For me, one of the first rules of business is to respect competition. Competition keep good businesses on their toes.

I believe business competitors are generally nice people, they have great ideas, ambition, great people and customer bases of (repeat) clients who enjoy products or services. So to take a ‘pop’ at competition really should be justified.

This morning I spotted the following on the back of a jeep style car…

Quite frankly, the above advertisment some might find funny, I think it is full of arrogance….. it says to me “buy from us, our competition are ****.”

What the advert lacks, is justification for why the company believes their service to be superior to that of the competition. Price? Service? Reliability? Support? Awards? Track Record? Year Established?

Apart from the fascinating mental images that pop up in my mind of the group of people who sat around a table throwing ideas(?) at each other, which resulted in the above advert, the whole process raises a few questions:

• Why do people buying jeep style vehicles allow the company that sold the vehicle to place an advert on the back of the purchase?
• Why would anyone buy a jeep from a company who would want to put the image of Rhino defecation to advertise further sales?

Really makes me to run out an buy a Suzuki. Quite frankly, what a crap advertising campaign, literally.

Work in the field of Learning Platforms (Virtual Learning Environments) is becoming more and more frequent make up of Cleveratom’s evolving portfolio of projects.

We’re doing more and more work advisory work in both the design of physical and virtual spaces for learning, and we understand what needs to happen to make both physical and virtual work together.

Every school must have a VLE by the end of 2008 and we’ve recently been enjoying working with schools to evaluate where they are in the process…… and work with them and advise on next steps.

Lets be honest here, some schools are getting it wrong, and others are getting it right. We’ve witnessed both and learned some lessons, lessons that we are happy to share.

In January of this year the Yorkshire and Humber Grid for Learning Foundation commissioned Cleveratom to produce a book and DVD which would help schools to learn from each other what a learning platform actually is, and how schools are using it. Read about our work on the YHGfL website (Click here. YHGfL will sell you copy of the book/DVD for £15, very good value for money.

Since the book and DVD launch in Castleford in May (read about it here) we’ve been frequently called upon by schools asking for help and support through the VLE process.

Our advert reads: Learning Platforms. Avoid the mistakes that are being made. We offer advice and a free fact sheet.We’re now becoming more and more familiar with the ‘common mistakes’ that are being made when it comes to picking and maintaining a VLE….. So we’ve produced a free fact sheet and are using education media to reach a wider audience of schools….Look out in the educational press, where you see an article about learning platforms you’ll probably see our advert linking through to free advice on how to get it right.

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If you have to have a loan, avoid having unsecured loans. The reason may be car loans or loans for start up of a business. However, unsecured ones tend to become bad credit loans nevertheless.