Mercian Labels - business, open source & security label printing

Just a quick reminder to all business people that bad debt is a terrible drain on profits, and in theese uncertain times, watching your credit risk is crucial.  A cost effective way of doing this is to use a credit reference agency, and the best value one we have found is creditserve.co.uk but there are many more.  Fora  few hundred pounds a year, you can get unlimited access to UK credit reports on sole traders, partnerships, ltd and plc companies.  Worth its weight in cash if you are considering taking on a new client, or that very large job that may well keep you going, or send you bust.

This morning I met Philip Oakley from Outserve Ltd, a new midlands based consultancy working from Wolverhampton Science park solely dedicated to supporting businesses with open source software. There are so few of these companies out there that actually know and understand FOSS, that I hope that Philip gets his new business offf the ground and helps other companies do what we have done here at Mercian Labels.

Good luck to them, they seem keen and switched on to the real needs of businesses working with open source.

Can anyone tell me what happened to the National Open Centre, and Open Advantage as well while I’m at it?  I thought the former took over the latter role when funding ceased, but the former’s website is down now.  Is any publically funded body in the UK solely promoting open source any more?

We have been getting lots of interest in our new Labellock range of security labels from customers and distributors across the world.  Its taken a lot of R&D to get this product range to market, and its great to see the product being shipped out of the door.

We’ve invested heavily in the business in the last year, and its great to see the product being shipped across the workd for all sorts of weird and wonderful applications, and being stocked by new distributors and business partners we hope to build good long term relations with.

If you have not looked it up yet, then please pop over here.

For anyone in the UK who values their privacy, Phorm is bad news.  Its just such a bad idea for users, the reputation of those companies taking part, and the regulators who approve it.  If my ISP Nildram subscribes to it, they will loose my business for sure.

Nuff’ said.

This is a great fun presentation on how to run a profitable software business in the SME market. Its 30 minutes long, and really puts into the perspective the importance of the SME business model.  Not everybody can be the next facebook, but there is good, enjoyable business to be had out there in smaller businesses.

Enjoy.

I rarely complain about companies on this blog, but this one just takes the biscuit.  I ordered 2 TVs from Ebuyer.com last week, only to find out that the remotes were faulty and not working.  I completed their returns system online, only to be told that to return that faulty goods I had to call a premium 0871 number, (and be placed on hold in a queue!) to speak to a call centre to get the return authorised!

Thats pretty poor customer service.  Ebuyer, you will loose business from otehrwise happy customers doing this.  Pleas go back to your online returns system - it worked, and customers were happy.

I am about 6 days late in posting this, but I am exceptionally proud to say that we completed the major piece of work in our migration on Wednesday last week when we went live with our new php/postregsql MIS system. I am very pleased with it, as FINALLY we are not dependent on MS to run our core business management information system.

Top give you some idea of this achievement for us…

• We started it in Feb 2007, and estimated completion by July 2007…
• Its taken a MSc qualified software engineer the best of of 18 months of time to write the PHP and javascript code, test and debug (whilst running other projects and helpdesk type support as well)
• I would estimate that its cost us over £15,000 in internal costs to migrate to open source (dont let anyone tell you that open source is “free”, as its certainly not, but it is OURS now, and we dont have long term licensing issues to pay to replace and run the old system.
• Its a better system, although we all have a lot of familiarisation to get used to it, and have a list of minor enhancements as long as your arm that Rich is crunching through.

It is a great relief to finally switch off our old system and not be dependant on it any more, as it was abaout to die any week now, causing us major inconvenience.

Lots more to do, but its great to say we’ve broken the back of the migration!

Next step - migration of our file store to our linux server, then the phone system to trixbox, then finally all the desktops to ubuntu.

Thanks to Rich for all his hard work and making this a success!

I posted a blog thread a few days ago about our reservations about RFID as a practical techology at this point in time, and today it appears as if there is another serious flaw in the use of RFID in labelling.

The BBC are reporting that the encryption used in one of the biggest RFID rollouts in the UK has been hacked, that of the London Tube Oyster card scheme.

One of the exciting possibilities of RFID in security labelling is to hold secure information on a challenge-respond basis, and its cases such as this that severly dent the reputatrion of RFID as a reliable technology.

The obvious question to me is, why did they use such a weak encrytion system?  Surely something along the lines of 128 bit public key encryption could be used that takes an awful lot of processing time to crack.

I dont think we have heard the last of this, and demonstrates a fundamental weakness of RFID in labelling.  If you can remotely reprogramme an “encrypted” chip, you can change the price, destination or whatever ona an item wihtout anyone knowing. Watch this space.

I keep up to date by using the BBC website for news, but very occasionally they miss somethig that I think is pretty interesting, like this story from The Times and others.

Apparantly the “encrypted” link between banks and cash machines, that is based on Microsoft windows platforms has been hacked, PIN numbers stolen, cloned cards made and money then withdrawn from ATMs.

Scary.  So much for secure CHIP and PIN.  Fortunately this was in the USA, and has been hushed up as far as I can see, but I’ll be watching my bank statements even more closely in future!