Archive for May, 2009

With trust in the banking sector at an all-time low, Santander’s decision to rebrand all of its UK High Street brands including Abbey, Alliance + Leicester and Bradford and Bingley over to Santander could be seen as a risky one. On the other hand it’s no surprise that the second-biggest banking group in the world (after HSBC) wants to roll out the changes when they reportedly plan to save £180m a year by integrating the three businesses.

Who remembers the £11m Abbey rebrand in 2003 shortly before the Santander takeover? Abbey adopted a soft, all lowercase, pastel coloured brand identity with the new tagline, ‘turning banking on its head’. Rebranding certainly isn’t new to Abbey customers.

It is, after all, five years since Abbey was taken over by Santander and in that time we have seen the incorporation of the Santander ‘flame’ logo, typeface and colour into the Abbey branding. What’s left to change, other than the brand name? As for the other two brands, their takeovers are still fresh and for that reason the rebrands could be seen as more risky.

However, bank customers are extremely loyal and Santander’s decison to roll out the rebrands by the end of 2010 suggests steady change rather than a swift one. Lets not forget that it will be an enormous rebranding exercise, and customers can probably expect some technical glitches along the way. Perhaps most interesting will be the advertising campaigns, direct mail and incentives that will follow, all in the name of turning one, or in this case three recognised brands into one ’super’ brand.

Will the newly launched Wolfram Alfa search engine change the way we use the web, just as Google has done. Or will it just be another search engine that will disappear without trace?

We hope it’s the former. We use Google everyday and find it an essential tool for our business. But, it’s always good news when someone like the British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram comes along and potentially changes the way the masses think and use the internet. Google managed to do it, so why not Wolfram?

Wolfram Alpha is a computation knowledge engine rather than a typical search engine. The idea is to give users direct answers to their questions rather than send them to other sites where they may find what they are seeking.

It was unveiled in April and has been publicly demonstrated with some people having had a chance to run queries through it. Typically the results it returns are annotated pages of data rather than a simple list of other sites that might help resolve a user’s question.

For example, if you asked what the tallest building was in the world, it would come back with a result for the top 5 tallest building names, their height and number of floors. It can also handle complicated mathematical queries, plot statistics and produce charts of natural events.

It’s currently very American-centric with its results, but that’s to be expected at this early stage. As for ease of use, it seems very intuitive with simple prompts and search tips.

Let’s hope it becomes a successful tool.

www.wolframalpha.com

For the full story, visit: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8052798.stm

Whilst on our daily trawl through the web we stumbled across an amusing site where you are able to play some ‘Daft Punk’ through you keyboard.

Just one piece of advice, if you are in the office, be careful not to have the volume too high!

Alternatively, you could opt for our approach by cranking the volume up and attempting to mime, thus sounding like a robot, genius.

Why not give it a go, here’s the link, www.najle.com/idaft