AT8 has launched today a series of informative factsheets, AT8 InfoBlogs, on the core propositions of the leading solutions’ vendors operating in the core UK Life, Pensions & Investment market sectors.

They are designed to describe the key attributes of each vendor, provide an outline of their proposition and their key target market and customers.

It is our aim to keep the information up-to-date and so check back regularly to refresh your knowledge.

The documents can be found here: http://www.at8-group.com/library/library.html

Well, after the excesses of the Christmas and New Year break, I decided to switch on my ‘geek’ mode and have a go at installing Microsoft’s new trail operating system, Windows 7.

Announced at the recent CES event in Las Vegas by Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO , Windows 7 is the replacement for the much maligned Windows Vista. It’s come around faster than previous Windows upgrades – only three years in development, where the norm is around four. For those in the development community, Windows 7 beta has has been around for a few months, but the general public was given the chance to download from the 9th January.

The release had a bumpy ride, with Microsoft servers being overwhelmed, but from about mid-Saturday the download was re-instated. So, I decided to give it a go – after all, it couldn’t be any worse than my experiences with Vista Business Edition (too many to go into here!).

It took about 1 hour and a few restarts – but it works; and for a beta release it works incredibly well.

I love its speed and the new taskbar, where you can pin your favourite applications but also jump straight to opened documents and also pin favourites, too. I’ve not found any application that doesn’t run apart from needing a little tweak to Google’s Chrome browser.

So, in my limited example, it looks like Microsoft have a winner here – the next job will be to attempt to persuade those who have paid for Vista to upgrade again and to undo the negative press around the Vista story.

Let’s see how it goes.

I attended the Mortgage Expo 2008 show yesterday.  This year my interest lay not just in visiting the stands as normal, but in seeing how the show had been affected by the current market conditions.  Would attendance be down? Would the number of exhibitors have reduced? Will the atmosphere be one of uncertainty and fear?  The answer of course was yes, yes  and yes.  As I arrived at 10 am I was jumped on by what seemed like every exhibitor that had braved the market conditions to attend. As one of the few attendees there freebees were thrust at me while scanners were clicked all around me trying to capture my details for some future marketing campaigns.  At that point there were so few attendees if it had a pulse the exhibitors jumped on it.

As for the exhibitors the numbers were also reduced substantially and the big prominent stands of the past were distinctly lacking. Gone were all the sub prime lenders that had entertained us in the past, even the traditional lenders were reduced in numbers.  Gone were the alcohol based stands, the computer games, walk in buses and chocolate fountains replaced by bowls of chocolates, bananas and free packets of mints.

The exhibitors were now made up of Software companies, Surveyors, Networks, Publications and Insurance companies – indeed of the 79 exhibitors listed in the exhibition guide, only 6 of these were lenders.  These remaining exhibitors have benefited and had clearly got increased stand size for reduced fees.  Some companies used to tiny stands said their stands had been increased in size 3 times by the organisers at no additional cost.  However given the drop in footfall in the exhibition itself this will have been of small consolation.

Let’s hope the market upturn happens quickly and next year things are back to normal.