment for goods, there’s a whole load of legal baggage that comes with that. In the eye of the law, they’re a retailer and there is nothing they can do to change this.

Paying the seller, not us
The only way to remove legal liability is for the customer not to pay us at all. They must pay the seller, who then quite rightly takes on the legal burden, and we charge the seller our commission afterwards. For this to work transparently, we need to perform some technical magic such that (1) the customer’s user experience of paying feels normal and natural, even though they’re paying the seller rather than us and (2) the whole process is automated, so we don’t need to get involved in manual invoicing and placing orders for home furnishings with sellers. In this way, it feels almost identical to if the customer paid us directly, except we avoid any legal liability. We do this as follows.

Paypal API
Every seller that comes on board must set up a dedicated Paypal account. If, say, a customer buys some modern furniture on furnish.co.uk and checks out, they’re taken to the seller’s Paypal page, not ours. The customer feels comfortable with this, as they just see a Paypal page. Nothing abnormal there. As far as the customer is concerned, their work is now done. But there’s more to the technical process.

The seller’s Paypal account is configured such that furnish.co.uk gets an automatic notification through the Paypal API when a purchase takes place. This information is then automatically processed, the commission due calculated and a tally kept of commission due for each seller. Because we can also automatically monitor payments made to our own Paypal account and by who, we also know when a seller has paid us our commission. So we can calculate the total a seller owes us by taking the commission owed from all sales and subtracting from it the total paid to us. The seller is automatically emailed regularly with the outstanding balance. The email to the seller contains a link that directly opens Paypal on a page ready to transfer the sum owed into the Paypal account of Furnish.co.uk. The seller simply needs to click a confirmation to make the transfer; it couldn’t be easier for them.

In the event the seller doesn’t pay within the allocated time, we have some powerful options available. We could remove the seller from Furnish, thus cutting off their income from any furniture sales on furnish.co.uk, or even contact the customer, so it’s simply not worth it for a seller to act dishonestly. An added beauty is that a seller is welcome to top up their payments to us at any time to avoid any risk of underpayment, just like topping up your mobile phone credit.

Ensuring automatic notifications happen
A flaw in the plan is that a seller *could* secretly switch off the automatic notifications from their Paypal account such that furnish.co.uk thinks that no sales are happening when they actually are. There’s an answer here too, which we’ll be implementing shortly. Every few days or weeks, we’ll automatically make a random payment of just a few pence to each seller’s Paypal account. If their notifications are set up correctly, we’ll be notified of the payment we made and we’ll just reduce the amount owed by that seller by the few pence we transferred. But in the event we don’t get notified of the payment we made, we’ll know that the seller has switched off the automatic notifications, and we can then deal with this accordingly.

I should mention that all of the above functionality is presently in development, but it’s looking good. I’ll let you know how it goes in a future post.

We have set out our stall at the Graduate fair and, for our first attempt, we’re very pleased.  If you’re a student and are thinking of attending the event drop by and have a chat.

Fubra is on the hunt for content writers, marketing experts, project managers and in particular developers, to help us continue to grow and invest in the future. The only requirements are that they are highly motivated, ready for a challenge, and well suited to our friendly, supportive working environment.

You can find the Fubra stand in the Austin Pearce Building on the University of Surrey campus and we will be available to chat from 2pm to 5.30pm. For the more technically minded we’ll have developer quizes ready for you to rate your skills. Alternatively come and chat to our friendly marketing and content team about the great opportunities in a non-technical role.

Take a look at the benefits of becoming a Fubra employee…

• Flexible working hours
• Casual dress code
• Chill out room with XBOX 360 and cinema
• Free gym on site with unlimited access
• Awesome social events
• Generous funding for training and books
• Up to 10% company pension contributions
• Excellent profit share scheme
• Free bike – Cycle to work scheme
• Free on site car parking
• Your choice of Mac, PC or Linux
• Friendly, supportive working environment

If you’re unable to attend the fair but you still want to get in touch about the opportunities at Fubra then take a look at our careers page, or email paul@fubra.com.

The costume arrived, and on Monday 14th March, Nick came into work fully prepared (beard trimmed, hair in the style of Riker, facial expression toned and polished) and we handed over the costume, with instructions to make sure it got a lot of exposure. Take a look at the resemblance below. During the week Nick reluctantly willingly took part in the many embarrassing challenges we set for him, including  a trip to the bakery and into town. It turned out that people in Aldershot didn’t really bat an eyelid at the fact he was dressed as a Star Trek enthusiast!

Nick managed to raise £145 for Comic Relief – Well done Nick

Next on our agenda was getting the rest of the company involved. Seeing as we have an in house gym, we decided to take full advantage of it and organise an exercise-a-thon spanning over 9 hours. This involved us each taking part in a 30 minute cycle and 3, 10 minute stints on the rowing machine. Not only a great way to exercise but a way to take your mind off work for a while and get the endorphins flowing ensuring an even happier team!

The starting gun went and we all pedalled and rowed as much as we could being sure to keep track of how far we managed to get. As a company we covered 110 miles on the bike and over 57000 metres on the rowing machine, the equivalent of 2 London to Brighton bike rides and rowing from central London to the mouth of the River Thames.

As a few extras our Product & Marketing specialists Hannah Bird and Annie McLoughlin cooked up a storm to keep all the exercisers going, making ‘Red Nose Day’ themed cupcakes, cookies and a cheesecake. These were available for a small donation, and turned out to be very popular in the afternoon during the exercise for staff who needed a quick sugar injection. Combining the cakes, with the exercise-a-thon, pick a pose sweepstake and Nick’s Riker challenge we managed to raise over £350 for Comic Relief. A big thanks to everyone who took part. Any ideas for next year are very welcome!