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BT fails to unbundle silicon.com journalist
The Round-up tries, it really does. It tries to exercise restraint, tries to remain positive and tries not to bash the same companies over and over again.

By Aled Herbert

Published: Friday 20 April 2001

Take BT for example, it's had its fair share of bad press over its cornucopia of blunders but surely there's a limit to the amount of abuse we can dish out. Surely there's only so much oomska we can shovel before we hold up our hands and say enough is enough.

But what's the Round-up meant to do when everyone's favourite telco tries to kill one of our journalists?

silicon.com reporter Ben King was invited along to the launch of BT's consumer GPRS range and was happily playing with one of the phones provided when a 10-foot by 15-foot wooden prop came crashing down on top of him, missing his head by inches, but drawing blood from his heel. It was only thanks to his cat-like reflexes that he escaped further, more serious injury.

The fact that this injury came the day Ben was due to make his debut for the silicon.com football team was a cruel blow lost on nobody - least of all Claims Direct who received his call a few short hours ago.

Coincidence? Ha! Unfortunate accident? Not on your Nellie. Mr 'I wouldn't hurt a fly' King has been dissing the BT GPRS range for months, check out: 'BT GPRS data services hit by glitches' http://www.silicon.com/a43761 , and 'Exclusive: BT Cellnet hits cut price internet hopes for six' http://www.silicon.com/a42308 ).

What more evidence could you possibly need? Ben noted at the time that all the hacks from the nationals had drifted out of range before the set came down and his life flashed before his eyes.

To add insult to injury, BT didn't even offer him a free phone. Which didn't matter, because they didn't work anyway. (See 'GPRS is here, but it's late and it doesn't really work' http://www.silicon.com/a43934 for his report on the event.)

Tony Blair could learn a thing or two from the Belgians about sprucing the UK's e-government offering. A link to the Belgian Consulate in Hong Kong takes you to a site with naked pictures of Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. It also has information on penile enlargement operations and links to porn sites.

The blunder has more to do with incompetence than the sexual like of Belgians, however. A spokesman for the Belgian cybercrime unit says the consul forgot to dish out for the URL and the site was then bought on 9 April by US company Bulkregister...

A large slice of humble pie for the British Airways table, please. The world's favourite airline's revenues for March are down nearly £20m after it admitted its brand spanking new flight reservation system Babs experienced serious problems in March. Or rather, it suffered a complete failure.

silicon.com first learnt of the problems when our chief executive called the news desk from Monaco airport to report that chaos had broken out and that enraged passengers were on the verge of resorting to violence amid the resultant disruption.

At the time, BA claimed the problems were insignificant and were rather abrupt with us when we pressed them. There was no problem with the system, no siree. Another press officer told our reporter he knew nothing about any problems with Babs.

Then the following day, a BA spokeswoman confessed that actually there was an itsy-bitsy problem with Babs. The problem, she claimed, originated at the point where the various systems are linked together, insisting that "it is actually quite small".

The problems caused delays of up to 40 minutes for long haul passengers and 30 minutes for short flights.

BA also blamed the drop in revenues on the ongoing foot and mouth crisis. Which is ironic really because BA's mouth is exactly where BA put its foot in March...

The dot-com dream is well and truly over. Dead as a dodo.

In an attempt to distance itself from its unpleasant image as a pureplay web company, US-based firm Internet.com has changed its name to INTMedia Group Incorporated. Catchy.

According to its SEC filing: "The Board of Directors believes that the inclusion of ".com" as part of a company's name is perceived to reflect the nature of that company as a provider of services or content to users or businesses solely over the internet. The Board of Directors believes that the Company has grown to provide services to an expanded group of users, and that the Company does not provide these services solely over the internet. Therefore, the Board of Directors believes that changing the Company's name will more accurately reflect both the Company's current business as well as its strategy to increasingly offer its services to users, merchants and service providers by means other than the internet."

The Round-up suddenly feels unclean. But anyway, would a dot-com by any other name smell as sweet? Or lose as much money? Thanks go to the Register for digging that up...

And finally, a big hand to PR company Firefly who brightened up a dull and dreary Tuesday last week with a marvellous clanger.

We received an email from one of Firefly's account executives, who shall remain nameless, (alright it was Marianna Morris) which contained a press release by Altavista UK. It was prefixed with the following sentence: "List of people who have been invited tonight to receive release... includes nationals, freelancer, every Tom Dick or Harry I could think of.... Please feel free to add..." Obviously meant for internal reference only.

When we explained that silicon.com had no Toms, Harrys or Dicks (well, people called Dick - you know what we mean) but were quite interested in the news, we were then informed by the unfazed Ms Morris that the news was actually under embargo and couldn't be reported on.

Chuckling to ourselves, we were later sent another email from someone else at Firefly who said the company didn't get to where it was today by not knowing a thing or two about crisis management and was offering its services to all and sundry.

Ironically, the original press release was all about Altavista's "cleaner site", such a shame the same principle doesn't extend to emails...

The Round up will be back next week, unless BT gets to it first...