Re: [ubuntu-marketing] Ubuntu for School

[Alan Lord (News)]

On 13/10/10 17:53, epic93d...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> Can you guys help me with this (especially the convincing the IT staff
> part) ?

Hi Epic93dude,

Well done for promoting OSS, you sound like you will go far!

One area we are trying to concentrate on here in the UK is that we need 
to change "what" we teach in terms of IT. Currently students are taught 
to use Microsoft Office, and a few other proprietary apps. By the time 
many of these kids actually hit the workspace, these apps will be 
largely legacy and traditional 'desktop computing' will be regarded as 
an interesting historical study piece.

Teaching about what you can use computing power/the Internet for, rather 
than specific applications, is far more important. As is indeed, moving 
away from considering IT as a standalone subject; it isn't. IT impacts 
on, and can be helpful with, almost any subject studied and is an 
intrinsic part of many people's (in the developed world at least) 
everyday existence.

Take a look at this article and video for a school in Utah that have 
adopted Open Source principles pretty much across the whole spectrum.

Might give you some more ideas and something to reference: 
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/66355


HTH

Al

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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] Ubuntu on the BBC

[Alan Lord (News)]

On 27/10/09 08:40, Martin Owens wrote:
> Very interesting,
>
> I wonder how much of this willingness was the number of official
> complaints.

That was my first thought too. Rory Cellan-Jones got a bit of a 
hammering over his rather pathetic description of FOSS last week during 
the Breakfast show and his "24hrs with Ubuntu" blog post[1] didn't 
really help his cause either. Although, a good thing was the tone of the 
comments on that post, not too many rants or stupid remarks.

Hopefully this is the wake-up-call the mainstream media really needed...

> It looked like a fairly balanced review, I'm sure Chris was about to
> mention wine after he said it didn't run windows programs. But it's not
> that much of a big deal, perhaps it's better to just say it doesn't to
> avoid any weird confusion.

Yeah, Wine is a can-of-worms for the non-technical viewer who might be 
interested in trying Ubuntu after seeing that video. Rather be clear and 
set some expectations rather than lead them into a path of confusion.

Al

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/10/24_hours_with_ubuntu.html



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[ubuntu-marketing] Ubuntu on the BBC

[Alan Lord (News)]

Chris Kenyon does a short video interview and a fair write up too.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8326264.stm

Very encouraging indeed.


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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] Request for input for Karmic Release Candidate technical overview

[Alan Lord (News)]

On 20/10/09 08:53, Steve Langasek wrote:
> Dear friends,
>
> The Karmic release candidate will be out this Thursday, so it would be great
> to have  as
> up-to-date and complete as possible in preparation for this.  What other
> great new features in Ubuntu 9.10 should be listed here but aren't yet?
>
> Thanks,

Hmm, I immediately notice:

No mention of the neat Disk Utility Palimpsest under 
System-Administration-Disk Utility.

No mention of Empathy.

HTH

Alan


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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] Help Needed in Marketing, Maldives Open Source Society

[Alan Lord (News)]

On 17/06/09 13:51, Martin Owens wrote:
> Can I point to this:
>
> http://doctormo.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/foss-understanding-foss-visual-guide/
>
> It may allow you to describe FOSS
>
> Regards, Martin


That's a great presentation Martin, thanks.

Alan


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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] Hopeful News for a 2009 Advertising Campaign

[Alan Lord]

Ronnie Tucker wrote:
> OK, here's a 'beta2' of the WhyUbuntu comparison video I was working on. 
> Completely remade in Sony Vegas (thanks for the tip Jacob!) clocks in at 
> 50 secs, and using a bit more pizazz this time. This is much closer to 
> my original idea...
> 
> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1743546330285506201&hl=en
> 
> It still needs some music, had a quick look on Jamendo.com - but it'd 
> take me forever to wade through the site, any suggestions? Any of you 
> good folks got some suitable music on a favourites list??
> 
> All comments welcome.

Hi Ronnie,

That's a great improvement over the first version. Nice one :-)

One small nit-pick. OpenOffice.org "WRITE" should be "Writer".

But other than that it's a nice idea, and well executed.

Next week, we are exhibiting at a major IT/Education trade show in the 
London, UK and I'd like to ask if we could have this video available to 
run on our stand? It's something that might be quite "eye catching" on 
the monitors when "nothing else is going on".

Is that OK?

Thanks

Alan

> 
> 
> 
> Alan Lord wrote:
>> Ronnie Tucker wrote:
>>   
>>> It's not finished yet, still need to add some sort of free music over it 
>>> (suggestions? Something soothing I reckon). But for your (pre)viewing 
>>> pleasure: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5931624988227229012&hl=en
>>>
>>> (ironically, I had to use Windows Movie Maker to create it  :/  )
>>> 
>> One thing jumped out at me; it might be construed as being picky but it 
>> will be noticed.
>>
>> OpenOffice. It really should be called OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice 
>> (without the .org) is a trademark owned by someone/thing else. OOo like 
>> to see the full name at all times.
>>
>> Nice idea though, the comparison of apps works well. Perhaps a bit more 
>> "energy" or dynamism (some kind of Compiz style might be nice i.e. 
>> Windows on one cube face and Ubuntu on another?)...
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Al
>>
>>   
> 


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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] Hopeful News for a 2009 Advertising Campaign

[Alan Lord]

Ronnie Tucker wrote:
> It's not finished yet, still need to add some sort of free music over it 
> (suggestions? Something soothing I reckon). But for your (pre)viewing 
> pleasure: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5931624988227229012&hl=en
> 
> (ironically, I had to use Windows Movie Maker to create it  :/  )

One thing jumped out at me; it might be construed as being picky but it 
will be noticed.

OpenOffice. It really should be called OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice 
(without the .org) is a trademark owned by someone/thing else. OOo like 
to see the full name at all times.

Nice idea though, the comparison of apps works well. Perhaps a bit more 
"energy" or dynamism (some kind of Compiz style might be nice i.e. 
Windows on one cube face and Ubuntu on another?)...

Cheers

Al


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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] The "I'm Linux" Video Contest (Mike Feravolo)

[Alan Lord]

Emma Jane Hogbin wrote:
> Alan Lord wrote:

>> Amen to that. Good prose Al. This follows nicely from the recent Jono B 
>> "manifesto for the common man".
> 
> I think you're referring to: http://www.jonobacon.org/?p=1483  ?

Yes, that's right.

> When I use Ubuntu I feel neither common, nor like a man. It'd be good to 
> keep the Ubuntu Ethos separate from common men.
> 
> Thanks. :)

"The Common Man" is a gender agnostic term - at least in my book anyway 
(but I think I get your drift... "man") ;-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_man

Cheers

Al


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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] The "I'm Linux" Video Contest (Mike Feravolo)

[Alan Lord]

alan c wrote:

> Cut to the Chase:
> The things which keep me using Linux (Ubuntu) is nothing to do with 
> Microsoft or its campaign.
> I love Ubuntu and Linux because I feel freedom and joy when I use it.
> I feel the community around me.
> I feel secure and safe when I am using a system which is created with 
> pride by the people who use it with pride.
> People who have a passion for freedom and quality.
> 

Amen to that. Good prose Al. This follows nicely from the recent Jono B 
"manifesto for the common man".

Alan (The Open Sourcerer)

(Hey we have three of the founding Alans here on the same thread!)


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[ubuntu-marketing] How cool is this?

[Alan Lord]

What a great story. Ubuntu, along with loads of other FOSS, played a 
part in the making of a new coin...

http://pythonide.blogspot.com/2008/10/how-to-make-money-with-free-software.html

Cheers

Alan

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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] Firefox EULA

[Alan Lord]

Przemysław Kulczycki wrote:

> Please keep the discussion on this topic on one mailing list. The
> discussion is already in ubuntu-devel-discuss so I strongly suggest
> everyone to move there.

I agree for the purposes of discussing the particular issue.

As this is a marketing list however, and clearly several people here 
were not aware of the controversy, I thought it made sense to ensure 
that the marketing team at least knew about it.

I was not expecting the discussion to actually take place here ;-)

Cheers

Alan


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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] new project builds Ubuntu based appliances for specific niche roles

[Alan Lord]

Liraz Siri wrote:

> 
> I am interested in receiving feedback on our project and to get your 
> ideas on ways in which we could collaborate with the Ubuntu community to 
> spread the word, get people involved in our sub project, and basically 
> jumpstart a real community effort.
> 
> Note that TurnKey Linux is not officially sanctioned by Canonical. We're 
>   an independent opensource project that is trying to take Ubuntu in 
> some new directions.
> 
> What do you think?

Hi Liraz,

I think you have a nice idea here...

I'm not sure how Canonical will feel about the look of your website - it 
does look "very similar" to Ubuntu's...

There are a couple of other bundled appliance providers out there but 
they seem to deliver them on a more commercial basis than this one so it 
looks great to me :-)

One question that immediately springs to mind is how do you plan to 
finance your project?

 From my own perspective, I'd love to see a couple of other appliances 
added to your portfolio:

* Asterisk
* A Tomcat platform with optional installs of Alfresco (Ubuntu will be 
adding this to their repo soon) and or the Cosmo Calendar sever and/or 
the Zimbra server (although I am not sure about the license terms for 
Zimbra so this one might not be possible).
* Also, how about a development server appliance? (SVN, Git, Bzr...)

Cheers

Alan

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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] [Bug 118823] Re: List "Buy a pc with Ubuntu pre-installed" as an option to "get ubuntu"

[Alan Lord]

Danny Piccirillo wrote:
> And here is a wiki list: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuPre-installed
> 

We (The Open Learning Centre) have been working with Elonex, Canonical 
and Carphone Warehouse.

You can now get the Elonex Webbook exclusively from Carphone Warehouse 
shops or online. It is pre-installed with Ubuntu Hardy Heron (or 
optionally Win XP).

The best bit of this is the deal from CPW: you buy a 3G broadband 
contract with either Three, T-Mobile or Orange and you get the webbook 
for free :-).

More details on my blog (which also contain links to the stores) and 
there's a "webbook blog" for users too:

http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/07/24/say-hello/
http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/08/08/ubuntu-webbook-now-available-online-at-cpw/
http://webbookblog.com/

Currently this is UK only but we are hoping to roll it out across 8 
further EU countries.

Perhaps you could add this to the list.

Cheers

Alan

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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] Organizational meeting proposed

[Alan Lord]

John Botscharow wrote:
> We need to hear from everyone re: their time zone so that we can get
> this meeting set up. 

GMT +1 (Another Brit!)

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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] Defining who we are

[Alan Lord]

alan c wrote:
> John Botscharow wrote:
>> On Thu, 2008-05-29 at 11:02 +0100, RJ wrote:
>>> I don't think creating a page there for your articles would be useful. 
>>> Maybe 
>>> putting a link somewhere getting guys on your wiki ? 
>>> The wiki page should be, imo, specifically about ubuntu marketing, not 
>>> marketing as a whole. 
>> You are assuming that everyone in the community understands marketing.
>> That, IMHO, is a DANGEROUS assumption.
> 
> I think that some people will be well motivated to help  but may not 
> know what marketing is about, so it will be useful to have a method of 
> setting out the basics somehow. I would want to encourage everyone 
> from a simple leaflet handout to more subtle stuff and also major 
> publicity stuff to get on media headlines.

I was once given a great definition of marketing that has stayed with me 
for a long time and I have yet to find a better alternative:

"The sole purpose of marketing is to shorten the sales cycle."

Anything anyone does under the umbrella of "marketing" should consider 
if the activity meets this criteria...

It still applies to [F]OSS just as well as in the commercial sector. 
Think about it.

Al


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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] Sounds like they need Edubuntu

[Alan Lord]

John Botscharow wrote:
> You are really going to make this hard LOL
> 
> I agree with the strong presence at BETTS, but how does that relate to
> the idea of a formal response to Becta? I'm a bit unclear here. Guess
> that comes with being a newbie.

Ahhh I see.

We had a look at the format of the response they were looking for: 
http://industry.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=36679 and it is 
definitely out of our (my Co's) league. But this RFP has been known 
about for some time now: "A contract notice was published in Official 
Journal of the European Union (OJEU) on 6 May 2008, under reference 
2008/S 87-118625".

I would be very surprised if the Canonical team hadn't al least 
investigated if they should respond or not.

They are looking for "full coverage" solutions however...

"The new framework will offer a broad range of commercial, off-the-shelf 
software and licences together with a range of value-adding support 
services (for example, but not limited to: sourcing, installation 
technical support, licence management)."

I am not sure if Canonical can provide the whole shebang themselves, but 
there's nothing stopping them partnering. Becta also do not explicitly 
state if they will select only one supplier. I would very much doubt it. 
They've been burned before ;-)

Anyway, like I said, I would really have expected Canonical to have at 
least reviewed the RFP already. Of course, whether they respond or not 
might be something they'd rather keep to themselves...

Al

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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] Sounds like they need Edubuntu

[Alan Lord]

John Botscharow wrote:
> Al,
> 
> I thought you and Alan Lord were the same person 

I (we) am (are).

I am Alan Lord or Al as most people call me.

> LOL I'll get better at this as we go along, I promise.

No worries, it gets worse... My business partner is also Alan, so last 
Jan at BETT we had three of us stand...

regarding you comment to Paul, we (The Open Learning Centre) are about 
to apply for one of Canonical's partner status programmes. Not sure 
which just yet but I'm hoping to get round to it this week. So maybe we 
will be in a better position to ask for collateral etc...

But whatever happens, Ubuntu/Canonical would be well advised to have a 
presence of some description at BETT. We met and had some pretty good 
discussions with the guys from Becta at the last one, and they are 
"very" receptive to talking about Open Source.

Al/Alan ;-)

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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] Sounds like they need Edubuntu

[Alan Lord]

Tiago Vieira wrote:
> Thanks Alan
> 
> This is the exhibition that I'm talking about. 

Well that's good then! We will be attending for all 4 days. As it isn't 
exclusively our stand I won't commit to anything just yet (The person 
who booked it is away for a week or so...). This year we are helping 
with the costs along with the OFE and doubling the size of our stand space.

Alan Cocks (who contributes on this list frequently and started the 
original thread on the UK Schools go Open Source) was on the OFE stand 
last year and did a sterling job: Burning CDs and providing information 
leaflets for visitors to take away and demonstrating Edubuntu.

As the organisers continue to mention: "BETT is the world’s largest 
educational technology event." We certainly met a great deal of people; 
some holding very senior (ministerial) positions in governments around 
the world. Consequently, any contributions from Ubuntu UK or Canonical 
for collateral, CDs and other giveaways would be most welcome.

BR

Al

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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] Sounds like they need Edubuntu

[Alan Lord]

John Botscharow wrote:
> Is there anyone in London who could easily make thie conference? I
> cannot phyiscally or financially make this trip, but if someone could go
> and take notes, I'd be willing to work on a project based on those notes
> to work out an educationally-orented marketing strategy. The education
> market may very well be our best opportunity to start seriously cutting
> into MS marketing share worldwide. Educators are more open-minded than
> other market segments and less susceptible to MS's bullying tactics.
> 

In January each year there is an IT/Technology exhibition in London 
called BETT: http://www.bettshow.com/

We attended this last year with our friends at the OFE 
(http://osacademy.hosting.amaze.nl:8060/OFE) and we had quite an impact! 
We managed to obtain several OLPCs which went down storm and captured 
the imagination of many teachers and IT support staff. We will be back 
again this coming year Jan 2009 with 2x the stand space we had last 
year. There is growing interest and demand for knowledge in the 
education sector especially in the past year or so since Becta have 
started to be so supportive of Open Source and derogatory towards M$ in 
particular.

I'm not sure if the conference you are referring to is the same or not, 
but as we are only 30miles or so from London it isn't much of an issue 
getting in.

What is it, when is it and how long is it on for??

Cheers

Alan
My company supplies professional services around OSS: 
http://www.theopenlearningcentre.com


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Re: [ubuntu-marketing] Dell Desktop (ubuntu) pricing

[Alan Lord]

alan c wrote:
> I am in the market now, for a desktop and would like it to have been a 
> Dell, supporting Ubuntu and Dell too. However, I have looked in detail 
> this morning and it seemed expensive compared to the windows stuff, so 
> I did a detail comparison, twice, just to be sure.
> 

Hi Alan,

Recently we needed a new laptop for our company. I too would have liked 
to buy Dell but they didn't have the right product/price.

The best firm we came across in the UK is Novatech. Take a look at their 
on-line shop. You can select no OS with any box they sell. And you see 
what the true cost of the M$ tax is...

I wrote about this on my blog too! 
http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/01/29/microsofts-fixed-rate-tax-approaches-100/

Cheers

Alan


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