Robert Gale, who runs the blog A Welsh View (a fine topic, in my humble opinion!) has been trying our service out, and the results are positive. Hurrah for that!

Read his blogpost to see what he thinks.

We at Texpert Towers try and keep a close eye on the blogosphere to see what people are saying about us. Happy customers are very important to us so we always like to open a dialogue with anyone who either loves or loathes the service, to understand what we can do to make it better.

Let us know your thoughts and suggestions!

We spent the weekend at the Edinburgh TV Unfestival 2007, described as a “collision of TV, Internet, Mobile, Media — New, Old, Future”. It’s arranged as a fringe event to the Media Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival, organised by Ian Forrester of BBC Backstage and Suw Charman. Suw very thoroughly blogged everything that she was at, so you can read up on many of the sessions in her Strange Attractor blog entries.

Internet TV and video is a really exciting area at the moment. There’s a lot going on and it was fun to see and meet representatives of Zattoo, Tape it off the Internet, Sclipo, and (a bit of a hit here at Texperts Towers) Planet Scicast. But the best bit was just meeting so many people involved in disruptive technology and media. Traditional media are struggling to keep up with what’s happening and users are turning away from them. Tape it off the Internet’s lolcat-powered presentation put it best: “O hai TV execs, I am in ur internetz stealin ur audiencez.” And of course the mobile space is hugely significant in all this, particularly the mobile find space. Perhaps the best evidence is Veveo securing $28million in funding for a mobile video search product which hasn’t even been released yet!

It was great to meet up with old friends like ThinkTank Mathematics, and to make some new ones like Trusted Places. Pictures of the event are up on Flickr. An excellent event all round!

As the erstwhile lawyer here at Texperts Towers, I’m not usually embroiled in that much controversy or legal wrangling – but this week that all changed. You may recall that last week Giles and Sarah were scooting around London looking for big buildings to “lightcast” our re-launched logo on. At the time, I must admit that my legal “spider-sense” was tingling ever so slightly, especially when they said that the MI6 building was their first target – shining lasers at the security services seemed a little over the top to me.

But as it turns out, that was the least of our worries. One of the big buildings that the team found was Wembley Stadium – and this week we got a very formal letter from the lawyers for Wembley National Stadium Limited. They are clearly rather cross.

They say that we will give members of the public the erroneous impression that we have been authorised as a sponsor of, or that we are endorsed by, Wembley Stadium, and that our use of the building was clearly designed to take maximum benefit of the goodwill and reputation of the Stadium. Oh dear.

So we have given a very formal undertaking not to use any pictures of Wembley Stadium or its arch (did you know that the arch is registered as a trade mark? I kid you not!). We will never issue any advertising or promotional material that will give rise to an erroneous association in the mind of the public between Texperts and Wembley. They asked for £500 for writing us the letter – and we have offered to pay this amount to charity.

So let’s be clear – the photo has gone from our website and we have no association with Wembley Stadium – they do not endorse us (and in fact, we don’t think that they like us very much). In future we will look for other large buildings if the urge to shine bright lights all over London town strikes us again. If you have a spare large building, do let Giles know. But in the mean-time, we will still answer football questions and keep you posted on any developments.

Here are some Wembley-related questions we’ve recently received. Enjoy!

Q. How much did it cost to build the old Wembley?
A. The old Wembley Stadium took 300 days to build at a cost of £750,000. Wembley was built in 1923 as a national stadium with a capacity of 125,000.

Q. How much did the new Wembley stadium over-run in cost?
A. The official overall cost of Wembley Stadium was £757m. It is alleged that it ran an additional £352m over budget, for a total of £1.109 billion.

Q. When was the last time England won a competitive match at Wembley?
A. England last won a competitive match at Wembley on the 4th of October 1999, beating Luxembourg 6-0. They last won a friendly on 31st May 2000, 2-0 vs Ukraine.

Q. Who scored the first goal at the New Wembley?
A. The first goal at New Wembley was scored by Mark Bright (BBC pundit, formerly of Sheffield Wednesday and Crystal Palace) in a charity match on 17 March 2007. He scored for Geoff Thomas’ Charity Foundation XI.

Looks like the Daily Star noticed our our re-launch antics on 15 August!

They wrote:

“THE MI6 building at London’s Vauxhall Bridge, Battersea Power Station and Wembley Stadium were the background for a cheeky advertising project last night.

They provided the backdrop for projections to relaunch mobile text-and-answer service 82ASK under the new name of Texperts. The service has switched from the text shortcode 82275 to 66000.

The £1million relaunch is part of a major initiative to establish a new ‘mobile find’ category.”

Just a quick note to thank all those who joined us for a cheeky beverage or two on Tuesday at the Marquis of Granby on Charlotte Street.

It was great to see 70-80 people turn up and squeeze in to the pub! We had a drive-by of a few of our Texpert taxis, thanks to Dylan for organising that for us. I missed that moment unfortunately, I spent way too much time at the bar!

We should do it again in a month or so, so watch this space (we’ll also post updates at our Facebook group). If any incriminating photos turn up, I’ll post them…

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Thom Watt, one of our Texperts who came along on Tuesday, managed to snap one of our taxis as it flew past! Here is the cab in all its glory!